FCMO – Growth Leadership for Women Healthcare Owners
About Kris Mitchell
Founder & Fractional CMO, Owners Table
I didn't start out as a marketing consultant. I started out as a practice owner.
For over a decade, from 2007 to 2019, I co-owned and led marketing for a three-practice dental group in Tucson, Arizona, alongside BG Dental Inc. There was no marketing department to inherit and no playbook to follow. I built the marketing function from the ground up: brand standards, patient acquisition systems, vendor relationships, and the internal processes that kept three separate locations pulling in the same direction instead of working against each other.
That work paid off in ways that are easy to state and harder to actually pull off. We grew those practices into the top 1% of revenue-producing dental practices in the Tucson market. New patient acquisition scaled from a standing start to more than 30 new patients a month, per practice. None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened overnight. It happened because someone was accountable for the marketing the same way an owner is accountable for the P&L, treating it as a real function of the business rather than an afterthought handled between patient appointments.
That's the part most marketing consultants can't offer you: I know what it's like to sit on both sides of the table. I've been the owner writing the checks, wondering if the marketing spend was actually working. And I've been the person accountable for making sure it did. That dual perspective shapes everything about how I work with clients today.
From Practice Owner to Marketing Leader
After stepping away from practice ownership, I didn't step away from marketing. I went deeper into it. I spent the following years developing hands-on expertise across the digital channels that now drive most patient acquisition: Google Ads, GA4, SEO, call tracking and attribution, and CRM systems like Salesforce. I wanted to understand not just the strategic layer of marketing, but the technical mechanics underneath it, because a strategy that ignores execution details is just a slide deck.
That work eventually led me to a Tucson, Arizona, digital marketing agency, where I managed integrated digital strategy across 45 client accounts, spanning Google Ads, SEO, social media, and Google Business Profile management. Overseeing that many accounts at once is, in a lot of ways, its own version of the multi-location challenge I'd already lived through as a practice owner: how do you standardize brand presence, consolidate vendor relationships, and build repeatable processes across a decentralized set of businesses, all while keeping performance accountable and measurable? It's the same problem, just wearing a different coat.
Along the way, I've stayed a deliberate student of the field. I hold a HubSpot Digital Marketing Certification, and I've completed additional coursework in AI-powered marketing, content creation, and video production, because the channels that work today won't be the same ones that work in three years, and I'd rather be ahead of that shift than catching up to it.
Why Owners Table Exists
Owners Table was built for a specific kind of practice owner: women leading dental and healthcare groups who are scaling past a single location, who need real strategic marketing leadership, and who aren't yet ready for the overhead of a full-time CMO hire.
I built this practice because I kept seeing the same gap. Growing multi-location practices need someone setting real strategy: someone deciding what to start, stop, fix, or scale, someone holding agencies and vendors accountable to outcomes instead of activity, someone connecting marketing spend to new patients and revenue in a way an owner can actually use to make decisions. But hiring a full-time CMO means a full-time salary, benefits, and overhead, a level of fixed commitment most growing practices aren't ready to take on, and shouldn't have to, just to get access to that level of leadership.
Owners Table closes that gap. I provide the strategic roadmap and team mindset that allows women healthcare owners to scale without being chained to operations. Whether that means stepping in as an ongoing fractional CMO, building out a unified marketing system across multiple locations, or running a fixed-fee audit to show exactly where your current marketing spend is and isn't working, the goal is the same: enterprise-level marketing leadership, without the overhead of a full-time hire.
How I Work
Every engagement starts the same way: with the numbers, not assumptions. Before I recommend a strategy, a budget shift, or a new vendor relationship, I want to see what's actually happening across your channels, your locations, and your patient acquisition funnel. Marketing decisions made without that visibility are just guesses with better branding.
From there, the work looks different depending on what a practice actually needs. Some owners need someone to set the strategic direction and hold the team accountable to it: the Fractional CMO role. Others are further along and need the operational backbone built out first: consistent branding, repeatable playbooks, and systems that work whether you have two locations or ten. And some just need an honest, outside look at whether their current marketing spend is earning its keep before committing to anything bigger.
What stays consistent across all of it is the standard I hold the work to. Every recommendation ties back to a measurable outcome: new patients, booked appointments, case value, revenue. I don't believe in vanity metrics, and I don't believe in marketing plans an owner can't actually evaluate for themselves. You should be able to look at a scorecard I built and know, at a glance, whether your marketing is working.
That's the standard I held myself to as a practice owner, and it's the standard I hold every client relationship to now.
A Personal Note
Outside of Owners Table, I'm also the author of Adventures of the Tooth Fairy, a children's book published under the pen name Queen Kristiana. It's a magical story about where the Tooth Fairy takes your tooth after she finds it, written for children ages 4 to 8, and a portion of every sale supports Tooth Fairy Society–approved children's charities in the U.S.A. and abroad. Apparently, after decades in the dental industry, I can't stay away from teeth even at bedtime.
I mention it here because it reflects something I believe about this work: the best professional relationships aren't purely transactional. I care about the practices I work with the same way I cared about the ones I owned, and I bring the same attention to detail to a client's marketing scorecard that I brought to getting a children's book onto shelves.
Working Together
If you're a woman-led practice scaling past a single location, and you're feeling the gap between what your marketing needs to be and what it currently is, I'd like to hear about it.
Maybe that gap looks like inconsistent branding across locations. Maybe it's an agency relationship that's stopped producing results, or one you've never been able to fully evaluate in the first place. Maybe you're simply at the point where the marketing decisions have outgrown the time you have to make them, and you know you need someone in that seat, but not a full-time hire just yet. Whatever the specific version of that gap looks like for your practices, it's the reason Owners Table exists.
A 30-minute discovery call is the easiest way to find out if we're a fit. No pressure, no pitch deck, just a conversation about where your practices are today and where the right marketing leadership could take them.