INTAKE — SIX A QUARTER
We accept six engagements per quarter. Here is how to apply.
SELECTION
Why it is by application
Because the alternative is a discovery call, and a discovery call is a sales meeting with a nicer name.
The application asks for the things a partner needs to know whether we can help: how many locations, what the group actually runs on, what has already been tried, and what the owner believes the problem is. Written down, that takes you fifteen minutes and takes us an hour to read properly. Said out loud, it takes both of us an hour and produces a worse record.
It also means the answer can be no without either of us having spent a morning on it. Roughly the most useful thing this format does is let us decline early, in writing, with a reason — which is a courtesy the standard process does not extend.
APPT — THE FORM
What we need from you
Enough to make a decision, and nothing that would only matter after one. Every field on this form is defensible against the question "why do you need this before a call" — if one is not, tell us and we will remove it. Nothing here is passed to anybody, and nothing here is used to market to you.
SELECTION
BY APPLICATION
We take roughly six engagements a quarter and turn down most of the practices that apply. That is not scarcity marketing — it is the capacity of a partner-led model where every engagement runs through someone who has done the work. We would rather decline than take it on badly.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
What happens in the first two weeks
- MON Partners review every application together
- TUE—THU We do our own diligence — your site, financials we can find, your team on LinkedIn
- FRI You hear back. Yes, no, or "let's talk for 25 minutes"
- WK 2 If yes — we propose. Fixed fee, six-week examination
Submit the form. A partner reads every application personally on the following Monday, and you have a decision — yes, no, or "let's talk" — by Friday. That part is unchanged and it is the whole of week one.
If the answer is yes, week two is a scoping conversation and nothing else: which three locations the examination will read, when somebody can sit with the call centre, which systems we will need access to, and who inside the group owns each of the numbers we are going to ask about. It ends with a fixed fee, a start date and a written scope for the six weeks. There is no proposal for anything beyond the examination, because there is nothing yet to propose.
If the answer is "let's talk", it is one call, and it is usually about whether the constraint is something marketing can move at all.
EXCLUSIONS
What disqualifies a group
A single location in a market with no real competition. There will be nothing for the instrumentation to find worth the fee.
A capacity constraint rather than a demand constraint. If the schedule is booked four weeks out across the group, the honest answer is a provider or a site, and neither is something we sell.
No access to the numbers. The examination reads the practice management system, the phone system and the general ledger. A group unwilling or unable to open those is a group we cannot examine, and we will not substitute an ad account for them.
A requirement for named references before the first call. The client list is sealed permanently.
And an expectation of a result inside one quarter. Most of what we do shows up over two to four quarters, and a firm that agrees to a one-quarter timeline is agreeing to optimise for something visible rather than something real.
FEES
What it costs, and when
The examination is a fixed fee, quoted before it starts, and it is the only thing you are committing to at this stage. It is not credited against later work and it is not a deposit, because a discounted examination is one with an interest in the answer.
If the diagnosis leads to an engagement, that is priced separately, after the constraint is known — which is the only point at which anybody could price it honestly. Media is yours, paid directly to the platforms, never marked up and never taken as a share, because a fee that rises with your spend is a fee with a view about your spend.
The engagement runs to a quarterly recommitment. Every quarter it either earns the next one on the data or it concludes.
No figures are published on this page. They depend on the size of the group and the scope of the examination, and a range printed here would be a number we would have to defend rather than one you could use.
POLICY
Confidentiality, before you send us anything
You are about to describe your group's numbers to a firm you have not met, so this belongs before the form rather than after it.
Your application is confidential whether or not we work together. It is read by a partner and not circulated. It is not entered into a marketing system, you will not receive a sequence of emails because of it, and if the answer is no the file is closed.
If we do work together, you are never named — not during, not after, not in a proposal to somebody else, not in a conference talk. The same rule that keeps every current client off this website is the rule that will keep you off it, and it is unconditional. What we publish is the work with the name removed: the method, the reference ranges with every figure read in its primary source, and the sample deliverables.
The full policy, including what we do publish and how access is revoked at handoff, is at /legal/confidentiality/.