Transcript for Podcast Ep. 169 – Optometry Practice Benchmarks: Why Your Overhead Probably Isn’t the Problem with Nathan Hayes

Introduction

Evon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Optometry Money Podcast, where we’re helping ODs all over the country make better and better decisions around their money, their careers, and their practices. I am your host, Evon Mendrin, Certified Financial Planner(TM) practitioner and owner of Optometry Wealth Advisors, an independent financial planning firm just for optometrists nationwide.

And thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate your time and your attention. And on today’s episode, I am joined by Nathan Hayes of IDOC, who also leads their Books and Benchmark accounting services for optometry practices. And we dive into their just recently released 2025 Practice Benchmarks Report.

And so we talk all about how practice owners should use benchmarks like this, and what their numbers say about practices in gro- in terms of gross revenue growth, the amount of their income going towards the seven key expense items in every optometry practice and where the opportunities are to improve [00:01:00] your numbers in your practice.

And so I will throw a link to that report and all of the other resources we talk about in the show notes as well as Nathan’s contact information there.

You have any questions on this or if you’d like to know what it’s like to work with an optometry-specific financial planning firm, reach out. We have just a few new client spots open as we get into the end of the year, you can head on over to our website, www.optometrywealth.com, or click on the link in the show notes, and we can schedule a time to learn about what’s on your mind financially and share how we help ODs navigate those same decisions all over the country and more.

And without further ado, here is my conversation with Nathan Hayes.

Welcome back to the Optometry Money Podcast. I am, very fortunate to be joined today by Nathan Hayes of IDOC. Nathan, thank you so much for coming on

Nathan: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here

Evon: appreciate your time, and I’m excited to dive into the brand-new 2025, Optometry Practice [00:02:00] Benchmarks report that you at BooksNBenchmarks have put out. And, before I dive into that, just tell me a little bit about your work and how these benchmark reports are put together

Nathan: Yeah. I’ve been a, a consultant working with independent practice owners for the better part of a decade, worked with at least 1,000 unique practices, reviewing financials, looking at overhead ratios, productivity ratios, and really using data to help doctors make great decisions. i- in that work for many years, like you build intuitions about what’s normal, but we never really collated all that data. and having been around like, Essilor and Ciba Vision had an MBA report in the late ODs, early teens,and knowing how that was put together, we like two things need to happen if we wanted to really build it. One, we had to do the accounting for it. just too much to ask a bunch of random practices with their own charts of accounts and their own, qualifications or lack of qualifications to do real bookkeeping to feed their own data in and trust it. and so we s- really, [00:03:00] the, the core of it was we started doing books for people and I knew going in that we could probably make their books better. we’ve made a lot of practices’ books a lot better

Evon: Yeah

Nathan: And it’s not just hey, you assume, oh, an optometrist trying to do accounting, like y- accountants don’t try to check eyes,we know how that’s gonna go.

But even,and this is not all CPA firms, but many CPA firms, and you see this I’m sure in your work with your clients when you’re doing tax reviews, like your CPA is very busy crunching a lot of paper and they’re just gonna take stuff and turn it around and not stop and think about it or even think about like beyond getting to a tax income number, what else your financials could tell you about your business from a wh- where is it in, from a capacity planning standpoint, from a, a efficiency standpoint?

when do you need to add more staff, add more space, add more doctors, or do we need to maybe put more on marketing to grow into our capacity? So we made them better from a technical accounting standpoint on the one hand, and also, like a lot of what we’re trying to do is make the books do more than just be ready for taxes, but tell a story about a practice so owners can understand [00:04:00] where their practice is in its life cycle and based on their goals, what needs to happen next.

We now serve about 175 practices, and so every month as we close their books, their, some- the key financial ratios are put into a benchmark engine so they, our clients get every month a, a great dashboard of P&L metrics. See how does my cost of goods sold compare to other practices, to the group, right?

How do my staff expenses compare? How do my space expenses compare? and we took that data, and I think we had, with a little bit of churn, close to 200 practices in the dataset for 2025. This is our third year running this report. and just taking accurate data. And I think from a listener standpoint, ’cause we get this question sometimes, it’s pretty safe to assume that we’re a reasonable index of the US optometry world as a whole.

So we have practices in small towns, practices in big cities, practices that focus on high-end retail, high medical practices. We’ve got some Medicaid practices thrown in. So it’s really a cross-section of the entire industry. And so it’s [00:05:00] not, I don’t know that we have a ton of skew. We probably skew a little large.

Our median practice is about $1.6 million in revenue, but… and there’s some selection bias from me in who I talk to, ’cause people who wanna talk to me are usually more successful ’cause they want advice.

Evon: Yeah

Nathan: I’m not sure that’s not close to a, a realistic median for where eye care in America is.

I think that the practice owners that are gonna, s- struggle along for their entire career is like a $600,000 practice. I think those have gone away, and most ODs that wanna own a practice right now are doing pretty well

Evon: I would definitely agree there is a wide range of, quality of bookkeeping in optometry practices. I see this in client books. I’m going through them. We’re using those numbers to project out the year, and it isn’t just, as you mentioned, isn’t just the OD owners doing it themselves. A lot of time it is the,I’ll just say generic bookkeeping that’s done where everything’s just an alphabetized list of expenses, and primarily just so that there’s a, a, an outcome for t- the tax year, for tax filing.

it doesn’t tell them, like you mentioned, the story of the [00:06:00] practice, which you imagine picking up a book and it’s in German, or, the King’s Old English. you’re not gonna be able to read anything from that story, right? You’re not even gonna use the book. You’re not even gonna read the book, and that’s a lot of times what happens with the owners and their books.

They just don’t look at them, a- and they don’t make any decisions based on them

Nathan: in, in your world too, for a lot of those, you can’t even see what the owner earned, like what they paid themselves between wages, benefits, taxes,

Evon: Yeah

Nathan: picture of distributions they took out of the business. how are we supposed to plan your sort of life beyond the practice if we don’t even know what the practice is paying you

given year or given quarter?

Overview of 2025 Optometry Practice Benchmarks

Evon: And, just kinda going through your benchmarks here, I love that it’s actual, actual data that you’re working with, not just, survey results. ’cause like you mentioned, there can be a wide variety of the quality of the survey results. a- and you break it down really nicely ’cause you have your…

W- we won’t go word for word for the listener through the report. You can download the report. There’s a link in the show notes. You can download it, follow along if you’d like to. But y- you start with revenue, and you’ve got seven key expense items, and [00:07:00] it’s cost of goods sold, non-OD staff compensation, occupancy costs, equipment costs, marketing costs, the catchall general administrative expenses, OD compensation.

