Four years ago, Paul Kanitra opened up a one-man lobby shop whose business model was nicknamed by some as “McLobbying” — he charged clients no more than $2,995 a month (compared with a typical K Street retainer of $15,000) to lobby on their issues in Washington.

Today, the firm has grown to include seven salaried employees and more than 20 clients, and is projecting $1 million in revenue this year.

Kanitra and his team are working on many of the hot issues of the day, including EB-5 visas and the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would enable state governments to collect sales tax on goods sold over the Internet. But they are largely representing the “little guy,” mostly mom-and-pop shops and little-known associations located outside the Capital Beltway that are affected by those policies.

LobbyIt is finding success by doing virtually everything differently from the traditional K Street shop. It started with three tiers of pricing: $995, $1,995 or $2,995 a month, and six months ago added a fourth tier of $4,999 a month. The firm is not shooting to pass legislation for clients, but rather build companies’ presence in D.C. and alert them to future regulations that may impact their business. Most of the firm’s clients have never had a lobbyist before, and the majority have revenue of less than $5 million a year.

The firm was originally called Keys to the Capitol, but that was later changed to LobbyIt — a name chosen in part because of its similarity with the word “lobbyist,” to maximize search engine hits. If you Google “DC lobbyist,” the first sponsored ad that pops up is that of LobbyIt. Kanitra, 34, said the firm pays up to $5 per click, and gets a third of its clients from the Internet. The firm’s Web site was designed to seem approachable and transparent, listing client success stories and pricing.

“Lobbying is a product,” Kanitra said. “You have to take into account things like, ‘What are your deliverables?’ ‘Is it affordable?’ And, ‘How do you bring people to the product?’”

Kanitra describes the firm’s target audience not as the seasoned in-house government affairs manager at a Fortune 500 company, but as “the executive director of a small association in Idaho who hasn’t been in D.C. since their eighth-grade class trip.” The firm has a small sales team that cold-calls potential clients.

It is an unconventional approach that, so far, has carved out a small niche for Kanitra. In its first year, 2010, the firm earned $10,000 in lobbying fees. The following year, it grew to $240,000, and by 2013, the firm hit $500,000.

“Business is booming now,” said Kanitra, who once worked on a Native American reservation in Nevada on gaming legislation, and later became a lobbyist for Carfax, the Centreville-based provider of vehicle history reports.

Among the firm’s clients are the Brick Industry Association, the World Floor Covering Association, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association and the American Jail Association. All of the firm’s clients pay less than $30,000 in fees each year, according to lobbying records.

Kanitra works out of a converted row house in Capitol Hill, alongside Nile Elam, the firm’s director of congressional relations and former Hill staffer; Keith B. Nelson, executive vice president and former Justice Department attorney; Morgan Muchnick, director of advocacy; and Matt Kent, manager of legislative and regulatory analysis.

Kanitra said he owes part of the firm’s success to a confluence of factors that came to a head around the time LobbyIt opened its doors in 2010.

“Earmarks are dead and there’s been increased transparency in government,” he said. “The interaction of the public and social media means there’s a lot [of measures that are] less able to get slipped in in the middle of the night. That’s created an environment where it doesn’t make sense to spend $20,000 or $30,000 a month anymore hoping for a big home run. But people still need to have a voice in Congress.”

Reprinted from the Washington Post…

Lobbyit.com partnered with Voice of America – China for this inside look into the lobbying profession. The video showcases not only the fastest growing lobbying firm on Capitol Hill, but how their lobbyists are able to effect change in the halls of Congress.

By Seth Dahle

TCU hired LobbyIt this month to lobby for its interests on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

According to an email from Chancellor Victor Boschini, the university will partner with the firm for two years and then re-evaluate the plan.

LobbyIt founder and president Paul Kanitra said the firm’s goal is to “help provide an affordable and accountable alternative to traditional lobbying firms,” which normally overprice clients while failing to provide compensation.

“Our firm was founded to give everybody a voice and make sure everybody has a presence before Congress, federal agencies and administration,” Kanitra said.

Senior lobbyist Nile Elam said Kanitra and he met with Boschini and the chancellor’s intern Michael Marshall six weeks ago in Washington, D.C. to pitch the idea.

“The Chancellor and Mike had an interest in lobbying and trying to raise TCU’s profile,” Elam said. “I think in the grand scheme of TCU’s future, we’re growing away from a regional university to a national university.”

Elam (‘10) and Kanitra (‘01) are both alumni, which made partnering with the university a given because of their love for the school.

“We really have an idea for what the university is,” he said. “We’re going to work really hard simply because that’s our alma mater, and we have way too much purple memorabilia in our office as it is. It’s great to say that we’re working with TCU.”

Boschini said he hopes having alumni work for LobbyIt will be an advantage since they already understand the TCU culture.

The LobbyIt website features different tiers for pricing, ranging from $995 per month to $4,995 per month. Boschini wrote that TCU chose the $2,995 per month tier with an added option to cease as long as TCU gives LobbyIt a seven-days notice.

Kanitra said affordable pricing is one of the key aspects of his firm’s “unique business model.”

“TCU is paying a fraction of what traditional lobbying firms are charging for this type of work,” he said. “If you look at lobbying disclosures across the nation, there are lots of universities that are paying $10,000, $15,000, to $20,000 a month for just the privilege of having a voice on top of Capitol Hill.”

Boschini said he liked how the business plan gave TCU a monthly contract instead of binding the university to a long-term commitment. The LobbyIt payments will come from tuition money since students are the “stakeholders in everything TCU does.”

