Director of Business Development

Description

Fenway Health is entering its next chapter—building a Strategy Office to drive bold, intentional growth in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape. As a mission-driven organization serving LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, Fenway operates in an environment shaped by shifting funding streams, evolving reimbursement models, and an increasingly uncertain federal policy climate. Rather than reacting to change, Fenway is choosing to lead through it—diversifying revenue, investing strategically, and making clear, mission-driven decisions about where to grow.

At the center of this work is the Director of Business Development. Reporting to the Chief Strategy Officer, this role will shape Fenway’s future by evaluating new service lines, partnerships, and affiliations—and translating complex data into clear, actionable insights for executive leadership and the Board. This is not a sales role; it is a high-impact strategy position focused on identifying the right opportunities, understanding their value, and ensuring Fenway grows with purpose.

This is a rare opportunity to build something from the ground up. As part of a new, CEO- and Board-sponsored function, the Director will create the analytical foundation that guides Fenway’s growth strategy—developing the models, tools, and processes that make deliberate decision-making possible. Starting as an individual contributor, this role is designed to grow into leadership, with a clear path to building and leading a team as the function expands.

Authority and Decision Rights

This role has no direct reports and no independent budget. Its authority comes from a defined set of decision rights and from the Chief Strategy Officer’s sponsorship, both of which are stated here so that they are not negotiated case by case.

• •Decides directly: the analytical method, the model architecture, the assumptions carried into every business case, and the content of the recommendation that reaches the Executive Committee. No one edits the recommendation on its way up.
• •Recommends: go/no-go on every opportunity, the ranked growth priorities, and which opportunities Fenway declines.
• •Escalates: unresolved diligence issues, disagreement with Finance or Operations over assumptions, and any recommendation opposed by a functional leader — to the Chief Strategy Officer, and from there to the Executive Committee, which is the forum of record for growth decisions.
• •Convenes: cross-functional diligence teams under a charter issued by the Chief Strategy Officer. Participation by functional leaders in a chartered diligence team is an expectation of those leaders, not a favor to this role, and the Chief Strategy Officer is accountable for making that convening power real.
• •An honest no is protected: a recommendation not to proceed carries the same standing as a recommendation to proceed and reaches the Executive Committee unedited. This role is expected to reach conclusions the institution does not want, and is protected in doing so.

Market Insight and Strategic Planning

• •Keeps Fenway Health’s picture of its markets current: who we serve, who else serves them, payer mix, demand and utilization trends, and the policy and payment environment.
• •Turns that picture into a short, ranked set of priorities that tells Fenway where to look for growth, so that we go after opportunities on purpose rather than evaluating whatever arrives at the door.
• •Supports the annual strategic planning cycle and the Board’s strategy calendar, including preparing materials and pulling together input from Finance, Operations, and The Fenway Institute.
• •Connects growth priorities to the Community Health Needs Assessment and the Community Health Improvement Plan, so that the mission case and the business case are integrated together.

Business Cases and Financial Models

• •Finds, develops, and investigates opportunities of strategic importance to Fenway Health.
• •Builds the business case for new opportunities, including new service lines, pharmacy program strategy, payer opportunities, education programs, partnerships, and affiliations.
• •Models each opportunity’s revenue, costs, staffing, space, start-up losses, and steady-state margin.
• •Builds a base case, a low case, and a high case for every model; shows how the answer changes when the most important assumptions change; and sets clear go/no-go points.
• •States plainly what would have to be true for an opportunity to fail, not only what has to be true for it to work.
• •Maintains one view of the full pipeline through decision, including a record of what Fenway declined and why.
• •Analyzes payer terms, rates, and mix as inputs to these models, working with Finance and the managed care function, so that revenue assumptions are credible.
• •Compares opportunities on the same basis every time: return, margin impact, capital and systems required, mission impact, execution risk, regulatory exposure, and reputational and community-trust risk. At Fenway Health, reputational and community-trust risk is not a secondary consideration; it is frequently the binding constraint. It is scored explicitly on the same scale as the others rather than raised informally after a recommendation is already moving.

Partnership and Affiliation Analysis

• •Leads the financial modeling for partnerships and affiliations, including the effect on the profit and loss statement, margin, and balance sheet, with particular attention to reimbursement and pharmacy.
• •Helps identify and evaluate potential partners, and leads evaluation discussions with the Chief Strategy Officer.
• •Coordinates Finance, Legal, and outside advisors through due diligence, and keeps the list of open diligence issues and how each one was resolved.
• •Presents opportunities and analysis to leadership and the Board in plain terms, so that a director without a finance background can act on them.

Decision Support and Handoff

• •Prepares the materials and facilitates the discussion for Executive Committee and Board decisions on growth.
• •Sets, for every recommendation, the baseline projections and the measures the venture will later be judged against.
• •Takes part in the review after each launch of how accurate the original model turned out to be, and uses what each review shows to improve the next set of models.
• •Works in partnership with the Director, Project Management, who leads delivery of approved ventures. The seam between the two roles is deliberate and fixed: this role owns the business case, the go/no-go criteria, and the baselines a venture will later be judged against; the Director, Project Management owns delivery against those baselines, readiness certification, and the handoff to Operations. Where the two disagree about whether a venture is performing to case, the Chief Strategy Officer decides.

What Success Looks Like

This role is judged on outcomes rather than activity. The measures below are evergreen: they apply in the first year of the role and in every year after it, and they are the basis of the annual performance conversation.

• •Fenway chooses where to look for growth . A ranked, current view of the market and a short list of growth priorities exists, and leadership uses it. Opportunities are pursued on purpose rather than evaluated because they arrived.
• •Every growth decision reaching the Board rests on a model a director can interrogate . Assumptions are visible, cases are bounded, failure conditions are stated before the vote rather than discovered after it, and a director without a finance background can act on what they are shown.
• •Fenway can account for what it declined. The decline record is complete enough that the institution can explain its reasoning to a funder, a regulator, a partner, or itself, years later and without the author present.
• •The models get more accurate over time. Post-launch reviews find the errors, the errors are written down, and the next model is measurably better because of it.
• •The mission constr