And why is that formatting helpful? why does it make sense to group these expenses together like that?

Nathan: I think at a high level, practice owners, it’s, it can be hard to know, what’s normal for a practice and you look at any given expense area and there’s broad ranges, right? Where,cost goods sold, like the middle 60% of practices call it a little less than plus or minus a standard deviation, right? I’m mixing medians and standard deviations, and I know that’s statistically wrong for stats nerds, but let’s just go with it. But that middle 60% is in the 22 to 30% range. And like staff expenses are gonna run from 20 to 28% of revenues.

Like there’s broad ranges there for any given stat. And a lot of times owners, when they talk to me, they wanna know, tell me if my cost of goods is right or wrong. And it’s like, i- if we take a little higher level and think about like what’s a variable cost to your practice and what’s a fixed cost to your practice, we can start [00:08:00] to really gauge at a high level how are you doing. and so at some level we wanna have the bigger buckets of variable cost, fixed cost, and we call it practice net or optometric net. It’s a term that flies around. and we know how variable costs behave. It tends to run about 50% of revenues. It’s been a little high since COVID, persistently high even.

We know where fixed overhead’s gonna be. And part of that story is like, if you wanna be more profitable, the best way to get there is just drive more revenue through the business, especially against your fixed expenses. Like to see five more patients a week, your rent doesn’t change, but your revenues go up. There’ll be some materials cost tied to those patients. There may not even be more staff time. There might be a little more doctor pay if you’re paying on production. But it’s a way to think about that and again, some of it’s just to discreetly understand where the money’s going and make assessments.

it’s really hard to know where a practice is out of line and where they need to focus without breaking down, at least grouping expenses in a way that makes sense too. So sometimes cost of goods is the issue and it helps to see oh my gosh, we’re spending 38% of revenues on materials costs.

Like what’s happening on [00:09:00] our pricing side, receivables,revenue cycle management type questions. are we just giving discounts away? Did we pick the wrong product? Anyway, some of it’s helping to assess where the issues are or where the opportunities are

How should optometry practice owners use benchmarks in their practice?

Evon: And so how,imagine a, an owner does group their expenses in this way or are able to do that for benchmarking purposes. how should an owner use benchmark numbers li- like this? what i- what is the best way to use something like this?

Nathan: I think there’s a couple paths. a quote I really like that I’ll use liberally in a lot of settings, so if you heard it before, somewhere else, sorry. Gary Gerber once said in a lecture, if you think about it, benchmarks are just a way to make you feel bad about your own practice. and so there’s a lot of danger here where people get really fixated on my friend said cost of goods should be under 25% of revenues, and if they’re not under 25%, I’m doing it wrong. And that’s, so that- that’s how not to use a benchmark. one, I think it, it helps to have some context, but things.

One, tracking your benchmarks over time is really helpful just to know, like, how’s my practice changing? Are we [00:10:00] improving or getting worse? And then based on the change, i- ideally you can explain the change. So hey, we negotiated a better deal with our lab, or we increased our fees, or did more regular markups, or we tightened up our receivables and so we’re getting more money in the door. we started outsourcing, receivables or using virtual assistants, and so our staff expense has gotten a little lower as a percentage of revenue because we’re finding better people for less overseas to do certain roles in the practice. some of it’s measuring things over time, some of it within reference to benchmarks is just to say, if we’re over or under, what’s the answer?

and a lot of t- for more practices than not, my feedback and my reviewing numbers is actually you look under benchmark here, is it time to spend more money so you can sustain your growth? o- oftentimes with staff, we’ll look at the numbers and I’ll just say, “Hey, based on this, if… Do you feel understaffed?

‘Cause it wouldn’t surprise me if you are.” And if they do, it’s that permission structure. Okay, think about where the bottlenecks in your practice are and do we need to hire a new optician, a new technician, another receptionist, another bill- Like where’s the next hire? Or as we’re scaling, are [00:11:00] we ready to look at that manager role that can free the doctor to see more patients and not worry or not be interrupted by questions coming from outside the lane? space cost similarly. and sometimes too, like if your space costs are high, like we can say “Hey, you swung big on your next space and you haven’t grown into it yet.” but it gives us laser focus to say, all right, how are we gonna get more patients in the chair and fill the schedule? and do we need to spend more on marketing, which is a, which is an obvious place, or do I need to take time and get in the community and try to recruit more patients by referral sources and networking?

Evon: So it sounds like you said two things. One is that it’s a sanity check to benchmark your numbers so you’re not out of whack in one particular expense area relative to

Nathan: Yeah

Evon: the quote-unquote normal optometry practice, if we can say that based on the samples. A- and then the other one is more of an internal check where you are tracking progress of your own numbers over time.

And i- in that case, sort of your own numbers eventually just become your [00:12:00] benchmarks. Like you’re really benchmarking yourself against enough prior history where you can track changes and see how you’re doing. Does that sound about right?

Nathan: your own best benchmark.

Evon: Yeah.

Nathan: and I think on the sanity check side, what most owners need to know, ’cause there’s this persistent fear and concern that I’m sure I’m spending too much money somewhere.” And what most owners need to know is “Oh, my overhead’s fine. That’s not the issue.

Let me focus on growth. am I gonna find new patients? What new service am I gonna add? How am I gonna train my staff better to increase capture rates, work on my inventory so we have the right frame selection that meets our patients’ budgets and taste?” so some doctors I work with in Rhode Island, Scott Colonna, and I forget his partner’s…

John Armando, they had this quote once. They said, “In our practice, we spend 5 to 10% time, of our time on cost controls and 90 to 95% on growth strategies.” And I think that’s actually a really healthy thing. and benchmarking a practice to know hey, overhead looks normal, is a great way to take, again, the, the fear that we need to spend a lot of time on cost controls and focus more on how are we gonna grow our patient base, [00:13:00] grow our

Evon: Gotcha. that makes sense. So maybe some, as, as owners are looking through these, some follow-up questions might be, why are these like this? What does this mean for us, and what should we do about it? And sometimes the what should we do is maybe nothing, right? Does that sound about right?

And maybe focusing more on growth of revenue rather than stressing so much about the expense side

Nathan: I think yes. f- if you think about an expense ratio too, you gotta remember that you have an expense, let’s just say it’s our materials cost or our staff, and you have a denominator that you’re dividing that into, which is to overall revenue. And there’s two ways to make that ratio get smaller. You can either cut the expense, which if you really think about it, is quite hard on almost all expenses.

There’s not a lot of c- cutting to do. we can grow the revenues with the same expense area. And so even if you have an expense like, “Oh, I’m spending too much,” quote unquote, the answer usually still lies on the revenue side of the equation ’cause there’s just, there’s… If you go down your P&L, where are you gonna cut stuff?

