FCMO – Growth Leadership for Women Healthcare Owners
About Kris Mitchell
Founder & Fractional CMO, Owners Table FCMO
In the dental industry since 2007.
My roots in the dental industry go back to 2007, when I started as a front office administrator for growing Arizona practices. In 2011, I took on ownership-level responsibilities, including marketing direction, and for the next eight years, I built and led the marketing function for what grew into a three-practice dental group.
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 or agencies 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. Work directly with me as your Fractional CMO.
From Practice Owner to Marketing Leader
After stepping away from practice ownership, I didn't step away from marketing. I went deeper into it, spending six years as a marketing consultant, creative director, and marketing director for service businesses, including a five-location client group, along with a role managing digital strategy across 45 client accounts for a Tucson, Arizona, agency. Across those roles, I touched more than 60 client accounts total, including firsthand experience directing marketing for a multi-location business, the exact challenge Owners Table FCMO now helps other practice owners solve. Along the way, I got hands-on with the tools that actually drive patient acquisition today: tracking which ads and calls turn into real patients (GA4 and attribution), showing up when someone searches for a dentist nearby (SEO), and keeping every lead organized instead of falling through the cracks (practice management systems). I wanted to understand not just the strategy, but the technical mechanics underneath it, because a strategy that ignores execution details is just a slide deck.
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 FCMO Exists
Owners Table was built for a specific kind of practice owner: women leading dental and healthcare groups who are scaling past 2+ locations, 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. And yes, I consider Owners Table a practice. I am learning every day how to make healthcare offices better. 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.
What Clients & Colleagues Say
“I asked Kris for help growing my dental staffing agency into other markets as I didn't know how to go about it. Kris got involved in learning my business and goals and we went to work. I have watched my business grow in the last year and I appreciate the knowledge Kris has taught me.”
L. Montes
Dental Temps AZ
“I was spending heavily on marketing without knowing its true ROI. Was I getting the right patients? Was my agency performing? I trusted Kris, as a former practice owner, to give it to me straight. She conducted a thorough audit, asked the hard questions, and delivered an actionable plan that helped me optimize my marketing budget.”
Dr. B
BG Dental Inc
“Working alongside Kris at a fast-paced digital marketing agency, I saw firsthand her dedication to her team and our many clients. She takes the time to truly listen, understand, and collaborate with owners, developing custom marketing strategies that align with each business's unique goals to drive real success.”
B Singh
CS Design Studios
A Personal Note
Outside of Owners Table FCMO, I'm also the author of The 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 they find 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 FCMO 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.