Most healthcare marketing advice is written from dashboards. These notes are written from inside the practices themselves — sitting with front desks, reviewing intake workflows, auditing campaigns, analyzing consultation quality, and seeing firsthand what actually moves new-patient volume.
Written first-person by Mike Funkhouser, based on active engagements across plastic surgery, orthopedics, med spa, regenerative, dental, vascular, and specialty psychiatry.
Written by
Mike Funkhouser
Founder, Practice Growth Co
Mike has spent more than a decade inside specialty healthcare practices — auditing campaigns, sitting with front desks, and rebuilding the systems that turn marketing spend into booked surgical consultations.
“The most useful patterns in patient acquisition don’t show up in dashboards. They show up sitting next to a front desk, watching where qualified patients actually slip, and noticing the same operational gaps repeating across specialties. These are those notes.”
— Mike Funkhouser, Founder
Featured Field Note
Tracking
A plastic surgery practice was happy with their $140 CPL. The show rate was 40% and consult-to-booked was 30%. Real cost per patient started: over $1,500. CPL tells you one thing. Three numbers tell you where the funnel actually breaks.
Field note by
Mike Funkhouser
Each post is written from inside an active engagement, what we saw, what we tested, and what the outcome looked like in the practice's own metrics.
Field Notes
Short, specific, and grounded in real engagements. Each note focuses on one observation, one intervention, and the outcome.
AI Search
Google just published their official GEO best practices. Here's what it actually says, what it doesn't cover, and what specialty healthcare practices should take away from it.
Google Ads
Google Ads reps have been more aggressive than ever this year. Here's what they're pushing, why most of it will hurt your healthcare account, and how to handle the calls.
Landing Pages
Google traffic already knows what it wants. Meta traffic has no idea why your ad appeared. Sending both to the same URL means underperforming on at least one channel, usually both. Here's how to build pages that match each audience's intent.
AI Search
A competitor kept showing up in ChatGPT for 'best rhinoplasty surgeon.' Fewer reviews, smaller gallery, less name recognition. Their About page said '2,400 procedures performed.' My client's said 'committed to natural-looking results.' AI cited one and skipped the other.
Meta Ads
For high-consideration procedures, patients don't decide in the consultation room. They go home. They talk to their spouse. They think for two or three weeks. The practices winning those cases are the ones showing up in the patient's feed after they leave.
Google Ads
Account-level CPL was $95. Branded CPL was $28. Non-branded CPL was $310. The account wasn't performing well, it was capturing people who already knew the practice existed. Here's when branded campaigns protect you and when they just pay for traffic you already had.
Working with the founder
The strategy call is direct with Mike. We diagnose the funnel, share what we'd change in the first 30 days, and send a written plan within 48 hours.