Rhett Buttle’s Journey From Las Vegas to Washington

Before the signed legislation on the walls, before the coalitions and the Washington rooms, there was a kid with a box of candy bars, knocking on doors in Las Vegas.

Rhett Buttle’s first paying job was door-to-door sales. His second was at a Quiznos inside a casino, which is, depending on your view of Vegas, either the most glamorous or the least glamorous first job in America. “City of neon lights” is how he describes where he grew up. It is also, it turns out, a useful place to learn that persuasion and persistence are closely related.

Today, Buttle is the founder and CEO of Public Private Strategies, one of the country’s more influential translators between the public and private sectors. He has helped build the Small Business Roundtable, a coalition that has become essential infrastructure for any administration seeking to advance an economic agenda. He has worked with the Aspen Institute on bringing economic leaders to the table, received the USHCC LGBT Award, and been named NGLCC Supplier of the Year. The list goes on long enough that it is easy to forget where the arc first started.

Lessons from the Desert

Rhett is fond of mentioning that his childhood playground was the desert outside Las Vegas. The detail sounds like color, but it’s not only that. There is something temperamentally suited to the desert in how he lives day to day now: observant, patient, unflashy, practiced at spotting the thing most people miss in a wide-open landscape.

He has described Las Vegas, fondly, as a place where the work ethic is closer to a theology than a lifestyle. The city runs 24 hours a day because somebody is always working. It is a valuable atmosphere for forming a baseline expectation that showing up is, as Buttle has put it, half the battle.

That phrase is not a throwaway. Ask him for the best advice he got growing up, and it is the first thing he says. A lot of careers are won or lost before most people know a competition is happening. The advice, as he remembers it, was to be the person who kept showing up.

Higher Education, Hard Times

Buttle headed west to the University of San Diego for his undergraduate degree, then east to George Washington University, which put him on the ground in the city where he would eventually build up. The timing of his career launch was less forgiving. He came of age during the financial crisis, a period he has said fundamentally shaped the way he thinks about the country.

“I grew up during a time when America was at war and in a financial crisis,” Buttle has said. “It shaped the way I think about America’s role in the world and how our country should work for its citizens.”

It is a statement worth sitting with because it explains much of what came next. A generation raised on the collapse of institutions tends to respond in one of two ways. Some of them lose faith in institutions altogether, while a smaller group decides to become the people who seek to make them work better.

The Rise

There is no single dramatic inflection point in Buttle’s account. That is part of the story. He worked on campaigns. He moved through coalition work. He served as an executive fellow for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Washington, DC, he kept building, across administrations, across crises, across the election cycles that reshaped the political landscape.

The founding of Public Private Strategies, in retrospect, reads like the logical consolidation of everything that came before. The firm is built on the premise that the most interesting problems lie at the intersection of what the public sector can legislate and what the private sector can deliver. Buttle spent a decade proving that overlap existed by working in it. Public Private Strategies was his formal declaration that he was going to do it full-time.

If you want to know what Rhett Buttle values, look at what he chose to hang on his walls. It is not diplomas, awards, or photos with powerful figures. It is signed copies of legislation he helped move.

The choice is telling. Laws, even ones that feel routine at the time, tend to outlive news cycles and careers. Putting them on the wall is both a memory and a form of accountability. These now exist, and people’s lives are different because of them. Those are the successes that he truly values.

The Private Side of a Public Life

Ask Buttle what gives him joy, and the answer is unguarded. Friendship. Connection. The kind of evenings that do not make LinkedIn posts. His greatest fear, he says with a smile, is spiders. His guilty pleasure is a cinnamon roll. His favorite way to spend money is on travel. His go-to workout is a HIIT class. His go-to stress relief is exercise.

These are not the answers of a man trying to project anything in particular. They are the answers of someone who has decided, somewhere along the way, that a public life works best when the private one is uncomplicated.

He describes himself in five words: curious, intuitive, empathetic, decisive, witty. The single piece of advice he would give his younger self would be to trust himself sooner. It is both a kind thing to tell the Vegas kid selling candy bars and a sharp piece of self-knowledge from a man who has spent a career learning to trust his gut.

What His Arc Says

There is a reason origin stories are so enduring. They are among the few honest ways we have of arguing that a starting point need not equal an ending point. Rhett Buttle’s version of that story involves a casino sandwich shop, a desert childhood, a financial crisis, and a career spent refusing to let others get stuck in first gear.

His own message to the world is short. Build something that matters, he says, and bring others with you. The line reads like a motto because it is one.