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Filtering through business advice for what’s most applicable to you
By Bethany Fishbein, OD
Oct. 8, 2025
Whether you’ve been a practice owner for 25 years or 25 days, you’ve already been bombarded with advice from “experts” (self-proclaimed and otherwise) on what you “should do” to grow your business.
They make it sound so straightforward and sometimes downright obvious. More time, more patients, more services, more dollars. It’s easy to be successful! And what business owner doesn’t want to be successful in their practice?
But the reality is more complicated. What happens when the things that are “best” for the business are in conflict with what’s best for you, the business owner?
Like Office Hours
If your schedule is too empty (or too full!), opening on more “desirable” evening and weekend hours might seem to make sense. But if the whole reason you started your own practice was to have the flexibility to get your kids off the bus, have dinner with your family and coach your little mite’s hockey team, is working those hours really what’s best?
Or Patient Volume
You can probably figure out how to see a few extra patients a day (or even an extra patient an hour) and drive higher revenue. But if this pace leaves you drained and miserable at the end of the day, or counting the days until you can retire (or the minutes until you go home), is it worth it?
Or Hiring an Associate
Industry wisdom gives a revenue threshold where hiring an associate makes sense. It professes that below that line, you should be seeing all of the patients yourself. But if something unexpected happens where you can’t—or maybe you simply don’t want to. The math may say it’s not time yet, but life doesn’t always wait patiently for the math to line up.
Or Grassroots Marketing
It’s so easy to tell new practice owners to get out there, meet their neighbors, shake hands and create connections in their communities. Again, solid advice. Until the new practice owner has crippling social anxiety and would rather be hung by their toenails than cold-call a neighboring physician. The advice is clearly right in theory, but it’s not right for them.
These are the tradeoffs advice-givers rarely consider when telling you what you “need to” do to grow your business. The reality is that this type of advice leaves many practice owners conflicted, because they feel like although these may be considered to be the “right” things to do, they don’t feel right.. And when you force yourself to do them anyway, you can end up stuck– trapped in a version of success that doesn’t feel like success at all. It can even leave doctors wondering if practice ownership was the right choice for them, because it seems to involve doing an awful lot of things they don’t actually want to be doing.
So How Do You Know What the Right Answer Is?
The truth is, there isn’t one. The advice is all right—and also all wrong—depending on what is most important to you as a practice owner. Profitability matters– a lot– as it’s what lets you continue to have your doors open month after month. But beyond that, you need to know the greater purpose you’re serving. It comes down to your bigger why.
Sometimes the purpose IS growth—some practice owners live for the thrill of racing toward a specific financial goal, are motivated by that, and willing to do whatever it takes to get there. For them, staying open until midnight on New Years Eve to get those last few insurance stragglers is an easy decision. Just need to send a quick text to let the hubby know you’ll kiss him at midnight Pacific time, and get back to the grind.
For more practice owners, the purpose of business ownership is something different. When it’s independence, freedom, service to others or the control of having things done a certain way, then decisions need to be filtered through both lenses:
- What’s best for the business?
- What aligns best with your own values and goals?
And in the myriad situations where those don’t yield the same answer, that’s where the hard decisions of ownership come in. What is most important? Or maybe more fully, what is most important to you, at this point in your life right now?
Sometimes you’ll choose growth. Sometimes you’ll choose freedom. Both can be right, as long as the choice you make keeps you moving toward the life you set out to build.
Read another article by Dr. Fishbein here.
Read more Insights From Our Editors on Review of Optometric Business here.
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Bethany Fishbein, OD, is a practice owner, practice management consultant and certified executive coach. She can be reached at bethany@leadersofvision.com |
