What Ten Years With One Client Actually Teaches You

The relationship with Privatus started the way most good ones do: a business that was already doing serious work and needed marketing that could keep up.

Privatus Care Solutions provides private home care across seven states on the East Coast. The families they serve are making some of the hardest decisions of their lives. The stakes of the marketing aren’t abstract — the right message, to the right person, at the right moment matters in a way that goes beyond conversion rates.

Over ten years, I served as their fractional CMO while my team ran execution. That structure is the whole story.

When a business hires a strategist separately from an agency, there’s always a gap. The strategy gets handed off to people who didn’t build it and aren’t accountable to it. Something gets lost, in translation, in priority, in the six weeks between when the plan was written and when the campaign actually launches. The two sides optimize for different things, and nobody’s fully on the hook for what actually happens.

With Privatus, there was no gap. I built the strategy and my team built the work. When something wasn’t performing, I didn’t have to schedule a meeting between two vendors to figure out why. We already knew. And we could change direction without it becoming a whole thing.

That’s the structural advantage. But the relationship advantage took longer to build.

Early on, I told their team something they didn’t want to hear: a website they were proud of wasn’t working. Not my opinion — the data made the case for me. Click-through was low, cost-per-lead was climbing, and the creative that looked great in a presentation wasn’t translating to applicants. Those conversations are uncomfortable. They’re also the ones that either end a relationship or deepen it. Ours deepened.

Over time, that honesty became the foundation. They stopped defending decisions and started asking earlier. I stopped softening feedback and started bringing the data first. By the end, they weren’t just listening to my recommendations — they were asking for them before they’d committed to anything.

The results reflected it. By the time we wrapped our work together, HDM had helped Privatus develop a more caregiver-centric approach that drove an 86% increase in applicants to their site — with a corresponding decrease in monthly pay-per-click spend. More qualified people, for less money. That’s what happens when strategy and execution are actually connected.

Ten years is a long time. Long enough that I knew their business the way you know something you’ve watched grow. Long enough to have seen multiple market shifts, internal leadership changes, and campaigns that worked and campaigns that didn’t. That context is what makes the difference between a vendor and a team.

We don’t work with Privatus anymore. Relationships like that don’t end because something went wrong — they end because both sides have grown and the chapter closes. What they built is still running. What we built together is the clearest proof I have of what the HDM model actually produces when you give it enough time to work.