Forward Strategies
You're going to be under scrutiny from Washington no matter who holds the gavel.
Forward Strategies builds the operation that means your CEO never sits in front of a committee unprepared. The goal is you operating from the point where Amazon was when Mattie left, not when she came in.
Who this is for
Heads of public policy, corporate affairs and external affairs, and the general counsels who own the policy budget. Right now that is mostly AI and energy companies hiring up in Washington: funded, exposed, and running the same charm offensive Big Tech ran in 2019. Investors call too, when a portfolio company needs to be diligence-ready before Washington notices it.
If you're the newly hired head of policy, here's the math. You need two executives to build this right, one to scale the team and one to build the infrastructure. You have budget for one. So one person does double the work, something falls to the wayside, and you spend three years playing catch-up. Forward Strategies is the second executive without the headcount, building in parallel while you hire, so your team executes on day one.
Relationships open doors. They don't stop a subpoena.
The scrutiny is coming from committees and regulators regardless of who you know. What decides how it goes is whether you built the operation before it arrived.
The further down the road you build it, the more it costs you.
Build before you need it, or pay for the delay later.
Kill a bad statistic in week one or live with it for a decade.
Once a number compounds into canon, lawmakers will legislate against it.
Buy-in that lives in a person dies with their badge.
If it isn't institutionalized, a departure is a veto.
Engagements
Campaign thinking, built into your company.
Every engagement runs on the proprietary 90-day system Mattie used to read live fights and build the functions that won them.
- 01.
The Audit
Find out exactly where you're exposed before Washington does.
Forward Strategies maps your operation, scores the gaps between your policy, communications and legal teams, and hands back a roadmap your board can fund. It's the fastest way to see what you're missing, and the firm takes only two a quarter.
How the Audit works - 02.
The In-House Seminar
Get your whole policy team moving as one in a single day.
In a half- or full-day session, your team leaves with its tiger team mapped and its decision rights drawn, so nobody is working out who signs off while a reporter waits on the line.
- 03.
Outside Counsel
Mattie on demand, for the calls that can't go wrong.
Forward Strategies works with only two outside counsel clients at a time, on six- to twelve-month terms, so Mattie is available the moment you need her, whether that's red-teaming a plan before it goes out the door or talking through a decision before it's made.
- 04.
The Build
The most custom engagement, built entirely around your company and your needs.
Standing up a public affairs function takes time most in-house teams don't have, especially when they're already stretched thin. Forward Strategies builds the infrastructure alongside you while you hire the right people and keep doing the work on the ground. By the time the engagement ends, you have a complete, ready-to-run operation: the team structure, the playbook and the systems to keep it going. Scoped and priced per engagement.
Not sure which fits? Most clients start with the Audit or the Seminar, then add an outside counsel seat when they want Mattie pressure-testing the plan as they build it.
Why not a big firm?
A bigger firm will sell you monitoring, play-by-play and a hypothetical, and charge more for it. Mattie built this for a real in-house team under the worst scrutiny in tech, and it held. You aren't betting on a theory.
Every engagement includes a lobbying-compliance check, so your board sees the whole risk picture and every engagement stays clean.