Sports fans rarely get to see their icons retire in their prime. Unfortunately, many athletes near the end of their careers as their dedicated fans are praying they will give it up. Holding on for too long can be as detrimental to legacies as never winning a championship.
In optometry, holding on too long might mean you will have to bury your practice. The best that you can hope for is getting a reasonable price for your patient charts.
When you are the owner of the practice, no one tells you it is time to take the severance package and retire. Relying on yourself alone to determine when it’s time to stop practicing might be a bit dicey.
Here’s a funny and not-so-funny Top 10 list to determine if it’s time to go.
You need to sell your practice and retire if . . .
- You think Silicone Hydrogel lenses are new.
- The refraction takes longer than seven minutes.
- Most of your patients are in conventional lenses.
- Your practice has a full page ad in the Yellow Pages.
- You believe a practice website is unnecessary.
- Your youngest patient is 72.
- You routinely fall asleep during exams.
- Patients have to yell for you to hear them.
- Your social security check is more than what you make practicing optometry.
- You consider one exam per hour busy.
No one wants to be told it’s time to retire. Facing the end of a career is difficult and possibly depressing, but there’s more at stake than an optometrist’s pride. Just as it pains sports fans to watch a game in which their favorite player struggles, it is increasingly painful to watch an optometrist whose patients are not receiving the standard of optometric medicine they deserve.
If you have a partner or associate who needs to retire, do the patients a favor and have a difficult conversation with him or her. If you are an optometrist and only you know that many of the reasons on the Top 10 list speak truth about you, have the courage and strength to think about your patients first and retire.
