CASE STUDY
Spring Lake Ranch
By Kevin Molloy, Spring Lake Ranch, May 2026
When I first thought about outreach, I tended to focus on the big names.
The larger programs with broad reach, significant resources, and a steady flow of patients. In my mind, those relationships had the greatest potential. If we could build a stronger presence with the right organizations, it felt like the referrals would naturally follow.
So we invested a lot of time there. We visited regularly, took people out to lunch or dinner, spent hours on video calls, and dedicated a meaningful amount of our travel budget to maintaining those relationships.
And those efforts did result in referrals.
Some of these larger programs were sending us 10 to 15 referrals per year. On the surface, that looked significant. But when we moved our CRM over to New Resilience and started looking more closely at the data, the picture became more complicated.
For some of those relationships, the referral-to-admission conversion rate was under 15%. Among those who did admit, lengths of stay were often shorter than average.
At the same time, a few quieter patterns started to emerge.
Some of our strongest referral relationships were with individual clinicians in smaller private practices across the country. They might only send three or four people in a year. But they knew our program well. They understood the type of person who could really benefit from the Ranch. By the time they made a referral, they had usually given a lot of thought to whether it was the right match.
Their conversion rates were often over 90%.
None of this means we stop investing in larger relationships. Those partnerships still matter. But having better visibility into what was actually happening downstream changed the way I think about where we spend our time.
The most visible relationships are not always the most valuable ones. Sometimes the better question is not simply who is sending referrals, but who truly understands what you do well enough to know when you are the right fit.
