Optometrists Building Empires

OBE - Jason Klepfisz
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[00:00:00]

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: up an office. I want my office to be cool, so I'm gonna build a cool office."

It's all about hospitality and taking care of people,

So I'm sitting there like, "Oh, crap. What am I supposed to do? I can't get onto these medical plans. You know, I have to pivot."

I mean, we go toe-to-toe with other offices and opticals in

the area for brands.

Ankit: yeah.

Jason: fighting,

there's backstabbing, there is everything you can imagine.

I think, the key to our success, is the ability to see what patients want, anticipate that, and stay in front of it.

[00:01:00]

Ankit: Today's guest is someone who proved that private practice done right can compete with anyone. He's a community leader connecting over 1,200 independent practice owners through his private Facebook group dedicated to elevating optometry together called Private Practice Club. He is a resident-trained optometrist who served rural and Native American communities through the Indian Health Services in some of the most underserved corners of the country.

He's founder of the top 1% revenue per patient private practice that is redefining what luxury independent eye care looks and feels like. He's the owner and founder of Urban Eye Care, which has two locations in the Phoenix area. Please welcome Dr. Jason Kloepfish. Jason, welcome.

Jason: Thank you for having me.

Ankit: Yeah, I'm cool. I'm excited to have this conversation, Jason.

You, I... as you, as you heard by the intro, you have a breadth of [00:02:00] experience. So with that, what was the thing that helped you build your empire?

Jason: I think the main thing was thinking outside the box. grew up as a punk rock kid, and I've always been very anti-conformist, always looking for a different way, a better path, something else out there with the idea that if you put something right up the middle, it's for everybody, and that's great. But what about the upper end of that?

Can you take that little area and just take the top, you know, 10% of patients and grow a practice through revenue per patient over volume?

Ankit: I'm curious, did that pull-- Did you have a similar thought when you went to, to go to the Indian reservations i- in those areas as well? Is that, or is it really just that was more of the approach you took with your private practice? T- tell me about that because that's a very... those are opposite worlds.

Jason: You know, I [00:03:00] always was into medical, straight medical. I did my internships through Indian Health Service hospitals. I did a residency in Indian Health Service hospital. I came back to Phoenix, and I worked in a geriatric care setting where primarily I was seeing 65-plus medical-only patients. And while I was in that position, I really loved what I was doing, but I could see that no matter how hard I worked, there was going to be a limit to what I could make in somebody else's business

Ankit: and so you decided to, to take that journey into private practice. Uh, what-- When you were building out your practice, talk to us a little bit about how you got into it, uh, why expand, and tell us about that journey a little bit

Jason: So I started in a really basic place of type in optometrist, look at Google Maps, and find out [00:04:00] where there is a place with no optometrists. Turns out, in the city of Phoenix, it's downtown Phoenix. So I am the only optometrist still nine and a half years later in downtown Phoenix.

So that keeps things interesting.

So I opened up in a location where there wasn't much competition f- to allow for rapid growth in the beginning. We used a designer outside of Phoenix from Denver who specializes in upscale dental and optometry offices and built out a really nice office. And that was kind of the starting point where it was like, okay, you know, everybody has the same drab tone, carpeted pegboard office, but what can we do differently and how can we turn it into something that people wanna shop in versus a medical clinic? So that was my first thought, was how do we build a retail [00:05:00] store within a medical clinic? And that

Ankit: Interesting.

Jason: started in heading down that road. You know, within three years, we were taking five or six insurances. We were doing over a million dollars. I was taking home revenue. It was great, I'm the kinda guy who just can't really with what he has. You know? If, if there's an option to make more or do better or grow, would I not take that option,

I had, I had the optometrist's dream. I was working four days a week taking home, you know, well over 300K, and it was pretty much on autopilot. So my great idea is, "Hey, why don't we open a second practice? We could just do this again." Not so easy, not so simple, not a, uh, quick replication process. you know, we're three and a half years into our uptown, our second [00:06:00] practice, and we are now at an even revenue point where both are making the same.

