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A day in the life of a business owner

“I truly believe that having a practice is not about making money”

The optometrist and owner of Durham’s eponymous Simon Berry Optometrists talks OT  through a working day that starts with school taxi drop-offs and ends with a relaxing turn on the piano

3 min read 1
Simon is looking to the left of the camera and is wearing a white shirt decorated with multicoloured butterflies
Simon Berry
Lucy Miller

Lucy Miller

11 August 2024

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Simon Berry, optometrist and owner of Simon Berry Optometrists, talks OT through his day – from mornings with his son to evenings with sci-fi novels, TV thrillers and piano music.

6.30am

Simon Berry

Name:Simon Berry

Occupation:Optometrist and practice owner at Simon Berry Optometrists

Location:Durham

Business owner since:2002.

I try to wake up as late as possible, but it’s generally about half past six. The first thing I do is get a cup of coffee.

My son has a learning disability, so he has a very particular morning routine. He goes to a special needs school, so he gets a taxi there. I sort out his packed lunch, then we’ll be waiting for the taxi, hoping it comes on time so I can get to work okay.

8.30am

If the taxi is on time, I arrive at the practice at about half past eight. My first task of the day is turning on all the machines. We’ve got bubble walls in the testing room, so it’s turning the bubble walls on, and having a look at the clinic to see who is coming in. We specialise in people with learning disabilities, and there are often also a couple of Minor Eye Conditions Service (MECS) patients.

8.45am

We have a huddle with all staff at quarter to nine, to discuss what is coming up in that day. The idea is to talk through the pressure points, and see what we need to be aware of.

11am

We have a very busy practice, with a lot of technology – Optomap, OCT. My main tasks vary, depending on which patient is coming in.

We always keep one emergency slot free in every clinic. If a MECS patient phones, even if they are not our patient, we’re responsible for that person, so we need to get them in somewhere else. If it is our patient, we will try and squeeze them in at the end of the clinic or at lunchtime. Some MECS appointments don’t take as long as others, so sometimes it’s a quick telephone assessment just to see what’s needed.

12.30pm

I never used to have a lunchtime, but I find that now if I miss lunch, my head is not right by the end of the day.

My official lunchtime is half past 12 until half past one, and I’ll try to nip out of the practice for at least for 10 minutes, just to walk around and get a bit of fresh air. I live three miles away, so I might go home and let the dog out.

1.30pm

We have a good staff communication system, where the practice management software has a to-do list and records all messages. That’s always live, when I'm looking at it between patients and seeing what else I need to do. The end of lunchtime is a bit of a catch up with that.

Inventing a visual fixation system for the practice’s youngest patients

You never celebrate the good things, do you? But our visual fixation system is quite a big thing. It's taken seven years to get to market. When it was relaunched, at 100% Optical two years ago, I said to myself, ‘if we sell five, I’m going to buy myself a new piano.’ My piano was 15 years old. And we did: we passed the five, so I bought an amazing new piano. It sounds awesome.

All of the things that we’ve come up with have been trying to help specific patients. We have a reputation for doing the complex things – the specialist things that nobody else can do. When you get those patients who really need help, and nobody else has been able to help them, you just try and think of ways to help. All the little inventions and all the little ideas and projects have come from that – they come from seeing patients. I think about it in the evening, when I’m out running.

 

5.30pm

On a good day, I leave the practice at half past five. On a bad day it’s 6.30pm or 7pm. It’s always busy. We have a recruitment problem in the north east. We have a long waiting list, and lots of things going on.

I like playing the piano, so I use that as stress relief. I used to be in a band, which is on Spotify now. The record we had out was 20-odd years ago. I’m 50 this year, and I’m trying to record a little piano thing to mark being 50.

7.30pm

I've always got a couple of books on the go. We quite like watching half hour comedies in the evening, too. My wife likes thrillers – Luther, and that kind of thing.

We don’t really have a go-to mid-week dinner – as long as it’s something that’s relatively quick and easy to make, and to put away afterwards.

If I had an unlimited practice budget, I would...

We see lots of people with learning disabilities, and I think we’re doing a lot of good with that. But every single one of those patients loses money, as a business. We do a lot of research, and we do a lot of unique things, but every time we do that, we lose money.

With an unlimited budget, we could do as much research as we wanted, and see more people with learning disabilities, because we wouldn’t have to worry about the money.

If I was to invent a piece of technology to help solve one issue in practice, it would be...

Something that would mean I didn’t have to manually write records. I could just see the patient, and the records would automatically be generated.

Electronic records are very good and very detailed. But actually, they disconnect us from the patient, because we’re clicking away. And our job is to deal with the patient and deal with their problems, and to try and work for the patient, because that’s the person who is in front of us. So, something that would be able to connect us back to the patient.

The very first change I would make to the optometry profession would be...

You would get your glasses where you have your eye test. At the moment, it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no incentive for somebody to be a good optometrist, because our industry is based on the sale of a pair of glasses.

If I could be visited in practice by one influential person, it would be...

With the university being close to us, we have a lot of professors as patients. I love it when professors come in, because a lot of them are very interested and you can talk about things.

One of my patients is called Carlos Frenk. He’s a cosmologist at Durham, and the astronomer who used to be in D:Ream, Brian Cox, was his PhD student. I love it when he comes in, and I always book an hour, because I know we’re going to have a chat. He’s incredibly knowledgeable, and he’s really interested in things. So, I’ll say him – Carlos Frenk.

If I could close the practice for a week without having any impact at all I would spend the week...

In the Lake District.

My wildest ambition for my practice is...

I truly believe that having a practice is not about making money. I don’t want to just make money and retire. I want it to be there to have done some good, and to have built something, and to be part of the community. That’s the wildest ambition – that it’s done some good, and it still exists.

Comments (1)

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  • Anonymous12 August 2024

    If you do the right thing by the patients the business and revenue will flow.
    High sales pressure sometimes implemented by non optical qualified retail staff may bring in temporary short term gains but poor future results.

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