Field Notes from the Founder

Notes from inside 95+ healthcare practices.

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.

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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

The most-shared insight.

Lead Qualification

What email scammers understand about lead qualification that most practices get backwards.

The Nigerian prince email isn't badly written. It's precisely written, to keep the wrong people from ever picking up the phone. Your marketing should be doing the same thing. Just, you know, for good.

5 min read·July 22, 2026

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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

What we're seeing in live funnels.

Short, specific, and grounded in real engagements. Each note focuses on one observation, one intervention, and the outcome.

Market Sizing

Sometimes the marketing isn't the problem. The math is.

A physician wants to build a $1 million service line. There are 500,000 people in the area, which sounds like plenty. But only a fraction have the condition, a smaller fraction know the treatment exists, and a smaller fraction still can pay cash for it. No campaign fixes that. Here's the math to run before you hire anyone, including us.

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6 min readOctober 12, 2026

Intake

I measured how fast nine practices actually answer a new lead. It was worse than I expected.

I pulled 90 days of inbound leads across the practices we manage and measured how long each one waited before a human being responded. Across 1,737 leads, about 6% got a person within five minutes. One practice's median wait was 18 hours. Here's what the data showed, and what I'm no longer willing to assume.

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6 min readOctober 12, 2026

Conversion

The most expensive screen in your practice is the first one in your booking flow

809 people started the booking flow. 321 reached the second step. Everyone who got past that first screen booked at a healthy rate, which meant the entire problem lived in one place, and it was not the ads. The part I did not expect: desktop users quit far more often than mobile.

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5 min readOctober 12, 2026

AI Search

What Google's new GEO guide actually means for healthcare practices.

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.

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4 min readMay 20, 2026

Google Ads

What to do when your Google Ads rep calls.

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.

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5 min readMay 19, 2026

Landing Pages

You're probably using the same landing page for Google and Meta. That's the problem.

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.

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5 min readMay 19, 2026

AI Search

AI search won't infer your expertise. You have to state it.

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.

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5 min readMay 19, 2026

Meta Ads

Most Meta funnels end at the consultation. That's where they should be starting.

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.

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6 min readMay 19, 2026

Google Ads

Your branded keyword campaign might be wasting money.

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.

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5 min readMay 19, 2026

Working with the founder

If a field note sounds like your practice, the call is the next step.

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.

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30 min strategy callDirect with the founderWritten plan within 48 hrs