There is a particular kind of panic that visits a corporate government-affairs office. A troublesome idea appears in a state capitol on Tuesday. By Thursday, a neighboring state has borrowed it. Someone asks what is happening in the other forty-eight. The in-house team has a Washington expert, a good local lawyer and perhaps a spreadsheet whose colors stopped making sense three legislative sessions ago. What it does not have is an air-traffic controller.
HB Strategies has built a business around that missing job. The firm lobbies Congress and state governments, advises senior executives, runs public-affairs campaigns and coordinates local advocates across the country. But the interesting product is the coordination itself. Its HBS 50 State practice is meant to sit inside a client’s existing organization, find the jurisdictions that matter, recruit or direct local specialists, and turn a national mess into a short list of decisions.
That proposition helped a firm with five offices and 42 clients in 2018 reach 13 offices and more than 400 clients by 2025, according to co-founders Andy Blunt and Gregg Hartley. Then came the telling move: Husch Blackwell Strategies ended its affiliation with the Husch Blackwell law firm and became independent. It kept the initials and changed what they stood for. HB Strategies was no longer a supporting practice attached to somebody else’s name. The network had become the company.
“The change is to the sign on the door.”Gregg Hartley, co-founder and COO, on independence
The product is triage
Lobbying is usually described in the language of access: who knows the committee chair, who can get a meeting, who understands the agency. HB Strategies certainly sells that expertise. Its teams work in Washington and state capitals; its senior ranks include former officeholders, legislative staff, campaign operatives, policy specialists and communications advisers. Former U.S. Senator Roy Blunt chairs the Leadership Strategies group, which offers executives what the firm calls a whole-of-government view.
Yet access is not scarce in quite the way attention is. A national company can face food-label rules in one state, employment legislation in another, a federal appropriations fight and an online reputation problem - all at once. The HBS model promises to decide which alarm deserves the fire brigade. Its pre-vetted network can monitor bills, gather local intelligence and add advocates without asking the client to manage a collection of unrelated firms.
Track legislation, regulation, elections and political risk before a local issue becomes a national pattern.
Choose the jurisdictions, officials and messages that deserve scarce executive attention.
Give an in-house team one operating rhythm across local lobbyists, federal advocates and communicators.
This is clearest in the firm’s work around state attorneys general. An attorney general is simultaneously a law-enforcement official, a regulator and often an ambitious politician. One office can start a multistate investigation; a coalition of them can reshape national policy without waiting for Congress. HBS 50 State built an engagement practice and a research series around thirty attorney-general races in the 2025-2026 cycle. The research is useful marketing, but it also reveals the operating thesis: the map of power is redrawn constantly, so the adviser must watch the map rather than one capital.
A Missouri start, a Washington scale
The origin was a merger of three government-affairs practices in 2018: work associated with Husch Blackwell, Andy Blunt’s Statehouse Strategies and the federal shop Cloakroom Advisors. That combination supplied a useful tension. Jefferson City offered the intimacy of state politics, where relationships are local and a committee hearing can turn on a detail. Washington offered a larger market and a formal disclosure system that makes at least part of the firm’s growth visible.
Aggregated federal filings show reported lobbying income rising from $2.1 million in 2018 to $9.3 million in 2025. The line was not perfectly smooth. Income reached $4.3 million in 2020, slipped to $3.5 million in 2021, then climbed in each of the next four years. Those numbers capture federal lobbying rather than the whole private company, but they show that the Washington practice became sturdier as the broader network expanded.
Federal lobbying income
USD millionspublic disclosure aggregation
Why communications moved into the room
The service menu widened because policy disputes no longer remain policy disputes. A proposed rule can worry employees, attract activists, move a market and turn an executive into a reluctant spokesperson. HBS Public Affairs handles crisis and issues work, change communications, executive positioning, employee engagement and transaction communications. It is less an add-on than an acknowledgment that the audience outside the hearing room may determine what becomes possible inside it.
That makes the firm an alternative to three separate vendors: a lobbying shop, a management adviser and a communications agency. The bargain is continuity. The same strategic center can connect what a governor’s staff is hearing with what employees are reading and what the chief executive is about to say. The danger, common to any integrated firm, is that breadth can become a brochure. HB Strategies’ answer is a roster of specialists and offices tied together by client teams rather than a claim that every practitioner can do everything.
The part worth copying
The transferable idea is not “know more politicians.” It is to make coordination visible and billable. HB Strategies names the hub, assigns it a defined job and explains how it fits into an existing team. A professional-services company can copy that architecture: pre-vet local experts, establish one intake point, rank problems by consequence, set a rapid-response protocol and return a single recommendation instead of fifty status reports.
The model earns its keep when a problem crosses jurisdictions or disciplines, when local context matters, and when the client already has capable people who need coverage rather than replacement. It is a heavier instrument for a one-city issue, a narrow technical filing or an organization unwilling to choose priorities. Networks create value by filtering. If every alert is urgent and every office gets a veto, the command desk becomes another inbox.
HB Strategies’ independence in 2025 was therefore more than a naming exercise. The founders said the people and their work would remain the same. What changed was the implied center of gravity. Seven years earlier, three practices had been assembled under a law-firm banner. By the time the sign came down, clients were buying the assembled machine itself - a way to look at a sprawling political landscape and see one desk.