Your Thesis Isn't the Problem. Your Growth Engine Is.
Henry 'Hank Hugh' Hernandez. I work directly with the CEOs of private-equity-backed fire and life safety platforms on the mandate the sponsor is graded on at exit — EBITDA growth and multiple expansion, driven by the demand engine and the move to contracted, code-mandated recurring revenue. I set the growth direction and the value-creation plan; the platform's own team executes it. Built to compound after the hold, not to run on me.
talk to hank
Three reasons you're here.
Three versions of the same gap — a growth thesis with no operator to drive it.
You underwrote growth the platform can't yet execute. The plan assumes a commercial engine that does not exist, and the hold clock is already running.
Your CEO runs the business well. Growth is a separate discipline — demand, positioning, the path to contracted recurring revenue — and right now it lives with vendors or with no one.
Agencies and point vendors are producing activity, not EBITDA. No one owns the whole commercial picture, and nothing is compounding toward the multiple at exit.
Foundations I have built. Numbers I can defend.
Different industries, one discipline — the growth engine built underneath the numbers. What it produces, and why it compounds.
A 1.4 percent share of voice in 2015. Today, $1.21M per month in organic traffic value.
In September 2015, Teladoc signed my agency to architect the growth infrastructure underneath their pre-IPO trajectory. They had nearly 11 million members. Roughly 600,000 telehealth visits projected for the year — double the 300,000 they had completed the year before. And a 1.4 percent share of voice in their own category. They were not ranking for "telemedicine." Not ranking for "telemed." Not ranking for most of the cluster they were trying to own.
I led the engagement as CEO of the agency. Principal Strategist on the contract.
The work was multi-layered growth infrastructure: keyword taxonomy and intent mapping, B2B audience segmentation across seven verticals, brand voice and messaging governance, content production standards, technical and backlink audit, meta architecture, member portal strategy, and the analytics stack underneath all of it. The work nobody outside the room sees, and everyone outside the room benefits from for the next decade.
Today, Teladoc Health ranks for 98,000+ organic keywords — including telehealth, telemedicine, online doctor, online counseling, virtual doctor, and virtual healthcare — driving organic traffic SEMrush values at $1.21 million per month, plus 3,400+ citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot.
They dominate the category they could not rank in when I started. Foundations compound. That is what I get hired for.
A 92 percent reduction in cost per call. From $209.45 to $16.26.
MHC was paying $209.45 for every inbound call from paid media, with market saturation sitting at 42 percent and call volume at 288 per period. The campaigns were producing activity. They were not producing efficient revenue.
After we restructured the account architecture, intent layer, and conversion path, cost per call collapsed to $16.26 — a 92 percent reduction. Market saturation moved from 42 percent to 98 percent. Call volume nearly doubled, from 288 to 507.
That is what happens when paid media is run as a system instead of as a line item.
What it actually feels like to have me on the inside.
Henry has a deep knowledge and understanding of what it takes for a website to rank well in all of the major search engines. He is also one of the most honest businessmen I have ever worked with.
"Henry has been an invaluable resource for my company. He has helped build us from a very small company to a large network. He is extremely responsive, helpful, and really knows what he's doing. Plus he's a good human being, which is the most important part of finding someone you trust."
"Working with Henry changed how I think about marketing entirely. He showed me exactly why what I was doing wasn't working and what to do instead. That clarity was worth more than anything else I had spent on marketing."
I take on a small number of platforms, and I commit fully to each.
Driving a platform's value-creation plan — owning the growth mandate and building it through the team to an EBITDA and multiple outcome — is depth work, not volume work. I take on few relationships at a time and go deep on each. If you are evaluating whether we should talk, request access. If we are not the right fit, I will tell you on the call.
talk to hank