Director of Strategic Growth and Outreach

Description

Position Summary

The Director of Strategic Growth & Outreach is responsible for designing and executing the enterprise growth strategy for the Embrace U Child & Adolescent PHP and IOP service line. The Director will build scalable patient acquisition capabilities across in-person and digital channels, strengthen referral ecosystems, support new-market launches, and lead the local growth and outreach team.

This is a non-operational role. The Director does not manage clinic staffing, clinical delivery, scheduling, utilization management, revenue cycle, or day-to-day clinic performance. The role partners closely with Operations, Clinical Leadership, Intake, Marketing, Payor Relations, and Executive Leadership to ensure growth strategies are responsible, measurable, compliant, and aligned with available clinical capacity.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Growth Strategy

• Develop and execute a three-year patient acquisition roadmap aligned with the expansion from 6 to 30 clinics.
• Create annual, quarterly, and market-specific growth plans with clear targets, assumptions, accountabilities, and leading indicators.
• Design a repeatable market-entry and clinic-ramp model for de novo locations, including pre-opening outreach and post-opening maturation plans.
• Use demographic, competitive, referral, payor, access, and utilization data to prioritize markets and acquisition opportunities.
• Advise executive leadership on growth risks, market opportunities, resource needs, and expected return on investment.

Patient Acquisition and Referral Development

• Build durable referral partnerships with pediatricians, child and adolescent psychiatrists, therapists, psychologists, hospitals, emergency departments, schools, school counselors, community mental health organizations, child welfare agencies, and other appropriate referral partners.
• Develop referral-source segmentation, account plans, engagement standards, and retention strategies based on referral quality and strategic value.
• Identify referral leakage and barriers to access, then coordinate with accountable internal leaders to address issues that limit appropriate admissions.
• Promote timely access to clinically appropriate levels of care without using pressure, inducements, or practices that could compromise clinical judgment or patient choice.

Digital Growth Strategy

• Partner with Marketing to develop integrated digital patient acquisition strategies, including paid search, organic search, local search, social media, content, online reputation, and conversion optimization.
• Define target audiences, market-level campaigns, landing-page needs, lead-routing requirements, and performance expectations.
• Monitor digital funnel performance from inquiry through admission and recommend changes based on conversion, acquisition cost, referral quality, and market capacity.
• Ensure digital outreach and communications are appropriate for children, adolescents, and families and comply with privacy, advertising, and organizational standards.

Team Leadership

• Recruit, organize, lead, coach, and evaluate local and regional Growth & Outreach professionals.
• Establish standardized role expectations, territory plans, account management practices, CRM requirements, and performance scorecards.
• Create a disciplined management cadence that includes pipeline reviews, market reviews, coaching, forecasting, and corrective action planning.
• Develop team capability in consultative relationship management, behavioral health access, ethical outreach, data interpretation, and executive communication.

Analytics and Performance Management

• Build and maintain dashboards for inquiries, qualified referrals, referral sources, admissions, conversion rates, referral-source retention, clinic ramp, digital channel performance, and acquisition cost.
• Establish attribution and reporting standards that distinguish outreach influence from operational, clinical, payor, and intake factors.
• Forecast patient acquisition by market and clinic and identify variances early.
• Use data to redirect outreach resources toward the highest-value and most sustainable opportunities.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Coordinate with Clinical and Operations leaders to align acquisition activity with program eligibility, patient safety, clinical quality, capacity, staffing readiness, and access goals.
• Partner with Intake and Admissions to improve referral responsiveness, handoffs, conversion, and closed-loop communication with referral sources.
• Partner with Marketing on brand positioning, campaigns, collateral, events, and digital investment.
• Partner with Compliance and Legal on outreach practices, referral relationships, privacy, marketing claims, gifts, sponsorships, and applicable fraud-and-abuse requirements.

Performance Measures

• Qualified referral and admission growth, adjusted for clinic capacity and market maturity.
• Same-clinic growth and new-clinic ramp performance.
• Lead-to-assessment and assessment-to-admission conversion rates.
• Growth, retention, and diversification of productive referral sources.
• Digital inquiry volume, conversion, acquisition cost, and return on investment.
• Accuracy of forecasts and timely completion of market launch plans.
• Growth team performance, CRM adoption, and execution of strategic priorities.
• Compliance with patient safety, privacy, ethical outreach, and organizational standards.

Role Boundaries

No Operational Duties

This position does not own clinic operations, clinical quality, staffing, scheduling, intake operations, utilization management, revenue cycle, or local profit-and-loss performance. The Director is accountable for the strategy, leadership, and execution of patient acquisition activities and for transparent partnership with the leaders who own those functions.

What Success Looks Like in the First 12 Months

• A three-year growth roadmap and standardized clinic launch playbook are approved and in use.
• Every market has a data-informed growth plan, referral-source strategy, digital plan, and measurable pipeline.
• A consistent CRM, attribution, reporting, and forecasting discipline is established.
• The local growth and outreach team has clear territories, goals, coaching, and accountability.
• Existing clinics demonstrate sustainable qualified-referral growth, and new clinics launch with established referral networks.
• Growth practices consistently support appropriate access, patient safety, privacy, and clinical eligibility.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in healthcare administration, business, marketing, communications, public health, or a related field.
• Seven or more years of progressive healthcare growth, business development, physician relations, patient acquisition, or outreach experience.
• Three or more years of experience leading multi-market or geographically dispersed teams.
• Demonstrated success developing and executing growth strategies for multi-site healthcare services.
• Experience using CRM, referral, digital marketing, and business intelligence data to manage performance.
• Strong executive communication, analytical, relationship-management, and change-leadership skills.
• Ability to travel regularly across current and future markets.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in business, healthcare administration, public health, or a related field.
• Behavioral health experience; child and adolescent services experience strongly preferred.
• Experience with PHP, IOP, ambulatory behavioral health, or other access-sensitive service lines.
• Experience supporting de novo clinic launches and rapid multi-site expansion.
• Knowledge of healthcare marketing, referral-development compliance, privacy requirements, and ethical patient acquisition practices.