A public meeting begins long before anyone reaches for the microphone. It begins with a list. The alderman. The block club president. The hospital executive. The neighbor who has attended every zoning hearing since the first Mayor Daley. Somebody must decide who belongs on the list, which objection is real, which one is theater, and who should be called first. In Chicago, that sequence can determine whether an idea becomes a building, a headline or a very expensive set of drawings.
Haymarket Public Strategies built a business around the sequence. The firm advises organizations that need something from the public realm: an approval, a relationship, a reputation, room for a project to breathe. Its services sound conventional - government relations, community engagement, economic development, campaigns, strategic communications. The interesting part is the connective tissue. Haymarket's own language says it connects clients to the stakeholders they need. The verb is not broadcast. It is connect.
The firm began inside City Hall's long shadow
Thomas P. Coffey did not arrive at public affairs through advertising. He served as a Marine captain, practiced law at Kirkland & Ellis and helped elect Harold Washington as Chicago's first Black mayor. After the election, Coffey left private practice to become Washington's director of intergovernmental affairs. The title is almost a perfect apprenticeship for what came next: making institutions with different interests move in roughly the same direction.
In 1987, Coffey and Jay Doherty formed the Haymarket Group. Doherty was another political connector, with roots in Democratic campaigns and Chicago's civic circuit. Congressional remarks from 1989 also identify civil-rights leader Al Raby as an early partner. The company was born not from a product insight but from a human one. Government is drawn as a hierarchy. In practice, it behaves like a network.
“The organization chart tells you who can sign. The civic map tells you whether they ever will.”Haymarket's business, in one distinction
That map became the asset. By 2012, a Chicago City Council resolution described Haymarket as a collection of people skilled in government, politics, media, law, organizing, public relations and mediation. It also named the firm's four core territories: government relations, economic development, community relations, and campaigns and elections. This is less a menu than a description of the places where competing constituencies collide.
The product is an order of operations
Consider a hospital expansion. The client may see beds, clinical capacity and capital investment. A neighbor may see traffic at 5 a.m. An alderman may see both, plus the next election. A regulator sees a statutory test. The usual corporate instinct is to prepare one polished explanation and repeat it. Haymarket's work sits in the opposite direction: first identify the audiences, then learn what each believes the project is.
There is public evidence of that work. At a 2013 state hearing, Coffey said Haymarket had handled community relations for Saint Joseph Hospital for 20 years. He was supporting a proposed advanced-care center and described the hospital's relationship with its Lakeview neighbors and alderman. The striking number is not the size of the project. It is the duration of the engagement. Twenty years is long enough to remember which promise was made before the current executives arrived.
A different example came in 2002, when Chicago was rewriting its zoning code. Reports on North Side meetings directed residents to Haymarket for information. Zoning reform sounds like technical work until it reaches a room full of homeowners deciding whether two-flats belong on their blocks. Haymarket occupied the translation layer between citywide policy and local consequence.
Small firm, expensive consequences
Haymarket's customers reveal where the model fits. City lobbying records have connected the firm with Lurie Children's Hospital, property owner Hearn Company, Mercury Cruises and manufacturer Focal Point Lights. Earlier reporting named elected officials among its clients. Campaign-finance records show Haymarket Public Strategies as a paid vendor. During the first pandemic year, the firm provided communications assistance to a long-term-care facility facing a COVID-19 outbreak. These are not interchangeable assignments, but they share a condition: the client faces a public decision or a public audience it cannot manage alone.
The business model is the classic boutique consultancy. Revenue comes from retainers and project fees for advice, outreach, lobbying, communications and campaign work. There is no subscription tier, no free trial and no public rate card. One visible campaign example recorded $27,141.05 in payments to Haymarket Public Strategies during a 2018 election cycle. It is a data point, not a standard price. The cost of this work depends on the duration, the number of stakeholders and how badly the issue has already gone sideways.
The firm's scale has also been modest. The supplied company record lists 23 employees, while outside directories estimate six to nine. During the pandemic, Haymarket received a $97,375 Paycheck Protection Program loan and reported six jobs. The loan, later forgiven with interest, is a small but useful glimpse of the economics. Relationship businesses may advise large institutions while carrying very little operating mass of their own.
The moat is memory - and that is also the risk
Competitors can offer the same nouns. Chicago has no shortage of firms promising public affairs, crisis counsel, community outreach and government access. Large law firms can bundle lobbying with legal work. In-house teams know their organizations better. Modern platforms can track legislation, donations and stakeholder sentiment faster than a person with a notebook.
Haymarket's distinction is narrower and more defensible: deep local pattern recognition accumulated across decades. The firm knows that a public challenge is rarely solved by the loudest argument. It is solved by understanding who grants formal permission, who grants social permission and why those are often different people.
That advantage has limits. It travels poorly. A Chicago network does not become a Phoenix network because the slide deck changed its skyline. It also depends heavily on trust lodged in individual people. Coffey's death in October 2025 makes the succession question unavoidable. When the founder is part of the map, preserving the map requires more than transferring a contact file.
“Local expertise compounds slowly. It also walks out the door one person at a time.”The succession problem in relationship businesses
A playbook worth borrowing
The useful lesson is not to collect more important phone numbers. It is to treat stakeholder work as infrastructure. Pick a geography narrow enough to know well. Record the history behind the current objection. Separate formal authority from informal influence. Meet opponents before a proposal hardens. Keep relationships warm when no vote is pending. And measure progress by reduced surprise, not by the volume of coverage.
This approach works best when the decision is place-bound, the stakeholder set is legible and the client has time to listen. It weakens when speed matters more than consent, when the controversy is national and diffuse, or when leadership wants outreach to decorate a decision already made. Community engagement cannot rescue contempt disguised as consultation.
Haymarket's own 2018 advertisement called the firm “the public strategies partner for Chicagoland leaders.” The line is plain, almost aggressively so. But it contains the whole model: public, because the outcome depends on more than the client; partner, because the work can take years; Chicagoland, because specificity is the point. The consultancy's product was never the meeting. It was knowing why the room would gather, what everyone carried into it and which conversation could make the next one easier.