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Setting meaningful goals for optometry practices
By Bethany Fishbein, OD
Jan. 8, 2025
It’s the second week of January– have you set your 2025 goals yet?
Everyone says you should. It’s one of those pieces of advice that gets tossed around at the start of every new year, every new project and every practice management seminar.
You’ve probably heard it before – you need to have goals, and they should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound – you know the drill.
It feels like a simple exercise– jot down what you think would be nice to achieve, attach a deadline and call it a day. This advice is presented as if it’s a guaranteed formula – write down your goals and success will follow.
Yet how often do these neatly crafted goals actually stick? Too often, they fade into the background, pushed aside by the busy-ness of work or life, and soon they’re nothing more than distant resolutions – good intentions that never quite materialize.
If you’ve ever struggled to stay motivated or found yourself uninspired partway through, the problem might not be your discipline —it might be that the goal you set wasn’t the right one.
When it comes to setting goals that stick, the secret lies in going deeper. A goal like, “I want to grow my practice by 20 percent next year,” is just the starting point. To uncover the real, exciting goal that drives you, you have to keep asking yourself variations of “Why?”—and then keep going until you hit the core of what truly matters to you.
This process is a little like peeling back the layers of an onion. Each answer you give reveals something more about your motivations, priorities and what you’re really working toward. It’s not always quick, and it’s definitely not always comfortable. But when you stick with it, the clarity and energy you’ll gain are worth the effort.
Why Layers Matter
At first glance, growing your practice by 20 percent sounds like a solid goal: measurable, actionable and tied to success. Go ahead and check “Set 2025 Goal” off your list. Done!
Will you achieve it? Maybe. Or maybe not. Does it even matter? Are you truly inspired and can’t wait to get to work and start? Is there a world where you could hit the goal and feel unsuccessful?
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I recall a practice owner who set a goal like this, then hired an associate full time, increased her practice revenue from $1 million to $1.26 million… beating her 20 percent goal… but after she accounted for increased cost of goods, paid the associate’s salary and the additional two staff members she had hired to support the second doctor, she found she had significantly less net profit than she did the year before!
So, to get to the right goal, you have to ask yourself what it is you really want.
“I want to increase my practice 20 percent.”
Great. Why? What does doing that allow you to do? What do you miss out on if you don’t?
Maybe you realize you’re hoping to grow so that it makes financial sense to hire an associate. Okay… keep going. Is your goal to hire an associate then? Why would hiring an associate make a difference to you? Maybe it’s so you can reduce your own clinic hours. And why reduce your hours? Perhaps it’s so you create a new business opportunity for yourself, or maybe it’s so you can spend more time with your family or finally work on that passion project you’ve been dreaming about.
Now go even deeper. What is it about that passion project that excites you? Is it the chance to write a book you’ve always imagined? Give back to your community? Create something innovative to help people in a way you wish you had been helped?
Ask “why” again. Why is creating something for others important to you? Maybe deep down, you believe in leaving a legacy – not just through your practice, but in helping others aim higher and achieve their own dreams.
See what happened there? The initial goal of growing your practice by 20 percent transformed into something much bigger and more meaningful. Instead of being about numbers, it’s about living out your values and creating something that lasts beyond you. And when your goal has that kind of depth, it’s no longer a chore to work toward—it becomes something you’re excited to pursue every single day.
Engaging Your Team
Once you know where you’re headed, sharing your goals with the team is important. To get them engaged, you need to drill down and uncover a goal that is exciting to them.
Suppose you see an opportunity to grow 20 percent by seeing two additional patients a day – and you know you can do this by improving a system in the practice that currently creates a bottleneck. On its own, telling the team you want to improve efficiency and see more patients every day will sound like, “Work faster and do more.” But when you dig deeper, you can connect this goal to something that directly excites and benefits the team.
Start with, “Why do we want to improve efficiency?” Maybe for them, the exciting possibility is to create some breathing room in the schedule. Why does creating breathing room matter to them? Perhaps it’s so that, instead of feeling rushed and stressed, the team can end their day on time more consistently and not have to rush to daycare pickup. Or maybe it allows them to more consistently finish what they started, meaning fewer calls from irate patients who didn’t get what they were supposed to. It’s easy to imagine your staff members getting excited about things like this.
To you, it matters because when you’re not perceiving your team as being stressed out and already having overflowing plates, it’s easier for you to think about growth, and for them to expand their mindset to see additional patients as a good thing.
Imagine framing the goal this way:
“This year, we’re looking to improve efficiency so that everyone on the team gets to leave work on time more often—no late nights catching up on charts, no staying past our closing time because the schedule ran over. By building smarter systems, we’re making room for all of us to have more balance in our lives.”
And here’s where it gets even more engaging: Involve the team in designing the systems. Ask, “What processes feel clunky or frustrating? Where are we losing time that we could save?” This isn’t just about hitting a target—it’s about creating a workplace they love, where their ideas and input shape the future.
By tying the goal to their daily experience and well-being, you transform what might feel like a management objective into something they’re personally invested in– and set the base for you to grow in the way you want.
From Goals to Growth
By embracing the process of uncovering the important “whys” to understand what your true goals are, you set yourself and your team up for growth that goes beyond metrics and milestones.
Here’s to a year of purposeful progress!
Bethany Fishbein, OD, is a practice owner, practice management consultant and certified executive coach. She can be reached at bethany@leadersofvision.com
