There are 253 members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Triad Strategies has a page on its website devoted to this fact, followed by a line that gives away the business: relationships matter with each one. The number sounds like a boast about a large Rolodex. It is actually a warning. Two hundred and fifty-three people produce 253 sets of motives, constituencies, committee assignments and tolerances for risk. Knowing someone is not the same as persuading them.
That distinction is the animating idea of Triad, a Harrisburg public-affairs firm founded by Roy Wells in 2002. Its neatest phrase is also its most useful: “Lobbying is a tactic, not a strategy.” A lobbyist can arrange the conversation. The strategy decides which conversation, with whom, after what research, supported by which allies, told in what language and timed to which budget or legislative window.
Triad sells the orchestration. Its three practices cover government affairs, advocacy and communications, and economic development. Under those headings sit the actual jobs: monitoring thousands of bills, reading regulations, managing political giving, hunting public funding, shaping messages, handling a crisis, recruiting validators, courting earned media and putting a project in front of the officials who can move it. The client does not buy software. It buys experienced attention, billed as professional services, aimed at a decision.
The founding observation
A budget analyst notices the team
Wells arrived at the idea from inside government. Early in his career, he worked as a budget analyst for the Pennsylvania House Appropriations Committee. The popular picture of a legislature is gridlock with better carpeting. Wells saw something else: a high-performing group solving complicated fiscal problems. He studied what made the group work.
Then he noticed what failed outside it. Public-affairs firms were often split into deep silos. Government-relations people guarded the government work. Communications people handled the public story. Business-development people chased money or opportunity. The client’s problem, inconveniently, did not respect the org chart. Wells built Triad around flattening those divisions.
“Every firm offers a similar suite of services.” The difference, Wells argues, is who gets pulled into the room.Roy Wells, writing on Triad’s differentiator
This is a modest claim with a demanding consequence. Triad’s competitors include Pennsylvania’s established lobbying boutiques, integrated public-affairs agencies and the lobbying arms of law firms. Any of them can hire a former chief of staff or a skilled press secretary. Triad’s wager is that the handoff between experts matters more than the possession of experts. On a project seeking state support, the funding specialist identifies the program, the policy team reads the path, the communications team makes the case legible, and the coalition work supplies outside voices. The deliverable is coordination.
One outcome, three synchronized lanes
The bar lengths are illustrative, not performance scores. The point is overlap: policy access, public narrative and funding strategy converge on the same decision.
What the work looks like
A meeting becomes money, momentum or law
The case studies are a tour through Pennsylvania’s machinery. Triad says it helped Cody Systems secure $500,000 for a police data-sharing pilot. It worked with a developer on a $5 million redevelopment grant for the faded Lycoming Mall. For the First Bank of the United States restoration, the firm helped facilitate conversations with the state Budget Office, including an introduction to the Budget Secretary. A $10 million state grant did more than fill the capital stack; project leaders said it gave the campaign credibility and helped attract more investment.
Elsewhere, the outcome is legislation rather than a check. Triad points to small-cell legislation that widened a path for 5G deployment, mental-health privacy reforms, and health-care funding for patients who rely on ventilator and tracheostomy care. Sometimes victory means stopping movement: the firm describes defeating a proposal to put tens of thousands of slot machines in bars and convenience stores. Sometimes it is less cinematic - monitoring a bill, interpreting a rule or giving a chief executive enough warning to act before an issue becomes a crisis.
The customer roster explains where Triad sits in the market. Cisco, Lyft, Expedia, Penn State and Pure Storage appear alongside firefighters, electrical workers, public gardens, a crime-victims law institute, a behavioral-wellness center and a museum. These organizations share no product category. They share a translation problem: an internal need must become a proposal that public decision-makers and outside stakeholders can understand, support and defend.
One public cost marker. Philadelphia City Council paid Triad a reported $90,000 across 2015-2018. That historical contract is a useful example, not a rate card; private engagements vary with scope, duration and the mix of specialists.
The operating system
Thirty behaviors, discussed one week at a time
The team model remained more instinct than system until the fall of 2019. After encountering David Friedman’s Culture by Design, Triad spent two months defining 30 “fundamental behaviors.” The list includes obvious virtues - act with integrity, do what is best for the client - and operational demands such as being fanatical about response time. Staff discuss the behaviors every week.
This could have become the usual laminated-values exercise. Triad attached consequences. Wells says the shared expectations and mutual accountability helped the firm work through the pandemic, adopt work-from-anywhere and remove fixed paid-time-off limits. The culture became infrastructure for granting autonomy without pretending accountability had disappeared.
Do not copy Triad’s adjectives. Copy the cadence: define observable behaviors, discuss one every week, connect each to a real piece of work, and let the team challenge the wording when reality disagrees.
In 2022, the firm found another thing that no longer worked: its brand did not resemble the client or employee experience. Triad hired Demi & Co to run workshops, Source Creative House to photograph employees as themselves, and Boldworld to rebuild the website. The choice to lead with people sounds predictable until one remembers how many government-relations sites lead with a dome, a flag and a handshake. Triad put its own oddness on display, including a Harrisburg gathering space it calls the Penthouse.
The model has boundaries. It depends on trust between specialists, enough account value to deploy several of them, and deep knowledge of the political terrain. A one-off request for a press release does not need this machine. Neither does a purely federal campaign for which Pennsylvania relationships are beside the point. And the method cannot be reproduced by purchasing a database of names. Its advantage comes from accumulated judgment: knowing when an introduction is useful, when a coalition is credible, and when the smartest move is to wait.
The useful lesson
Access is perishable. A way of working can compound.
Faces in a capitol change. Majorities change. A contact retires, loses an election or takes a different job. Mike Acker, one of Triad’s longtime government-relations hands, makes the point directly in his company biography: a lobbyist’s value is not merely who he knows today, but whether he can help a client adapt when the faces change.
That is why Triad is more interesting as an organizational story than as a political one. Its reported 2024-25 figures - 66 clients, 39 hosted events and more than $21 million in procured grants - are snapshots. The durable asset is the habit beneath them: assemble the right people around the whole problem, make their behavior explicit, and keep the client’s objective from being chopped into departmental pieces.
In Harrisburg, relationships remain the admission ticket. Triad’s business begins after admission, when somebody has to decide what to say.