BEYOND THE NUMBERS: WHY INDEPENDENT OPTICAL PRACTICES ARE TURNING TO BUSINESS COACHING
By David Samuel, David Samuel Coaching
Get the VAT treatment of your dispensing income wrong, and it shows up fast — in an HMRC letter, a missed relief, a partial exemption calculation that quietly costs you thousands. Practice owners rightly invest in specialist advice to get that side of the business right.
But there’s a second set of numbers that matters just as much to the long-term health of a practice, and it never shows up on a balance sheet: how well the practice is led, how well the team works together, and how clear the owner is about where the business is going.
That’s the gap business coaching is designed to fill. It’s a natural companion to good financial advice, not a substitute for it. A practice with immaculate VAT compliance can still be losing money through high staff turnover, a manager promoted but never trained to manage, or an owner too buried in day-to-day decisions to plan an exit.
THE ISOLATION OF INDEPENDENT OWNERSHIP
Most independent optical practice owners qualified as clinicians, not managers. They end up running a retail operation, leading a team, handling HR and setting strategy — often with no one senior to talk it through with. Decisions that would get debated and stress-tested in a larger organisation get made alone, late at night, with no sounding board.
That isolation is where a lot of avoidable mistakes come from: hiring the wrong manager, avoiding a difficult conversation with an underperforming team member for too long, or leaving succession planning until it’s urgent rather than deliberate.
WHAT COACHING ACTUALLY CHANGES
Good business coaching isn’t a consultant arriving with a template and telling an owner what to do — optical practices are too individual for that, and owners know their business better than anyone. It’s structured, regular conversations that create space to think clearly: challenging assumptions, stress-testing decisions before they’re made rather than after, and building the leadership and delegation skills that let an owner step back from day-to-day firefighting.
In practical terms, that shows up in a handful of places: teams that are better led and retain staff for longer; owners who delegate with confidence instead of doing everything themselves; and a clearer, earlier plan for what happens when the owner wants to sell, retire, or bring in a partner. None of that appears on a set of accounts — but all of it hits the numbers eventually, through staff costs, through growth, and through the value of the practice when it’s time to move on.
A NATURAL PARTNERSHIP
SIAL already helps optical practice owners get the financial and VAT side right. Coaching addresses the other half — the leadership, team and growth decisions that turn a financially sound practice into a well-run, resilient one.
If you’re making good financial decisions but feel stretched, isolated, or unsure about your next big move — bringing in a manager, planning an exit, building a team that doesn’t depend entirely on you — that’s usually the point where coaching earns its keep.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Samuel spent 35 years in the optical sector, starting as a dispensing optician and contact lens specialist before building Eyesite from a single practice into a six-partner group with 70 staff, where he served as partner and CEO. He holds an MBA and a degree in Marketing, and since exiting Eyesite he has focused full-time on coaching independent practice owners and their teams — having now worked with over 160 people across 75 independent practices, alongside facilitating peer group retreats across the sector, including groups run through SightCare Services.
David works with owners on leadership, team performance and succession planning — acting as an independent sounding board, not a consultant with off-the-shelf answers.
If you thinks coaching might help you or a member of your team, ask SIAL to put you in touch — or book a free discovery call at www.davidsamuelcoaching.com.