Episode 02 - Ocean Optometry | Dr. Euan McGinty: What it costs to hold the line

Euan McGinty has been building a different approach for more than 15 years.

He trained as an optometrist in Cardiff, built a successful practice in the north of Scotland, and then in 2010 decided to start again. He packed up his life, his wife, and his three children and moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Both Euan and his wife had to requalify in their professions from scratch in a new country. No shortcuts, no guarantees it would work.

Today, Euan runs with his partners, two practices with 35 staff, while the Canadian eye care market is in the middle of a consolidation wave that is making what Euan and partners are doing harder and more necessary at the same time.

Large corporate groups, including private equity funded ones, are buying up independent optometry practices, standardising them, and using their scale to offer graduating students signing bonuses of $50,000 to $100,000. Students who have spent seven or eight years studying, often accumulating significant debt loads, and who are being told: sign here and your first five years are taken care of.

Independent practices can’t match that. What they can do is build something those groups cannot replicate.

Ocean Optometry, Euan and partner’s premium practice is based in downtown Halifax, sources eyewear from independent European designers you will not find anywhere else in the city. Appointments are up to 90 minutes. Before a patient arrives, the team has already spoken to them, understood what they need, and prepared for the visit. After the exam, there is a written summary of recommendations. The optometrist’s time is spent on the patient, not the equipment.

Euan calls the approach to eyewear selection a pillow menu, borrowed from the kind of hotel that asks what kind of pillow you would prefer (even if you have no idea what types there are on offer!). Not overwhelming you with a wall of a thousand frames. Instead, walking you through a guided selection, teaching you to feel the difference in how a well-made hinge closes versus one that has not been hand-finished. Glasses are something you wear on your face every day. They should feel like a choice, not a default transaction. And the longer a frame lasts, the less fast fashion it is, good for the planet meantime.

“For many people, buying glasses has always been a stressful, begrudge purchase,” Euan says. “It shouldn’t be like that!”

The episode goes deeper on the commercial reality behind all of this. What it means to source from suppliers who are also your direct competition. How Euan thinks about price versus affordability, and why he believes the mobile phone industry solved a problem eyewear still hasn’t. What happens when you try to scale without becoming the thing you set out not to be.

There is also a question Jason asks every guest: would you change anything?

Euan’s answer is worth hearing.

The full episode is live now. Go listen.

About Ocean Optometry and Miller Optometry

Know a founder, leader or team whose story deserves more attention? Tell us about them at beavertales.co. A message is enough — we will take it from there.

Not yet subscribed? Every episode and Field Note goes to subscribers first.