Ankit: Yeah, so, so let's touch on that, 'cause, uh, you know, what is this famous Mike Tyson quote? "Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the mouth," right? Uh, so, so tell us about what happened when you got bl- uh, when that opened second product. And I wouldn't say bloodied or punched in the mouth, but it sounded tougher than the first one.

Jason: You know, I, I hired new staff. I brought in a full-time doctor I had a manager. I brought my best staff member from my prior location to the office, and they just couldn't really put it

together. I fired the manager within two weeks of starting. Um, members slowly trickled out for different reasons, you know, some personal, some

I had to let go just because of the overall performance. And I think my last new staff member from that point sent me a [00:07:00] message when I got home from the hospital having my second daughter, I wasn't gonna be there for a week, saying, "Hey, I took a job for a dollar more at another practice." And I was like, "Okay, I think it's time for you to just go home. Don't bother coming back tomorrow. You know, enjoy your life." So that point, I'm bringing in new staff constantly. You know, that's been the hardest part, honestly, since opening, is staffing, finding people that are self-motivated, that really enjoy eyewear and just helping people. We run off of a system, I'd say, more akin to a hotel versus a medical office. It's all about hospitality and taking care of people, thinking one step ahead of everybody and always having the answer ready, what they need next going before they get there. And that's really been, I think, the key to our success, is the ability to see what patients want, [00:08:00] anticipate that, and stay in front of it.

Ankit: I love that. You know, it's funny because like there's all these books now and it's basically the same concept which you're describing is reducing friction.

Jason: Absolutely.

Ankit: reducing friction is make it easier, but it's also like, oh, proactively t- you know, take them to the next step, read their mind and do what's next so it's even easier, right?

friction.

Jason: yeah, re- reducing the friction from point A to B and that final sale. You can walk in here, have a full comprehensive exam, find your favorite pair of glasses, pay and be out the door in under 30 minutes.

Ankit: uh, and a side note, what I'm seeing is trust and friction. Those are the two pain points people have with optometry office. They don't trust the pricing and everything feels like it's a scam because it's insurance, the model's weird. Uh, and then, uh, friction like, oh, you know, I'm gonna be here for an hour, right?

You know, and so it's gonna be a long exam and I might have to wait depending on which office I'm at. So,

um, it sounds like you guys are tackling

Jason: is we're built

Ankit: it.

Jason: an improper system.

Ankit: Ah.

Jason: profession in the world [00:09:00] who, whose greatest competitor is also everybody's supplier.

Ankit: talking about Estoril Luxottica, yeah. it, it makes zero sense, you know. And the way the industry has evolved over the past 15 years with that push towards medical optometry It's been interesting.

Jason: I mean, it's great. Medicine is fantastic. I love the medical side of it. You know, I think we need scope expansion for rural medicine, not necessarily, you know, inner city care, things like that in terms of who's been pushing us in that direction, know, it's been industry. It's the same industry that's making all their money off of selling eyewear. They figured out that retail is the most lucrative part of optometry. why, you know, LensCrafters has independent doctors in the back that just get exam fees,

Ankit: Mm-hmm.

Jason: less about the exam fees.

Ankit: And the margins are much better on the optical too than the, uh, well, contacts at least, so yeah.

Jason: [00:10:00] Yeah, and I mean, margins for medical were--

Ankit: yeah.

Jason: they're better, but now with the high cost of equipment

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: cost of staffing that you need to run that equipment, it's a volume game.

Ankit: It is, yeah,

Jason: And how do

Ankit: the reimbursements.

Jason: without

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: your optical?

Ankit: Yeah, that's, that's a great point. So, uh, uh, let's dive into some of that. I wanna hear some of the, the, the J- the Jason way of doing business. Uh, but before we do that, I'm curious, I wanted to ask, what made that second practice so hard? 'Cause it's not that far from your existing location, right?

Or is it?

Jason: So I'm in the probably hottest spot of Phoenix, central Phoenix, in probably the most upscale shopping plaza there is. It's well known. We have a high-end grocery anchor, restaurants, gyms. It's mostly high-end either retail or services.

