Running an award-winning, sustainable optometry practice in Somerset

Sarah Gibson

8.15am

I theoretically get up at about quarter past eight. I am not a typical business owner, who is up early and doing all sorts of things. My friends at university bought me a badge that said, ‘Not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it.’ I don’t always get out of bed as soon as I should. When I have, I will fly around, and grab breakfast in some sort of chaos.

I don’t really achieve an awful lot first thing. I consider getting up, having a shower, and getting out the door on time, having eaten breakfast and done a very short workout of stretches, to be a good morning.

10am

I live upstairs from the practice, so I don’t even have a commute. I do have to go out of my house and then into the practice, so the staff have joked that a fireman’s pole might be useful.

I start work at 10am, because I’m much nicer at 10 o’clock than I am at 9 o’clock. I fly through the door ready to go, have a five or 10 minute catch-up with the ladies on reception if there’s time, and then see my first patient. I’m not one of these people that needs to mess about with a cup of coffee.

11am

We do 45-minute testing, and I test all morning. We have optical coherence tomography and Optomap, and as optometrists, we do our own scans. We offer extended eye examinations, which the vast majority of our patients will upgrade to. They appreciate that our offering is a little bit different.

1pm

We have lunch 1pm until 2pm. We’re quite old-fashioned, and will close the practice, because you wouldn’t like us when we’re hangry.

We have an all-female team. We do occasionally have lunch together, but we’re often all running errands. A couple of the staff go home for lunch because they’ve got dogs to let out. Closing over lunch is pretty much sacrosanct, because it’s important that people get a break.

As a business owner, you have to be able to pivot quickly. You can try new stuff, but if it doesn’t work, you’ve got to recognise that

2pm

Usually, I go straight back into clinic at 2 o’clock. If I’ve got one of my admin afternoons, I will catch up with the reception team, interrupting their day and seeing whether there’s anything they need from me.

I have an ongoing to-do list. We’re currently making changes to our direct debit scheme, so could be drafting letters for that. I could spend the afternoon catching up on my referrals, or updating the contact lens price lists.

My admin afternoons will also involve a meeting with my superb dispensing optician (DO) and practice manager to discuss what we are currently doing to drive the practice forwards, or a meeting with our business coach. I am a ‘bigger picture’ person, whilst my DO is excellent at the detailed plans and minutiae needed to get us there. She is the driving force behind our sustainability drive, and I trust her implicitly to do what is right for the practice and the planet.

3pm

As an independent, you cannot try and compete with the multiples and with online sales. We are focusing on sustainability and the environment, which we have recently won two awards for, and a couple of years ago, for our twentieth anniversary, we completely rebranded. We are putting in place our target audience and being much more specific about who we are for.

As a business owner, you have to be able to pivot quickly. You can try new stuff, but if it doesn’t work, you’ve got to recognise that it doesn’t work, and then be able to change it.

5pm

My last appointment is at 5 o’clock, and it’s usually either an emergency appointment or a contact lens appointment.

I theoretically finish at half past five. It depends on who I’ve had in – if it’s one of my contact lens patients, who I’ve known for years, we’ll still be chatting at quarter to six.

Sarah Gibson

6pm

Because I’ve been talking all day, I like half an hour’s worth of not talking when we get home. My partner understands that. He puts a cup of tea in front of me, and tells me what’s for supper, and then leaves me to stew for half an hour – unless I need to vent about something, in which case he’ll pretend to listen. Occasionally, if you’ve had a stressful day, or something has happened, you need to let it out.

I am always looking for the next great photo. My partner and I have a bit of an unspoken competition going on: who can get the best shot of a particular scene or sunset. Sunrises obviously do not feature heavily in my repertoire, although I did get up at 5am to take a photo of sunrise over Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, as it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

7pm

I eat a very low-carb diet. We’ll often have roast chicken and roasted vegetables, or in good weather, some sort of meat and salad.

Because we like to cook, we don’t eat out much anymore. We like making our own burgers and our own kebabs, so if we fancy a takeaway, we’ll make it rather than buying it in.

8pm

My guilty secret is watching things like Sort Your Life Out, Garden Rescue, and Interior Design Masters. I will binge watch those when they’re on, and then I won’t turn the television on for weeks.

I also started painting recently, after being bought some watercolours for Christmas, which is nice.

9pm

My partner is a bass player in a band, and I do the sound tech. That’s a fairly recent thing, so it has been a bit of a steep learning curve. But sound behaves very much like light, so I understand the principles, but it’s a whole new language. We do quite a lot of pub gigs, where managing the sound is interesting, and something of a challenge.

11pm

I am a bookworm. I like science fiction and fantasy. Wincanton is twinned with a mythical city, Ankh-Morpork, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. It’s the only town in the UK that is twinned with a mythical town. The town is a bit polarised, actually: you’ve either got the mega fans, or the people who think it’s a bit weird.