
Industry leader Jamie Rosin scaled his practice to over 50 locations and grew revenue by millions. Want to learn the exact strategies he used? Keep reading. This episode is all about driving exponential growth in optometry practices -...
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Welcome to the Power Hour, Optometry's biggest and longest running show. We are in our 13th season and I'm your host, Eugene Shotsman. And we've got a great show for you today. My guest today, Jamie Rosen. And this is a man with an incredibly impactful combination of accomplishments. He's actually run a practice to a level of excellence and then built it from a handful of locations to 50 plus locations. He's mentored practice owners all over the country. He teaches, he consults for various industry groups. He's got an incredible impact, but he's also got an incredible vantage point of the whole industry. So I thought, who better to bring on the show to talk about growth than the guy who's 10x his practice over and over again so that we can kick off our year, right? And today we start with the universal three ways to grow an optometry practice. Then we start zooming in and we zoom in on an incredibly detailed explanation and strategy to address a problem we all have. And that's exam only, which is a little bit different than capture rate, but still, that just means patients walking out without buying anything in your practice. Trust me, you're going to want to listen to Jamie's explanations, maybe even re listen after you hear them the first time. So we talk about that. We also talk about referral programs, strategic reactivation, and just overall how you leverage exponential growth and strategically align lots of things, making optimizations in multiple areas of your business so that you can make exponential growth possible in your practice. We literally go through an example of how we can take a $1 million practice to 1.65 million by having levers of growth that just build on themselves. Anyway, there's lots to unpack in this episode before we get there. Quick reminder, make sure that you're subscribed on Your favorite platform, YouTube Spot, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast so that you are alerted every time an episode drops. And also, quick reminder to reach out, if you go to Eugene Shotsman.com you can drop me a note, provide feedback, ask questions directly, or suggest episode topics. You can do that@eugene shotsman.com or at the Power Hour website. And as always, I look forward to your feedback. Now let's go to the show. Jamie Rosen, welcome to the Power Hour.
A
Great to be here, Eugene, once again. Let's go.
B
Yeah. Well, welcome back and happy New Year to you.
A
Happy New Year to you as well. Hope 2025 is a great year for everybody that's listening as well as you.
B
Well, and you know, that's one of the kind of themes for the episode, is we want to make it a great year for the listeners. We're in season 13 of the Power Hour, and there's a theme that I want to explore today, which is all about stacking success and. And really also talking about some of the things that helped you become most successful. And as you've coached practices and as we've taught practices together, some of the lessons that we've learned that we can help the audience kind of bypass all the BS and just kind of zoom in on, I think, a philosophy, but then also some key methodologies and maybe techniques for growth.
A
Yeah, absolutely.
B
And the principle I want to explore is that in all reality, it's like New Year. Everybody's making resolutions, everybody's got growth goals. But I think, you know, the. The thing we always talk about is that you don't necessarily want to just say, hey, I want to grow this one particular way. Right?
A
Yeah, no, right, exactly. I mean, what we. What we learned is at its most simplistic, there are kind of three ways to grow your practice, and that's really kind of more on the top line side of the equation. There are also things between the top line and the bottom line that you can approve. Focusing on cost of goods.
B
Well, yeah, so you've got increased frequency of transactions. Right. So increase number of patients, increase average transaction size and increase the frequency of transactions, get them to come back more often. And so in. In our world, when we think about this, if we just. Let's just stay at that level for one moment is like, let's make it one. What we have to realize is that all of this is exponential and it builds on itself. So if you, for example, make your average transaction size 10% bigger and you bring 10% more patients, and those patients come back more often, you didn't 10% more often. You didn't just grow 30%. It's not 10 plus 10 plus 10. It's 10 times 10 times 10, which is 33%, which, you know, at 10%, yeah, maybe the exponential difference is a little bit negligible, but if you got 25% better over a period of time, it doesn't have to be over a period of a year, but you got 25% better at each one. So you got 25% more for every transaction. You have patients to come back 25% more often, and you increase the number of new patients by 25%. Well, then you actually grew your business, you know, 1.25 times 1.2, 5 times 1.25, I believe, is something like 1.95. So you grew your business by 95%. So this is all exponential.
A
Yeah. And so, yeah. So I think, and I would say this, what I hear often is I'm going in. There's one big idea in practices, and sometimes that multiplies based on what the owner of the practice is hearing from their peers. But the idea is it's not one big thing. It's not two big things. It's really like three to five, small, incremental. And this is the whole concept of optimizing your practice. Small incremental improvements in three to five areas of your practice creates geometric, not linear growth. And I think that it's funny because it's hard to get 25 or 30% better in a year. It's really hard. It's not as hard to get 5% better or 10% better. And the incremental impact on the practice is like you had said, it's geometric growth. It's not. It's not just 10% across the board. You grew because you 10, 10, 10. It's more like 30, 33%, because they tend to build on each other. If your average ticket goes up 10%, then everybody that comes in that year is spending 10% more. And if your conversion rate goes up 10%, 10% more of the people coming in are not walking out without purchasing something. So. And they're spending that 10% more, it becomes really geometric.
B
Yeah. And what's funny is that when you now take this one level deeper, right? So there's three ways to grow a practice again. Increase number of patients, increase the transaction size, increase the frequency of transactions. You can take that one level deeper and say, well, you know, everything you do for growth can fit into those three categories. And let's call those things levers. And I know that when you and I taught our class last year and in the new class that we're teaching, you know, one of the things that we found is that there's over 100 different levers. 109, I think, is what we identified as ways to potentially grow. And they all fit into these three buckets. Right? Like, and you don't. Not all of them are just marketing. Right. A lot of these are operations. So, for example, of course, to increase new patients, sure, you could get better at email and text campaigns, you could get better at your digital marketing, But a lot of operational stuff, like, you could get better at your phone capture strategy, you could get better at split testing certain things. That are going on in your practice.