So cost of goods sold, if we think about it, m- your contact lenses, your ophthalmic [00:14:00] lenses are almost always being ordered downstream of a sale. So y- you didn’t order those without a patient buying them, so you kinda had to have it if you wanna dispense a product. frames, there’s some play there where if we’re not just reordering what we sell off the boards or drop shipping and we’re getting crazy with our inventory, yeah, you could probably tighten things up there.

In most practices, you want your easy win on cost of goods sold, that’s w- gonna be where the, the action is unless you’re doing something crazy with banks and inventories. So even cost of goods sold, which feels like the one area we can really control cost, there’s actually only so much you’re gonna be able to do. On your staff, like once they’re hired, cutting them is very painful, so that’s more of a being intentional with your expenditures as you grow. Your space, good luck finding a third of it. Your equipment cost is most of it’s necessary, and you can’t really take it back if you bought an IPL that’s not working for you. Marketing is a vanishingly small part of the practice, and honestly, putting 5,000, 10,000 more wouldn’t be the worst idea for most practices that are looking for growth. 5% to 10% on a m- $1 million practice or [00:15:00] $5,000 to $10,000, you’re talking, a half a percent to a percent of revenues overall. so it’s just not that much. then G&A, you might find some stuff in there that’s either personal or, we’re paying every consultant under the sun to do stuff, but that’s somewhat rare and usually pretty necessary. And then you have your doctor pay, which is an area with… Doctor inefficiency is probably the one area where we can really look at it and say you’re either compensating way too much here or you’re getting not enough out of your doctor’s time that you’re paying for. it’s still a revenue question, right? how much revenue are we getting out of this doctor salary, either to an owner or an associate?

Evon: So it sounds like there’s only so much, there’s only so much you can squeeze out of the expense side. at some point you’re just stunting your growth and you need to focus really more on how do we increase revenue. And by increasing revenue, you’re very often hopefully improving the percentage of your revenue that each of these expense items are falling into.

is that a good understanding?

Nathan: Yeah, I think so. And it’s like, can we generate more with what we have? And

Evon: Yeah.

Nathan: the answer is we need to spend more [00:16:00] to be able to generate more. that- that’s the uncomfortable part for a lot of practice owners where,cash flow’s tight, profits are low, but the solution still is, And I’ll tell them, “This is gonna be uncomfortable. We need to hire more staff. You need another doctor. you need to market more. we need to put some expenses in.” one of my favorites, there was a practice that was like 90,000 behind in receivables, and I was telling her she needs to hire a biller.

She’s like, “I can’t afford it.” It’s like, how can you not afford it? You’re gonna spend $50,000 on a biller to get $90,000 in revenue. this is gonna pay for itself in three months once it’s working. yeah, I think if most owners search their hearts, they don’t spend a dime in their businesses they don’t have to. m- in, in your world you probably see it like, and I have a colleague that came to me and said, “I’m not sure that’s true,” but what… When she said they’re not spending a dime they don’t have to, it wasn’t in the practice, it was that their personal life had outgrown what the practice,

Evon: Ja.

Nathan: right? the old Maverick quote,your mind is writing checks your practice can’t cash. so is, that, that’s a cash flow question in itself, but not really solved by [00:17:00] expense ratio work

Evon: I do see it even in situations where, for example, like maybe a practice owner or talking about tax planning and retirement planning and thinking of doing profit-sharing contributions, for example, and the math would far favor doing that type of profit-sharing contribution where, yes, the owner has to contribute to the employees as well, but the math, the way the math calculates is that it’s far in the owner’s favor to do that.

But just sometimes it’s just the fact that, the, the expense has to be spread out across the employees is the block, right? And sometimes we’re, what’s the saying? Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies or something like that. It’s

we’re too careful looking at these expenses when it’s gonna benefit the practice or the family financially o- over the long term

Nathan: Yeah. And part of it as an owner is, one of my principles, I just want owners to be intentional. So l- thinking about staff expenses here, which is a great topic. th- there’s a scenario where we have a, a 80-year-old practice in its third generation that has a lot of long tenured [00:18:00] staff that have had automatic increases every year. and they’re older, they’re less efficient, but we’ve had salary creep and wages are just out of line. And it’s gonna be hard to unwind and that’s painful and it’s difficult. Another practice may have the exact same like staff percentage and even maybe close to the same wages per staff, but their principle was we’re gonna pay 20% above market to get better people so we can have the best people who are gonna be happy working here making a wage that works for their families. They’re not gonna turn over. We’re gonna be more effective with less stress and turnover. and you could have the same ratio and tell the same story, but there’s two different inputs to that. And maybe we’re doing profit sharing and we’re loving the fact that, hey, although I’d say most staff don’t appreciate the profit sharing contributions, they’d rather have cash in hand. we wanna be generous with our staff because out of our own values, and if there’s a tax benefit to us, great.

Evon: Yeah.

Nathan: So maybe the same outcomes from an expense standpoint, but that attitude probably says a lot about how the practice runs and how fun it is to work there every day as well,

Evon: it’s,

Nathan: [00:19:00] performance

Evon: it’s also the intention that you mentioned, right? One is very intentional. The- they’re doing that on purpose. There’s a reason for that. The other, it’s accidental. they’re just reacting to the… Yeah, they’re just reacting to the environment as it is.

When should practice owners hire more staff vs. keep more profit?

Evon: And, I’d like to stay on, actually, let’s talk a little bit more about non-OD staff comp and really just this sort of general tension.

if I wanna be really dramatic, like this really deep inner tension of wanting to keep as much profit in the business as possible. maybe they’re looking at these benchmarks and their expense categories are below median and they’re just feeling really good about that, versus needing to or maybe they should be spending and investing in the business so that the business grows.

h- how do they look at something like non-OD staff compensation and when does it make sense to, to spend more, or we can say invest more in people and grow the patient capacity and the earning ability of the business versus, we’re spending too much [00:20:00] and maybe we need to make adjustments.

h- how does an owner look at that and make a decision of when it makes sense to spend more? If I can wrap that question sort of in a bow there.

Nathan: That’s great. Yeah, thank you for that. let me take three passes at it. So one, at a high level, the owner’s goals have to come into play. So you could have an owner that wants to park the practice at 1,000,005 and not hire more staff ’cause every person we add is a, another living time bomb to blow up our culture and okay, like that.

So part of it’s just what do you wanna accomplish within your practice? and again, working with your financial planner, what does where your practice is provide enough to fund your lifestyle and, generate enough savings and practice value to fund retirement as well? Like there, there’s a obligation there if you wanna park it.

