Chapter 06 — The Marketing
Market like you own the place.
Nicole's hospitals paid a national veterinary marketing company to bring in the clients. Then the family read the raw numbers behind the polished reports. This is the chapter where they took the marketing back.
What happened
The reports were beautiful. The accounts underneath were not.
For Nicole’s hospitals, the arrangement looked responsible on paper: a national veterinary marketing company handling the website, the ads, and the reporting, at roughly $9,000 a month. About $1,000 of that was the management fee. About $8,000 was ad spend. Every month, a polished report arrived saying the machine was working.
This summer, the family that owns the hospitals stopped reading the reports and started reading the accounts. Not the dashboard the agency built: the raw search data, the ad logs, the form submissions, the indexing records. What they found fills the rest of this page.
What the audit found
53% of the search clicks were people typing the hospital’s own name.
The audit started with search. 53% of the website’s search clicks were people typing the hospital’s own name: clients and neighbors who already knew the practice and were looking for it by name. Then, conversions. The dashboard counted clicks near a contact form as conversions, and in one 28-day window that meant 1,912 form-adjacent click events reported against 60 real leads.
The ad spend told the same story in geography. Paid ads reached visitors in 258 different cities, for a hospital that serves roughly three counties, and roughly 15% of the paid visitors were physically out of state. Dollars meant for neighbors who could actually book an appointment were buying clicks from people far outside the area the hospital serves.
Then the content. 43% of the blog the agency wrote was invisible to Google, never indexed at all, and less than two-thirds of the site’s current pages were in Google in any form. One published post had the town’s name substituted everywhere the word “vet” belonged, through the entire article: a bulk find-and-replace, left live for months on a page carrying the hospital’s name.
How honest marketing is measured
A click near a button is not a client. Count completed inquiries, or count nothing.
An ad shown to someone who can never walk through your door is not marketing. It is waste.
Every lead should arrive with its origin attached.
Read your own accounts. A dashboard is someone else’s story about your numbers.
Publish the results, whichever way they land.
The decision
This summer, the family brought the marketing in-house.
No new agency. No softer dashboard. The same family that owns Mtn Green Animal Hospital and is building Agave Animal Hospital now runs the marketing itself, on accounts it reads directly. It is the same conviction that drives the mission: the people accountable for the outcome should own the thing that produces it.
The in-house practice is strict, and short enough to print. Count only real inquiries, a completed form or a phone call, never clicks near a button. Make every lead arrive knowing where it came from. Aim ads only at people physically in the area the hospitals serve. Read the numbers monthly, and act on what they say.
Early proof
Agave’s website is already appearing in Google, before the hospital even opens.
Agave Animal Hospital is not open yet; it is expected in early 2027. Its website was built in-house, and within its first six weeks, with no ads, no business listing, and no open hospital behind it, it began appearing in Google results for searches like “washington county vet,” “veterinarian in st george utah,” and “cat urgent care near me.”
Read that honestly: appearing is not winning, and six weeks is a beginning, not a verdict. But it is a real signal, earned with no ad spend at all, and every visitor it ever brings will be measured the only way this family measures anything now. Did a real person actually reach out.
The open ledger
The results will be published here, whichever way they land.
This chapter is built to grow. As the in-house numbers mature, they will be posted on this page: the honest before and after, real inquiries against real spend, held to the same standard the agency was held to. If in-house wins, the numbers will show it. If it stumbles, the numbers will show that too. That is what it means to own your accounts.
For partner doctors
A doctor who owns the building should own the numbers that fill it.
Every hospital in the partnership model gets its marketing the way the family now does it: built in-house, counted honestly, aimed at the community it actually serves, and read monthly by the people whose names are on the loan. The engine is one of the things a partner never has to buy or babysit. The medicine, and the building, are yours.
If you want a hospital where even the marketing tells the truth, the conversation is open.