A
I mean think of the levers just in the well I exam category. Forget about the specialties product which is a whole nother series of levers. But let's just say you got better at converting your well eye exams to purchasing. So call that exam only. So you reduce the number of patients that come in for a well I exam and leave the practice with purchasing nothing but the exam. If you re, if you increase your capture rate, reducing your exam only, that's just one lever. But if you increase your multiple pairs and we're only, let's just use the example of 5%. So 5% more people purchase 5% more people buy multiple pairs for their everyday glasses, their sports glasses, their occupational glasses, their backup glasses. If they're contact lens patients. Like, if they just get better at that, then you get better at like 5% better at annual supplies, 5% better at transitions or photochromic, 5% better at polarizing what you start to see. And you can't focus on 10 different things. But three to five is what's manageable. You really get geometric growth. And the practice, it's, it's not 5% better in the practice. It's way more than 5% better in the practice. It's closer to 30%.
B
Yeah.
A
So that, that's the concept that I think is important to. Because for years in the early going I thought the way to expand was open new locations. I didn't realize that the actual footsteps that were coming into the office every single day, we were not maximizing. It's the easiest. It's the low hanging fruit, essentially.
B
Well, you know, I think this is a good time to just kind of tell your story of that particular, that particular story is that, you know, there was, and we're telling everybody, hey, focus on three to five different things every single. Because there are now tools and people and mentors and classes that, and, and coaches and trainers and all kinds of resources that practices can have to be able to really ultimately focus on three to five things every year. But I think you had a pretty compelling story when you guys focused on just one thing, right?
A
Yeah. So when, when we first started down the path, our hallucination was that somewhere around an exam only rate of 20% was what we sort of thought was potential. We weren't 20%, we were more like 40%, 42%. And at the time we had eight locations. And if memory serves, I think we did like 11,700 exams. Well I exams in, I think it was like somewhere around 2004, 2005, when we really started to decide we were going to focus on this optimization side of the equation and how big was.
B
The business at that point revenue.
A
So at that point it was like an 8. Yeah, like an 8. 7.8 million. 8 million dollar practice, if memory serves, right around that point. Right around that number. And this is many years ago. And so we focused on exam. Every office had at least exam only as their goal. Initially it was kind of the only goal, but then we added some over the course of a five year period. Not a lot. And while we were, we thought we were a 7.8 to $8 million practice, when we looked back five years after this journey, we actually did, it was close to 13 million. It was like 12.7 million on an additional 300 exams. So we went from 11,700 well eye exams to 12,000 well I exams. And we grew from 8 million to 12.7, nearly 13 million. And we had not figured out at that point. And that illustrates, we had not figured out some of the stuff that you guys had figured out and helped us with, which was how do you drive reactivation of patients? Which added even more when we met, when we met, when we came together and worked together. So just. So it's interesting because when I look at practices and I look at their capture rate, slash exam only rate, they're a little different. So I prefer exam on these versus capture rate.
B
Well, let's talk about that for a second because this is a nice, nice interlude, but we're going to come back to your numbers in a moment. So capture rate versus exam only. I'm going to probably. I, I'll. Well, you, you describe it, Jamie. Yeah, I will.
A
And so a lot of practices use capture rate. So and what we're finding, if we look at capture rate, you should be north of 85%. Like that's a really good number because your capture rate includes the patients that come in and buy multiple pairs of glasses. That raises the, what looks like your capture rate exam only really measures did the patient come in for a well eye exam and did they purchase the day of the examination? That's what we used for exam only. Multiple pairs add to it. But it's really because it could be one patient buying two pair of glasses. And most practices that I look at are somewhere between 8 and 12% multiple pairs. So if you look at your capture rate and you're using that as your metric, because there's a lot of practices that are probably listening that use capture rate as Their metric you get, you should be. And they're very different between contact lens exams and glasses exams. Contact lens exams, when they get a routine eye exam with a contact lens fit, that number from an exam only should be around 10 to 12%. That would be good. Best in class would be 8%. So 8% of the patients that come in to get a contact lens fit have high purchase intent and 92% of them purchase and your exam only rate is 8%. But I'm just saying 10 to 12% is legit.
B
And for and for frames and lenses.
A
For frames and lenses, it's more like 25% is really good. So if you have an exam only rate of 25%, you're doing really well right now.
B
Let me just, I'll, I'll reiterate this point of exam only versus capture rate. We had a, I think we had a student in one of our classes last year and we introduced this concept and it was interesting because it was actually exactly that. It was this particular, this particular guy kind of came back to us and said, you know, you really opened my eyes to something because I thought we were doing really, really well in terms of capture rate. And then I looked and I realized that because he had a really nice high fashion optical. There were people who were walking in, outside RX was coming in, they had people who would definitely buy multiple pair. And what he realized was, you know, the easiest way to describe it, and I don't think this was his exact sit. But you know, if 10 people came in today and one person bought, and two people bought four pair of glasses, you had an exam only rate of 80%. 8 out of 10 people walked out without glasses. And at the same time you also had a capture rate of 80% because eight pairs of glasses were sold to 10 people. So this is where those, those and so this is, you know, this is where those metrics really have to be. You have to watch them carefully and they could really bite you in the, in the butt if you don't, if you don't really pay attention to them. But in this particular case, I think the exam only is something that is, it's a really interesting industry metric because it very clearly articulates what it articulates. The people who walked into the, who walked into the practice for, you know, got an eye exam, probably could have had high buying intent and walked out without glasses. And that's what we're really describing is people who walked out without buying anything, who were right there ripe for the picking and didn't do it. And in your case, what you're describing is, when you guys focused on that over a period of time, you went from being an $8 million business to a $12 million business. So 50% growth in the revenue line of the business and presumably substantial growth in the profit line of the business, because he probably didn't have to hire 50% more staff to do this. Um, but you had 50% more revenue with the same number of patients.
A
Yeah. Right.
B
And that is a substantial impact from just one metric. So, of course, everybody, listen.
A
There were 300 more patients that came in, but, yeah, we're.
B
I mean, those 300 patients didn't spend $4 million, Jamie.
A
Right.
B
I mean, tell me who they are. Well, we'll go sell them some classes. But the true. So the question is, of course, for the. For the audience is okay. Or if I'm the audience and wondering, well, how the heck did you do that, Jamie? What. What did you do in order to. How do you drive exam only down?
