When a physician joins your platform, the growth story matters. What can this practice achieve with your support that it couldn’t achieve alone? And how will that growth contribute to the physician’s income recovery after the transaction?
More meetings probably wasn’t the investment thesis.
When I help a platform build its marketing strategy, I want it connected to that growth story from the start. Marketing should help shape the plan before the deal, not just get a list of things to launch afterward.
That starts with three questions about what the practice gains. Then comes the commitment to measure the difference.
Three answers and a commitment to prove it
- What work comes off the practice’s plate?
Be clear about who owns the work. Who manages the vendors? Who updates the website? Who runs the campaigns? What does the practice still need to do?
Giving advice while leaving the practice to coordinate everything isn’t much of a service. Ask the practice manager what they no longer have to chase. They’ll have a fairly clear answer.
- What can the practice now do better?
Tie the plan to a growth priority: filling a new specialist’s schedule, building demand for a treatment, or making it easier for patients to find and book an available appointment.
I’m glad the practice has better tools. It probably wasn’t short on passwords, though. I want to know what it can do now that it couldn’t do before.
- What stays local, and why?
Protect the name patients know, the physicians they trust, and what’s distinctive about the care. Those are part of the practice’s value. I’ve heard specialists explain a treatment approach and thought, why isn’t any of that on the website?
A shared process for updating office hours is unlikely to threaten anyone’s clinical autonomy. Keep what’s different for a reason, not just what nobody has gotten around to changing.
- Benchmark at acquisition. Review at 6, 12, and 24 months.
Six months after the deal is a bad time to start asking where you started. Establish the pre-acquisition baseline across marketing, operations, and finance: spending, new-patient bookings, completed visits, and collected revenue where available.
Keep the definitions consistent. Account for changes in staffing, capacity, and seasonality. And if your data stops at bookings, say so. An appointment on the calendar isn’t money in the physician’s pocket.
Check campaign performance along the way. Use the milestone reviews to show the cumulative change.
This is evidence for the next acquisition
Results from existing partners give business development more to work with than another slide about the platform’s capabilities. Which practices grew? What did the platform change? How did that growth contribute to physician income recovery?
Work with finance to connect growth to income under the physician’s actual compensation arrangement. Make marketing’s contribution clear without attributing every improvement to a campaign. A specific, defensible story is more useful than a bigger claim.
The Monday Morning Version
Take one recently acquired practice and put the three answers next to its starting numbers. Agree on who owns the work, who tracks the results, and when you’ll review the difference.
That makes marketing’s contribution visible. It gives business development evidence for the next partnership.