Although Boschini said he is not certain of the plan’s outcome, he hopes it will result in two things – increased visibility and awareness of what students, faculty and staff need, as well as more federal funding for various campus-based programs and ideas.

Meanwhile, Kanitra said the relationship would give TCU many opportunities.

“We’re going to be able to showcase a lot of the great research and a lot of the great work and unique programs that are going on at TCU,” he said. “Additionally, we’re going to be monitoring the grant and student loan space and the financial aspects of just being a student.”

Read it at TCU 360…

Originally published in CEO Update.

By Mark Tarallo

 Associations keenly interested in bills now winding through Congress

Veteran lobbyist Michael Petricone says immigration is one of the few issues that the White House, Senate leadership and House leadership all want to see fixed. And so, even though Congress is best known for gridlock these days, Petricone—along with many other association executives—has high hopes that a comprehensive overhaul bill will be approved.

“We’ve got momentum. We think something very positive is going to get done,” said Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs for the Consumer Electronics Association.

And unlike Congress’ previous large-scale initiatives, such as the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial bill, the revamp of immigration laws is not attracting significant association opposition. When the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” released its 800-plus-page immigration proposal last month (which the Senate starting marking up May 9), a range of associations praised the effort.

“The Gang of Eight’s focus on reforming our broken and unworkable immigration system is an historic achievement,” National Retail Federation CEO Matt Shay said in a statement.

“But much work needs to be done.”

And therein lies the lobbying battle: the struggle for each association to get its own desired industry-friendly provisions into the final legislation. Then those groups will push for approval to the finish line; as Petricone said of CEA: “We will support any comprehensive bill that has our specific ‘asks’ in it.”

Fighting for different things

The ‘asks’ CEA is pushing include three provisions: (1) increase the number of H-1B visas available for high-skilled foreign workers; (2) allow foreign-born, U.S.-educated immigrants to remain in America after graduation with a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) graduate degree; and (3) grant visas to foreign-born entrepreneurs who want to start businesses in the U.S., if they raise sufficient capital and hire American workers.

Other groups, such as the National Restaurant Association, share a strong interest in the proposed mandatory employer verification system, or “E-Verify.” NRA took its message to the White House in late April, with CEO Dawn Sweeney leading a delegation of NRA officers and members to meet with administration officials.

The NRA contingent spent about 90 minutes in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room, talking with administration repre- sentatives including Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, and Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. The officials were interested in hearing NRA’s perspective, according to Angelo Amador, vice president of labor and workforce policy for NRA.

“On E-verify, we have a lot of experience. A lot of members use it already,” said Amador, who was present at the meeting. (NRA recently conducted a survey of members’ current use of E-Verify; the study found 80 percent of NRA members who currently use it—either voluntarily, or because their state requires it—would recommend it.)

NRA’s White House meeting was part of a larger “immigration week” for the group that included a meeting with some GOP members of the Senate’s Gang of Eight, including South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Arizona’s John McCain.

E-Verify is also a key proposal for the NRF. “NRF will examine the size, scope and phase-in schedule of the new, mandatory employer verification system,” Shay said.

Down on the farm

IT, retail and restaurants are not the only association sectors with a keen interest in immigration. Farm and food groups like United Fresh Produce Association, American Nursery & Landscape Association, American Farm Bureau Federation and U.S. Apple Association have joined forces to form the Agriculture Workforce Coalition, so the groups could influence the debate with a unified voice.

AWC worked with some of the members of the Gang of Eight on one of the coalition’s key priorities: establishing a new agricultural guest worker program to be administered by USDA, not the Department of Labor, according to Ray Gilmer, vice president of issues management and communication for United Fresh.

The new guest-worker program is designed to give growers more certainty about worker availability, and to assure access to a skilled and stable workforce, Gilmer said. It establishes wage rates for different job classifications, and allows more flexibility for crews to move from farm to farm, as needed.

“When Mother Nature says you have to harvest, you have to harvest that day,” Gilmer said.
Given that the AWC helped design the guest-worker provisions in the Gang of Eight’s bill, the coalition is supporting that legislation. House leaders are working their own version, which the AWC will evaluate. “The House still has a ways to go until it makes their proposal,” Gilmer said.

The power of story

The efforts on immigration by large groups like NRA, NRF and United Fresh raise a question, however: Will small associations get drowned out in the debate? Not if they leverage their stories and make a strong case in a lawmaker’s home district, says Paul Kanitra, CEO of LobbyIt.com, a nonpartisan firm that represents small association clients on both sides of the immigration issue.

To Kanitra, immigration is illustrative of the “seismic shift” taking place in the lobbying profession. The old model of “money buys influence” no longer holds sway, he argues; a group can spend millions blanketing the airwaves and inside-the-beltway publications with paid advertisements and still lose on an issue.

Now, small association members can make an effective case in the lawmaker’s home district with a compelling story of how a bill can make or break their business. This type of personalized local story is powerful, especially in the current information-saturated climate, with lawmakers buffeted by noise.

“At the end of the day, if they’re [the member] on the fence, and not dyed in the wool on either side of the issue, that’s the sort of thing he or she will remember,” Kanitra said.

Indeed, the power of story has also been acknowledged by another player in the immigration debate: the White House.

In an official White House message released May 8, Muñoz asked for citizens to submit their immigration stories for possible publication on the White House website and dissemination via Facebook and Twitter.

“Share your American stories with us, and we’ll put them to use,” Muñoz wrote.