NOTE — QUESTIONS ASKED AT INTAKE
The questions worth asking, answered the way we answer them on calls.
Straight answers, no softballs. If a question keeps coming up in application conversations, it earns a line on this page.
Q.01
How does the six-week examination work?
Same way any exam works: baseline vitals before anyone prescribes anything. We evaluate new-patient acquisition, revenue, acquisition cost, and sources; audit ops, finance, and the front desk; sit on the call center for a week; read your last four board decks. We do not write a deck of our own. Where our team is on the ground — Texas, Utah — we run it on-site; everywhere else it's remote by video and phone, or on-site if you cover the travel. It ends in one document — the diagnosis — and a go / no-go conversation.
Q.02
Why is it by application? Why only six engagements a quarter?
Because every engagement runs through a partner who's done the work, and that doesn't scale past six without becoming the kind of agency we left. We decline more applications than we take. We'd rather not take the work than do it badly.
Q.03
Why won't you tell me who your clients are?
Policy, not coyness. The same discipline HIPAA forces on you to protect a patient's chart, we apply to yours. Engagement records share the data, not the names — no client business names, no staff names, nothing identifying beyond industry and geography. Here's the honest version: almost no operator wants a case study written about them. They don't want competitors holding their numbers, and they don't want patients seeing how many new charts they opened last month or what it earned. The rare exceptions we've published were long-tenured clients who agreed reluctantly, out of relationship — not appetite. And if we'd name our last client to win you, you should assume we'd name you to win the next one.
Q.04
What does it cost?
The examination is a fixed fee, quoted before we start — it doesn't float with what we find. If the diagnosis warrants an engagement and we both want to proceed, the engagement is priced from the diagnosis. We don't publish figures because the number depends on the case, not the calendar. What we can promise: you'll know the full cost of the exam before you commit to anything.
Q.05
What verticals do you work in?
Competitive healthcare, usually multi-location: general dentistry and DSOs, specialty dental, veterinary, dermatology, behavioral health, emergency and urgent care, multi-specialty MSOs, PE-backed platforms, and optometry / ophthalmology. But the gate isn't location count — it's whether the market's competitive and there's enough revenue to instrument. A single practice the size of five, in a fought-over metro, qualifies; so does a growing two-to-five-location group. Nine profiles, one underlying disease — see the roster under Who we treat.
Q.06
What won't you do?
Logo refreshes as standalone projects. Award-bait creative. Blog content farms. White-label work. And any vertical where we can't measurably help — if we can't move a number your CFO recognizes, we're decoration, and we don't sell decoration.
Q.07
What's the quarterly recommitment?
Every quarter we re-earn the engagement with the same data we'd use to end it. You get a continue / conclude decision to make with the numbers in front of you. No auto-renewing retainer, no sunk-cost gravity. The method ends, and continues only if it earned the right to.
Q.08
How does confidentiality work if I become a client?
You're never named — before, during, or after the engagement. Your record joins the sealed files: vertical, region-grain geography, before/after KPIs, methodology. The data survives; the name doesn't. Your application is confidential from the moment you submit it.
Q.09
Do you replace our internal marketing team?
No. We instrument, we operate alongside, and we build the system so your team could run it without us — the front desk owns its feedback loop, finance owns the readout, your people own the gains. That's the point: you stay because it's working, not because you're stuck. We've never put a client under contract. Most stay for years anyway — we keep running the media, the measurement, and the periodic refresh of the site and creative — but the day it stops earning its keep, you leave, and we part as friends.
Q.10
What if the examination doesn't find anything worth fixing?
Then the diagnosis says so, and we leave. That outcome is on the table from day one — it's what makes the exam honest. You keep the baseline reading and the instrumentation either way.
Q.11
Who actually does the work?
A partner, or someone a partner trained personally and supervises directly. Nothing is white-labeled in, and nothing is handed to an account team you've never met. That's most of why the roster is capped at six.
Q.12
How fast should we expect results?
The honest answer is a range, and it's on every diagnostic profile: most engagements reach a working, instrumented system in roughly six to twelve months, with intake fixes reading out first and exit-multiple work reading out last. Anyone promising a specific number before the examination is guessing on your budget.
A question we didn't answer? Ask it in the application — a partner reads every one.
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