But that’s one. So goals matter here. secondly, just when we’re evaluating staff, key principle is I’m always looking at cost of goods as staff is in dialogue with one another.

Evon: my read for most practices, your cost of goods percentage tells me what your revenue mix looks like. So if it’s on the higher end, 30, maybe 30 plus, tells me more of your revenue’s coming from [00:21:00] products, eyewear sales, contact lens sales, particularly if you’re heavy contact lenses, it’s gonna be over 30.

Nathan: Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. That’s just normal. And again, breathe, you look normal. But the higher that cost of goods percentage is and the more retail-oriented our practice is, generally speaking, we have a higher revenue per exam practice ’cause most of the products we’re selling to more of our patients are expensive.

And so have more revenue coming from product sales, and usually that means with a higher revenue per exam, we’re getting to our revenue number with fewer patients coming through the practice, and so generally we carry less staff in that type practice. conversely, if I see cost of goods in the low 20% range, high services-based practices, services are great ’cause they pay the same every time the patient comes in, whereas every vision care patient’s a game of roulette.

You’re either getting $600 or more or $60, and it’s just, on average, that’s gonna come out at 400 plus for most practices, but it’s still kinda painful to know. a medically oriented practice, lower revenue per patient, but very consistent, you’re gonna have more patients coming through, we’re gonna carry more staff. [00:22:00] And so our general rule for most practices, we typically wanna see cost of goods and non-staff together around half the revenues. The median for the past several years has been right at 52% of revenues, so it’s been persistently high. The 80th percentile is at 56, 55, which is I never thought that would be the case pre-COVID. one of the beauties of doing the numbers is we can give practices the grace to say, “You know what? It’s higher than historically normal. It’s also not that abnormal for now.” Again, breathe. Let’s work on the revenue side, on our pricing, keep on our receivables, look at ways to drive more revenue above our fixed overhead, and how to be more efficient with our staff over time as well. there’s that piece. and then from there it’s really asking the question if there are gaps, if our staff expense looks low,and we wanna grow, like wh- where are the bottlenecks? ‘Cause again, depending on where things are, if you look at your own practice, you might have a lot of patients coming through that are even interested in eyewear, but if we only have one optician and two doctors running full-time, like optician can’t handle all those pa- two opticians probably can’t handle all those patients.

And do we need to add a cross-trained tech who can do fr- [00:23:00] some frame styling? do we need more techs so our patients can get through the exam in enough time, fast enough so they have time to shop for eyewear in optical? and that, that number’s usually 40 minutes or less from the exam time to optical.

If you’re much longer than that, patients are already onto their next appointment or back to work. I think I’m getting at your question there, there’s that, and then some of it’s just looking at what our local market is, Now, are we in the Northeast where patients are, or staff are more expensive?

Are we in the Southeast? I’m from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and you can still hire people for $15 an hour, there. that’s not true in much of the country. So

Evon: Gotcha.

Nathan: a,

Evon: So it

Nathan: in there, but I do think at some level we’ve gotta have more patients in the door. We need staff to manage that

Evon: So part of it is knowing the type of practice you have, which I guess is a, a trap of looking at benchmark numbers like this, where it’s aggregated, it actually represents many different practices. the median is not exactly like yours perhaps, but, so it’s knowing the type of practice you have and the services you provide and also your own revenue goals.

[00:24:00] And knowing your own revenue goals you can back into and say… And I like how you break down really what drives collected revenue because it’s basically the amount of patients you see, revenue per patient, and your ability to collect revenue from third-party payers. And it sounds like knowing your revenue goals you can back into, how many patients do we need to see, at what revenue per patient, and can we support this with what we have?

Does that sound about right?

Nathan: Yeah. I think that, that’s exactly right. And one– as we grow, we wanna get deeper into that patient count thing. So it’s easy to use like revenue per non-OD staff as a proxy for patients per non-OD staff. But there’s… we have practices that, you know, the median’s probably in the $150,000 per non-OD staff to $200,000 in collected revenue per staff member. You have practices doing like $500,000 per non-OD staff or more. And but those practices average $1,000 a patient. And I would assume, and I wanna test this and validate it, that we bring it to comprehensive exams per non-OD staff, total patients per non-OD staff, you’ll have a much tighter range of [00:25:00] approximating how many staff does a typical practice carry. it’ll get a little messy with contract labor outsourced, for VAs and type things, but, probably a better way to think about it.

Evon: y- you mentioned that it’s d- it is difficult to bring back, non-OD staff compensation costs once they’re already there. you’re not gonna be cutting everyone’s pay. I don’t think your team will be very happy with that or stick around very long. In situations like that where there’s already an established team, compensation’s higher maybe than makes sense for the practice or higher than benchmarks without that intentional purpose behind that, what can be done?

How might an owner look at a situation like that and say, “How can we improve our numbers here?”

Nathan: yeah, I think data’s always helpful here. So the first thing I’d tell that practice is y- you wanna go and get whatever information you can on prevailing wages in your area, whether that g- is going to, a Glassdoor or the Chamber of Commerce. there’s a number of sort- You just Google it, right?

Where can I look up average wages for different roles in my office? And I wanna know, what’s the average pay for an optician, a [00:26:00] receptionist, a biller, a manager. and I wanna benchmark my, my employees against this ’cause hopefully what you’re gonna find is, we’re either at the top of the range, above the range. But I want data so I’m not being reactive to my staff just saying I want a raise. To say, “No, we are, we’ve, we’re benchmarking this. We are very happy to tell you’re at the top of the range for what you’d earn for any other employer around here. but because you’re at the top, we’re not gonna do annual increases for a season,” right?

we might give bonuses if you want some variable comp, but we’re at least gonna stop the growth in that area per employee. but we wanna have the data to say, you’re being paid well, and we’re really happy about that, and we know you are.” and then I would just, let the practice growth cover it, focus on…

Again, most practices have some slack in terms of there’s not a butt in a chair every exam slot every day. if you solve for that, almost everything takes care of itself. So that’d be the first pass. second pass is looking at capture rates and revenue per exam, fee schedules, and again, what are our bases of, driving revenue? [00:27:00] Butts in chairs, revenue per exam, so what’s the standard of care being provided? And then a subset of revenue per exam is receivables and getting paid for the work you do. and just focusing on those things. the other thing I’d be looking at if we have… If we’re just overstaffed and we have some subpar employees, yeah, we’re gonna make that choice to move on, and that’ll create accountability and better morale for our better employees ’cause they hate C players. and if we need more employees, I’m gonna look at anything that can be done outside the office, looking for a virtual option where we’re paying $12 an hour for someone offshore to handle that role. so there’s a laundry list of things to do on that. Hard thing to unwind, though.

