Dr. Mai with his practice team. Dr. Mai’s practice success owes a lot to what he refers to as “critical non-essentials.”
Strategies for eyecare practice growth
By Thanh Mai, OD
Feb. 19, 2025
These are the tasks you don’t strictly have to do, but should do to succeed. Measuring IOP and refractive error is essential to an eye exam.
Asking a patient how their children are doing isn’t essential… but in my opinion, it’s a critical non-essential!
It’s easy to handle urgent issues (“the raging fires”) because they’re obvious. But the difference between an office growing 4 percent versus 40 percent a year often lies in those high-priority, non-urgent items you overlook.
Examples of Critical Non-Essentials
Host Multiple Grand Openings
When we launched, we held two grand openings. We didn’t want Grandma pinching my cheeks in front of a potential referral (the corneal specialist), so we split it into a friends-and-family event and a professional one.
For the friends-and-family event, we invited everyone we knew personally—hundreds of people showed up as though it were my wedding day.
They toured the office, met the staff and tested our equipment.
Immediately, we had 50 new reviews and were off to the races.
Handwritten Thank-You Cards
In our first year, we averaged only two patients a day. So, after each appointment, we wrote a personal thank-you card. Patients found it charming and felt truly valued. We quickly racked up five-star reviews. If I were opening a practice from scratch again, I’d do the same until it became too large to handle.
Treasure Chest for Kids
In my opinion, no credible myopia management or vision therapy practice is complete without a treasure chest. Children love prizes, and a little motivation can encourage the right behaviors.
Other Articles to Explore
Weekly Meetings
You can have brilliant ideas from conferences or online sources, but if there’s no follow-through, they end up in a forgotten pile. The key is a consistent weekly meeting—there’s a reason churchgoers meet every Sunday. A weekly cadence ensures accountability and keeps great ideas alive.
Track Lead Measures
We often focus on lag measures like gross revenue, production or frame capture rates. If you’re trying to lose weight, the number on the scale is a lag measure.
Lead measures—like how many times you go to the gym—are actions you directly control. Tracking and staying accountable to these lead measures naturally improves the lag measures. Here are some examples:
- Growing Myopia Management by 10% this quarter
Your lag measure goal is 10 percent growth over last year. You suspect you can generate referrals from other optometrists, pediatricians, Kumon centers and Chinese schools. So, you set a lead measure goal of visiting one allied professional each week. Fifty-two weeks later, you have 52 new connections. It’s not out of the question that you’ll sign up 50 more kids this year. You can directly control whether you go into the community, and simply mark on a scorecard how many people you visited. - Boosting Digital Presence
You want your website traffic to reach 1,000 visitors a month—your lag measure—with the ultimate goal of more online appointment bookings. How do you get there? A good lead measure might be how many blogs you write, how many videos you shoot each week, or how often you publish in industry news outlets. You control those actions and can measure them weekly. - Improving Frame Capture Rate
You want to improve your frame capture rate (lag measure) by X by Y date. Set a quarterly goal and align your ODs, opticians, front desk and technicians to that mission. Perhaps you enroll them in a training program (e.g., Vision Source’s “optical dream”) and track completion. Your lead measure is 100 percent completion of all modules by the end of the quarter, with a proficiency test at the end to gauge what they’ve learned.
Thanh Mai, OD, is an owner of Insight Vision Center Optometry, a Vision Source practice in Costa Mesa, Calif, Optometry Corner, a Vision Source practice in Irvine, Calif. and Eyecon Optometry, a Vision Source practice in in Reseda, Calif. To contact him: tmai@visionsource.com
