ABOUT

Martel Campbell

I designed the investment thesis that created a PE-backed multi-site physician services platform, then crossed to the operator side and spent four years building the infrastructure to make it work: operating systems, commercial infrastructure, integration capability.

The combination of designing what needed to be true and then building the infrastructure to make it true, with my name on the outcomes, is what shaped how I work now. Often this work gets split across investors, consultants, and operators who each see part of the problem. I’ve built the whole chain from thesis to infrastructure to results.

Why I built Martel Health

I built Martel Health to do one thing.

PE-backed healthcare platforms reach a moment where the operating model that got the company to current scale is being asked to deliver the next one. Every CEO who hits it says some version of the same thing: I don’t have the bandwidth to build what comes next and run the business at once. The bandwidth constraint is real. Adding people to the vertical org chart does not fix it, because the build that comes next is horizontal. Integrating an acquisition, operationalizing a value-based care risk contract, entering a new market: each spans every function and belongs to none. One or two of these a year make the year.

But the organization has no horizontal seat. The only role that sits above every function is the CEO’s. So the cross-cutting build lands on the one person already running the business, or it gets deprioritized. The vertical wins every time.

This is the gap Martel Health exists to close. I bring the horizontal capacity the organization does not have, and build it into how the company runs. What gets built is the Transformation Office: one place where cross-functional work is owned, sequenced against real capacity, and measured against what each build was underwritten to deliver. It gets installed, and then it gets handed over.

The work starts from one belief. Infrastructure is strategy. Everything I built as Chief Transformation Officer confirmed it. Everything Martel Health does proceeds from it.

I do that work while the build runs: embedded inside the leadership team. Then I leave with the team operating what got built.

What I believe

Infrastructure is strategy. Platform performance is constrained by the operating systems underneath it. Strategy work that does not change infrastructure is decoration.

The system is the deliverable. The operating base and the infrastructure under it get built inside the leadership team, with a partner who builds it with me from day one and runs it after I leave.

I build to leave. The instinct to be central, important and hard to fire is the failure mode I refuse in myself and remove from the platform.

Monday morning is the test. What runs differently at the portfolio company because of this work is the only measure that counts.

The Monday morning test

There is a Monday morning when the planning cadence runs, referral volume shows up on a schedule, rate and mix hold where they were set, every site knows what a visit costs, and the next add-on integrates faster than the last. The team runs all of it. The CEO leads them. The horizontal is built in. The bandwidth comes back. The infrastructure to deliver the thesis is in place. The board sees a team executing with discipline. That is the one thing I built Martel Health to do.

What does the thesis need built?

Tell me where the platform sits against the thesis. I'll tell you what I'd size first, and whether I'm the right person to build it.

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