--- title: Site Growth Partners | Financial Operations for Independent Research Sites description: We build the financial operating system independent clinical research sites need — study-level margin, cash conversion, forecasting, and exit readiness. --- [SITE GROWTHPARTNERS](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/?hsLang=en) [About](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/about?hsLang=en) [Score your site](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/scorecard?hsLang=en) # Which of your studies left money on the table last year? Most site owners can’t answer that — and some are quietly losing money at the study level without knowing which study. We build the financial operating system that tells an independent research site which studies make money, where the cash is stuck, what the next quarter and the next year look like, and how the foundation for a more valuable business gets laid. [Score your site in four minutes](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/scorecard?hsLang=en) [See what a Diagnostic covers](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com#services) Study economicsCash conversionPipeline & forecastingSystems & dataBuyer readiness Busy is not the same as profitable ## If your best year didn’t put money in the bank, the money is in three places It’s sitting with sponsors who haven’t paid, in work you performed but never invoiced, and in studies that lost money without anyone noticing until the year was over. None of that shows up on a monthly P&L. A P&L tells you the site made or lost money in aggregate. It will not tell you that Protocol 4 has been underwater since activation, that your coordinators are carrying twice the visit load on half the revenue, or that forty percent of your receivables are past ninety days with one CRO. Part of that is an accounting problem. Plenty of sites have clean site-level financials and no study-level financials at all — not because the bookkeeping is wrong, but because the accounting system was never given the dimensionality to carry a study. Done well, studies ride on the project or class field and sites on location, so every dollar of labor and cost lands somewhere you can actually report on. Done the usual way, there is nowhere to put it, and nobody ever asked for a number at that grain. The rest of it is an operating problem that happens to be measured in dollars. Margin analysis before you sign. A P&L per study once you activate. Someone who reads both the way an operator does, not just the way a closer does. That part a monthly close will never hand you, no matter how clean it is. From the field ## Twelve percent of the margin on a big-ticket study was decided before we enrolled a patient A sponsor brought us a post-surgical pain study that could run across several different surgery types. Everybody treated the budget as a formality. With past experience in healthcare services modeling surgery center opportunities, I knew something the rest of the room didn’t: when a surgeon goes into a shoulder, what actually gets performed frequently doesn’t match what was scheduled. Once they’re in there the picture changes, and a whole range of procedures can end up coded. So before we signed anything, we negotiated across a set of code combinations rather than the single one everyone assumed, and we set the opening parameters high enough to absorb whatever the surgeons actually did. It was a large study to begin with. When it closed, gross margin came in about twelve percent higher than it otherwise would have. None of that came from running the study well. All of it was decided before we enrolled a single patient — which is the part most sites never get a second chance at. ## We install the financial operating system a research site should have had at $4M Three things, and they compound. 01 ### Study-level economics Contribution margin by study, by sponsor, and by site. Coordinator productivity and real capacity. What a protocol costs you to deliver before you sign the budget, not after you’ve run it for a year. 02 ### Cash conversion DSO by sponsor, by CRO, and by study. Unbilled revenue you haven’t invoiced. Invoiceables you never captured. Holdbacks nobody chased at closeout. Sites run negative cash conversion cycles for years without naming the problem. 03 ### Forward visibility A rolling twelve-month forecast, a monthly backlog rollforward you can actually steer by, and enrollment that drives the financial plan instead of living in a separate spreadsheet nobody reconciles. The objection, addressed ## “My coordinators won’t code their time accurately.” I hear that constantly, and it’s a fair objection — it never will be perfectly accurate. Here’s what it costs. We picked up a rescue study late, the kind you take partly because the relationship matters. Margin analysis put it at about thirty-six percent gross margin, already under our gross margin target, and we went in with our eyes open. What we didn’t see was sitting in the labor line. The operations plan assumed the overnight surgeries would double up, so one coordinator could cover more than one case. It never happened once. We had modeled site labor at nine percent of study revenue; it landed at thirty. On the lookback, effective gross margin on that study was negative twenty-seven percent. Before a dollar of corporate overhead. That is a sixty-three-point miss against target, and twenty-one of those points sat inside a single assumption nobody validated — the only reason we ever found it was that our staff were coding their time to studies. