Insights From Our Editors

What Your Practice Gross Revenue Tells You About What You Need to Do

By Mark Wright, OD, FCOVD,
and Carole Burns, OD, FCOVD

Feb. 9, 2022

Jobson Optical Business Tracker provides national and regional optical business metrics for the U.S. on a weekly basis. Let’s look at one of the primary benchmarks Jobson tracks: gross revenue. If you want to know more you can access the entire report HERE.

(Jobson selected 1,500 optical locations that have been operating and reporting their sales to our partners, GPN and ABB Analyze, since 2019. The numbers were re-based the index to an average week in 2019. This new index base is used as an arbitrary benchmark and assigned a value of 100.)

The most important point of this exercise is to compare the graph below to your own practice numbers and then create an action plan. Your numbers should be available from your own practice management software or from whomever prepares your practice taxes. (Rather than indexing your numbers to 2019, instead just use your real numbers to see your own trends.)

Let’s look at the Jobson gross revenue trends reported for the years covered: 2019-2022. Here is the Jobson graph:


Note that the high point for gross revenue for the years 2019-2022 was hit in the beginning of 2021. The trend for gross revenue at the beginning of each year starts out lower and then immediately bumps up.

One number to note is that the beginning of 2022 did not start out as low as it did in 2019, 2020 and 2021. It is also important to note that the bump up in 2022 was less than occurred in 2019-2021. A third general point to note is that when gross revenue is lower, you would expect frames, lenses and contact lens sales to be lower, as well as number of total exams. Gross revenue being lower is a result of other numbers in the practice being lower. That is true for all years covered by this report.

Action Plan
One way to handle this information is to view it historically with no change going forward. In other words, just keep doing what you are doing.

The other way to handle this information is to use it to help you plan for the future in order to have better results. For example, seeing that the bump up in 2022 did not move as high as we would have liked we can (1) investigate what happened to cause the number to not reach the heights that you were expecting in 2022, and (2) plan further actions to drive the number higher this year.

By taking this approach, you are not just looking at your numbers historically, shrugging your shoulders while you say “it is what it is,” but instead, you are using your past and current performance to manage your future performance. Because you have numbers from multiple years showing you weekly or monthly numbers, you can plan ahead this year and the next. This is a significantly better direction to take. This is key to taking control of your practice.

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