Evon: Hard thing to unwind. And looking at the other side of that coin for variable expenses, cost of goods sold, w- where are the opportunities for owners to improve that number, at least as a relation to, to revenue outside of growing revenue? Or is that the primary, the primary thing we’re looking at?

Nathan: I, so again, I have a philosophy that I’m sure some owners can prove me wrong and tell me stories where they’ve really batten down the [00:28:00] hatches. but I do think for most owners, like it’s kind of an organic output of what your pr- practice looks like.

work- lowering that percentage is gonna have more to do with other things than just cost controls. optical inventory management, eyewear, like that’s probably an opportunity for most practices. the owner of a prominent frame, manufacturer in the US said to me once,if every practice managed their boards the way they should, a third of us would be out of business overnight.” if you wanna trim some costs out, c- free up some cash, ask your optical what they’re doing with frame buying and, the intentionality there. So there’s, an obvious opportunity. contact lenses, the, the… They’re so commoditized, like it’s just gonna be what it is, and if you’re heavy into contact lenses, you’re just gonna have higher cost of goods.

But you’re also gonna have higher revenue per exam. You’re also gonna have opportunities for dry eye management. You’re gonna have patients coming back more regularly for catching other stuff going on. So contact lenses are not a bad thing to me, but they do make a practice look different, and you’ll probably have less staff with a heavy contact lens practice. On the lab side, I mean you, you can threaten to [00:29:00] leave your lab and get a better deal almost any time you want, so there’s that. The other piece that I’ve seen a couple times lately is w- when you negotiate with a lab, they have a price list that’s, I don’t know, it feels like a million SKUs that you could choose, but they’re gonna pick about a basket of 15 or 20 products, and that’s gonna be a certain design and a certain material with a certain coating, and they’re gonna give you a great deal on that, and everything else is gonna get jacked up. And if you don’t make sure your staff are ordering that product that’s been discounted, your lab bill will suffer for it. so some of it’s in just auditing, yeah, I think twice a year. Just pull out some contact lens bills, make sure you’re getting your rebates. Pull out your lab bill, make sure you’re ordering the right product at the right price. ’cause vendor systems are not… I think owners know their systems aren’t super sophisticated because they’re a small business owner. You’d be shocked even at the multinational companies, their systems aren’t much better than yours, and they mess up too. trust but verify on those things. but again, I’d say like that’s a 5 to 10% of time, maybe do some audits on your materials cost twice a year, [00:30:00] quarterly at most, but probably twice a year is fine

Evon: I’m curious how you’re managing this, your, how your team’s managing this for the practices you serve. what I see a lot is the cost of goods sold tends to be cost of the goods purchased, and then at the end of the year, for tax purposes, there’s this big adjustment based on some estimate of inven- inventory.

others I’ve seen where inventory is tracked in real time, and you see that adjustment happen in the cost of goods sold line item throughout the year to tell you what is actually sold, because it should be cost of good actually sold. So how does your team manage that?

Nathan: So we’re cash basis, so we’re not accruing, which means that we’re just recognizing expenses when they come in, which does mean anything you’re carrying in inventory is, it’s gonna be expensed at the time you buy it. I think on a month-to-month basis, if you bring in a new collection of frames, it’s going to make it look off, and so it’s a limitation of doing it in cash basis. But we do most of our benchmarks on a trailing 12 basis, and there are very few practices where if you pull back to [00:31:00] trailing 12, that month-to-month noise doesn’t come out in the wash. So it’s not… There, there, there’s trade-offs too, ’cause when you start accruing, you start doing the inventory adjustments, a lot of times those are just making up numbers. don’t think any practice that I work with, I know maybe one out of the 1,200 I’ve talked to that I think actually has a real-time sense of what their, the value of their inventory is at a,

Evon: Yeah

Nathan: I’m gonna use a technical term, a FIFO or LIFO basis. like I just… Practices take inventory. If they do it once a year, great, and they don’t remember what they paid for those frames, so the inventory is just a count. my sense is that, in- the inventory number of your balance sheet for most practices is just made up. any adjustments you make to it are gonna be similarly like, and

Evon: Gotcha

Nathan: we’re just looking for a tax number and making it up to get there.

Evon: Yeah

Nathan: a-and I’m not saying people are intentionally committing fraud, just we have to accept the limits of what we know and be honest about it on our practices.

Most owners are so checked out of what’s happening in optical that, to say we have a really tight sense of what the inventory is week to [00:32:00] week, month to month, even year to year, I kinda doubt it from what we see.

Evon: that definitely makes sense. And w- what are your thoughts on, consignment models of managing frame inventory?

Nathan: I, I’m not– My expertise is the P&L and less on optical sales, although I find it interesting and I enjoy my talks with optical experts. I think the most important thing for most practices is to figure out what products meet sort of the fashion sense of your patient base and the price points that your patient base can afford. and one of the real challenges of the managed care environment we live in is that there’s just an intuition for most practices that because, with managed vision care, my… the one lever I can pull on, on, on revenue really is my frame product mix because my content lenses are either on formulary or cash pay.

My le- ophthalmic lenses are on formulary, so I can sell a nicer lens and get more, but I can’t really… only so much control I have to push that up. The one thing I can really drive revenue on is super high-end eyewear because it’s, I’m reimbursed as list over wholesale, list over retail. [00:33:00] If I sell nicer glasses, I make more money. and the, the challenge is that, great, that’s a way to make more money, but can your patients afford those products?

Evon: And, when you come in and I’m getting, spending $500, $600 on a pair of glasses after my vision benefits, not everyone can afford that every year.

Nathan: So one of the things we’re working on at EyeDoc, just as an aside, is trying to bring products to market that, that can come in at a price point that’s more accessible to more patients. that’s an aside. On the consignment side, if it sells. I’m less worried about it. most practices are carrying less than 1,000 frames.

you’re maybe, you’re almost certainly less than in inventory. if your practice is generating a million five, 2 million, that’s just, it’s not a ton of cash tied up, all things considered.

I’m less concerned about going consignment. I’d rather have the right, spend money on the right products that are gonna sell just be so cost-conscious that I’m not there.

But if I’m spending $100,000 or I have $100,000 in cash tied up in stuff that doesn’t move, that’s a [00:34:00] problem. but I think the burden is more to make sure that whatever we’re carrying is turning over and less worried about consignment versus a wholesale price point.

Evon: that makes sense.

