Score, before
64/100
Case Studies / Healthcare
A full funnel, leaking at week three.
A multi-site healthcare services provider was acquiring patients well and spending confidently to do it. Growth still stalled. The business was filling a bucket with a hole in it, and nobody owned the hole.
Growth Intelligence Summary · Redacted
Constraint
Retention
First Move
Onboarding
90-day churn
↓ 9pts
Score, 90d
64 → 71
Situation
Acquisition was working. Growth wasn't.
Strong demand generation, a respected brand, and a leadership team proud of their marketing. Yet net growth was slow, and the cost to keep it moving kept rising. The reflex was to acquire harder.
Symptoms
Busy front door, quiet back door
New-patient numbers looked healthy month to month, but a large share didn't return past the first few weeks. No single team owned early-stage retention; it fell between marketing, operations and the clinics.
The constraint
Retention, hiding behind acquisition
Compounding scored weak. Churn in the first ninety days was masking otherwise strong acquisition. Every new cohort partly replaced the last. The business was paying to stand still.
Recommendation
Own the first ninety days
Build a deliberate onboarding journey, assign clear ownership of early retention, and instrument the first-90-day drop-off so it could be managed. Hold acquisition spend flat until the bucket stopped leaking.
Outcome
Same acquisition, more growth
Within a quarter, early churn fell around nine points and net revenue retention turned clearly positive, on the same acquisition budget. The projected Growth Score moved 64 → 71.
The lesson
Acquisition into a leaky bucket is expensive water
When retention is the constraint, spending more on acquisition makes the problem look busier, not better. Fix the bucket first; then the tap is worth turning up.
† Figures representative; client identity and specifics redacted.
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