When growth sits at the center of the org chart | Blair Primis | SSG Ep. 16

Growth inside a private specialty practice usually gets split across departments. Marketing runs demand, operations owns the front desk and the contact center, online scheduling belongs to IT and Epic, and real estate decisions come out of finance. This episode is about what changes when a practice stops splitting it up and builds a growth department instead. Joe Zboch talks with Blair Primis, Chief Growth Officer at OrthoCarolina, a physician-owned, physician-led orthopedic practice with over 130 docs and 40 locations across North Carolina. Blair walks through the three lanes his team occupies, the full funnel marketing attribution engine they spent five to seven months building, and what it turned up about their own online scheduling process. He also gets into the harder half of the work: standing in front of 80 to 90 shareholders at a physician retreat and asking them to move their slots around. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT WE COVER • Why a growth department is still novel in private practice and mostly lives inside health systems • The three lanes OrthoCarolina's growth team occupies: demand, supply, and experience, each with its own director • How hub and spoke works in practice, with growth at the center liaising out to operations, IT, legal, and the ASC team • The four or five data sources feeding the team, including Epic, Freshpaint, and Placer.ai • What the full funnel marketing attribution engine uncovered: too many questions for patients to answer before booking online • Why showing friction publicly invites competitors into your market • Schedule first, solve later, and why the behavior change was harder than the data work • The franchise parallel from McDonald's and why it maps onto a physician-owned practice ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT THE GUEST Blair Primis is Chief Growth Officer at OrthoCarolina, where he leads marketing, patient experience, and growth strategy. A Duke University graduate with more than 25 years in marketing, he worked at McCann-Erickson and McKinney before moving to corporate marketing at McDonald's. He first joined OrthoCarolina in 2009 and rose to Senior Vice President, later serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Flagship Specialty Partners before returning to OrthoCarolina in 2025. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ RESOURCES MENTIONED • Epic — electronic health record: https://www.epic.com/ • Freshpaint — privacy and compliance platform for marketing: https://www.freshpaint.io/ • Placer.ai — third-party location and foot traffic data: https://www.placer.ai/ • Google Ads and Google Business Profile • Jerry Seinfeld keynote, on why he ended Seinfeld after nine seasons • McDonald's corporate marketing and the franchise owner-operator model ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙 Scaling Specialty Growth is hosted by Joe Zboch and presented by Hatch, referral management built for specialty care. 🔗 Hatch: https://hatchcare.com/ 🔗 Joe Zboch:   / joezboch   🔗 Blair Primis:   / blairprimis   🎧 Also on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... #SpecialtyCare #HealthcareOperations #ReferralManagement #PracticeManagement #HealthcareLeadership