Nathan: answer from

Evon: Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. That makes sense. And, so we have cost of goods sold. We have non-OD staff costs. These are the largest investments in the practice. These are the largest places where revenue’s gonna go. Then we have fixed costs, so occupancy costs, equipment, marketing, general administrative expenses.

How do occupancy costs show up in an optometry practice profit and loss?

Evon: What was interesting from the report is that occupancy costs don’t necessarily rely on geography as much as we might expect. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nathan: Yeah, I think, and this is true of staff expenses too, having, having done this as much as I have, is just impressive how organically practices all end up the s- same sort of expenses regardless of where they are. So in, geographies that are more expensive, practices just make do with less space.

They make d- do with less staff where staff are more expensive and you see it pretty consistently across geographies. [00:35:00] what’ll be different is the revenue per square foot in, say, New York City versus, Macon, Georgia. you’re almost gonna have to be generating 800, 1,000, $1,200 a square foot to stay in business in Manhattan, whereas, 300, $400 a square foot is fine when you can get 5,000 square feet for $500,000, and own it. So it’s gonna look different in that sense. That’s probably a little charitable on the 5,000 square feet. Call it a million. But, yeah, it d- it tends to stay pretty tight on especially the space cost. There’s not a lot of play above or below the, the, the mean. There’s not a lot of practices spending a, a lot more than 12% of revenues on their space, period.

Evon: Yeah, and it seems like just going through the report,

Nathan: that, that was one of the spots where you pull out as an example where it’s okay to deviate higher than what benchmarks suggest, at least temporarily, if you need to move into a new space, more, more space, the opportunity for higher amount of patients to come through.

Evon: as long as– Well, at least what you’ve seen is that practices tend to be [00:36:00] able to eventually make that up on the revenue side. So that, that’s, that was an interesting example of where, yes, it does make sense to deviate from benchmarks for your revenue goals, right? to increase spending to meet the revenue goals that you have in mind.

Nathan: Yeah. Two areas where owners usually come to me and say, “How can I afford this?” Are I’m looking at a bigger space, or I’m looking at the next doctor. and they tend to be in a mindset where “I’m just gonna add this cost and nothing else is gonna change,” right? like you, you’re not gonna add cost unless… sometimes you might just, we need to move and we don’t wanna grow, but this space is happier for us. you’re adding cost to get somewhere, and that’s usually driving revenue growth. So practices, even after a remodel, if you talk to groups like, Eye Designs or OMG that do a lot of space design, they organically see 20, 25% revenue growth after even just a remodel and a

Evon: Wow

Nathan: Forget adding space. So it’s not a, a lock solid guarantee. I don’t have data on this, but anecdotally that’s my experience too, that when you [00:37:00] move, your staff are excited, your patients are excited. staff morale’s usually up ’cause it’s a nicer space. Maybe they have a break room to get away from the insanity of patients for a little bit and recharge during the day. and they tend to grow. They, they just do. so the, the challenge in investing in a practice is really knowing how far can I go and not get too far over my skis, right? and so we try to give guidance on hey, if you go a little above the range, you’re probably fine ’cause you’re gonna grow into it. There’s a point at which you add too much too fast, and it’s just gonna be a drag on profits and cash flow for years until you grow into it. And that’s where, some guidance on, yes, you can spend a little more than normal i- in your next space, but let’s cap it at 10% of revenues, 12% of revenues on the outside if you wanna be ambitious.

But let’s not go and spend 20% of revenues on space. Like you’re not gonna grow into that quickly, more likely than not

A- and with the important caveat, like you mentioned, it’s there, there is a, should be a goal attached to this, right? There should be a goal attached to the spending or investment. There needs to be a plan.

Evon: yeah

Nathan: I think, when you talk to practices, it’s [00:38:00] decision-making just looks different if we’re scheduled out for three months and we just, we have patients banging down the doors, versus, you can get an exam next week and we have holes in our schedule right now.

Those are two very different experiences of a practice. And usually when you’re looking to expand, you’re hopefully, maybe not three months, but scheduling out two, three, four weeks and you know you need more capacity because the patient demand is there. and I think a lot of practice owners sometimes think it’s an if you build it, they will come thing, and I’d always rather start with where are the patients gonna come from, and we’re gonna let patient volume drive decisions on staffing levels, space, resourcing, lanes equipped. Pa- If you keep patient volume and patients as the centerpiece of your decision-making, you’ll probably make pretty good decisions over the life of a practice

How much should practice owners be spending on marketing?

Evon: O- on that note, let’s talk a little bit about marketing. marketing, one to 2% maybe o- of collected revenue. Why do practice owners hate marketing their businesses?

Of course, I’m only joking, but

Tell us a little bit about the [00:39:00] low, the low percentage of revenue going to marketing.

Especially relative to other industries, uh, is this about right? Are there opportunities to market more strongly or aggressively that practice owners should be investing more dollars into? What accounts for that low percentage of revenue that goes towards marketing in a typical optometry practice?

Nathan: yeah Some of it’s knowing where your practice is. So if you’re scheduled out three months, why would we spend a lot on marketing to drive more patients through the door? There’s probably still an opportunity to do some internal marketing to, ask your doctor about what we can do for your dry, itchy eyes when you’re wearing contacts or, about our new frame line or our Plano Suns.

But, And prime the pump for spending. But there are some practices that don’t need more patients, and therefore a lot of marketing isn’t necessary. it’s also worth noting that for most practices, the largest marketing expense is the discounts they give on their professional fees and products to manage vision care and health insurers. that’s really a giant Groupon. it’s not– They are s- when you’re cutting your exam from [00:40:00] $175 to $60, that’s a marketing expense. You’re trading revenue for a referral of a patient from a VSP or an EyeMed or what have you. So that’s, that, that’s another marketing expense we don’t think about.

but that may help people also feel a little better about their managed vision care. and then when you look at marketing itself, there’s sort of a baseline of at least $15,000 to $20,000 a year that practices are spending that’s just to have a functional website, patient communication software, maybe some Google Ads running and SEO. and there’s some expenses that are better thought of in terms of just raw dollars, and I think marketing is one of those where there’s a, there’s an opening bid to be there. and over time, at some point, spending more on marketing probably doesn’t drive results.

Evon: that limit’s probably a lot farther out than most practice owners are ’cause marketing is hard for marketers, right? Y-you are taking a risk when you start spending on it, and you have to spend time to learn from what’s happening, validate your results, fine-tune what you’re doing. one of my favorite examples on marketing that I don’t think I put in the report, but [00:41:00] last year we had a second-year practice.

Nathan: They spent $82,000 on Google Ads, $82,000. even I was like, “Guys,are we into deb- diminishing returns yet? that’s a lot to spend.” And they said, we’ve been tracking it rigorously. it was working, so we kept doing more, and it kept working, so we kept doing more.” And they grew $600,000 in revenue that year.