A
So what we kind of learned is this is. This is all about behaviors. Right. So that's the important component. It's really not the metric. So I made the mistake of thinking if I put the metric in front of my people, they would deliver the metric. That's not the case. It's behavior change. Right. So you have to. There's a lot of nuance. But generally speaking, what it takes is you got to have the metric. You have to be looking at it every day. You have to make sure that your office manager and staff are aware of where they're at at the end of the day. What would we do in sales? How many exams do we have? How many exam only did we have? And what was the reason for the exam only? Like, that was really critical. So there's first awareness.
B
So every exam only had, like, a. It had a reason written down next to it.
A
Yeah. It would have, like, the patient's name and why they said they were leaving. So sometimes you got like, I had to leave, so I had to pick up my kid. Sometimes it was a little bit more honest. But when you looked at. This is another interesting thing. When we would meet every single week with every one of the eight locations, and we. And we still. I mean, we did this. We still do kind of do this.
B
With their 50 some locations.
A
Yeah, right, right. They're still reporting, like, how many exams did we have per day? What was the sales? And what was the number of exam only? And not as much on the reasons now, because what we realized is if There's a good handoff. If there's a good reception of the handoff, right. That, you know, think of football, like, when I get the ball, it's a good handoff. Then there are some key behaviors that we learned, one of which was, you know, the question after a good handoff, that the optician would speak to the patient and say, would you like me to explain the doctor's recommendations? Or did you have a price point? Or do you have a budget in mind? And 95% of the patient said, no, I'd like to hear what the doctor's recommendations are. But what that did was it gave the optician an opportunity to talk about the doctor's recommendations because they got the high sign from the patient. But if the patient was like, oh, that's a lot of money, I was kind of looking for something less, then we can go and hit your budget. So what kind of budget do you have in mind? And that was a really important component. But we also had a series of. We would do this in Q4, so we wouldn't budget in Q1 of the new year. We would be budgeting for the entire Q4, where our managers were doing observations of our opticians speaking to patients, and they would look for, what are the behaviors that my best converter does? And what are the behaviors that the lowest performer was? And if we saw a big gap, we were like, if we can just narrow that gap from top performer to bottom performer. So Maybe there's a 10 or 15% gap between top and bottom. If you can get that to 5% gap. So everybody's just getting a little bit better. It has a huge impact on sales. But more importantly, you start identifying the behaviors that your best performers are doing, and then have your, you know, lower performers emulate in their own words, their interpretation of what that top performer was. It's kind of funny because if you talk to your top performers, and first you got to watch them, and if you see what the top performer does differently than the rest of the pack, it's really hard for them to articulate what they're doing differently. It's almost easier for an observer to help articulate and reinforce that behavior. And the same thing with the lower performers. We'd have them watch our best, and we have our best watch our, you know, our lowest. And you create this learning environment. You're learning from one another, and you're grabbing hold of those key behaviors that drive the metric. And that was a big learning curve for me, because I again, I thought if I show you, the metric. It's like, you know, eugene, you know, give me a rock. And then you come back and you give me the black like a rock. And I'm like, not the right rock. Like, I had to be explicit and we had to really focus because change management is all about the behaviors and it's awareness. So we talked in our class a lot about a behavioral economic economist, Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economy. But he's really more of a psychologist than he was. So more of a behavior psychologist, but he turned this into behavior economics. And what he had. You know, in his writings, he talks about awareness as the critical piece of behavior change. Because if you don't get feedback, feedback's the key. If you don't have feedback, you're not aware. So feedback is the enabler for me to know where I stand. And that feedback helps drive the ability for me to change my behavior. If I don't have feedback, I don't know what to change.
B
So, meaning if I give you. So if. If you give me a metric and you say, eugene, you need to be at 20% exam onlys, and I deliver for you 45% exam onlys for a week. And you say, eugene, you really need to be at 20. And I say, okay, I'll do better. And, you know, I just. That conversation is circular and mostly pointless because we're not really talking about what I'm actually doing to get better and when nobody is standing there and observing what my actual behavior is, because I. I don't know. I don't know what the best. Best in class person really does and what I need to change. I'm just gonna try harder and, you know, and then tell you how unfair you are and.
A
And feel under a ton of pressure because you don't really know what to change. And you don't want to admit to me, your boss, that you don't know what to change because you think you're supposed to know what to change. So it did not work. I mean, we spent six months and we had no. It's interesting. We would have good and bad weeks. So this is the thing that's a little bit interesting. So, like, one week, an office would have a really good exam only week. And when I would ask the question, like, okay, so what did you change? What did you do differently? And they're like, not nothing. We just had a really good week. I knew that I could count on their numbers being up and down and up and down. Not consistently at that high level. But remember, pretty distinctively one of our managers, guy named Paul Beretta, had a good week. And I remember asking him, like, I would everybody else, like, what did you do differently? He's like, well, this facility, the facility was in was really big, was like 6,000 square feet. And the exam rooms really far away from the dispensary. So he got a pager system, and he had the doctor hit the pager to the manager, who would then direct one of the opticians, even if they were the patient, like, under taught him how to, you know, say, hey, one minute, I'll be right back. I know we're in the middle of this, but it'll just take me 30 seconds. I'll be right back. And they would leave, get the handoff from the doctor because the pager was going off, and the manager was like, hey, you're up next to the optician one through six. You know, we'll rotate. And what we found, what I observed was, yeah, they still had some bad weeks, but the majority were at that high conversion rate, meaning low exam only. So teaching your people to articulate what they've done differently, to understand and connect. We did this differently. It was a good result. Let's keep doing it. Was a really critical component of the change, of the change management. So everybody was aware of their goals. They had, you know, numbers in the break rooms. Like, we have, you know, 15 exams. We're supposed to do about a. Let's call it 25 exams. We're supposed to do somewhere around 150, 200 in that week. In this particular facility, we can afford 20 exam on these, whatever the goal was. And then every day, it would be like, we had a great day. So our average ticket, our average. Our sales for the week is now. The rest of the days of the week are now lower because we're trying to hit our goal because we did really well on Monday. And then Tuesday happens, and we. We had a huddle. We have, you know, 10 exam onlys to give today. That's it, you know, so we got to be on our game kind of thing. And that was a really critical component as well. So everybody was aware is my point. And then we started to get into the groove of looking for what are the behaviors that lead to the metric. And then if you had a really good day, what did you do differently today? Because that's the best day you've had in, you know, three months. Well, and if they couldn't articulate it, you can expect it's going to be up and down, up and down. If they get articulated, it tended to stay a little bit more steady.
