Ten Commandments To Start Your Optometry Practice Like A Pro

Premium location, large space, excellent concepts, astute clear objectives, customer relation, and best value proposition are the phrases we hear most frequently in the eye care industry about Optometry practices starting up. In most industries, 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of operation, and more than 60% of all businesses fail before the fifth year, according to data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Furthermore, if you solely consider software businesses and businesses with high levels of technology and innovation, those rates are significantly higher.

The first stage of a business is the most difficult stage since you have no data yet in hand to rely on. Therefore, it might be challenging to figure out what works and what doesn’t when you are just getting started. During this phase, you are prone to make a lot of mistakes, but some of them will kill your startup more quickly than others. Knowing which early mistakes to avoid could increase your chances of success. To identify the biggest and most frequent mistakes that startups make, we wrote the following ten Commandments by looking through the lens of growth strategists, financial advisors, legal experts, business consultants, and entrepreneurs. This can help you avoid these pitfalls when launching your own business. We anticipate that this will be useful to plenty of aspiring eye doctors and business owners once they are done with filing for the proper legal structure and business registration.

1- The Story: Garages, showers, and people’s heads are where product and business stories are created. Before the first paintbrush strikes the walls of your office or the first eyeglasses display is constructed, the product story begins to take shape.

2- The Need: “People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves”. Remember that the first buyers of your business story are backers and builders. Backers are you, your family, and your close circle of partners and friends. Builders are everyone who puts effort into building your practice, from designers and marketers to cleaning services.

3- The Minimum viable product, or MVP: It is a product with enough functionalities to draw and attract early adopters and validate the idea for the existence of the product early on during the stages of the business development. For example, start promoting what distinguishes your long-awaited practice that is coming to town from the incumbents.

4- The Business plan:  Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and 34th President of the United States, David Dwight Eisenhower is famously quoted by “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. Planning is indispensable, whether your business plan is written on a napkin, a one-page business plan, or a complex business model canvas. The three essential things a business plan should include are the resources, the processes, and the profit formula of the business.

5- Who are you getting on board: Hiring is very important and should be treated with special care when starting. To complete tasks more quickly, many entrepreneurs desire to hire before their company has even launched. However, this is frequently a catastrophic error. Instead of hiring someone just because you can, a business should only do so when they are truly necessary. This will increase initial costs as well as startup issues. Instead of making irrational financial decisions, successful business owners should stick to their goals. If you need to hire early on, make sure your employees adhere to your business’s mission, vision, and purpose.

6- Know your core competencies focus on them and distinguish yourself in order not to forget them: when starting don’t blur your vision with tons of ideas that you want to fulfill or goals that you find sexy and attractive to accomplish. Do what you can do best and iterate to perfect yourself.

7- The Marketing Plan: Don’t just wait and rely on referrals but know your product, where to place it, how to promote it, and at what price. Never forget that marketing is an investment, not an expense. Calculate your customer lifetime value in order to come up with answers about the return on investment of your marketing decisions.

8- Budgeting: Budgeting is essential and there are many ways to do it, from the simple 6 jars method that most grand moms used at home to more sophisticated methods relying on spreadsheets or accounting software. They all work for an Optometry practice that is starting cold and does not need to be complex.

9- Scaling too early: Learn the concept of good and bad money before you start your business. “There Is Good Money And There Is Bad Money”. The concept explains how we should grow capital knowing that only 8% of innovative businesses survive the first five years in business. Profit and growth are crucial for sustaining your business. While profit is crucial at the beginning and investors should refer to it when deciding to invest in a company, growth is crucial in the long run, and investors should count on it to decide to invest because long-term growth insures the presence of capital by reducing expenses like training staff, lowering costs through economy of scale, increasing productivity by attracting and retaining the best talents, being able to expand on new activities, products, and services, as well as benefitting from
businesses assets to build capital, etc.

10- Iterate: unless you have enough capital you will not be able to iterate. Try, fail, adjust, and repeat. Don’t use all your capital from the first try you will need it to iterate and continuously play the game.