Ankit: Mm.

Jason: So my rent per square foot is the same, but rent is an advertising expense at the end of the [00:11:00] day. You know, I'm paying $13,000 a month for just over 2,000 square feet just to be where we a-are.

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: opening this, too, know, downtown, I was the only guy out there. They didn't really have a choice. If they wanted care, there I was. Here, I have the nearest optometrist is less than a quarter mile away.

Ankit: Mm.

Jason: interned at the office at one point.

Ankit: It's a, is it more suburban type environment?

Jason: We're not downtown, but, you know, I'm only five miles up the road from my other practice.

Ankit: why'd you choose that location then? 'Cause it sounds like it's the opposite of your i- idea on the first location

Jason: Um,

Ankit: you open up with no competition, the first location. This one sounds like it had some competition.

Jason: I proved that I could do retail

And with that, I looked at the central Phoenix area. Yes, there's an optometrist down the road. Yeah, there's a Warby Parker. Yes, there's a LensCrafters, Sears Optical, two private practices all within a mile or two, but we do [00:12:00] something different.

We are a doctor-owned, doctor-ran private practice that focuses on unique independent eyewear.

Ankit: Hmm. we don't have any connection whatsoever to EssilorLuxottica. The last vestige we had was using a, uh, contact lens distributor that they owned,

Yeah.

Jason: left them about a month ago.

Ankit: Okay.

Jason: we're officially 100% independent across the board.

Ankit: So I heard a lot of good things here that I wanna dive into. The, uh, you treat it more like a, uh, hospitality, not a clinic.

Let's talk about that a little bit. What does that mean? What does that look like?

Jason: You know, the idea of the full experience. I'm thinking patient experience over billing and scheduling and all that. We have a great digital presence through a great website. We have social media with, you know, 7,000-plus followers on [00:13:00] Instagram, so we have that social proof there. We are a part of the community. We give back, we donate, we sponsor events. We just sponsored a large music festival in Phoenix.

Ankit: Nice.

Jason: interesting things, you know, I'm not, I'm not bothering with the kids' baseball team down the road. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the cool people out there that have money to spend on frivolous things like really cool eyewear.

Ankit: you know, I heard a couple things there. One, know your target audience and go where they are. Uh, two, be local, 'cause you're not gonna necessarily do it online, although you probably do some online ads too, but you put back it up with local.

Jason: Yeah, you

Ankit: Um,

Jason: you need that experience online

Ankit: yeah. Yeah,

Jason: to find you.

Ankit: and, and then the third thing is know what you're good at, right?

You guys are, "We're good at hospitality, we're good at optical."

Jason: Exactly. Exactly. So when-- even when they find us, they can book their appointment online. All communication is via text. We keep it nice and simple. They're greeted by name when they walk

Ankit: Love

Jason: door. We have bottles of water, still and sparkling, waiting [00:14:00] for them, ask them if they want it. There's a comfy couch for them to sit on while they fill out their digital paperwork, which, you know, they receive a link for and hopefully filled out before they got there.

we immediately go into showing frames. You know, let's go shopping. This is fun. This is what you're here

Ankit: Yeah

Jason: should have a tray picked out for them, waiting for them when they walk out of the exam with me. They should have

Ankit: Love it.

Jason: smooth, clean, frictionless one person to the next person, the same person that checked them in, so the number of people they contact is minimal and everything is kept personal.

Ankit: Interesting. So in our offices, we did that as an overflow. If a tech was busy, if the optician was there, then you start shopping. But I, I, I'm gonna try that actually. I like that approach. Um, that's really cool. W- what else is different process-wise?

How would I feel as a patient coming to your office versus any other office?

Jason: I look at it as the different levels of [00:15:00] retail. You Hmm. you go to buy a car and you go into the Kia dealership, there are 12 people on top of you trying to sell you anything and everything. When you walk into a Ferrari dealership, it's one guy in a suit asking what they can do for you.

