Case Study
How I stepped into the CMO seat at a plateaued agency serving psychiatry clinics, installed a leadership cadence and a KPI scorecard, and built a new demand channel from zero inside healthcare marketing rules.
Neurovo is a marketing agency for interventional psychiatry clinics. It sells to clinic owners, a small, specialized and heavily regulated audience.
When I came in, growth had plateaued. There was no outbound function: no sending domains, no prospect lists, no ad campaigns, no nurture sequences, and no way to reach a clinic owner who hadn’t already found the agency.
Paid search couldn’t fill the gap. Google keeps ketamine and Spravato ads behind LegitScript certification, which is issued to clinics, not to the agencies that market them, and the TMS terms left open were expensive and crowded with other agencies. Demand had to be built directly.
The mandate: build a repeatable way to reach the right clinic owners and turn those conversations into signed clients.
I stepped into the CMO seat in September 2025 and ran the work on MomentumOS™, my marketing operating system: one theme per quarter, then diagnose, focus, deploy and track.
Fall 2025. Installed a leadership operating cadence, with a weekly priorities meeting and a midweek check-in, and started the KPI scorecard the leadership team would come to run the business on.
Q1 2026. Built outbound from zero: sending domains and inboxes, warmup, sequencing, and an AI-assisted list-building system that found clinic owners in publicly available sources and verified each one before it went into a send. The first wave launched in March, the same month the rebuilt website went live.
Q2 2026. Read the first wave’s replies and weighted the next waves toward the segment that was responding: 38 interested leads in the quarter. Shut down a Google Ads test after four weeks with no conversion signal, and rebuilt the proposal and pricing model to improve margins.
Q3 2026. Launched a second outbound cycle and built a direct mail program for 50 priority clinics. Introduced an AI design workflow that took the design team from a bottleneck to spare capacity.
Along the way, the team got a weekly rhythm that held everyone to the numbers, and by June the scorecard was the sheet the leadership team read the business off.
Clinic owners are a regulated audience, and every channel had limits to work within.
Paid search was mostly closed. With ketamine and Spravato ads behind a certification Neurovo couldn’t hold, and the open TMS terms expensive and crowded, outbound had to do the work paid search usually does.
Referral rules shaped the offer. Clinic owners can refer Medicare and Medicaid patients, so anti-kickback rules ruled out gifts and inducements. The cold email and direct mail campaigns were built to offer something useful instead: a local market analysis for each clinic, delivered by mail with a letter from the founder.
Every message had to sound like Neurovo. Cold email that reads like spam costs a premium brand more than it earns. The sequences were written to the company’s own standard, and the founder signed off on the copy.
If you run an RIA, the rules differ but the discipline carries over. The SEC Marketing Rule limits what you can claim and puts conditions on testimonials and paid referrals, and your CCO reviews what goes out. What transfers is the method: a narrow, well-researched audience, messages that claim nothing you can’t support, and sign-off built into the workflow, not bolted on at the end.
At handoff: 10,590 emails sent at about a 1.9% reply rate, 38 interested leads in Q2 alone, and multiple signed clients. None of it existed a year earlier.
Monthly retainer and fee revenue rose 64% from February to May 2026, while outbound became the primary channel for new clients. The gain came from a mix of newly signed clients and business-model changes I pushed for, such as billing for client software subscriptions the company had been absorbing.
A leadership KPI scorecard, pushed from the first month, was live and trusted by June: the one place the leadership team read the business.
A Figma plus AI workflow took the design team from a bottleneck to spare capacity, with faster turnaround and better quality.
Chris Walden, Founder, NeurovoWhen we brought Shane in Neurovo was plateauing, without the clarity or organizational structure to see the next phase of growth. We were struggling with stability.
A year later we have a foundation: more accountability, better systems, and real clarity on the right levers to pull. We needed a real leader to keep the leadership team on track, and Shane has filled that role for us.
He is disciplined, knowledgeable and kind, and good at holding a team accountable. If you are fortunate enough to align with Shane’s availability, we would highly recommend making the investment. We would do it all over again.
After a year together, it was clear that Neurovo’s core constraint wasn’t demand. It was operations and improving margins, which isn’t the job of a CMO. The core demand engine was built, the team was equipped to carry the work forward with the outbound assets, sequences and send history handed over, and we wrapped at the end of August 2026 on great terms.
If your firm works under compliance rules and new business still runs only through the partners, let’s look at what it would take to give your team a plan, a scorecard and a leader who owns the number.