So it’s not like the, the math didn’t math on that expenditure. And this year they pulled back. They said, “Look,we were hitting another plateau. Like we’re not doing as much this year.” But most practice owners, and Google Ads are just done well is the most obvious place where you said, “Let me put some dollars somewhere and just see it work.”

Done well Google Ads are probably the most reliable way to increase patient volume. Again, some of it depends on where you are. Are there more patients to be seen? but again, $5,000, $10,000 on most practices is a rounding error on the P&L, and if it puts more butts in chairs and drives revenue, it’s usually well worth it. and again, some of it just depends on what your goals are.

Evon: So yeah, there you go. Back to the goals. that, that makes sense. do you tend to see just in [00:42:00] your conversations and the numbers do you tend to see the lower percentage of revenue going to marketing as a function of those goals? Meaning it’s just, it’s naturally happens due to the already high patient demand.

M- maybe they’re scheduled out well, they don’t necessarily need additional patients. or do you tend to see it more as a, as a result of what’s happening and they’re just reacting to the number? do you see the intentionality behind it, or do you see that there are just opportunities to improve and increase that marketing spend a little bit more?

Nathan: I think it’s probably a mix of both, where for a lot of practices it’s we’re growing fine without spending more, so why would we? word of mouth is still a great way to grow a practice, if you don’t need to spend on marketing, why would you? of it is coming down to goals, and some of it’s, some of it’s also, the times when you most need to spend mon- money on marketing, where your practice is struggling, is also the times where emotionally it’s hardest to let go of more dollars.

Evon: Ah.

Nathan: so it does take some firm nudging in some cases to say, [00:43:00] “Look, I know you feel like cash is tight. This is not a huge outlay. You need more patients. This is where to get it.” and, so a mix of all those things. there’s just the natural conservatism of doctors, but also, marketing’s kind of a black box they don’t understand, and you’re growing your business, I’m growing my business.

it’s still hard to say,you could probably tell me I’m doing this podcast, I’m getting, reaching this many ears and eyes in the optometry world for client growth, some of this is just we’re throwing content out in the ether and,

Evon: Right

Nathan: it, how do you know what your return is?

we run a marketing service, and doctors wanna know,what am I getting out of this spend?” And it’s really hard to do measurement in marketing. and really, you to my colleague who runs our marketing services, “Look, I can tell you whether someone clicked and maybe whether they called. Past that, I can’t tell you what your marketing dollars did.

Evon: can get someone interested in your practice, but I can’t tell you if they came in, I can’t tell you what they spent. So I can’t really give you an ROI on that.” and that makes it hard for owners that are very data-driven to, to pull the [00:44:00] trigger.

What is the net income of a typical optometry practice?

Evon: That makes sense. l- let’s talk a little bit about the sort of the bottom line here, which is, optometric net. And this is a, i- if you look at any of the online communities we’re in, it’s often confused what terms mean. what is optometric net? What’s owner’s net? What’s net profit? What’s gross collected revenue?

What’s net revenue? there, there’s a lot of these terms that are accounting terms and benchmarking terms that are mixed up and confused a lot of the time. So can you just talk through what is that? What does that mean?

Nathan: Yeah. first off, anytime we’re talking about revenue, we are talking about collected revenue, net revenue. What you bill out to third parties is a pleasant fiction that means nothing for your business. you cannot pay a bill with a receivable. You can pay it with cash in hand. so we’ll knock that one out.

When it comes to measuring net, the challenge really comes down to, if you just wanna do net income a-and you raise profit sharing plans already, which is great because owners’ decisions on how much w-wage they take from their practice in terms of W2 income and bonuses and what have you, is a very [00:45:00] individualized decision that can vary based on the business structure.

So if we’re a prop or a C corp, like we’re really not gonna take a salary through the business. If we’re an S corp with a profit sharing plan, like we’re probably gonna pay double the market rate to ourselves so that we can not have as big a match to our staff. and so you just get a lot of noise at the net income level, the EBITDA level based on owner compensation.

Then you have the, the other variable of are we in partnership where we’re paying ourselves more? We– Do we have associates? Are we intentionally paying ourselves less ’cause we hate payroll tax? And there’s just a lot of play in owners’ compensations in particular. So it’s very hard to benchmark net profit as such. And so we choose, what we call optometric net. I called it practice net, but optometric net seems to be favored term here, which is let’s put the profits together with doctor pay, and let’s use that as the benchmark. And it’s a good way to make apples to apples comparisons practice to practice.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the best way I know that solves for ownership mixes ’cause we throw the associates and the non-RE staff, that’s gonna blow that up. practices where the owners take a lot of wage, they take no [00:46:00] wage. and you can imagine there’s a lot of play at the ends of the bell curve of net income or EBITDA, which is the metric we use, based on owner comp.

So it, it can be hard. What it does mask is you can have a healthy optometric net, and if you’re inefficient with your doctors, your practice can really struggle with profitability and cash flow. So there is an underlying assumption that we’re getting something like a five to six X, seven X return on our doctor pay at fair market rates. which means that, ideally our $150,000, $155,000 a year associate’s generating a million dollars or more in collected revenue. probably the one– I, I don’t like should-ing on practices and really giving them firm stuff, but doctor production is one that,I’m pretty confident that a million dollars threshold for a floor on doctor productivity at a full-time level is a good number to, to look for. staff can be a little more varied based on the shape of the practice, but doctor productivity needs to meet a certain level

Evon: That, that makes sense. That’s really helpful. You’re right, depending on the practice and just the structure from a tax, perspective [00:47:00] can change whether there even is a wage or not. par- practices taxed as partnerships are not gonna be seeing a wage. They cannot pay themselves a wage. There may be something called guaranteed payments on your P&L if you’re one of those practices, which is sort of the equivalent of that.

Nathan: But, that’s gonna be different from an S corporation, which you are required to pay yourself a wage. now the amount that’s required is sort of a gray area, and for many tax reasons I’ve never seen someone penalized for the wage they took at an S corp. Like

Evon: nor have I, but, we see for, from a tax perspective sometimes that wage pushed down unreasonably, or for retirement contribution purposes we see that wage pulled up and it’s depends on one owner to another, one practice to another. So that makes sense how that sort of combines those together and gives us apples to apples comparison across different practices.

But it’s not quite, as you mentioned, it’s, it does mask some things. It’s not quite net income. It’s not profit, especially if you have an associate. That OD cost is a true [00:48:00] cost to the business. So it’s not quite profitability, but it’s great for benchmarking and comparison.

How should practice owners measure optometrist productivity in a practice?

