OUR PREFERRED MODEL
A 12-month engagement at a fixed monthly rate. We operate as an embedded extension of your commercial and marketing function. We know your company, your science, your market, and your goals. We build on that knowledge month over month. Here’s what changes when you work with a team that has been at this with you for six months: the briefs get shorter. The strategy gets sharper. The creative gets more specific. The media relationships deepen. Momentum builds. That’s why we believe retainers produce better outcomes than any equivalent spend on project work or rotating agencies.
Retainers are a senior-level investment, scoped to your stage, team size, and objectives. If an ongoing retainer is more than your stage calls for right now, a defined project or a Commercial Readiness Sprint is built for exactly that.
Retainer clients typically come to HTG with one or more of the following:
We do excellent project work. But we consistently see better outcomes in retainer relationships. The more we know your company, the better the work gets. We’re transparent about this because it’s the most useful thing we can tell you before you decide how to engage.
FOR LARGE ORGANIZATIONS
Some of our clients have internal marketing teams of ten or twenty people. They work with HTG because we execute specialized programs faster than their internal teams can, with deeper domain expertise than a generalist agency offers.
We know the press, the scientific conference circuit, the investor landscape, and the regulatory context of life sciences marketing. That institutional knowledge takes years to build. We’ve built it. You get it from day one.
If you have a strong internal team, we plug into it. We take on the high-value work that sits outside its bandwidth or specialization, work closely with the people already in place, and make the whole function more capable.
If you need us to own more, we can. For companies with smaller teams, changing organizations, or a mandate to rebuild marketing quickly, HTG can take operating responsibility for individual functions or for most of the marketing organization.
For established companies, the model is determined by what you actually need: specialized expertise alongside your team, additional execution capacity, or broader ownership of the function.
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FIXED-FEE, DEFINED SCOPE
For engagements with a clear beginning and end. A project typically fits one of these patterns:
Projects are a natural first step for companies that want to work with HTG before committing to a longer engagement. Many of our best retainer relationships started as a single project.
FAST, FIXED-FEE, FOUNDER-READY
A 30 to 60 day engagement for early-stage diagnostics, medtech, and biotech founders who need to clarify their commercial story, sharpen their pitch, and build the assets they need to raise capital or engage early partners. Three tiers. Fixed fees. Direct access to Elizabeth Chabe, HTG CEO and bestselling author of The Giant’s Ladder: The Science Professional’s Blueprint for Marketing Success.
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A founder finds us through The Giant’s Ladder, a referral, or a conference. They apply for a Sprint. We do the Sprint. They raise their round, land a partnership, or move into development, and they come back when they’re ready to build a commercial marketing program. That’s when we talk about a retainer.
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Or: a commercial-stage diagnostics company with an internal team that’s underwater calls us for a project, a competitive analysis, a conference, a product launch, sales team training. The project goes well. They bring us on retainer.
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Or: a large established company with a professional marketing team needs to run a scientific symposium or launch into a new indication, and their internal resources are already committed. We come in, execute it cleanly, and either stay on for the next one or hand it back.
We’re not trying to sell you the most expensive engagement. We’re trying to sell you the right one.
