When it comes to your dispensary, do you know what you don’t know? Are you an expert at both delivering the highest-level patient experience within the optical while seamlessly navigating the vast sea of sight, style, board space, and Cost of Goods (COGs) management?
The reality is there are a number of critical things we don’t know about our businesses. While we can never know it all, it is important that we constantly strive to improve our knowledge and skills.
Let’s say you are the Optical Manager and/or optician, and your employer (often the doctor) is looking to you to enhance optical performance for the practice. First, what does your day look like? Are you in the throes of the perpetual patient care/work balance tornado, trying to figure out how you are going to provide five-star patient care; stay on top of new staff training; manage your numerous optical vendors; and grow optical sales despite unexpected challenges, such as those presented by COVID-19? To top it all off, you are tasked with maintaining COGs at 24% or less! How do you manage it all?
The HEA PracticeAdvantage team, a partnership between Healthy Eyes Advantage and Williams Group, understands your challenges and appreciates your successes. Our personal experience and more than 30 years of working with independent eye care professionals can help you thrive.
Here are three tips to help you level up your dispensary:
- Ensure you have a solid inventory tracking system in place, with reporting that is accurate and up to date. This helps guarantee your dispensary is not over- or under-stocked. We highly recommend powerful inventory management software that utilizes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Smart technology will streamline your production and empower you to have confidence in your COGs management.
- Maintain monthly invoice and statement reconciliation. Thousands of dollars are lost annually simply by overlooking this important step. Set a monthly date and time to consistently reconcile your monthly vendor statements, credits and refunds. You might just be surprised. HEA’s consolidated billing makes this process simple.
- You cannot manage what you do not measure. There’s a great deal of information to keep track of in a successful optical and a number of critical decisions that must be made to keep your optical growing. Leveraging an analytics tool like HEA’s SmartData Solutions (SDS) dashboard facilitates this process. SDS pulls your optical sales information automatically from your PM system, helping you understand key information like capture rate, AR percentage, and your top selling frame lines. You may feel as though you don’t have enough time to leverage a data tool but doing so will allow you to make critical decisions more efficiently and effectively, saving you time and money in the long run.
Leveling up your optical is our passion because your success is our success. Our HEA PracticeAdvantage Program, with its live coaching, strategic planning, and online, on-demand training Optometric Success Center Learning, will help take not only your optical but also your entire team to the next level and will give everyone in the practice the confidence necessary to succeed in creating an exceptional patient experience.
Want more tips like these to help you level up your dispensary? Get access to Vision Web's OD Boot Camp! 5 steps to expand your scope and profit. This boot camp includes the resources you need to move your practice forward!
Ready to level up your dispensary? Contact Williams Group today.
Learn more about PracticeAdvantage with Healthy Eyes Advantage.
Join Vision Web's OD Boot Camp to begin expanding your scope and profit!
Healthy Eyes Advantage is the next-generation marketplace for independent ECPs, delivering the most competitive vendor pricing and unique benefits to more than 10,000 independent eye care professionals nationwide. Williams Group Consulting is the eye care industry’s premier consulting firm, delivering innovative, relationship-based consulting, practice transition consulting, and accounting/payroll processing, to thousands of clients across the U.S. and Canada.
