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Prioritize Marketing After the Deal Is Done
CARL WHITE
Founder, MarketVisory Group
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magine that you’ve been hired by a private equity firm—we’ll call it PE Capital—to run a portfolio of four podiatry practices that PE Capital recently acquired. In total, there are 10 offices, eight podiatrists and multiple staff spread across your metro area. Each has a decent-sized patient panel with room for more. PE Capital told you they see potential in the practices to grow their patient panels; add higher value treatments; serve as a platform to buy more practices; and achieve cost synergies across the operations.
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Marketing is integral to realizing the first three areas and can participate in the fourth. Unfortunately, many PE buyers and operating executives don’t prioritize marketing after the deal is done. Instead, each office keeps doing what it’s doing, which is what got their panels to decent-sized but not bigger. The sooner you put marketing high on your list, the faster PE Capital will realize its vision. So, where do you start? Build and run a marketing plan common to all offices and tailored where needed. Here’s what that looks like.
Marketing Strategy
It’s common to see similar offices doing different marketing activities without a good reason. That’s what you find as you start to tour the offices. You’ve inherited a bunch of tactics. Strategy corrects that—it always comes before tactics. The four essential elements of a marketing strategy are: • TARGET PATIENT TYPES. Who are your patients? It’s not enough to say “people with foot and ankle
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1/27/22 9:38 AM