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be directionally correct and take under five minutes at the end of the day. We’ve built that system before — we can build it here with you, or hand you the tools and let you build it yourself. ![A research site owner and a financial advisor reviewing study-level reporting together](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/hs-fs/hubfs/AI-Generated%20Media/Images/Professional%20Advisory%20Firm%20Guiding%20Independent%20Clinical%20Research%20Sites.png?width=1280&height=610&name=Professional%20Advisory%20Firm%20Guiding%20Independent%20Clinical%20Research%20Sites.png) ## Three ways to work together Fixed scope, fixed fee, and a written answer about whether it’s worth doing at all. ### Financial Diagnostic Three weeks · fixed fee Contribution margin by study for the trailing twelve months, ranked. Coordinator productivity and capacity. A full cash-conversion analysis — DSO, unbilled, invoiceables, holdbacks. Contracted backlog and a twelve-month forward view. Then a prioritized plan with a dollar amount attached to every item. Priced by study count, quoted on the call, fixed before we start. [Start with the scorecard](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/scorecard?hsLang=en) ### Fractional Research CFO Monthly retainer · three-month minimum A monthly reporting cycle that sits on top of the close your bookkeeper already runs — study P&Ls, a rolling forecast, a KPI dashboard, sponsor and CRO profitability, and reporting your lender or board will accept without a translation layer. For owners who now need the reporting to run every month, without hiring a finance team to produce it. [Talk about a retainer](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/meetings/casey-schier?hsLang=en) Coming Soon ### Exit Readiness Scoped per engagement · three to six months Clean financials, study-level margin history, backlog and pipeline reporting, sponsor concentration and key-person risk documented and addressed, a data room built, and management prepared for diligence questions before a buyer asks them. We don’t take transaction fees, which means our advice about whether and when to sell costs you nothing to trust. Prepare the business Systems work — accounting system dimensionality built for research, study-level costing, CTMS and ERP integration — is delivered with an implementation partner and priced separately. ## Who this is for The honest version, including when the answer is no. ### This works if you - Run an independent site or a small network, typically $4M to $15M in research revenue - Have roughly ten or more active studies — that’s the number that decides whether study-level analysis has anything to find - Own equity in the business, or answer to someone who does - Have a bookkeeper or a part-time CPA rather than a finance function - Are growing, taking inbound interest from buyers, or looking at a succession decision ### This isn’t for you if - You’re under $2M, or running a handful of studies — the engagement won’t pay for itself yet, and I’d rather tell you that now - You already have a controller producing study-level margin monthly - You’re hospital-affiliated, university-affiliated, or part of a network with centralized finance - You want someone to keep the books rather than tell you what they mean Who’s behind this ## Built from inside the operation, not from a consulting deck Casey Schier, CPA Founder, Site Growth Partners Clinical research Built the finance function at a research site network from the ground up — ledger, ERP, study-level costing, and the reporting the business ran on Healthcare services Built the financial models behind a portfolio of de novo surgery centers for a private-equity-backed platform Today Leads research finance at a national subspecialty physician services organization with a nine-figure clinical research operation Casey built the finance function at a clinical research site network from the ground up. There was no general ledger, no system, no reporting, and no finance department when he arrived. Eighteen months later the business was profitable on a $12 million run rate. Before that he built the financial models behind a portfolio of de novo surgery centers for a private-equity-backed platform, which is where the coding insight above came from. Today he leads research finance at a national subspecialty physician services organization, on a clinical research operation that has scaled into nine figures. He has seen these numbers on the way up and on the way down, and knows which ones were telling the truth. That means the conversation starts at PSV-to-award conversion, activation-to-first-patient-screened days, autopay query backlogs, and what you negotiated for audit reimbursement. Not at what a P&L is. [More about Casey →](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/about?hsLang=en) ## Start with your own number Twenty questions, about four minutes. You’ll get a score across study economics, cash conversion, pipeline and forecasting, systems, and buyer readiness — plus an estimate of what the gaps are costing you every year. [Score your site](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/scorecard?hsLang=en) [About](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/about?hsLang=en)[Scorecard](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/scorecard?hsLang=en)[Book a call](https://www.sitegrowthpartners.com/meetings/casey-schier?hsLang=en) © 2026 Site Growth Partners, LLC · Texas