Maxwell Donnellan

Why MaxConnex exists

I spent seven years in pharmaceuticals. Long enough to learn how Australian healthcare actually works, how patients move through it, and how heavily it is regulated. Long enough, too, to notice that most marketing agencies will not go near healthcare for exactly that reason.

So clinics get served by generalists who learn the rules on your account, usually after publishing something they should not have. That always struck me as the wrong way round. The regulation is not the obstacle. It is the reason a specialist is worth having.

Where healthcare meets technology

After pharma I spent time working in tech, on the software side of how businesses get found and win customers. That is where I saw how completely technology now decides what people find, and how far behind the healthcare world had fallen.

Put those two together and the problem was obvious. Patients had started asking AI who to see. The answer was not ten links, it was two or three practices by name. Almost no clinic in the country had a website or an online presence structured to be one of those names, and the agencies that could have fixed it were avoiding healthcare because of the compliance risk.

MaxConnex sits exactly where those two worlds meet: helping patients find the right practitioner, and helping practitioners be found, now that the finding is done by technology.

The part that decided it for me is that these models keep citing sources they already trust. Whoever establishes themselves early is difficult to displace later. I thought the practices that moved first would see returns out of proportion to what they spent. Nothing in the client data since has argued with me.

Healthcare first, agency second

I studied chemistry with a minor in marketing, which turns out to be the exact combination this business runs on. The science opened the door to pharmaceuticals. The marketing is what I do with what I learned there.

That order matters. I did not start an agency and then pick healthcare as a niche. I spent my career inside the industry first and built the agency to solve a problem I had watched from the inside.

Why the website comes first

Most of the practices I speak to do not have a visibility problem. They have a website problem. An AI assistant can only recommend what it can read, and most clinic websites give it almost nothing: no clear services, no practitioners, no locations it can trust.

That is why so much of our work starts with the site itself, built to be read by patients and by machines from the first line. Everything else we do works better on top of it.

What I believe, that most agencies would not

No lock-in contracts. If a practice is not getting results, a contract should not be the thing keeping them. I would rather lose a client than trap one. The practical effect is that the people who stay are staying because of what the reporting shows them, not because of what they signed.

Report the losses too. An agency that only ever has good news is managing its client rather than their visibility. Our monthly reports show the queries we lost alongside the ones we won, and where a number needs a caveat, the caveat goes in the report.

Compliance is an advantage, not a tax. Seven years in pharmaceuticals taught me AHPRA and TGA rules from the inside. Knowing what you cannot say turns out to push you towards exactly the signals that earn an AI citation anyway: verifiable credentials, consistent information and careful explanation.

Where I am

Sydney. I grew up in Western Sydney and I live in the city now. The work is remote by design and most of our clients I have never met in a room, which has not affected the outcome for any of them.