Ankit: Hmm. It's just a completely different level of care, and too many optometry offices get caught up in admin work. That's something I always thought was an issue working at other practices and just being an optometrist in general. staff spending hours on the phone contacting insurance op- insurance companies. You've got admin time trying to bill, fix claims. Who's automatically denying or downgrading everything you do? And with my first practice, I just systematically cut the lowest payer every time we were booked up.

sorry. When do you consider yourself booked? Like, was it two weeks out, How, how about this? [00:16:00] Okay, if you're fewer more than two days out, start cutting the lowest reimburser.

Jason: Yeah, I think being booked out is a disease,

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: you're-- If you're booked out two to four weeks, all that means is somebody with cash in their hand isn't going to your office because they have to wait four weeks. They're coming to my office because I get them in the next day.

Ankit: And it's interesting 'cause I, I, so I, I think, and I wanna make a... For, for the listeners too, and you have a lot of experience with this, so I wanna mention this. If you're in rural eye care where there's no other option, you may have to weigh that, 'cause it's, it's a different animal.

It is access to healthcare. It is not the retail experience necessarily. It can be, but that's not the primary, it doesn't seem to be the primary, uh, reason why, uh, uh, regional and like, uh, you know, remote offices thrive.

Jason: rural healthcare is the most profitable healthcare there is at the end of the day, just due to that lack of concentration and being the only optometrist out there.

Ankit: Yeah

Jason: your prices, pick the days that you work, and call it a day

Ankit: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we have-- I've talked to several on this podcast that [00:17:00] have done it that way, and it's been very s-- They, they're not, they weren't necessarily... I don't know if they may have been, but they never said they were fun fans of punk music, but it was a very similar philosophy. and we're gonna try this."

Jason: the reason people don't get paid in the city is 'cause everyone wants to be there.

Ankit: Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Jason: you pay optometrists 70% of what you'd pay them to work in the middle of nowhere.

Ankit: so what do you think it is, um, and anything you want to share, if you don't want to share anything, that's okay, but what do you think it is about the second office, um, that made it harder to take off even though you had a model that was good? Like, if you had to say like, "Here, here's a couple of things that I would do differently."

Jason: well, I mean, in an insane amount of competition

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: my small little area.

Ankit: Hmm. probably one of the most well-known

how do cash pay opticals in the country. You know, that top 1% of cash pay opticals that does all the, uh, independent like JMM and high-end, mid-level brands, I'd say. JMM is probably their highest brand and their bread and butter versus, [00:18:00] you...

Jason: know, the average optometrist opening, you know, one doctor down the road and it's just like, "Well, I don't like that person.

I'm gonna go here." looking for a bigger catch than that. I'm not selling myself, I'm selling the brand.

Ankit: Hmm.

Jason: If I could do something different when I first opened, I'd probably say hire a PR team.

Ankit: Okay.

Jason: You know, that- that's kind of the biggest thing is getting your message out there. You can have the best message, you can be doing the greatest thing, but if people can't find you, it doesn't matter.

Ankit: I love that. And the, um... So what I'm hearing is make sure they know who you are, but what you actually are as well is important.

Jason: how you operate, why they should be coming to you, that's all PR.

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: all someone speaking on your behalf and letting the world know what's going on between these four walls.

Ankit: And let, let's talk about that a little bit because it sounds like there's an underlying assumption here that you have your marketing is tight, your [00:19:00] social media is tight, and you know what you're saying to the market. Is that, is that accurate to say? Yeah.

Jason: Ideally, yeah. I run my own Google Ads.

Ankit: Okay.

Jason: I've, I've gone out there and I've hired that $20,000 marketing team and wasn't really impressed. I've gone through different iterations of marketing companies and branding operations, and it all kinda comes back down to the same thing of this practice is a physical, example of me.

This is me turned into a building and a store. And at the end of the day, what I think and what I wind up doing winds up being, I think, the most important thing. Where do I feel we are? Where do I see that gap? How do I attack it? And the biggest thing

in the past probably two years I've seen is Google Ads moving to AI-generated targeting. That has increased our [00:20:00] click-through rate over tenfold,

Ankit: Interesting.

