Queen Street’s top-consultants and lobby-firms in November
Queen Street’s top-consultants and lobby-firms in November
Cheema Strategies, T. Bjornson, and MarketStep have busy months, with PAA's Andrew Walker tops the leaderboard of busiest individual consultants
In today’s issue we look at November’s top-consultants and lobby-firms.
The CliffsNotes version:
In November, there were 1,240 lobby communication filings that involved external lobby consultants (amounting to 31% of all lobby communications)
These filings were associated with 571 registrations across 114 separate lobby-firms.
November’s saw several big jumps in activity among the smaller boutique shops, including Cheema Strategies, T. Bjornson & Associates, and MarketStep.
There were 33 consultants with 10+ filings, with the leaderboard topped by PAA’s Andrew Walker.
November’s list of busiest lobbyist-consultants included many owner-operators like David Pratt, Bilal Cheema, Isabel Metcalfe, and Tyler Bjornson. Owner-operated mid-sized lobby-firms, historically more common in D.C., appear to be rising in prominence in Ottawa.
PAA, Crestview, and Sandstone also top the leaderboard of new registrations
Among individual consultants’ new registrations, November saw nothing close to the 22 new registrations of PAA’s Annyse Hawkins in October. Instead, Hugues Théorêt leads the pack in November with seven new registrations to his name, having recently joined Sandstone from Sussex Strategy.
1. Lobby-Firms and Lobbyists Comms Leaderboard
November’s 1,240 lobby communication filings involving external lobby consultants were associated with 571 registrations across 114 separate lobby-firms.
Exhibit 1 breaks these filings across the major lobby firms, showing the 25 most active lobby-firms in November, with the filings in the second column.
Exhibit 2, from LobbyIQ's lobby-firm selector dashboard, shows how November’s leaderboard stacks up against the leaderboard of firms ranked by their trailing twelve-month (TTM) average activity level. Comparing Exhibits 1 and 2, surprise packages in November include:
Cheema Strategies which only ranks 27th on LobbyIQ on a TTM basis
T. Bjornson & Associates, which ranks 39th on LobbyIQ on a TTM basis
MarketStep, which ranks 76th on LobbyIQ on a TTM basis
Scott Thurlow LLP, which ranks 43rd on LobbyIQ on a TTM basis
Botterel, which ranks 111th on LobbyIQ on a TTM basis
To us, this indicates continued ample room for boutique firms to carve out their market niche in a GR industry that is already fairly un-concentrated (as we documented) by standard metrics like the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI).
Which individual lobbyists drove communication filings activity?
Exhibit 3 shows the leaderboard of individual consultants with 10+ meetings in November. The second-last column reports on the number of active registrations represented in those communications, and the last column reports on the same consultants’ October meetings.
November was a much busier month than October, with PAA’s Andrew Walker topping November’s leaderboard with a whopping 47 filed meetings.
November was a particularly productive month for owner-operators, with each of David Pratt, Bilal Cheema, Isabel Metcalfe, and Tyler Bjornson at #2, #5, #7 and #9 respectively driving the entirety of their firms’ communications reported in Exhibit 1.
2. Lobby-Firms’ and Lobbyists’ Registration Leaderboards
Which lobby firms and consultants registered the most new relationships last month?
To answer this question accurately we exclude simple registration-renewals, and do not double-count multiple registrations per firm-client pair (i.e. when several individual consultants file separate registrations for the same client relationship).
Exhibit 4 shows November’s leaderboard, listing the number of new registrations (NewReg) as well as the number of new relationships, i.e. registrations not preceded by any existing registration between the same client and lobby-firm.
Exhibit 5 takes the aggregates in Exhibit 4 and breaks them down by clients; where the last column indicates when multiple consultants filed registrations for the same firm-client relationship.)
Lastly, Exhibit 6 breaks out new registrations by consultants. Sandstone’s Hugues Théorêt leads the pack, but there is nothing like the crazy breakout month that Annyse Hawkins had in October with 22 new clients.
LobbyIQ’s consultant-dashboards provide the quickest way to take a peek at individual consultants’ registrations: for example, Exhibit 7 breaks down Hugues Théorêt’s registrations, which exhibit some real traction with Indigenous stakeholders groups.
This concludes our lobby-firm and lobbyist issue for November’s data. Next week, we start the December-data cycle with our issue on the most lobbying-active organizations and sectors.