B
Well, and it's interesting because this really feeds into the philosophy of, you know, almost constant, basically running your business like a science experiment. And I always talk about running your marketing like a science experiment. I think running your business like a science experiment and getting your staff involved, I mean, you take it to the next level of what you're saying. It's that like, let's have a staff meeting and say, okay, we have to get better. So in order for us to. Because we're always kind of in the spirit of continuous improvement. We know our numbers, we know where we are today. What behavior can we try for a period of time, one week, two weeks, whatever, so that we can run an experiment, but we got to do it the same time, the same way, every single time. So we're going to try it can't back off. What behavior are we going to try? I mean, the behavior. And I talked to a client a while ago and he said, you know, when we started using the velvet trays to deliver the frames, that was a big change for us. And so like, okay, well let's try velvet, whatever, the velvet trays. But the reason it worked for that particular client was because it actually shifted the mindset of the staff. They went from transactionalists to advisors or to fashionistas, right into the, you know, to high end advisors. And that was kind of the mindset for that particular staff where it worked. And. But it was like, okay, well what did we try? How did it impact us? And then let's look at the numbers. You know, maybe it didn't have an impact, maybe it had a negative impact. Okay, well, let's go, let's scrap that behavior. But if you just keep constantly running experiments to find wins and involve your staff in finding those experiments, that's where the magic happens, right? It's like, then you've got an organization where the continuous improvement doesn't just happen from the top. You, the doctor, you the practice manager, have to come up with every single idea. But your staff can be coming up with those ideas. And as long as you give them a controlled sandbox to play in that, you know, can really lead to a place where they, they are now bought in to. How does my behavior impact the metric?
A
Yeah, for sure. And I, and I'd also say like this whole conversation that we're having is really, I think the idea is, so we spent six months talking about the metric, not maybe a year talking about the metric, not the behavior. So it Took us a long time to figure that out. And then how do you actually build observation forms that, you know, take the patient journey so that somebody can be observing? Like that took years for us to do and probably why it took us five years to go from eight to. We really were $12.7 million business at that time with the eight ish locations. But we didn't know it. We did. We didn't know it. So the idea is how do you short track that which is really, you know, the elements are goal setting, observations of behaviors, awareness. Like they have to be aware of where they're at during the day. Like how many exam. We call the managers at locations and be like how many exam always have you had today? So, and what was interesting is then we applied it to multiple pairs, then we applied it to premium Progressives, then we applied it to ar. And then I want to backtrack one more one. Just rewind a little bit. The model that we sort of had was so we had MDs and ODs in our practice at this time. And so the model was. Because if you look at your chief complaint from patients when they come in and sit down with the doctor, the tech who's ever doing the history, what you'll find is the, the number one chief complaint is I'm not seeing some form of. I'm not seeing as well as I used to. So in our mind it was like, okay, so you're not. Your chief complaint is I'm not seeing as you're in for a well eye exam, you're not seeing as well as you used to. That to us meant high purchase intent. Like I think I'm coming in here to buy, get a new prescription essentially.
B
Right.
A
But the funnel was really the well eye exam. Did we convert you to new product because you had a change of prescription? Did we. And the other chief complaints. I broke my glasses, I ran out of contacts. My wife said I look like a. You know that you're wearing the same style frame for 25 years, it's time to change it up. There was usually high purchase intent or the patient wanted to get out of glasses and in or contacts and, and do in Lasik or the patient actually legitimately has a disease state that needs to be treated. So if you're coming in with chief point of not seeing well, one of those three or four outcomes, which is conversion, conversion to our MDs, conversion to Lasik, conversion to glasses or contact lenses is usually the result. So that's kind of the way that we looked at the funnel at least that was the way that we looked at it back then, for sure. Does that make sense?
B
And, you know, I think it's important to recognize that when someone comes in with that chief complaint, I think it's not the right. It's not the. You're not really serving the patient that well. If you're letting them walk out the door and go shopping for glasses somewhere else, even if they think that, you know, somehow that's beneficial to them, you know, they're already there, that you have a great selection, you presumably have the best product that fits their needs. They're going to be wearing this product on their face and they're going to be walking out the door and going somewhere that's inferior. I mean, it's really not in the best interest of the patient for you to really let them walk out the door.
A
Yeah, I agree with you, but. And it's usually not like what I find in most practices is the discipline on the handoff from the doctor perspective, and then how that handoff is received is where the action is. And some of the questions that the patient asks, some of the questions that our staff would ask the patient are really, like I said, it's all behavior driven. But you're right. I mean, that's. It's very true. You know, I don't know the answer to the question. I saw once back in like 2004 or 5, the Vision Council put out some data, and I remember they had this one metric where they essentially asked of the survey people that they had filling out this pretty robust survey, how many of you had an exam in the last year? And then the next question to those that had an exam was, did you think you were going to be buying new glasses or contacts? And like, 95% of the people on that survey, I tried to dig it up on my computer, I couldn't find it. But about 95% said they intended to purchase. And then when they asked, did you actually purchase, that number, like, went to like 55%. So in some ways, we're actually talking people out of what they think they're going to do when they come into the practice, which I thought was really interesting.
B
Yeah, Creating obstacles where they don't need to be. And oftentimes those obstacles are with poor handoff, poor process, poor sales consultation, or no sales consultation. Right.
A
No, nobody there for the handoff. So I'm left looking at a wall of frames by myself.
B
Yeah.
A
End up, you know, and so I think it's, I mean, if you, if, for those listening, if You, I mean, just take 15 minutes a day to watch the interaction. I think you'll probably find there's opportunity. At least we did.
B
Yeah. And what we heard from and when.
A
We look at and when we've taught this class and we've talked to where they are from an exam only perspective, just saying, hey, manually track this for a couple weeks. You know, they're coming back with, oh my God, like, you know, half the patients that have a well eye exam are walking. Are walking. And they, and most of them have, the vast majority of have a change of prescription because their chief complaint was I'm not seeing as well as I used to.
