A short list, and an equally deliberate list of what I leave alone.

Every practice already has people telling it what to do. The useful thing a senior partner brings is not another opinion, it is a defined territory and the judgment to stay inside it. So here is exactly where the work lives.

The right hand column is not a list of things I am unwilling to discuss. Several of them come up in almost every engagement, and pretending otherwise would be silly. It is a list of things I will not be accountable for, because they need a different specialist and you deserve one.

Two of them are worth saying out loud, because they are what most people expect when they hear the word marketing. I do not run ad accounts and I do not manage Instagram. Both are real crafts, both are better done by people who do them every day, and neither is the reason a practice’s demand has stalled. Hiring a strategist to post is an expensive way to get posts.

What I do instead is work out which of the seven gears is actually costing you, and then either build the fix or brief the person who should. When the diagnosis is right, the execution gets much cheaper, because you stop paying people to solve the wrong problem well.

Most practices come in one of four ways. A solo owner who has grown on word of mouth and can feel a gap forming. A multi-location group in a growth sprint with no in-house strategist. An established practice quietly losing ground to a slicker but weaker competitor. Or a fast-scaling practice already spending on marketing, just inefficiently.

The diagnosis is the same in all four cases. What differs is how much of the engine already exists and how much has to be built. That is what the engagements are shaped around.