Rhea Allen asked Peter Murphy Lewis for a story that included the parts that did not work. He gave her one: hired in November 2020 to rebrand and turn around a distressed healthcare software company for private equity, with a two-year clock, no conventions because of COVID, no experience in enterprise software, no experience in healthcare, and clients he was not allowed to visit because nursing homes were the most closed buildings in America.
What he did instead of advertising is the substance of this episode — and the eventual answer was not a campaign. It was handing the microphone to the frontline staff and letting them become the face of the brand.
The conversation also covers what a fractional CMO actually does and how the engagement is designed to end, plus the Tanganyika Wildlife Park work and the intern system behind Peter’s own team. For more on this, see our article on healthcare content built on real people.
Key Takeaways
1. The turnaround started by admitting he was the least knowledgeable person in the room
“I wasn’t the smartest person in the room, I was by far the dumbest person in the room,” Peter says of his first months in long-term care software. The product sold for $20,000 to $150,000 a year, the sales cycle was long, the industry was heavily regulated, and he kept using the wrong terminology. His response was to start a podcast and get comfortable asking obvious questions — which turned out to be the fastest route to competence in a compliance-heavy category.
2. The pivot: stop interviewing executives, start interviewing caregivers
The single change Peter credits most came from a friend’s advice — do not build the podcast around CEOs and executive directors, build it around frontline caregivers. Once the show focused on CNAs, med aides and nurses, it took off. And it produced something the marketing team could use: “a 22-year-old who’s a CNA is going to be a lot better as the face of a brand of a nursing home than a 60-year-old who’s a little burnt out” — and who already knows TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
3. Be the most helpful person in the room, not the smartest
The keynotes that moved the needle had nothing to do with the product. Peter spoke about using LinkedIn to recruit from community colleges — an organic answer to the healthcare staffing crisis for companies without a marketing budget. It is the same principle he says he teaches his son: you cannot control how smart you are, but being the most helpful person in the room means you will always have work.
4. A fractional CMO engagement should be designed to end
Peter is unusually concrete about the shape of the work: strategy plus 20–50% exploratory tactics in year one until the funnel is mapped, then a deliberate step back — from ten hours a week to one hour a month and a monthly executive call. Clients also hire him specifically to coach up a mid-level marketer against milestones, and those engagements typically end in six to twelve months. Working himself out of the role is the design, not the failure case.
5. The wildlife park: the product was already good, the reach was not
On Tanganyika Wildlife Park, where Peter has worked since 2020 and where he lives, he is careful about what he takes credit for. “I didn’t do anything with how well they take care of animals or how well they take care of their clients.” What the work added was reach — a Google Ad Grant through the nonprofit arm, SEO, and social. In this episode he says the result was doubled revenue and ten-times reach, with the park moving from the best in Kansas to, in his description, the top five in the country.
6. His own marketing is three playbooks, and the third is the one people skip
LinkedIn, posted daily with video most days and a DM to every newsletter signup asking what brought them over. PR, pitched by a team and then repurposed hard across ads, organic, LinkedIn and YouTube — because the placement itself is not very discoverable. And third, showing up in a handful of paid communities to answer people’s problems asking nothing in return, which he says produces most of his referrals.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: What is a fractional CMO, in plain terms?
A: A full-time CMO suits a company doing north of five million in revenue and costs $250k–$500k. Plenty of faster-growing companies below three million need that strategy without that salary. A fractional CMO brings the full strategic expertise at roughly 10–25% of the cost, as a contractor rather than staff.
Q: Do clients outgrow the engagement?
A: Often, and by design. Three of Peter’s clients have had a mid-level manager installed into the role he was holding. Others hire him explicitly to coach someone up, which usually completes inside six to twelve months.
Q: What was the biggest mistake period?
A: The whole first year in healthcare SaaS. No product knowledge, no industry knowledge, no ability to visit clients, and the wrong moment to learn paid ads. He calls it a year of ups and downs before the podcast-plus-keynotes combination worked.
Q: What is the “Interns to A Players” system?
A: Peter’s mentoring programme, turned into a book after he abandoned an earlier memoir attempt. He says more than a hundred interns have come through his companies, and that of roughly sixteen full-time people on his team at the time of recording, fourteen started as interns.
Q: What is his advice to marketing students?
A: Blunt, and he apologises for it in advance: don’t study marketing at university. Find the best internship you can under a marketer who actually does strategy and execution and who will share how they think. He allows an exception for academics who also run their own agency.
What This Means for Employee-Led Marketing
The transferable idea here is that the most credible spokesperson for a business is usually the person doing the work, not the person running it. That is true for a nursing home, and it is equally true for a contractor, a bank branch or a wildlife park. An executive making the same claim invites scepticism; a frontline employee making it invites trust.
It is also a practical answer to a budget problem. The healthcare SaaS company could not buy attention during COVID, so Peter built a content engine out of people who already worked there and already understood the platforms. That is a cheaper and more durable asset than a campaign, and it keeps producing after the spend stops.
The second thing worth borrowing is the shape of the engagement. A marketing leader whose plan does not include reducing their own hours is not building capability, they are building dependence. Milestones, a named successor and a scheduled step back are what separate the two.
If you want the version of this that Strategic Pete builds for clients, storytelling-led marketing is the discipline, and the People Worth Caring About docuseries is what it produced in long-term care.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation first aired on the Marketing Expedition Podcast, hosted by Rhea Allen of Peppershock Media, on 10 July 2025. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.
