Psychiatric Expert had a strong clinical reputation and a growing book of work, but growth remained constrained by its size relative to its ambitions.
The business depended heavily on its founder, Dr Jon Valentine, for business development, brand direction and market visibility. Clinical delivery sat with the psychiatric faculty rather than with Jon himself, a pain management clinician by background, but there was no consistent system for attracting new clients or recruiting the faculty needed to support anticipated growth, and no structured way of turning demand into a scalable pipeline.
The website was functional, but positioned the business in much the same way as conventional medico-legal directories. It listed experts and services without clearly communicating what made the faculty different or why instructing solicitors should trust its evidence in the most complex cases.
Psychiatric Expert was introduced to The Marketing Centre by The CFO Centre, who were already providing fractional CFO support to the business. Stephen Rumbelow, a Fractional CMO for The Marketing Centre, was appointed to reposition the brand and build a repeatable marketing system capable of supporting significant growth.
The Challenge
Psychiatric Expert faced four connected challenges.
1. Founder dependency
The business relied heavily on Jon for both business development and market visibility, even though clinical delivery sat with the psychiatric faculty. This created key-person risk on the commercial side and limited the business’s ability to scale.
2. Growth constrained by size
Psychiatric Expert’s ambitions for growth outpaced its size. Without a broader marketing system, revenue depended on organic referrals rather than a deliberate strategy to expand instructions and grow the faculty.
3. Limited differentiation
The website presented the business as simply a panel of available experts. It did not explain the much greater value of the chambers-style faculty model or demonstrate why the quality of the evidence was different.
4. No repeatable marketing system
The experts were busy clinicians with little time to create content. There was also no integrated CRM, campaign structure or reporting framework to show which activity was generating instructions and faculty enquiries.
The Solution
1. A new website designed around the audience
The old site was rebuilt from the ground up around the needs of the people using it — instructing solicitors trying to find and assess the right expert quickly, and clinicians considering whether to join the faculty. Clear signposting, a stronger information architecture and conversion-focused design replaced a flat, listing-style layout, shortening the path from arrival to enquiry.
2. Repositioning the brand around the quality of the evidence
The first step was to move the brand away from the language of directories and panels.
Psychiatric Expert was repositioned as a chambers-style faculty, united by a clear promise:
The gold standard in medico-legal evidence.
This addressed the issue that matters most to instructing solicitors: whether an expert’s opinion is independent, authoritative and capable of withstanding cross-examination. The new positioning was carried through the website, expert profiles, content, campaigns and business-development activity.
3. Targeting the people who influence expert selection
The target market was refined beyond the broad category of “law firms”. Research identified the roles played by senior associates, partners, paralegals and barristers, alongside the claimant firms, defendant firms and clinical bodies most active in mental health and forensic psychiatry work. While paralegals often manage the practical instruction process, senior lawyers and barristers can have greater influence over the selection of an expert in complex cases.
LinkedIn account-based marketing campaigns were built around named firms and chambers accordingly, with content and outreach designed for the specialisms — clinical negligence, Court of Protection and forensic psychiatry among them — that drive instructions in this field.
4. Creating expert content without taking clinicians away from clients
High-quality content was essential for search visibility, LinkedIn activity and establishing the authority of individual experts.
The difficulty was that faculty members were clinicians, not professional writers, and had little time to create regular articles. What they did have was a substantial back-catalogue of case presentations, CPD talks and conference material — expertise already articulated, just never turned into content.
A bespoke AI-assisted content workflow was developed using each expert’s own presentations as the raw material, alongside their case experience and specialist knowledge. The system produces initial drafts in an appropriate professional tone for a legal audience, which are then reviewed, amended and approved by the relevant expert before publication.
This substantially reduces the time required from clinicians while ensuring the final content remains accurate, credible and attributable to them.
Experts supported by the full combination of an optimised profile, specialist insight content and LinkedIn promotion are consistently among the most visited on the website and are attracting instructions more quickly than those without the same level of support.
5. Expanding the faculty to match demand
As enquiries grew, the faculty was deliberately expanded to keep pace — recruiting new experts and broadening coverage into additional sub-specialisms, including neuropsychiatry, an area of strong and rising demand where the business previously had limited capability. Growing the panel and growing demand happened side by side, rather than one constraining the other.
6. Building one integrated and measurable growth system
Rather than treating each marketing channel separately, the activity was designed as a connected system.
LinkedIn content and targeted account-based campaigns build awareness among priority firms and chambers. Google Ads target the same specialisms and search themes, increasing the likelihood that solicitors who encounter the brand through LinkedIn will also see it when actively searching for an expert.
Organic search and specialist content support both channels, allowing visibility to build over time rather than disappearing when a campaign ends.
Every expert profile was rewritten and optimised. New search filters covering specialism, location and availability now give solicitors a faster route to the most appropriate expert.
For the first time, the business also has a monthly KPI dashboard providing visibility of enquiries, channel performance, cost per lead and return on marketing investment.
The Results
(H1 2026 compared with H1 2025, monthly averages, unless otherwise stated)
1. Turnover has more than doubled
Turnover for the current financial year is up 106% on the previous year, with income for the year to date already up 89% and forecast to grow further.
2. Qualified enquiries more than tripled
Legal instructions and Join the Faculty enquiries increased by close to 260% year on year.
3. Website visits grew more than tenfold
Traffic grew from a near-standing start to a consistent and rapidly increasing monthly volume.
4. Market visibility grew sharply
Search impressions grew from a near-standing start to a consistent monthly average of over 23,000, with the majority of this improvement coming from organic visibility rather than paid spend.
5. Contact engagement increased substantially
The number of visitors progressing from browsing the website to making contact grew more than twentyfold, from a low base.
6. The faculty has doubled in size
Expanding into additional sub-specialisms, including neuropsychiatry, an area of strong demand where the business previously had limited capability.
7. A more scalable platform for growth
Psychiatric Expert now has a clearer market position, a repeatable way to promote individual experts, a stronger pipeline for faculty recruitment and a measurable system for generating demand.
Marketing is no longer dependent on Jon finding the time to create every piece of content or personally drive every new-business opportunity.
