Tom Bowen has been in the optical industry for nearly four decades. A founding principal of Williams Group, Practice Coach, Optometric Consulting Systems, and the Silvermark Agency, he is now the founder and CEO of Thrive Practice and Life Development, based in Roca, NE. Thrive aims to help eyecare practices succeed at teamwork and work-life balance while achieving (and celebrating) their business goals.

Here, Bowen shares the insider details on this unique consulting focus for optometrists.

EB: Please tell us about Thrive.

TOM BOWEN: Thrive is the product of about 40 years of what I’ll call “practice and life development.” I don’t want to mention one without the other. There are plenty of practice consultants and life coaches, but it was high time for practice owners to have a solution designed to incorporate both—advising practice owners and helping coach their teams.

EB: How is Thrive different?

TB: Its essence is the difference between information and implementation. The company’s backbone is the concept of taking potentially difference-making ideas, dialogues, and training and reducing it all into an exact set of actionables...and then putting the relationship in place to fully implment them.

There’s that old expression, “Information is power.” I’ve found that to be completely untrue. It’s more often the case that information is a waste of time. I would rather identify and implement 10 actionables to cause a desired result than hear about 100 and drown in the pile of information (good as that information might be).

EB: What are the biggest challenges to independent optometry today?

TB: First, it’s getting and keeping great team members, which is more challenging than ever before…especially in optical. Then it’s keeping that team in place and the practice thriving.

Second, the more uncertain the times (like now), the more important certainty becomes. That is simply planning the work and working the plan.

Other challenges include internet distribution, evolving competition, and work-life balance. The difference today is an exaggerated cumulative effect.

The solution? Meet the cumulative challenge of our day—that there’s more to do—by fully leveraging the patient care team as the practice care team and by putting initiatives in place in the practice and life to get more done when we work. That’s where Thrive can help most—that deliverable to get more done and accomplish more, rather than just working more, accepting less, or bailing out of ownership.

EB: What are your future goals?

TB: Short term, we will coach clients to leverage their teams, employ great strategy, make that strategy fully implementable, and get those initiatives in place.

Long term, the goal is to preserve the integrity of private practice, the greatest model of delivering the most life-impacting patient care. That’s a decision first, then a commitment, then as a set of deliverable initiatives in a given practice.

The key is that we make those solutions implementable, and we are in some exciting conversations with strategic partners in technology to help with that!