Poor Lacey fields lots of enquiries from practice owners who want to find out more about Optical Success Academy and she hears a lot from the practice owner who ‘knows it all.’ He has been there, done it, got the T-shirt and can tell us a thing or two. Thankfully I don’t take any of these calls (or any unscheduled calls) so I don’t have to speak with these blithering idiots. If I did I might not be able to restrain myself from pointing out firstly that nobody on earth knows it all, and if you think you do sir, you are a moron. And secondly, if you are convinced you do in fact know it all, why the hell are you bothering us?

I wouldn’t tell them this nugget because it would fall on their big deaf ears, but I’ll tell you. When it comes down to it, ‘knowing it’ is irrelevant. Knowing what to do does not put any points on the scoreboard. Nor does knowledge put any pounds in your bank account. As one successful businessman recently put it “If knowledge was all it took we’d all be billionaires and have perfect abs.”

You can read all the books. You can hobnob with the movers and shakers in the industry. You can be privy to all the insider knowledge. You can have the biggest brain. But your results are always governed by what you DO, not what you know.

There is the old joke about how a consultant is someone who knows 365 different sexual positions but can’t get a date any night of the week. That’s the key. Can you implement? Are you putting things into action? For smart practice owners like you and I, that needs to be our constant focus. Implementation.

This is why I purposely designed the format of the Optical Success Academy program to have amazing live event but backed up by monthly input, inspiration and implementation. Take away the fact that I show up through your letter box, in your inbox, and on zoom calls every month and your chances of implementing go way down. It’s all by design to get busy practice owners like you to DO something each month and get better at taking action. Because that is what drives the results that you desire.

This is actually good news. Most practice owners and most business owners in general are not good at implementation (hence why 80% of businesses fail within 5 years). They implement poorly, with mediocre standards, and very s-l-o-w-l-y. If you on the other hand keep working at getting better and better at implementing then it becomes a true competitive advantage.

People can steal your design, they can copy the look of your shop and your business name. They can get the exact same stock as you. They can go everywhere you go. They can match your pricing strategy. But what they cannot copy is the quality of your implementation.  Sahar Hashemi who started and grew Coffee Republic from scratch as the first UK chain of coffee shops in the 90’s, talks about how at that time in their early years they were getting competitors popping up everywhere who blatantly copied their logo, their name, their look but how it was all irrelevant because they were not able to copy Coffee Republic’s quality of implementation. Their competitors might have looked the same but all it took was one cup of bad coffee, a taste of unfriendly, disorganised service and a stale muffin to prove to the customer that it was not the same quality.

Same thing with all the trendy-looking opticians and online stores that we’re up against. It might look like customers can get the same thing for a quarter of the price, but they really can’t. The level of personal service (versus anonymous service), the professional dispensing expertise and the feel of the whole experience just doesn’t compare. They are simply unable to implement these things as well as we can.

Knowledge isn’t enough, it comes down to what you do consistently. Keep striving to implement a bit better and a bit more than you currently do. That will put you and keep you ahead of the curve.