Jason: where you can run your own Google Ads with no issue. You don't need to pay somebody hundreds of dollars a month to do it.

Ankit: Yeah. Yeah, the AI is definitely makes it easier, so love that. Um, so, uh, I'm, I'm gonna-- We'll, we'll give a tease around that, I guess. So tell us a little bit about how you got the AI search engine to pick you up. Do you know, or is it just good practices over the years? Like how, what, what is the trick to do that?

Jason: ~Um, I, you know, ~I'm kind of battling with that right now.

Ankit: Hmm.

Jason: I'm trying to locate myself on search engines with AI and seeing where the holes are, what the, what Google basically thinks I am, and how it's presenting my office to patients. And something I found recently is that my office is being presented as an optometric office.

Ankit: Yep.

Jason: When people are looking for a high-end optical, high-end eyewear, I don't actually come up with AI. [00:21:00] So I'll spend a lot of my lunchtimes having conversations with AI, pretending that I'm a patient, saying that I went here, I bought this brand, I had the best experience ever. It's my favorite optical, with the idea that that is going to, over time, increase our, you know, rate of popping up within AI search engines.

Ankit: ~Yeah. ~Yeah, I think what you're talking about, like information architecture, and

Jason: Exactly.

Ankit: AI-- So, um, we had an epiphany recently. I'm just gonna go a little sidetrack. We did a-- We just took over our website again, uh, and I went through the information architecture piece and realized the same thing.

I was like, "Oh, we're not that. We're not, we're not ophthalm-ophthalmology." I was like, "Why are we even ranking for that?"

Jason: Yep.

Ankit: uh, and so like, okay, so why was that the case? Well, the people that designed the website, shotgun approach, like, "Hey, this seems okay. It's ranking in your area. Let's just go and put that on the website and rank you for it," right?

No rhyme or reason. Uh, and, and so that, that, that approach wasn't there. So when we got in and learned information architecture, it, now, [00:22:00] now it's changed quite a bit over the last two months. We-we've been skyrocketing in what we wanna... dry eyes, what we're specializing in. So that's gone through the roof for us, which has been great.

Jason: And

Ankit: but it w-

Jason: ways I've found to

Ankit: Yeah

Jason: actually to, you know, use AI and say, "Hey, I'm looking to rank better. I'm looking to improve and attract this type of patient. you make me a plan, an SEO plan, an advertising plan to target this specific type of patient?" And it works wonderfully. Google Gemini will tell you what Google wants to make you rank better. It's simple as that.

Ankit: Yeah, it's pretty good. Uh, and one quick pro tip, what we found from the research, and this is just something in your blog post, ev- all the H2s, 70% of them should be questions that they would ask in a search engine.

And that, that helped a lot just in our rankings.

Jason: Yeah, and the new FAQ dropdowns are the hottest thing it seems in AI searching.

Ankit: Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's like, okay, well now, now the search patterns are [00:23:00] different. LLMs look for different things than humans do, so now you gotta cater to them and

Um, so, so let's talk about a little bit how you're dealing with staffing and... Well, reimbursements don't sound like as much of an issue for you because you're more retail-focused. Uh, but do you find reimbursements an issue?

Jason: I don't find reimbursement to be an issue. A lot of optometrists complain about the $40 exam fee. The real thing is that $40 exam No. Yeah. I like that. And what about staffing? We talked about

At that point, it's up to you, your business, your

Ankit: [00:24:00] that But how are you doing with staff challenges if you're, if you're experiencing them still?

Jason: man. I, I run ch- small teams. We run two to three staff members per office, 'cause they're not all busy doing medical testing. really have had trouble finding opticians. And when I say optician, I'm not so much talking about somebody with this great detail into understanding optics and frame design and all these [00:25:00] things, because honestly, that doesn't really exist anymore. average optician these days is trained in a corporate setting to do nothing more than put an order in through a system and sell it

But they also get scared when all of a sudden the frame price goes from the $50 frame they're selling to a $2,000 frame, and they don't know how to sell that either.

I've actually moved away from hiring experienced staff members.