B
So again, you know, and I'm going to kind of push you to help diagnose. If a practice is in this situation where they, they do the measurements, they don't necessarily look at capture rate, they do it, they just manually look at exam only for a couple weeks and they realize that, yeah, you know, maybe my, my patients are walking. 50% of my patients are walking. And maybe it's because, you know, and I think this is a lot of listeners might res with this when they say, well, my patients are leaving because they think my optical is too expensive. We're too nice, we're too, you know, we don't, we don't have stuff that's, you know, as cheap as the stuff that they would be able to get at Costco or online or wherever. Right. My patients are walking because. And the because is always like my, my stuff is too nice. So what, what advice do you give to those folks?
A
Well, so I would say that one question the optician asks the patients is really important. 1. And, and how did this come up? So we used to have these sales process calls every week. We had two regions at the time, small, like five to six locations in a region. And we would have the, each region would have this every other week. Call about what are you going to try differently on the sales process? And you know, what do you think? You know, helps. So this one specific situation happened. One of our managers had said I had like this terrible experience with a patient. He needed readers. And I showed him really nice frames. And at the end of the transact, at the end of the sale, basically at the end of the interaction with the patient, it was like, that's going to be $500. And the patient was like, are you kidding me? I can go down the street and get readers for like 20 bucks, 15 bucks. And the guy left very angry. And so we challenged the managers to what is the Right thing for the optician to say, try different things and let's see what works. Turned out that statement. Would you like me to explain the doctor's recommendations or did you have a budget in mind? Was critical so that the patient 5%. I'm going to say I have a budget in mind. And then you got to hit the budget. So you do have to have price points that are affordable for patients. But 95% of the time you got greenlighted to discuss and explain the doctor recommendations and the benefits that the features and the benefits, mostly the benefits are the most important to the patient based on their complaints. That was critical. So if they did have a budget in mind, you could do the downsell and get them into the right price point. If they didn't, you're explaining the doctor's recommendations.
B
Yeah, that's great. And I mean, it's all again, the way that you arrived at that is the same as this mindset of running a business like a science experiment. And I know we're both students of Jay Abraham. Jay has been on the show last year. And one of the things that I love the story that he tells. Not my story, it's the story. He consulted some sort of chain of furniture stores and the guys came to him and said, you know, we need to alter our advertising. We need better, better marketing. Better advertising. Better. More dollars in the. Because we need. We need to improve sales. And he said, well, you know what's interesting is that like you're spending a lot of money in advertising. It seems like there's a lot of volume walking into your stores. What are you testing? And they said, well, whatever, just get us better marketing. Like, look at our ads. Make our ads better, right? And he said, well, how about this? Why don't we start figuring out how to test certain things and what's the first thing that happens when. When a customer walk furniture store, they're greeted, right? So why don't we test the greeting? And so they tested like 20 something different greetings with all of this, all of these salespeople. And they tracked it and they tracked the. The amount of stuff that people bought as a result. And one greeting outperformed all of the other ones. And it was not one that I would sit here and guess. And I think if anybody sat there and they would try to guess at what was that particular greeting. When you walk into a furniture store, that gets the person to not say, oh yeah, I'm just looking, you know, just looking around, you know, leave me alone, salesperson. Right? You're that the salesperson approaches you and says what? Which then leads to a higher number of dollars spent by that person or by. By the average customer. And that particular greeting at that particular time for that particular furniture brand was, and which ad brought you in the store today? And it had to start with an. And it wasn't just, hi, my name is Bob. You know, which ad brought you. No, it was like, and which ad brought you in the store today? And apparently that was the, that was the exact language that was used. And then when they got that, then they all started using that, and then they tested something else. Right. It's like, run. Run it like a science experiment. But they found that, you know, if you, if you're constantly challenging your team to try to run little tests, you got to just make sure that they stay consistent with them, though. But for a period of time, we run a test and then we review the outcome that leads to really big results.
A
Yeah, I totally agree. And that was interesting because it was a furniture manufacturer, big company, a big single door furniture company that ran a bunch of promotions. Right? That was what they did in their marketing. They ran promotions. So the question of what promotion did you come in for? Allowed the salesperson to, to be like, oh, and so did. So are you looking? And then they could add on, like, I, I came in for the bed set, but then they could add on the nightstands because they knew what they came in, as opposed to this massive warehouse of furniture saying, can I help you?
B
Well, and I, I believe that one of the reasons why that worked was because it led. It actually established an advisory relationship right away for the salesperson. Right. Because what are you afraid of when you walk in the store? I think the brilliance with that statement, and, you know, we're talking about furniture, but it, it applies. The brilliance in that statement is that if I ask you, and what ad did you. Brought you in the store today? And you say, oh, was the, you know, the bed set for 4.99? And you say, oh, the black one or the white one? And you say, well, the black one, it's like, oh, the wood one. Yeah. Okay, let me show you where that is. I can help you. Let me just show you where that is so you can see if you like it. And that way you're like, you know, at that point, I'm not the sleazy sales guy trying to be like, well, you know, what can I help you with? Because at that point, I don't, I don't want to tell you what you can Help me with. I've now added value. I've showed you something, and then there's maybe some reciprocity associated with it. It's just a theory. I'm not sure that that theory necessarily is gospel there. But I do know that in optical sales, when we have a much more advisory relationship than a transactional relationship, that always leads to more sales. When you believe that the person who's helping you is preeminently interested in the best possible outcome for you, the patient, then you trust that person, you take their recommendations, and you're not afraid to spend the money because you don't. Because you think the person will take care of you if you don't like something that happened.
A
Yeah, it's, it's. And I would say the other thing is this isn't like you introduce this concept and then you're done and you hit success. You have to work it. So it has to be constantly worked. And you have to build an environment of you're getting ideas from your people, which means you got to take the time to talk to your people, and you have to recognize positive performance or approximation of the total goal performance. Just little steps towards getting better. And that really comes back to full circle, too. It's just optimizing. It's slowly getting incrementally better as an organization.
B
Okay, so we're going to take a quick break. When we return from the break, we're going to talk about how it is that you can change three things in a practice and grow 65%. Be right back.
