The most revealing thing NorthStar Strategies says about lobbying has nothing to do with lobbying. It is a line about trade associations: running one, the firm argues, is essentially running a small business in which every member is a customer. The sentence explains more than it intends. Public affairs is usually described as access - knowing which door to open, which official to call, which committee is about to move. NorthStar's version starts there and then keeps walking. Someone still has to organize the members, build the event, calm the neighborhood, find the donors, and make sure Tuesday's strategy survives Wednesday morning.
That is why the company, founded by Joe Fiordaliso and Jody Herkloz in July 2016, looks less like a narrow lobbying shop than a compact operating company for public-facing problems. From its office on West State Street in Trenton, it offers five linked practices: government affairs; association management; corporate, charitable and political fundraising; meeting and event planning; and public and community outreach. The clients it names span FedEx, Chubb, T-Mobile, Attentive Energy, and the American Council of Engineering Companies of New Jersey. The common denominator is not industry. It is friction.
The problem after the meeting
Imagine an infrastructure project that will reroute traffic, disturb storefronts, require permits, trigger legislative questions, and arrive with a public meeting already circled on the calendar. A conventional division of labor sends the policy issue to a lobbyist, the public meeting to an events vendor, resident questions to a communications agency, and stakeholder tracking to the project manager. Each handoff creates a tiny crack. Tiny cracks are where dates slip and opposition hardens.
NorthStar's offer is coordination. Its government-affairs team analyzes the issue and works the legislative or regulatory path. Its outreach specialists speak with residents, community groups, elected officials, businesses, and media. Its events people build the room. Its association practice handles the membership machinery. Its fundraising team can set goals, identify donors, and execute the campaign. The product is not any one of these boxes. It is the shorter distance between them.
One mandate, five working surfaces
A repair job became the blueprint
The clearest preview of this model predates NorthStar itself. Fiordaliso became president of ACECNJ in 2011. His company biography describes a bottom-up overhaul: stabilize and rebuild membership, develop programs and events, and restore the engineering association's presence in Trenton. The first thing that had failed was not a grand policy thesis. It was the operating system - the repetitive work that turns a collection of member firms into an institution with a voice.
NorthStar now runs ACECNJ's operations, member engagement, programs, events, advocacy, and strategic priorities. That assignment compresses the firm's business model into one example. Advocacy brings relevance. Events create a place for the network to gather. Member service gives people a reason to renew. Back-office discipline keeps the promise from becoming theater.
“The NorthStar team runs our business like it's their own.”Bernard P. McNeilly, PE - ACECNJ chairman
The economics are those of a private consultancy: retainers and project engagements rather than a public product menu. NorthStar does not publish its prices. New Jersey's annual lobbying report does, however, list $916,974.82 in 2024 receipts for the firm's registered government-affairs activity. That number is useful with guardrails. It is not the fee for one client, and it is not total company revenue. It simply shows that the lobbying operation has meaningful scale inside a broader services company.
The roster is the strategy
Fiordaliso came through Washington and New Jersey government, including service as chief of staff at the state Department of Transportation. Herkloz runs operations and client work. Denise Peck brought 36 years at NJDOT to public outreach. TJ Mann arrived after a decade as chief of staff to a state assemblyman. In September 2026, NorthStar added Taryn Boland, formerly chief of staff and then senior advisor at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, as director of government affairs and executive director of ACECNJ.
This is a familiar revolving door viewed from a more practical angle. The expertise being sold is fluency: how an agency makes a decision, how a legislature moves, how an engineering association behaves, how a transportation project lands in a town. Relationships matter, plainly. But the hires also carry knowledge of workflow - the sequence, documents, pressure points, and personalities that determine whether a reasonable plan becomes a real one.
The competitive field is crowded. Large New Jersey firms can offer deeper benches; specialist agencies can claim sharper focus in events, fundraising, or communications. NorthStar's argument is different: a senior, regional team can see the same problem from several useful angles without forcing the client to manage the seams. Its collaboration with Urban Strategies extends that approach into New York and the Northeast without pretending the Trenton office is a global network.
What another small firm can copy
The transferable lesson is not “add five service pages.” It is to notice what clients must do immediately before and after they hire you. NorthStar's adjacencies are close enough to share information and distinct enough to solve real problems. Government affairs produces intelligence for member communications. Association management generates events. Events strengthen relationships. Outreach reveals political risk before it becomes a headline. Each practice can feed the next without becoming a random collection.
The model has conditions. It is strongest where local knowledge, trust, and high-touch coordination matter - state policy, regulated industries, associations, and visible infrastructure. It is less naturally suited to anonymous self-service work, commodity communications, or a campaign requiring instant coverage in dozens of unrelated jurisdictions. The very thing clients buy is senior attention and regional fluency; scale it carelessly and the differentiator disappears.
NorthStar's own phrase is “navigate any challenge.” The interesting word is not challenge. Every consultancy gets one of those. It is navigate - a verb that assumes the map will be incomplete, the weather will change, and somebody has to remain at the wheel after the meeting ends.