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Gain a Competitive "Edge"
By Oliver Lou, O.D., Cedar Park, TexasMy belief is that the sooner you can have an edger in your practice, the better. The reasons:► It meets patients’ desire for convenience. Investing in an edger for your practice can help you capitalize on the instant gratification your patients expect to receive. Though some patients may say they don’t mind waiting a week or two for their glasses, I’ve often seen them smile with surprise when we tell them their glasses will be ready in an hour or less, thanks to our in-office edger.►It helps you compete with optical retailers. In this day and age when there are more competitors than ever, whether online or retail, it is nice to offer the convenience and time advantage of being able to make glasses in an hour or less.Also, my patients don’t have to spend time in their cars driving to multiple retailers who can’t offer them the combination of speed and service that we can.In addition, they don’t have to wait for glasses to be shipped, particularly if they were to purchase them online. (I find many of my patients much more open to what we offer when I tell them we can finish their glasses in less than an hour.)Having an optician with a mechanical inclination is a necessity before purchasing an edger.► It saves and makes you money. If your practice can edge four pairs of glasses a day, I estimate that you will save $120 a day (or $600 a week on an average five-day week) from external optical lab costs, including edging, polishing, tinting, mounting and shipping.Also, if you are selling and edging that many glasses, your practice should at least sell one more pair of glasses a week, because you offer a fast turnaround time (assuming a modest $200 profit for that extra pair sold). The extra $800 a week in savings and profit equates to roughly $3,400 a month.These estimates are on the conservative side, as my practice edges an average of 15 pairs of lenses a day. I’ve calculated that we save approximately $30 per pair of glasses that we edge ($450 a day, or about $9,000 a month). And, shipping frames to a lab and having them ship it back costs a lot more than paying for a shipment of stock lenses every two to three days.In fact, I owned an edger on the first day of my practice and found it was so valuable that, in the eighth year of my practice, I purchased a second edger. I believe so strongly in this, that four years ago we stopped accepting any vision plan that wouldn’t allow us to at least make single vision lenses same day with our own optical lab.While I believe you will see these benefits, you must have the following in place before purchasing an edger.1 A skilled opticianHaving an optician with a mechanical inclination is a necessity before having an edger. An optician’s salary may cost $2,500 a