C
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B
And we're back, Jamie Rosen, and we're talking about growth for 2025. And we spent a lot of time on, I think, one of the most impactful topics, which is exam only. But I think that I want to zoom back out in this segment of the show and come back to where we started, which is that there are only three ways to grow practice. You can get more patients, you can get those patients to come back more often, and you can get those patients to spend more. So we already talked about exam onlys, and we talked about what happened to your practice when you just focused on exam onlys, and you guys grew 50% simply by focusing on exam onlys. But that's getting your exam onlys down that much. And you guys went from, what, like 42% to 20% or something like that?
A
Yeah.
B
Right.
A
Blended between contacts and glasses.
B
Yeah, yeah. Then it turns into, okay, well, if we're moving, I don't think we need to be that extreme, but let's say the average practice could get 10% better at exam on these. What does that really do for you? And I'm just going to explain some numbers, and then we're going to talk about a couple of. So, Jamie, I want you to kind of think in the back of your mind, because this is the increasing. The average transaction size is increasing. Exam is. Is reducing exam onlys. So I'll go through the math, but you think about two examples you want to bring up for increasing number of patients and then increasing and reducing the frequency between visits. So when I think about the data, though, when we think about the numbers, right? Let's just say you have a practice that sees 200 patients. They're doing a million 200 patients a month. So that's 2,400 patients a year. They're doing $1 million in total revenue. And, you know, let's just say they have 40% of their patients are exam always, right? So 60% of patients buy, 40% walk. The reality is that the average dollars spent by that patient are somewhere around. The average revenue per patient is something like 415 bucks. I did the math on this, and what, what happens is, you know, there's 40% of patients where you get revenue for only the exam, and then 60% of patients where you get revenue for the exam and, and the frames and lenses. So let's assume that, you know, and obviously those balance out. So let's assume you get 50 bucks for the, for the exam. Well, you get way more than $400 for the, for, for the ones that spent money. So you got. Let's, with this particular math, it works out to like $660 is what the average patient who is actually buying stuff is actually spending. So what happens if you reduce your exam only by 10%? So now you got 10% more patients spending $664 rather than 50 bucks. So that brings your total revenue up by 10% of your patients are now spending $610 more than they were spending before. That's not adding a single patient, which actually leads to about a 15% growth in your revenue line. And it, and a lot of that drops straight to your bottom line because you didn't need more rent, you didn't need more people, you probably didn't need a lot more in terms of resources to accomplish that. You just had cost of goods. So maybe 30% of that is cost of goods. And then the 70% goes straight to your bottom line. If I, if my math is right. So now you just put you, you added 15% more revenue, but you added disproportionately more profit to your practice at that exact moment. So that's exam onlys. So I just went through the calculation. Which one do you want to do for more patients, Jamie?
A
So let's do referrals. And by the way, that is the, the exam only capture rate kind of thing that's really talking about increasing your average basket size. The average ticket. Right. So taking those that would have spent 50, 10% of them that are now spending actually 600, your average ticket is higher because they're really spending 660, whatever that number was.
B
Right.
A
So that's under the raise the average ticket.
B
Right.
A
Driving in new patients. Let's just talk about referrals. So when I ask practices, how many of you track your referrals? And some do, but most don't. And I say, if you look at this is what we did internally, we had survey data and generally speaking, patients, like the patients that chose to come to us, liked us and felt they were, you know, satisfied or extremely satisfied. So the majority really, you know, were. But let's go even further. Let's go like, how many of them really love you? And let's just say it's 10% of the patients really love you and would refer you two patients a year into the practice. So walk through those metrics, Eugene, because.
B
It's fairly staggering 10% of your patients.
A
So in this case, this practice that's 200 exams a month. 2,400 exams a year in the, well, eye exam category. But you could extend this to every exam you had, whether it's medical aesthetics or you know, hardware driven.
B
Yeah, but, but you're absolutely right. So you've got 20. So, well, let's make it easy. So I got 200. So I got 200 patients a month. So that's 2400 patients a year, right?
A
Yeah.
B
So I take those two, 400 patients and I say okay, 10 of those patients, let's just call it simple. I can convince 10% more of those patients to send me two patients each once, once a, once every six months. Because they're my real advocates. They're my, you know, they're the patients who really, really like my practice. And so I can convince them if I had a good system in place, I might be able to convince 10% of those patients to send me two patients a year. I don't think 10% is unreasonable. But if you did that, what happens is you now have, you now have gone from 2400 patients to 10% times two. So that's 240 patients times two. That's an extra 480 patients. So now your total number of patients goes from 2400 patients to 2880. Right, I think that, yeah, to 2880 patients. Which actually interestingly enough adds another what, 30 something percent to your bot to, to your revenue line is you now have, you now have accelerated revenue. And why, why 30 something percent? Because you got better at your exam only. So now, now all of the patients who are referrals by the way, if they're referrals, they're more likely to buy. Right, that's another, that, that's another point is that you know, if you've got, if you had someone who said, oh this, this is a great practice that they sold me these amazing glasses. The person who's walking in is walking in with an even higher purchase intent. So chances are it's going to help your exam onlys anyway. But that referral system is now going to drive more patients who are now spending less, who are now spending more dollars in your practice and spending less of their time just coming in for an exam and walking out the door. So this is like, you know, I think the referral component is important. Now. I'm sure everyone who's sitting, who's, who's listening to this is thinking, well, what can we do to drive referrals? I'm going to give you a couple ideas I think this is like when, when we do this in our class, like two, two and a half hour lecture. So I'll just give you a couple key ideas. Maybe Jamie, you can chime in or if you want to kick it off and I can throw in a couple ideas.
A
I think, you know, the, the first thing people's minds go through is how am I going to ask for a referral? So the most linear and easy one to connect is when the doctor is talking to the patient about the outcome of the exam. The doctor can say, hey, if you have other people that suffer from the same thing, that, you know, I'm happy to take care of them. Or the optician when they deliver the glasses, says, those look really great on you. If you have other friends that are looking for the same styling pick up, pick a niche, same styling, same price, same quality, same quantity, you can ask them for a referral. As long as they're in a referral state of mind, meaning they're really happy. Yeah, but you talk about segmenting and I think you go through that because it starts opening up the ideas of. It's not hard for me to, it's easier for me to segment based on my practice to ask for the referral. So go. Because you listed a bunch.
