There is a moment in the life of a medical device when the engineers have finished explaining it and everyone else is still staring at the slide. The mechanism is elegant. The data are encouraging. The diagram has seventeen arrows. Yet the physician, investor or reporter across the table is left with the most expensive unanswered question in business: why should I care?
LEVITATE lives in that moment. The Fort Wayne communications agency, founded by Stacey Holifield, works mostly with healthcare, medtech, digital health and biotech companies. Its job is not to make the science sound simpler than it is. Its job is to make the consequence clearer - what changes, for whom, and why now.
This sounds like copywriting. It is closer to translation under commercial pressure. A medical company rarely has one audience. It has clinicians who want evidence, investors who want scale, hospital buyers who want economics, journalists who want news and employees who want to know what the company is actually building. Each group listens for a different signal. A sentence that excites one can worry another.
“Your audience cares less about you and more about what you can do for them.”LEVITATE's operating premise01 / The origin
The first failure was activity without a destination
Holifield spent more than a decade leading accounts at national PR agencies before starting Levitate in 2014. The gap she saw was not a shortage of activity. Companies already had announcements, campaigns and content calendars. The problem was that those things were often treated as isolated assignments, detached from the outcome the business needed.
So she changed the sequence. Instead of beginning with the requested deliverable, Levitate begins with questions. What is the business goal? Whose decision matters? What does that person believe today? What proof could move the belief? Only then does the work become a message, a media plan, a brand identity, a launch or an executive presentation.
That shift explains the company's favorite word: uncomfortable. A messaging workshop becomes uncomfortable when a cherished feature fails to matter to the buyer, or when an executive's preferred description makes sense only inside the building. Levitate's process is designed to uncover those moments early. The discomfort is cheaper in a conference room than it is after a launch.
- Define the problem
- Validate the problem
- Define the solution
- Demonstrate value
- Show long-term impact
- Make the ask
One device, four rooms
LEVITATE's niche is narrower than “healthcare marketing” and broader than media relations. It sits between the science and the market, where a company needs one coherent story that can survive several rooms. The facts remain stable. The emphasis moves.
The same innovation enters four conversations
The client roster is the best evidence of where the agency fits. Levitate says it has worked with more than two dozen companies, from growth-stage innovators to established global players. Names include BIOTRONIK, GE Healthcare, Acutus Medical, Vektor Medical, CathVision, Acarix, Galvanize EP, Enterprise Health and Nanovis. Its work with BIOTRONIK is visible across years of product announcements in which Levitate staff appear as U.S. media contacts. The unglamorous repetition matters: specialist positioning is most convincing when a client keeps calling.
Not a menu. A connected system.
The agency sells expertise rather than software. Engagements are custom, from a focused strategic assignment to ongoing integrated support. There is no seat count or self-serve tier. The useful unit is the decision a client needs to influence.
Competitors can do each item. Large healthcare agencies bring international scale. Generalist firms bring broad consumer instincts. An internal communications team brings daily proximity. Levitate's wager is that a small, senior, domain-literate group can connect the items faster and with less translation overhead. It does not need a week to learn why a 510(k) clearance matters or why a clinical claim needs restraint.
This model is strongest when the product is complex, the stakes are high and several audiences must move together. It is less distinctive for a simple local promotion, a pure performance-marketing brief or a company that already has deep specialist communications talent in-house. And communications cannot manufacture clinical evidence, product-market fit or trust that conduct has destroyed. Clarity amplifies what exists. It does not substitute for it.
04 / The copyable partBorrow the order of operations
The most portable thing about Levitate is not its industry network. It is the discipline of refusing to confuse motion with progress. A team can copy the logic before it hires an agency.
A five-question preflight
- Name the business result in plain English.
- Choose the audience whose action unlocks that result.
- Write down what the audience believes before hearing from you.
- Match each claim to proof the audience will accept.
- Pick the channel last - after the message and the ask are clear.
This is deceptively difficult. Organizations enjoy talking about themselves because themselves are what they know best. Features are comfortable. Internal language is efficient. The audience is inconvenient: busy, skeptical and uninterested in the company's org chart.
LEVITATE's work is a campaign against that convenience. Its own evolution makes the point. Early public material described a broad strategic communications agency. The current version names the territory plainly: healthcare, medtech, digital health and biotech. Focus is a message too.
There is no theatrical ending to the story, because this kind of firm earns its position through accumulation - another message clarified, another executive prepared, another complicated launch made legible. Somewhere, an engineer is adding an eighteenth arrow to a slide. Somewhere else, Levitate is asking what the audience needed from the first one.