Ankit: Hmm.

Jason: We train everything. best seller was a manager at a little retail spot called Salad and Go.

I

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: don't know if you have those by us, but it's a

Ankit: We got that.

Jason: lot that sells salad

Ankit: Nice.

Jason: into a multimillion-dollar company,

he was great at multitasking, great personality. The last person I hired was a Starbucks manager. [00:26:00] Prior to that, there's one that's a retail trainer at Express. She would take the new hires and teach them how to interact with people and how to sell. And all of them have been fantastic.

But there's been, you know, eight duds in between.

Ankit: You know, even the best companies in the world, I was hearing that they get, they get it right only about 60% of the time. Like, uh, and so hiring is hard. So I, I like this. So it sounds like you're hiring for attitude,

skill set. hire for attitude, and don't be afraid to fire quickly. You know, keep a probationary period. Be Prepared that if they don't start hitting those metrics, and make sure you write out the metrics that are expected. know, if you expect them to have a 60% capture rate, make sure that's written down in a contract that they have to hit, and if they don't hit that rate, b- they're out the door.

Yeah. It's, you know, it's interesting because I, I think, and, and maybe you can speak to this, how you've dealt with this. I see so often, and I felt it too, man, they're not doing their job, but I really don't want to bring [00:27:00] in someone new. I'm so busy. I'm going to be working more. I got to man- like, do I really want to do that?

I'll just deal with it and let things slide.

Jason: Oh, man. I run a small staff,

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: with two people in the office, if one person's not doing their job, the other person is killing themself. it becomes real easy and real self-explanatory that the person who's doing all the work needs to tell me, "Hey, so and so is not doing their job."

You know, if they don't take that initiative, I won't know. But once they take that initiative, I give them the exact option. I say, "Hey, let's start an improvement plan. Let's get them going. But if they don't make that improvement plan, would you be okay with me firing them? will have to work a little bit harder for a time period, but the goal will be to bring in somebody who is a much better fit and helper to you to work synergistically to end all these problems."

Ankit: I like that. Um, that's interesting. So, and so you don't have a, a manager over both locations, correct? just you?

Jason: one manager [00:28:00] that I have at one location, and she's one of the two staff members, and then an assistant manager, somebody who really knows what they're doing at the second location, the highest paid, more bonuses, more money going their way to handle more tasks and more of the issues.

Ankit: Gotcha. That's interesting. Um, and so let, let's, let's talk about the future. What are you excited about for your own practices and for the future of optometry? I'll let you decide whichever way you wanna answer that.

Jason: You know, there's a lot going on with optometry that I just-- I find it a little odd,

Ankit: Hmm. I'm not worried about the future. I'm ex- I'm excited ~about the future.~ I think all the things that are going are going to make private practice absolutely amazing and probably better than it's ever been in the past. We've got these companies coming out with technology. They're telling us to test

Jason: medical, but they're asking you to buy a $100,000 piece of equipment. You [00:29:00] know, how many $100,000 pieces of equipment can you have in your office? And, you know, like the IPL idea, great idea. The tech, you know, kinda works. I'm not 100% sold that it is like the end-all be-all of dry eye treatment, given that the treatment cost is, you know, two to $5,000 per treatment. But they came around and told everybody, "Hey, put this in your office. It's a goldmine." Well, it's not. If you can't sell IPL, if you can't explain why it's great, if you can't get people to actually sign up for it, it's a $100,000 paperweight.

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: So we're seeing that on the product side. We are seeing private equity buy up the medical side. They're looking for those

right up the middle optometry offices hitting a, you know, a specific net and a specific gross. And that's great, but how does private equity actually work? They're short-term holdings. [00:30:00] They work by decreasing cost of goods, cost of staffing, by, you know, flattening everything out to be this little tiny line, increase profits, and then sell. thing we've seen in healthcare is we're not this super overstaffed luxury business. You know? We have a certain level you need to operate at just to be functional and in the, you know, positive legal realm. So with these offices, at what point are we gonna start firing staff members? We're gonna see decreases in quality, decreases in compensation, decreases in how we treat doctors, how we treat staff members, and there's gonna be this massive outflow of patients from private equity offices because there's no reason for them to go there

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: why not just go to LensCrafters instead? There's really no difference. And LensCrafters might

even take a little bit better [00:31:00] care of you than a private equity office in the long run. You know, when you focus on profits, you're not focusing on patient care. And I don't focus on profits. Do we make a lot of profit? Do we make a lot of money? Yes. Is that my goal?