B
Yeah, well, and the reality is that there are lots of times when somebody is in a referral state of mind. One of the easiest ones we teach is when somebody is scheduling an exam. And who else do you know or who else in your household needs an eye exam? Right. Like it's that, it's that simple. But it's, you know, when they're picking up their glasses, when they're talking about their lifestyle. Oh, oh, you guys are, you know, if you're doing myopia management. Oh, you're, your child plays sports. Well, who else on that sports team needs to, needs to help their kid with the same exact problem? Right. Like it's kind of, like it's kind of a natural conversation when you're checking out, when you're delivering good news. At the end of a successful, you know, if you're doing again, specialty treatment. At the end of a special, at the end of a successful outcome, when somebody's just really happy with your practice, that's a really good time to ask. But it really does start with this concept. And you said referral state of mind. It's the mindset. I mean, there's ways to do influencers, there's ways to do events. I mean, there's, I think we have like 30 different types of events that you can do to drive referrals. We make. Make somebody feel super VIP special. Nothing does that more than says, Jamie. I know you're a big fan of the outdoors, and we have like an outdoors, you know, we've got a special frame vendor coming and a special, special lens vendor coming specifically for people who enjoy the outdoors. It's going to be on a Tuesday afternoon, and, you know, I want to welcome you and I'm going to give you two guest passes, and everybody who shows up is going to get some food, is going to get some whatever, and is also going to get, you know, a special, special exposure to something that we don't normally put on our shelves. And so if you, if you got outdoors, people that, you know, I'm just picking outdoors because I know you're an outdoorsy guy, but you could do this with, you know, vision and wine nights. You can do this, some sort of glasses. Glasses and glamour red carpet event. You could do like a family fun day for if you want to get more kids. You could do like a color matching thing when, if you're trying to attract fashion, they could have some sort of dry eye awareness event. I mean, I spy events. Like, just like, it's, it's. The opportunities are very, very, very vast.
A
And I'll go a little different direction. Eugene. Like, so we partnered with. So this is getting referrals from a very different source. So I just want to throw it in so your mind starts thinking about this avenue as well. So it was a nonprofit. And one thing's. One thing about nonprofits is they're always looking for money, basically donations. And we partnered with a group in Chicago. It's like the oldest nonprofit. It was actually started by some wealthy people that lived in Chicago during the Chicago fire, which in the late 1800s when the entire city burned down. And we talked to. They had a certain education program that they were trying to raise money for. And we said, hey, how about this? We will, on our recall, we'll recall our patients for these three months and we'll tell them that part of our, you know, giving back to the community is we've partnered with this particular nonprofit and that 10% of the proceeds will go back into this particular nonprofit. They then were able to use their donor list to say, Rosen Eye Care, who's conveniently located all over the place in Chicago, has partnered with us. And 10% of the proceeds, if you choose to go in and buy glasses, get an exam, et cetera, are going back to this nonprofit. So, like, there's, it's not always just the patients, but there are other people that you could consider, stakeholders in the community that you can partner with and cross market with one another.
B
Yeah. And I think you hit on one of my favorite levers. Remember, we're talking about levers on each category of, you know, more patients or more patient or patients coming back more often or patients spending more money in each one of those levers. You're hitting on one of those levers, which is the cause based marketing or, you know, community referral programs. And I think that's a, that that's another fascinating way to just drive more patients. But I want to, before we run out of time, I want to hit the last piece, which is let's think about getting patients to come back more often. And maybe some of the, I don't know, like, let's pick something kind of middle. Middle road of the obvious. Non obvious. Yeah.
A
Well, so I think we did this together. Honestly. We, you know, we used to have a reactivation so recall procedure that we would hit you up every six months out to 48 months. So every six months, if you're six months past your annual eye exam, we'd hit you up twice a year out to four years. We started hitting them up and you know the nuances, Eugene, but, but we would hit you up every single month to 60 months. And we found. Well, you can talk about the data, but I think we shrunk the repurchase frequency or the revisit frequency by like three or four months, something on average. So people came in three or a month, four months sooner. And then if you do the math. Why don't you walk them through the math? Because it's interesting to see what happens if you shrink that repurchase frequency. The increase is pretty phenomenal.
B
Yeah, what's, what's interesting is that every month of, if you think about the data that exists in the eye care industry is that, you know, patients typically come back no matter what we say. And, you know, everybody thinks they've got really great recall. And even if you pre appoint, the average for the industry is that patients come back every 22 months. You know, you're probably, if you're a listener of the show, you're probably a little bit more mindful, you're probably doing more than, you're probably doing better than that. But even then, what we found is that if you take one month, if you just shave one month off of the average repurchase frequency, that adds something like an extra. Yeah, we figured out that an extra 6% if you shave one month, you increase your patient volume by 6% that year. And we, then when we look at, hey, if you increase your, if you increase your patients by, or if you reduce three months off of the average, off of the average time between appointments, it stacks a little bit. But you still have something like a, you know, you, you, you have something like 18 more patients, right? Because six plus six plus six, three months. And you, and you do that in a relatively straightforward way. We call it kind of the strategic recall strategy. But you can do that by, you know, most of your software is sending the same exact message every time that it's trying to recall the patient, which is why it doesn't hit them every single month. Because the patient would actually get frustrated and say, you keep sending me the same freaking text message. I'm just going to unsubscribe. So if you're doing that every six months, okay, you're probably not going to unsubscribe if you're doing it every, you know, every two days. Right, like it's going to unsubscribe. So we found that the middle ground is you hit every patient every month with an email and a text, but you don't say the same thing every time. You try to segment the patients and you say something relevant to who they are, right. You try to figure out who's that avatar and what do they care about. And then you tell them something relevant to them. And that's what we kind of called strategic reactivation. And instead of going, most practices stop at 36 months. Rosen was actually a little bit more ahead of the curve because you guys were going to 48 months. But most softwares naturally stop somewhere between 30 and 36 months. Well, what if you go to 60 months? Well, what we found is that the unsubscribe rate didn't go up when we went up to 60 months. You just, you actually, because you fed people relevant messaging and it didn't seem like the same stuff every single month. People reacted. And you could get a whole bunch of people. We actually, I think over a period of running this for about a year, we got 20 something percent of the patients who we, who we reached out to that were not who had missed their 12 month appointment and who had been in that 13 to 60, 60, almost five years out category. 20% of those patients came back for an appointment.
