New patient counts are easy to buy. A plan is not.

Four decisions and a plan. Service line and location priority, meaning which services and which practices get funded and which are declined; positioning and proof, meaning why a patient should choose your practice rather than the one on the next block; channel roles, meaning what each channel is for and in which quarter; and budget and measurement, meaning owners, spend and the numbers leadership reviews weekly. The output is a written marketing plan, not a workshop summary.

No. Coaching is a recurring relationship built around the dentist or the leadership team: vision work, accountability, team habits and general practice advice, often delivered monthly for a year or more. This is a fixed-scope project that examines your production, acceptance and capacity data and produces a written marketing plan with owners, budgets and dates, then ends. Some groups use both, for different reasons.

No. We give no clinical, legal, HIPAA, insurance or dental board compliance advice, and nothing here is guidance on any of them. Claims are drafted with your clinical leadership and reviewed by your own counsel before publication. What we will do is refuse to build a positioning claim your records cannot support, which removes most of the risk before it reaches review.

An agency executes a plan. This engagement writes one, and because we take no execution work inside it, the plan can say that a channel should be cut, that a location should stop advertising until its recall system works, or that the next quarter's money belongs in reactivation rather than acquisition. The deliverable includes a one-page brief written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it. Execution is scoped separately afterwards if you want us to do it.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of locations and service lines in scope and the state of your practice management data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue on average across industries, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Because a new patient is not production. We rebuild reporting around treatment plans presented, accepted and completed, average treatment value, hygiene reappointment and retention by acquisition source, which usually reverses the ranking of channels. Offer-led sources are frequently cheapest per new patient and worst per completed treatment plan, and no campaign change fixes that until the reporting shows it.

The clinical conversation stays with your clinicians. What marketing owns is everything that happens before it: which patients you attract, what they were promised, what they already understand about the treatment, and whether financing and scheduling were explained honestly. With industry average acceptance at 58% and completion at 47%, a plan that only adds new patients funds a leak.

Yes, usually before the acquisition work. Unscheduled treatment and lapsed patients are the cheapest production in any group, and the systems that recover them are marketing systems: messaging, timing, channel and ownership. Henry Schein One puts average retention at 70% against 94% in the top decile, which is a larger gap than most acquisition programmes can close.

Different question. Dental growth advisory looks for the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including case acceptance and completion, hygiene reappointment and provider capacity. Marketing strategy consulting takes the commercial model as given and answers what marketing should do about it: service line priority, positioning, channel roles, budget and measurement. Groups that already know their constraint usually want this one.

Yes, within the agreed scope and with patient privacy respected. Active patients and lost consultations are the fastest route to a positioning claim that survives a treatment conversation, and coordinators and front desk staff know which promises the schedule cannot keep. Interviews are short and confidential, findings feed the positioning platform, and no patient information is published.

A sponsor, usually the owner, chief executive or platform president; clinical leadership; regional or office managers; the treatment coordinator and front desk or call centre lead; and whoever owns marketing today. Expect around two hours of interviews each in week one and a half-day decision session in week three. If the sponsor cannot attend that session, we move it rather than run it without them.

No, it is often the right first step, because the plan states what the first hire has to do and what stays with vendors. Where the question is really about structure and sequencing of hires, marketing team advisory covers it, and where you need someone to lead the function while you build it a fractional CMO is the engagement. Both are quoted separately and neither is required to use the plan.

Yes, and we will say plainly where it limits a conclusion. We work from financial records first, reconcile practice management, CRM and call tracking against them, and label which findings are solid and which are directional. Validity's 2026 research found 62% of organisations losing revenue to poor CRM data and 67% having campaigns delayed or scrapped because of it, so this is normal rather than disqualifying. Marketing operations consulting implements the fix.

Yes. The plan states whether an acquired practice keeps its name, moves to the group brand or runs a transition period, what has to be true before a rebrand is worth the lost search equity, and how patient communication is sequenced. It also sets which numbers tell you at ninety days whether the transition cost you patients. We are not brokers, valuation advisors or transaction consultants.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many groups book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators and adjust the sequence, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit instead, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back. The parent engagement is marketing strategy consulting, and execution, if you want us to do it, is scoped separately.