Is that my focus? Absolutely not. you take care of people, when you provide the best products on the market, the most innovative technology out there, you have service from beginning to end, and you hit all of those points from before they walk in the door to, you know, a follow-up text two weeks after they pick up their eyewear to see, "Hey, how are you doing?

Is there anything we can do better? Is there anything wrong? How can we help?" ~You know,~ it's a service level that just can't be offered by cutting costs and cutting staffing.

Ankit: I, I'm curious, I'm gonna change it around a little bit here, Jason. So I'm more curious about how you got this way and how you think this way. So can you share with me a [00:32:00] story that, that was formative for you, that made you who you are?

Jason: Man, I, I wish I had this really great formative story, but the reality was I, I did my IHS residency,

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: up an office. I want my office to be cool, so I'm gonna build a cool office." I go to open up that office, I apply to every medical

plan out there, and what happens?

Panel's closed. Panel's closed. Panel's closed. So I'm sitting there like, "Oh, crap. What am I supposed to do? I can't get onto these medical plans. You know, I have to pivot." I don't know what their reasoning was, but I ha- I started with the idea that I don't wanna support Luxottica. don't wanna sell name brands. know, luxury has been democratized over the last 25 years. [00:33:00] We went from Louis Vuitton being, you know, a small shop hand-stitching bags together to them selling millions of bags a year, but they only do about 300 bespoke bags a year, which is pretty wild for a company that size.

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: luxury has turned into marketing.

How does Balenciaga sell a $300 T-shirt? Marketing. You know, I, I think luxury these days is a scam, and I hate the word luxury because every single place has adopted it.

why open an office selling what everyone else sells? So we brought in independent eyewear. I had my naysayers from day one.

"Well, you can't sell a frame that expensive downtown." And they were right. That's fair. You know, it took some time to build up the clientele and the right people understanding, oh, this is where I'm coming for higher-end independent eyewear. And I didn't start high. My highest priced frame was probably $400, and I felt really great about [00:34:00] that. But then I would find a line that I absolutely loved. I think the first one was Barton Pereira. You know, that brought my price point up to, at the top, around $700. And I was like, "Man, I really, really hope that if I bring this in, I'm able to get patients to spend a little bit more money on this higher-end frame line." And I would do

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: next thing I know, people are buying the most expensive frame from that line constantly.

Ankit: Interesting. Yeah.

Jason: you bring in Dita and

another more expensive line, and it's kinda been like that, just looking at lines where you can price appropriately.

They're higher end, so I, I don't care what my retail, my wholesale reimbursement is from VSP If

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: wholesale's $500, that patient's paying me a good amount regardless.

And I find profitability to be either on the bottom of the market,

buying the brand name stuff at a discount, or the top of the market, focusing on independent higher-end [00:35:00] items that not everybody has and that will not

sell to every office. Exclusivity matters.

Ankit: ~Like that. Yeah, that's, that's,~ that's important because you're right, especially in a competitive market, the city, Uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of... You know, you want... Actually, ironically, distribution is one of those leverages, right? So, uh,

Jason: And we, I mean, we go toe-to-toe with other offices and opticals in

the area for brands.

Ankit: yeah.

Jason: fighting,

there's backstabbing, there is everything you can imagine. But you know, I'm happy to wrestle a brand from

another store.

Ankit: that's funny. Yeah.

Jason: willing to do it, you're not satisfying your distributor and whatever business they expect from you.

Ankit: it goes back to some of your, uh, concepts of being different, like supply chain is one of those, right? You're not

Luxottica and Essilor, so that's a differentiator. You can get that any- everywhere, get, you get unique stuff.

