The independent, employee-owned Butler/Till Health grew again in 2022. Revenue surged 28%, to $44.1 million from $34.5 million the year prior, while head count shot up from 235 employees at the start of the year to 281 at the end of it.
But to hear VP of client engagement and planning Michael Deichmiller tell it, the company didn’t stop to smell the roses — nor does it plan to do so anytime soon.
“The work we did in 2022 helped us push our analytics and media technology teams to a whole new level in terms of the solutions and offerings that we can bring to our clients,” he says. “It has set us up well for the rest of this year and into the future.”
While most of the growth came from existing clients — the company’s roster includes engagements with Bristol Myers Squibb, Amgen and Bausch + Lomb — Butler/Till notched a trio of wins: Inogen (which produces lightweight oxygen concentrators), Phathom Pharmaceuticals (on its treatments for gastrointestinal acid-related disorders)
and Axsome Therapeutics (for a migraine treatment currently under development).
Deichmiller points to the Inogen business as a prime opportunity for Butler/Till to evolve its performance marketing capabilities.
“We’ve always been focused on outcomes and performance, even in the pharma work that we do, but this was a little bit different,” he explains. “What we’ll do in the future with modeling and productization will, in some ways, have originated with our work on Inogen.”
Butler/Till also added a host of practice areas in 2022. The company’s software architecture and engineering arm has been entrusted with devising strategies to enable enterprise growth initiatives, while the operations and technology department will lead all subsequent digital-transformation initiatives. The holistic video group will focus on linear TV, advanced TV, connected TV and other video offerings.
It was a busy year on the personnel front as well, with Butler/Till shoring up its leadership team via a series of promotions. These included officer Scott Ensign, elevated to chief strategy officer from VP of strategy and partnerships, and Amanda DeVito, upped to chief marketing officer from SVP, marketing and growth. Mayo Clinic chief digital officer Rita Garnett Khan was appointed to the company’s board of directors.
Butler/Till expects more growth in the back half of 2023; but company president and CEO Kimberly Jones stresses that it won’t be easy.
“I don’t know if I would call it a downside, but one of the challenges of so many consecutive years of growth is that you have to sustain it,” she says.
Jones finds inspiration in Butler/Till’s annual anointment of a company-wide word of the year. “This year, it’s ‘elevate,’ which we’re applying to everything that we do,” she continues. “We want to continually elevate the quality of our work, the type of people we’re attracting to our business — both employees and clients — and, ultimately, the collective success among all of our stakeholders.”
. . .
Our marketing role model…
Our two founders, Sue Butler and Tracy Till. They challenged us to be ambitious about our business growth while never compromising our values. — Jones
Click here to see Butler/Till Health’s Agency 100 2022 Profile.
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From the June 01, 2023 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