A
Yeah. So even if, and we looked at the conversion rate, like how many came in month 60 in that latter half, and it was still A response rate of like in, in direct response marketing. Right. Which is what recall kind of is. You know, if you're 2%, like that's money. Like you are doing really well at 60 months. They were still. It was something like 7% response rate. 7%.
B
No, exactly. That was, it was, it was pretty significant. So I'm going to summarize three ways to grow business. And when we looked in this particular example, we said, okay, we're going to reduce our exam only by 10%. Well, that added 15% to the practice. We're gonna have 10% of our patients refer two people to every. To the practice. That added that. That took us from 2,400 patients to 20 to 2800 patients. When we reduced our average time between appointments, that took us by three months. That took us to an additional 18%, 18% patient volume. So all those things stack on each other. And what's interesting is that that's one way you can take a million dollar practice that started with a 40% exam only and you can take that practice to $1.65 million by, with a 60, with a $650,000 increase in revenue with very little additional cost. Right. You think about the additional staff, the additional rent, the additional hard costs. You need to, to make that happen. You know, yes, of course you got cost of goods, but a lot of that drops straight down to the bottom line. So the point here is that, you know, there is an exponential way to grow your practice. You've done it, Jamie. We've watched, we've, we've helped practices do it, we've watched people do it. But the lesson for the audience today is what?
A
Yeah, it's small incremental improvements in three to five areas of your practice can be. There is gm. It's not linear. Growth is geometric. And then underneath that aspirational like I want to grow my practice. What does it. It's focusing A have the metrics in place, focus on giving feedback and what's the behavior that leads to the metric every single time. And to your point, Eugene, in terms of the split testing, you got to measure the results. You got to measure your. If you're split testing, you got to measure. But it's important to be a little bit of a scientist in your practice because trust me, from our own experience, this is not like, you know, theoretical that I saw it. And Eugene and I are trying to help you shorten the learning curve with some pearls that took us five years, more than five years to learn so that you get there quicker but that, that's the takeaway for me is not one big thing, not two big things. Three to five small things that drive growth in your practice.
B
Three to five small things measured, well, running experiments focusing on the behavior behind the metric. And that's how you can have great 2025. Thanks for listening everybody. Jamie, thanks so much for joining me on the Power Hour.
A
Listeners have a great 2025 and have the ability to apply some of this stuff that we talked about. Thanks, Eugene, for having me.
B
Thanks for listening to today's Power Hour episode. The Power Hour is actually owned by the Power Practice. Power Practice is a premier consulting group who helps practices achieve freedom of time, confidently solve practice issues and grow their practices. They do this by having coaches and OD consultants, people who have actually done it, been there, and they're ready to help. You want to learn more? Go to powerpractice.com there's a bunch of free tools there. You can also get a whole bunch of information and decide whether it's right for your practice. Again, if you're looking for more time, you're looking to solve complex practice issues or grow the Power Practice might be right for you. Go to powerpractice.com to find out more.
Title: 3 Proven Strategies to Boost Practice Revenue by 65%: Insights from Jamie Rosin & Eugene Shatsman
Host: Eugene Shatsman
Guest: Jamie Rosin
Release Date: January 15, 2025
In this episode of Power Hour Optometry, host Eugene Shatsman welcomes Jamie Rosin, a seasoned optometry practice expert known for scaling practices from a handful of locations to over 50. The discussion centers on three fundamental strategies to exponentially grow an optometry practice's revenue by up to 65%. These strategies focus on increasing patient numbers, enhancing transaction sizes, and improving patient visit frequencies.
Eugene introduces the concept of "stacking success", emphasizing that growth is not achieved through isolated efforts but by leveraging multiple small improvements that compound over time.
Jamie Rosin elaborates:
“It's about small incremental improvements in three to five areas of your practice. These create geometric, not linear, growth.” [06:51]
He explains that focusing on increasing the number of patients, the average transaction size, and the frequency of patient visits can lead to significant revenue boosts when these elements work synergistically.
A critical metric discussed is the "exam only" rate, which measures the percentage of patients who leave without making any purchases beyond their eye exam.
Jamie Rosin clarifies the difference between exam only rate and capture rate:
“Capture rate includes patients who buy multiple pairs, whereas exam only rate strictly tracks those who leave without purchasing anything.” [12:34]
Key Insights:
“Small incremental improvements in three to five areas of your practice can lead to geometric growth.” [06:51]
Behavioral Strategies:
Referrals are a potent growth lever, tapping into the existing satisfied patient base to attract new clients.
Jamie Rosin discusses the potential of referral programs:
“If you can convince 10% of your patients to refer two new patients each year, your patient volume can increase by nearly 30%.” [48:29]
Implementation Tactics:
Examples:
Enhancing the frequency of patient visits ensures a steady revenue stream and strengthens patient relationships.
Jamie Rosin introduces strategic reactivation:
“By sending personalized, relevant messages every month, rather than the same generic recalls every six months, we increased patient return rates significantly.” [58:12]
Key Components:
Impact:
“An extra 6% patient volume per month adds substantial revenue with minimal incremental costs.” [58:12]
By integrating the three strategies—reducing exam only rates, increasing referrals, and enhancing patient visit frequencies—practices can achieve compounded growth effects.
Example Calculation:
Jamie Rosin and Eugene Shatsman emphasize that sustainable practice growth stems from multiple small, strategic improvements rather than singular overhauls. By focusing on reducing exam only rates, actively increasing referrals, and strategically enhancing patient visit frequencies, optometry practices can achieve significant, compounded revenue growth.
Final Notable Quote:
“Growth is geometric, not linear. Focus on three to five small, impactful areas, and watch your practice transform.” [63:23]
For optometry professionals seeking to implement these strategies, the episode provides actionable insights backed by real-world examples and emphasizes the importance of behavioral change, continuous improvement, and strategic experimentation.