S-3 Group started at the Lucky Bar. John Scofield swears you can still smell the stale beer.
He and Jeff Shockey had worked together on the Appropriations Committee — Jeff as staff director, John as the guy complaining it was time for something new. Jeff’s answer was simple: why don’t we do our own thing? They mapped it out over drinks, shook on it and walked into a PNC branch in Chevy Chase the next morning to open an account with about ten dollars. They paid a college kid to draw six logos. Their wives picked the winner.
Then came the hard part.
“That first year, I went nine months without a paycheck. That’s a little scary.”
John told Brody and me he’d saved ten mortgage payments before they started. He was down to his second-to-last when the first real check arrived — $6,000. He called it the happiest they’ve ever been, and I believed him.
Fifteen years later, S-3 is one of the firms Washington calls when an issue gets complicated. Makes sense. Complicated is where John learned the trade. Nearly a decade on Appropriations means years inside the least legible process in town — the markups, the conference committees, the senators across the table negotiating bills in real time. Knowing how it worked was never the job. Explaining it to the people who didn’t was.
That skill matters more now than it did in 2011. Brody put it to him plainly: the Republican Party is turning on corporate America. How does a lobbyist work with that?
“You have to have a message that is deliverable to Main Street.”
S-3 now represents three unions. For a firm built by two Republican appropriators, that isn’t a detour. It’s the same job with a new audience — and John thinks the party’s focus on working people is a good thing.
What stayed with me most wasn’t the strategy, though. In fifteen years, exactly one person has left S-3 for another firm. A year later he wanted back.
“It’s not about bodies and policy skill sets. It’s about people and individuals and reputations and families.”
Washington likes to measure influence in access and headcount. John made the opposite bet — hire good people no matter which way the political winds blow, keep them and let the reputation compound.
Ten bucks, a handshake and a logo the wives picked. Fifteen years in, he’s still running the same play.
Takeaway line: In a Washington that keeps changing its language, the translators are the ones who last.