Evon: How would a– how would an owner know if their OD- if their doctors are working efficiently?

y- perhaps if it’s themselves, but especially if they have associates. Like, how would they e- evaluate that?

Nathan: Yeah. And you may have these numbers in front of you, which I don’t. But I think if you look at the range of doctor pay as a percentage of revenue in that middle 60%, it’s gonna run from 14% of revenues on the low end to about 20, 22% on the higher end of like the 80th percentile. And we kinda look at the 20th to 80th percentile as our sort of normal range, quote unquote, that plus or minus one standard deviation. and I, I’m gonna look for doctor pay to be 20% of revenues or less. if you’re dipping under 14% of revenues, I’m gonna ask if you’re… And this is assuming you, you’re paying a normalized wage to the owner. owners, if you’re gonna benchmark yourselves, just if you have associates, just give yourself their wage and plug that in and then do your math. but I’ll tell owners, ’cause we get the question a lot like, what should we pay ourselves? [00:49:00] In a perfect world from a benchmark standpoint, pay yourself a fair market wage like your associates. In the real world, I don’t really care. You need to talk to your CPA and CFP and decide what meets your goals from a tax planning and wealth planning standpoint. ’cause the only time apart from evaluating the practice at any moment in time, the moment when this really matters is when we’re trying to sell a practice and we need to put a number on a valuation. We need a benefit stream, an income stream to put a multiplier on so we know what we’re gonna ask for the practice. And at that point, the, the first normalizing adjustment’s gonna be to look at the owner’s wage and either increase it because they weren’t taking a wage or decrease it ’cause they’re taking $350,000 to fund a profit sharing or cash balance plan. So these are very normal things in these moments. And a-a-again, like there’s just…

we can have a sense of what’s going on without, you know, being too hewn to, I need to look normal on my doctor wages. So I’ll just do the mental gymnastics on a phone call usually

Where are the biggest opportunities for improvement in an optometry practice?

Evon: so you look at these benchmark numbers. [00:50:00] you’ve done this for a number of years now. I at least have from 2023 to 2025, so at least three years of this. y- you’ve seen the changes over time. You see the practices that you’re working with. where do you see the top opportunities for action or improvement?

seeing the numbers in in real time as you’re updating them year over year and seeing how they change over year

Nathan: Yeah. I think, one, remembering that your P&L is well downstream of your operations, so the stuff that’s gonna move the needle may live more in an Edge Pro or ABB Analyze of fill the schedule. and I think that the number of times from a, a new practice to a mature practice that I’m reminding the owners that the fundamental input to your business is patient volume. i-if you solve for that, again, 90% of the cases, the practice financials are gonna be great. You fill the schedule, it’s hard to mess it up after that. You can, but it’s hard. I think the expense ratios are, are– again, I like your term of [00:51:00] sanity check. Some of it’s sort of intentional expenditure to say “Hey, we’re falling behind. we’re gonna spend with the intent to grow.” And sometimes even hiring staff, like there’s a practice that’s smaller that may carry an extra half-timer just to have flexibility for when someone calls out. there’s an older owner that sometimes hires a scribe not ’cause the practice needs it, but benchmarks call for it, but they’re just gonna be happier practicing if they’re not spending, all their weekend in front of a computer trying to chart. So a-again, like some of it’s just intentionality and knowing “Hey, are we in the range? If we’re out of range, was it on purpose? Was it not on purpose? are we falling behind in ways that suggest, ‘Hey, I feel like I need another staff and I’m afraid of it.’ I’m gonna look at the benchmark. Oh, we’re on the low end of normal.

let’s hire that next staff and grow.” but I think from a growth standpoint, patients, revenue per exam, collections, like that’s– those are the three levers to pull. And what I’ve found with owners is they often wanna set goals of they’ll call me in January “Should I set a 5% or 8% growth goal?” And, it’s just, it’s the wrong question to ask. let’s put gr- ’cause that’s [00:52:00] very abstract, right? Like what’s 5% growth look like? Am I gonna see 5% more of a patient? let’s break that down into a revenue number we wanna hit, how many more patients per week it is. Now we have a marketing goal or a scheduling goal. What our revenue per exam is. Maybe we can move the needle on that, maybe we can’t, but we’re at least working with concrete things that our staff can control. we can impact or at least influence. We can influence how many patients are coming in. We can influence the capture rates and the sell-through. We can influence receivables and billing appropriately. And so now we’re in control of working towards that goal and then it’s just a matter of like trying and learning and iterating and the purpose of goals is not, and ratios not to say like your practice has to look exactly like this. It’s just to say, do we have a direction and a plan for where we’re going?

And then, as we execute on that and probably fail in certain areas, what do we learn? How do we change? How do we grow?

Evon: I love that. And I, Nathan, I really appreciate you coming on to talk about this. I love these reports. I hope you continue to do them into eternity so I can enjoy looking through them and [00:53:00] talking about them with my clients. but none of this is possible, for the listener, none of this is possible without clean, accurate data, clean, accurate books to look at, to monitor, to track, a- and to build a story off of and make decisions on.

And so that leads us to Nathan. Tell us about the work that you do or your team does with, optometry practice owners. Where can they find you and follow you and learn more about what you’re doing?

Nathan: Yeah. idoc.net’s the website. look at accounting services. I think it’s under, Books and Benchmarks is the name of our service. we provide, full scope accounting services to practices, and we’re really just on the business accounting. So we don’t do tax. We wanna play really nice with your CPA.

We like playing really nice with CFPs. We think they’re incredibly valuable. and we see ourselves as part of that team where, where we have a trifecta of an engaged CPA, engaged C- CFP, and we’re providing the real numbers, from a tax and wealth building standpoint for our clients. It works really well.

again, we’re in the books every month, accepting transactions, categorizing them, reconciling them so it’s true to reality. we can help run payroll, we can help with bill pay if you need it. [00:54:00] but most of our lane is just making sure the, the books are accurate, they’re meaningful, and they’re on time every month.

and that’s, for a lot of practices, that’s,if you fall in the category of I don’t really trust my numbers, they don’t mean anything to me, or like they’re never there when I need them, give us a call. and we’d love to support. We’re in growth mode. Got a great team of eight bookkeepers.

We’re anti-fragile at this stage and ready to take on more clients. So if you’re looking for help as we go into tax season or just in general wanna have a better handle on your business, we’d love to talk

Evon: that’s great. I will put a link to all of that and all of Nathan’s information there in the show notes, as well as a link again to this report for 2025. for the listener, really appreciate you listening today. We will catch you on the next episode of Optometry Money Podcast. In the meantime, take care [00:55:00