Jason: independent companies out there

than anybody realizes,

Ankit: Yeah.

Jason: uh, you know, you go back 20 years when we were using hard designs for progressives and, yeah, you know what? The white label stuff really wasn't [00:36:00] great.

Track 3: But we're at a point now where the average customer can buy a white labeled lens from IOT or Horizon. Uh, VSP uses Horizon lenses. But the premium progressive from them,

just as good as anything that anyone else has on the market.

Ankit: Nice.

Track 3: And maybe even at this point right now, independents actually has the leg up. With Horizon offering their virtual reality based progressive- Mm-hmm ... where rather than aggregating data from 10,000 people using an auto refractor or whatever wild way they decided they'd collected data from all these people, we're putting a

virtual reality headset on your face.

We're designing that progressive specifically for you, And no one else is doing

Ankit: That's cool. Yeah.

Track 3: And with that, we brought our progressive price up $200.

Ankit: Well, it's

yeah, it's, it's a unique price. I mean, it's a unique product, right? You can't get [00:37:00] anywhere, So, yeah.

Track 3: Exactly.

Ankit: It's

Track 3: the-

Ankit: Ferrari versus a Kia, right?

So yeah, it's a great analogy. I, s- so what, what

advice would you give to your younger self knowing what you know now, right out of, let's say right out of, uh, optometry school?

Track 3: You need to lean on your colleagues and talk to other people and understand what's going on. It's really easy when you open a business to wind up in this little tiny echo chamber bubble where the only person you have to talk with is, you know, your friend or your staff members.

Staff members are usually a positive echo chamber. They're not really gonna help you grow

when you don't have a

direction for them to grow in.

So I would, I mean, that's why I started Private Practice Club. Mm. At the end of the day, I had questions for other private practice owners, problems that I needed to solve that I didn't have the answer to, and I wanted to talk to people in the same position as me to grow our practices, solve these [00:38:00] issues.

'Cause if I'm having them, everyone's probably having them.

Ankit: Yeah, that's

true. ~Uh, and I'll, and I, and I... You know, ~I like your group, by the way. I've been a member. I didn't know you were actually s- until we started talking, I was like, "Oh, I didn't know that was your group." So

Track 3: So

Ankit: a cool group. It's a cool group.

Track 3: Thank you.

Ankit: Definitely appreciate it.

Track 3: it.

Ankit: I highly recommend folks join, join...

No unsol- this is unsolicited too. I highly recommend people, if they're interested, absolutely going to the Facebook page, checking it out. Uh, you might even find this interview on there. Who knows? So listen to it there as well. Uh, so if people wanna get in touch with you, Jason, where can they find you?

Track 3: You can find me on Instagram at urbaneyecarephx, Phoenix. Uh, same thing on Facebook. You can find me running Private Practice Club. I'm over there as Jay Klepfisch. you?

can reach me via email through my website, urbaneyecarephx.com. But any way you wanna reach out, I'm always happy to talk about business.

Ankit: Perfect. And we'll put that contact information in the show notes. So, uh, Dr. Klepfisch, thank you again for being

Track 3: being on the

show.

Thank you so much. I appreciate [00:39:00] you having me. I loved having the conversation.

Ankit: And thank you, audience. If you learned something, laughed, please share the podcast with a friend, and make sure to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you look at the show notes, there's a link for booking a meeting. If you book a meeting, I'll get you a free copy of my book, Optometry Redefined.

Uh, thank you again, Jason, for being on the show. This has been another exciting episode of Optometrists Building Empires, and we'll see you next time.

That's a wrap on another episode of Optometrists Building Empires. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, visit buildingempires.live. This show is proudly sponsored by My Business Care Team. My Business Care Team was born out of staffing challenges my wife and I faced together managing multiple optometry locations.

We refined our approach at Classic Vision Care and now offer our expertise to others. If you're experiencing challenges with staffing and you'd like to set up a discovery call, we'd be happy to help you and connect you with the right resources. We'll see you next time.