The Firm That Learned to Campaign Between the Aisles

The odd thing about a political message is that it changes shape as it travels. In a conference room, it is an objective. At the Capitol, it becomes a policy argument. On television, it has perhaps twelve seconds to become a sentence. At a front door, it must become a reason to care. Most organizations hire a different specialist for each room. Paramount Consulting Group built a business around remembering that it is still the same message.

The Atlanta consultancy sits where lobbying, campaigns, communications and media overlap. Its clients include companies, public agencies, nonprofits, political organizations and people running for office. The problems vary - a legislative priority, a bruised reputation, a constituency that needs organizing, a campaign that needs winning - but the operating question is consistent: who needs to hear what, from whom, and in which room?

That sounds obvious until one watches a large institution attempt it. The policy team writes a memo. The communications team trims it into a press release. The lobbyist discovers that the most important legislator objects to paragraph three. The grassroots consultant learns that nobody outside the building knows what paragraph three means. Each person has done a job. The organization has not necessarily solved its problem.

A company hiding inside a career

Paramount makes more sense as the assembled pieces of Tharon Johnson's working life than as a list of services. Johnson managed Kasim Reed's successful 2009 campaign for Atlanta mayor. The American Association of Political Consultants named him Campaign Manager of the Year in 2010. He later served as southern regional director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign, worked in public affairs at major law firms, advised elected officials and became a familiar analyst on Atlanta television and radio.

A campaign manager learns velocity. A government-affairs practitioner learns procedure. A broadcaster learns compression. Johnson's company is the place those habits meet. In 2017, after leaving Greenberg Traurig, he publicly launched Paramount as a bipartisan shop that could move between campaign politics and lobbying. In a later interview, he described the decision with the refreshing specificity of a person who had set himself a deadline: at 40, he wanted to own a company and help shape Georgia's future. His team told him it was time.

“I saw the need for a bipartisan firm that had great local relationships and relationships with the state.”Tharon Johnson, on starting Paramount

What changed his mind was therefore not a pitch deck or an untapped software category. It was the recognition that the relationships and campaign judgment already existed, but were trapped inside other people's structures. Ownership gave them a common address.

The first silo to crack

The first thing Paramount's model rejects is the tidy wall between winning an election and governing afterward. Campaigns are usually sold as bursts: message, field, turnout, finish line. Government affairs is sold as continuity: monitor, brief, meet, persuade, repeat. Yet the skills cross-pollinate. A coalition built for a ballot initiative resembles a coalition built for a legislative priority. Crisis communications borrows the campaign's obsession with speed. Lobbying benefits from knowing how an issue will sound outside the committee room.

Paramount packages that overlap as governmental affairs, lobbying, advocacy, strategic and crisis communications, media relations, campaign management and grassroots work. The firm says its campaign experience runs from school-board contests to presidential races. Its current public team adds legal, federal-agency, congressional, workforce-development, broadcast and historical-research experience. This is less a row of departments than a compact table where specialists can hear one another.

What the invoices reveal

Consultancies are fond of describing value and shy about describing price. Public work gives us a peephole. In 2019, a Development Authority of Fulton County agreement called for Paramount to receive $10,000 a month plus expenses. The assignment covered lobbying the county's legislative delegation, commissioners, Atlanta officials and the school board. In 2023, MARTA listed a $60,000, twelve-month professional-services contract for lobbying. In August 2026, South Fulton considered a broader one-year engagement worth up to $140,000 for legislative strategy, advocacy and stakeholder work.

Those numbers clarify the product. A client is not buying a clever sentence or a single meeting. It is buying sustained attention across institutions that keep different calendars and answer to different constituencies. The work becomes expensive when coordination matters, because coordination consumes senior judgment. The alternative is often to hire several shops and become the coordinator yourself.

The local advantage, taken seriously

Paramount's materials name or display corporate and institutional clients including Microsoft, Delta, Southern Company, HNTB and the Atlanta Regional Commission. State lobbying records connect Johnson with organizations such as the Atlanta Hawks, Comcast, JPMorgan Chase, Lime and Wellstar, as well as local governments. The point is not that every logo buys every service. It is that the customer base crosses the same boundaries as the firm's offer: public and private, civic and commercial, local and national.

Its competitive set changes with the assignment. Sometimes the alternative is another Georgia lobbying boutique. Sometimes it is a law firm's government-relations practice, a communications agency, a campaign consultant or an internal public-affairs hire. Paramount's difference is not that nobody else can perform those jobs. It is that the firm has arranged them in the order a live political problem tends to demand them.

The method also has borders. Relationships are not cloud software. A network earned in Atlanta does not arrive in Arizona at full strength. Bipartisan credibility matters only when both sides believe it. An integrated shop is most useful when policy, reputation and public opinion genuinely interact; a narrow compliance question may belong with counsel, and a commodity media buy may belong with a specialist. The model works best for clients facing consequential decisions in a geography the team knows intimately.

The public face is part of the machinery

Johnson appears weekly on Fox 5 Atlanta's The Georgia Gang and on WABE's Political Breakfast, writes for Georgia Trend, and is regularly asked to explain political events elsewhere. In 2024, the Atlanta Business League named him Entrepreneur of the Year. The media work gives Paramount visibility, but its deeper value is rehearsal. Explaining politics in public forces a consultant to hear the difference between insider language and human language.

That may be Paramount's most portable idea. Public affairs is often treated as a collection of doors: the door to government, the door to the newsroom, the door to a neighborhood. The useful skill is not merely having a key. It is remembering what you came to say after the door opens.