Long-time communications and public policy operatives Marty Carpenter and Wesley Smith have formed a new public affairs strategy shop named 24NINE. Here is a look at this new political consulting business.
Tell us about 24NINE — why you formed the business and what your services are. Jokingly, we say we formed the business because we don’t know how to work apart at this point. Wes and I were hired by Natalie Gochnour at the same time in 2008 to work at the Salt Lake Chamber. I handled communication and Wes did the public policy work. We worked together at the Chamber for five years before I went to run communications for the Herbert administration. Wes came on to run the policy shop a few weeks later. So, after nearly a decade working together at a non-profit and then in the public sector, we wanted to take our approach to communication and policy work to the private sector.
We strongly believe in free enterprise. At the Chamber, we championed business as a collective group. We worked for a very pro-business governor. We want to help business succeed and we can help them build the right strategy to navigate the external challenges they face. We do not tell a business how to make better widgets, but we can provide perspective and strategy to help businesses address their external challenges.
24NINE helps businesses with strategy, engagement and influence. We work with businesses to communicate with purpose, shape policy and regulations, build community relationships, cultivate coalitions, engage stakeholders and win by giving back.
Will you manage political campaigns? That’s a question we get a lot, which makes sense considering my role as Gov. Herbert’s campaign manager just prior to starting this firm. I’ve told people that is very similar to asking a woman who just had a baby when she is going to have another. The memory is just too fresh; it hasn’t been long enough to remember only the good and forget all the bad.
Political campaigns are not our primary focus at this point, but it is certainly something we could do if we had the right candidate and race. I think we would be interested in consulting on campaigns more than running the day-to-day, but as time goes by we will see how that evolves. The clients we take and the causes we support are those we believe in. We definitely care about Utah and we want to support policy makers who have the right vision for our state.
Will you do direct legislative lobbying? We are focused initially on the strategy, coalition building and communication work. While we have not ruled out lobbying as a primary service of our firm, our hope is to specialize in providing strategy, coalition building and messaging. We would prefer to work with lobbyists to achieve positive results for our clients.
Our first high-profile issue was the non-compete legislation that died this session. We worked with a group of businesses that were very concerned about additional changes to legislation that came out of nowhere last year. We agreed with their position on the issue and we helped form and build the Free Enterprise Utahcoalition. We laid out five principles that should guide any non-compete legislation. It is an important perspective to bring to the discussion and we will continue to work on the issue going forward. That’s a great example of what we do. We had businesses that knew their position on an issue and anticipated that it would be an issue during the session. They have a lot at stake and 24NINE helped them understand the landscape, join with other, like-minded, businesses and communicate effectively on an important issue. We developed and helped execute the strategy to get them where they wanted to be. It is a unique combination of public relations, public policy understanding and proactive communication that we’ve developed over the past decade of our experience with business (the Chamber), government (Herbert Administration) and politics (Herbert campaign).
Will you provide advertising/PR services? We don’t have any plans to be an advertising firm but the advertising game is changing with new technology. If you think of advertising as producing newspaper/magazine ads or :30 TV or radio spots, then, no, that won’t be our focus. Effective communication is a significant part of what we do and advertising is evolving; the lines are blurring a bit. Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time is the goal and we will help our clients do that through earned media, what we call owned media (including social media platforms), and paid media. It’s just that the line between owned and paid isn’t as distinct as it was just a few years ago. Many businesses under-utilize the communication tools at their disposal. We help craft, refine and drive the message.
Tell us about the partners, your backgrounds, strengths, etc. For my money, Wesley is one of the best policy minds in the state and a terrific strategist. He has done great work for the business community at the state level and, by all accounts, was very effective working at the federal level leading the Republican caucus of governors as Gov. Herbert served as vice chair and chair of the National Governors Association.
I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from some of the best in Natalie Gochnour, my boss at the Chamber, Vicki Varela, who chaired our communication committee when I started working at the Chamber, and Bob Henrie at R&R Partners with whom I have worked on two statewide campaigns, just to name a few. I also have a now-distant past as a broadcaster.
It is the combination of those two skill sets that we think provides the real value. Very little gets done just by a communication effort and doing just the policy work isn’t always enough. Policy and communication working together, with our understanding of the support businesses need, that is the value proposition of our firm and we think we have developed and extraordinary way to approach issues our clients face.
What sort of clients are you looking for? A very good friend and mentor told us early on that we don’t know what we are yet and we shouldn’t expect to for a few years. I anticipate we will evolve over time because I know we have evolved at a high rate in the first few months. We know the marketplace is becoming far more dynamic and complex for businesses. Businesses and interest groups face any number of hurdles and new sources of opposition. We want to help them focus on their core business by helping them navigate the external challenges they face. Those challenges may come from policies or regulations, they may come from special interest groups trying to use them as leverage points, it may require working with their competition to address an issue harming their industry. We’re looking for clients who need help with external issues and we want to help them address those challenges so they can focus on doing what their business does best.
How is business going? How is the business climate out there? Business is going very well. We’ve been at or ahead of where we anticipated to be when we charted out some expectations. Growing a business brings a new challenge every day. We had some appreciation for that from our time at the Chamber and working with so many business leaders, but it’s a new puzzle every day. We learn every day and work to provide real value for our clients and for our community. It’s not easy but we both really value the opportunity to build what we hope will be a successful firm.
