In 2019, a Chicago-area therapy practice reached out to me for help clarifying its messaging.
That project led to a new website. Then Google Ads. Content strategy. Clinician recruiting. Support for new locations. And eventually something much broader: an ongoing need for someone to understand the business, determine what marketing needed to do next, and make sure the right people were doing the right work.
Today, I provide ongoing marketing leadership across an increasingly complex practice — working with leadership, internal team members, intake, and outside specialists to connect marketing decisions to what the business actually needs.
The practice is intentionally unnamed to protect client confidentiality.
2019–Present · Chicago-area therapy practice · Ongoing marketing leadership
What began as a messaging project has evolved into a six-year relationship spanning positioning, website, paid acquisition, clinician recruiting, internal marketing resources, intake and conversion, new locations and services, and private-pay growth.
The original assignment in 2019 was straightforward: help the practice explain what it did more clearly.
We developed the positioning and messaging, creating a clearer story and foundation for its marketing.
That led to an obvious next question: What should we do with the website?
The existing site was dated and difficult to navigate, so I developed the sitemap and user experience, wrote the copy, brought in a designer, and oversaw development and launch.
Then came another opportunity. The practice was already investing in Google Ads. If we were sending paid traffic to a much better website, could we make that investment work harder?
I brought in a Google Ads specialist, and what started as a messaging project became a broader marketing relationship.
But that didn't mean the practice suddenly needed every kind of marketing.
It meant we kept asking what it needed next.
Over the next few years, the work expanded across paid acquisition, website optimization, content strategy and different audiences.
Then I asked the leadership team a question I still ask regularly:
What's keeping you up at night?
The answer wasn't Google Ads or getting more prospective clients.
It was hiring therapists.
The practice was already working with a recruiting consultant, so I met with her to understand what she was doing, what she was seeing and where marketing could complement her work.
That led to a dedicated recruitment marketing effort, including employer positioning, testimonials, video and content designed to help prospective clinicians understand what made the practice different.
The business didn't need more clients. It needed more clinicians. So that's what marketing needed to help solve.
As the practice grew, so did the complexity.
There were multiple locations. Google Ads. Website updates. Email. Content. New initiatives. Outside specialists. Internal resources. And a steady stream of decisions about what deserved attention.
By 2025, addressing those things one project at a time no longer made sense.
There wasn't one meeting where someone announced that I was now responsible for marketing. The relationship evolved because the practice needed something different.
Instead of waiting for someone to hand me a marketing assignment, I increasingly became the person leadership could bring the bigger questions to:
Should we pursue this? What should we prioritize? Who should handle it? Are the ads actually working? How should we launch this? Is this even a marketing problem?
And increasingly, my job wasn't to personally execute every answer.
It was to make sure the right person did.
“Dan has been at the helm of so many important improvement projects over the years. We’re so glad to have his wisdom and the way he holds our mission and vision guiding us.”
— Founder, Chicago-area therapy practice
The practice needed more consistent execution, but that didn't mean I should personally create every social post, email or website update.
So we looked at the marketing function itself.
What required senior judgment? What could be handled by someone earlier in their career? Where did we need specialists?
I helped define and source a part-time internal marketing role. Today, I provide the senior direction while that person handles much of the ongoing execution. Paid search stays with a specialist. Web development goes to a web specialist. Clinicians contribute their expertise without having to become marketers.
I sit across those pieces — setting priorities, coordinating resources and connecting the work to the larger strategy.
The goal isn't to make every marketing problem something I personally execute. It's to make sure the practice has the right people doing the right work.
As our work became more connected to the business, another question became increasingly important:
What actually happens after someone becomes a lead?
A therapy practice doesn't grow because someone completes a form.
That person has to be a fit. There needs to be an appropriate clinician with the right availability. The intake team has to connect with them. And ultimately, they have to schedule.
So we started looking further downstream.
That meant working with intake to better understand lead sources, qualification, follow-up, therapist matching, availability, statuses and where prospective clients were falling out of the process.
At one point, for example, we found that two locations were converting qualified inquiries at roughly the same rate — but one was generating substantially fewer opportunities.
That's a different problem from simply saying, “This location needs more clients.”
We also identified qualified prospective clients who hadn't scheduled and built a nurture process to stay helpful and make it easy to reconnect when the timing was better.
The question stopped being: How many leads did marketing generate? It became: What happened to them?
The conversations I have with leadership today look very different from the one we had in 2019.
We're still talking about campaigns, content, websites and messaging.
But we're also talking about clinician capacity. Intake conversion. Locations. Services. Insurance reimbursement. Private pay. Internal resources. Attribution. And which opportunities actually deserve the practice's attention.
One current example is the practice's effort to grow its private-pay business.
That's not simply a matter of generating more leads. It raises questions about who is most likely to choose private pay, what makes the practice worth paying for out of pocket, which clinicians and locations should support the strategy, how intake should work, and how we learn what's working.
Those questions have shaped the positioning and launch of new private-pay offerings and a new location designed around that model.
It's still a work in progress.
And that's important.
Not every marketing initiative ends with a giant percentage and a victory lap. Some things work. Some need to change. Some take longer than expected. Sometimes the data tells us the problem isn't where we thought it was.
My job is to stay close enough to the business to see that — and help determine what we do next.
In 2019, this practice needed clearer messaging.
Since then, the work has touched its website, paid acquisition, content, clinician recruiting, new locations, email, internal marketing resources, intake, attribution, private-pay positioning and new service launches.
But the breadth of that list isn't the most important part.
The practice changed. Its challenges changed. Its opportunities changed.
And the marketing needed to change with them.
That's what ongoing marketing leadership means to me:
Understand what the business needs. Determine what marketing can do about it. Put the right people and resources around the problem. And keep learning what needs to happen next.