I help behavioral health group practices bring clear direction to their marketing as their teams, services, and locations grow.
As your fractional CMO, I lead the strategy, coordinate your team and outside partners, and connect marketing with intake, clinician capacity, and your practice’s business goals.
I work with therapy, counseling, psychology, and psychiatry group practices, where marketing is closely connected to intake, clinician capacity, services, locations, and the overall health of the business.
From the outside, a practice can look like it's doing great. A growing team. A steady stream of inquiries. Ads running. Content going out. A busy website.
But practice owners see what isn't obvious from the outside.
Maybe some clinicians have more capacity than others. Maybe inquiries aren't turning into clients at the rate they should. Maybe a new location or service needs to grow. Maybe the practice wants to shift its payer or service mix. Or maybe there's simply a question of whether all that marketing activity is actually contributing to a healthier business.
Those are business questions first. Marketing has to work backward from them.
That's why I don't think about practice marketing simply in terms of generating more leads. The starting point is understanding what the practice is trying to accomplish — and where marketing can actually help.
There isn't one formula for growing a practice. But there are patterns I see again and again.
A practice doesn't just need demand. It needs the right demand in the right places.
One clinician may have a full caseload while another has room. One location may be thriving while another needs to grow. Certain services may be priorities. Insurance-based and private-pay offerings may have different goals and economics.
Marketing has to reflect what the practice actually needs — not simply generate more activity.
An inquiry isn't the same thing as a new client.
What happens next matters: how quickly someone hears back, whether the practice accepts their insurance, whether there's an appropriate clinician available, how well the practice communicates fit, and whether the person ultimately schedules.
An ad platform can tell you that someone filled out a form. It can't always tell you whether that person was a good fit, became a client, or why they didn't.
If you can’t connect marketing to intake, bookings, and new-client starts, it’s difficult to know what’s actually working.
Paid search, your website, email, content, social media, referrals, community relationships, and intake aren't separate problems.
A strong email list isn't particularly valuable if nobody has a plan for it. Great ads can underperform if the website or intake process isn't doing its job. Good content can go unnoticed if it isn't connected to a larger strategy.
Sometimes the biggest opportunities are already there. Someone has to see them and connect the pieces.
There's always another idea: a service to promote, a partnership to pursue, an ad campaign to try, a website update, an event, a newsletter, a new platform, a new location.
And marketing may already be spread across an internal team member, agencies, freelancers, ad partners, a web team, clinicians, and the practice owner.
The challenge isn't necessarily getting more people to do marketing.
It's making sure someone is looking across all of it, setting the priorities, and helping everyone focus on the work that matters most.
My work with behavioral health group practices has gone well beyond campaigns, channels, and lead generation.
I've gotten close to the business behind the marketing — how clinician capacity affects growth, how intake affects conversion, how services and locations change what needs to be promoted, how payer mix influences priorities, and how all of those things affect what good marketing should actually look like.
I've also seen how quickly the marketing itself can become fragmented. An internal team member may own one piece. An agency or specialist may own another. The website lives somewhere else. Intake has its own process. Meanwhile, the practice owner is trying to understand what's working, what deserves attention, and what will actually contribute to a healthier practice.
That perspective shapes how I approach practice marketing: start with what the practice is trying to accomplish, understand what’s happening across the business, and build the marketing around those priorities.
What started as a need for clearer messaging became much more complex as the Chicago-area practice grew — more clinicians, multiple locations, new services, outside marketing partners, and an increasing need to connect marketing with intake, capacity, and the goals of the business.
Since 2019, I've helped the practice evolve its marketing as its needs have changed — from positioning, website, and paid acquisition to clinician recruiting, internal marketing resources, intake and conversion, private-pay growth, and new locations and services.
Instead of tackling marketing one project at a time, the practice now has an ongoing marketing function with clear senior ownership — coordinating the people and resources doing the work and connecting marketing decisions to what the business needs next.
Read the full client story →You may need to clarify your positioning, understand which marketing channels are bringing in suitable clients, improve visibility into intake conversion, or plan for a new service or location.
Or you may already have internal staff and outside partners doing the work, with a growing need for someone senior to set the direction, coordinate everyone, and keep marketing connected to the practice’s goals.
For a specific challenge or decision, a focused strategy project can help you move forward. For ongoing leadership, I work as your fractional CMO—leading the strategy, team, and partners, reviewing performance, and adjusting priorities as the practice grows.