Dr. Wes McCann is one of the most prolific businessmen and speakers in optometry. He is the owner of 8 (soon to be 9) optometry practices, he is a renowned speaker for many industry partners, and he is constantly at the forefront of providing the most advanced specialty care to his patients.
In this episode, Dr. McCann shares his THREE PILLARS to finding success and fulfillment in all facets of your professional career. Whether you’re a new grad looking for the right job or a veteran OD looking to make the next move for your practice, these three pillars will help guide you in your decision making.
Connect with Dr. McCann:
Dr. Wes McCann – Instagram
Big thanks to our partner for this episode, Thea Pharma Canada. Their continued support of the podcast and optometry in Canada has been incredible!
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Good for Your Patients, Good for Your Practice, Good for the Profession – Dr. Wes McCann
I have an incredible guest. Somebody I’ve been trying to get on the show for a little while here. One of our most esteemed colleagues, Dr. Wes McCann. I’m so happy to have you here. Dr. McCann is one of the most well-known optometrists in Canada. He’s the owner of eight, soon to be nine, optometry clinics in the London, Ontario area.
We’ll rewind the clock a little bit. Dr. McCann graduated with three honors. Bachelor’s degree from Western University. He did his optometry degree at Nova. He has done an accelerated MBA program and in his career outside of the clinic, he’s a prolific speaker. He speaks for multiple companies within the industry, as well as coming up with his own lectures to educate our colleagues. He specializes in all sorts of specialty eye care from myopia to dry eye to AMD to specialty contact lenses. He is also a board member of Eye Recommend. I’m using that as a segue to say a big thank you to Eye Recommend for having us here.
We are in beautiful Kelowna at the Eye Recommend NTE West National Training Event here to meet Dr. Wes McCann and a couple of other colleagues to record some content. Thank you Eye Recommend for accommodating us. I appreciate it. Before we start, a big thank you to our good friends at Thea Pharma Canada for partnering with us on this episode. Thea is always supportive of me, of the show, and of optometry in general with everything they do, their programs, and their products. Huge shout out to Thea for partnering on this show. Dr. McCann, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
That’s a long intro, but it was well deserved and it was much shorter than it could have been. There’s a lot more accolades. There are a lot more amazing things. The one thing I want to ask you is how you do all of these things.
I joke that I have a twin.
I would believe that. I would believe triplets even.
It’s good. It’s all about the people you have. If you have good people in the right places, they help you to do everything that you do. I have a big shout-out to all the people who help me do what I do and help our organization do what it does as well. That makes a big difference. People always ask if I sleep at all.
I would ask the same question.
I have all these metrics. I’m a metrics guy and I have the Oura Ring, I’ve got my Apple watch, and things that track sleep. I do average about 7 to 8 hours a night of good sleep.
That’s good. I envy that. My sleep is not very good. I asked you about the Oura Ring. I want to get that soon. I’m not getting it now because I know my sleep would be terrible. Thanks to our one-year-old. I love her. I’m obsessed with her, but thanks to my one-year-old, my wife and I don’t sleep as well as we’d like to. Once she’s got a better sleep pattern then I want to get into the Oura Ring. There’s something else you showed me when I saw you in Vancouver that blew my mind, which also explains how you’re able to do as much as you do, and that is your calendar. Tell me about how you schedule your calendar and your entire life on your calendar, and how maybe the rest of us need to be a little better.
I still see patients four days a week. Usually 7:00 AM until noon, Monday to Thursday. I spend the afternoons doing admin meetings, and content development for lectures and such, and then Fridays are my admin days. Having that time set aside to get good quality work done is a lot easier than in between patients and such, so good quality work time makes a big difference. Having things like Calendly where I can send out a link to people and they can book meetings with me is much easier than the 50 back-and-forth emails trying to find a time that works. I’m sure you can appreciate that. Those have been huge and I would not survive with my Google calendar and all the different calendars within.
I wonder if you would show us the calendar if it’s nothing too personal, just to see a tip. I would give a shout-out to Dr. Richard Maharaj because he’s like, “You have to look at Wes’s calendar.” When I looked at Wes’s calendar, I was like, “I am not scheduling my life well enough.” Whatever shows up. You see how many different blocks and how many different colors.
It’s color-coded based on what it is, whether it’s kids. My kids are 6 and 7 now. We sleep full nights than we did before. I color-coded it and see what’s going on.
That’s incredible. That’s a little bit about personal. The fact that you’re a family man and you have kids adds to the incredible. The fact that you get to do all the things or you manage to do all the things that you do is great.
I do my best that once 5:30 hits, work is done, get home, and spend time with family, get to all their events, sports, and music stuff. It’s good. After that, you work for what you can provide, then you can do the other stuff with the family.
I 100% agree. Unfortunately, I feel like I’m in a place of a little bit of flux where I’m not able to be there for as many things as I’d like to be. I miss soccer practices and stuff like that because I have to be in clinic some days, but I’m working towards prioritizing being present for all the family stuff. That’s a high priority for me. Let’s talk about the clinic a little bit. You are the best person I can imagine to talk to about practice management having brought all these specialties into your clinic. You’ve grown your business to eight locations and all the other stuff you do. One of the questions that we want to ask is, you and I were talking about we want to share the idea of differentiating yourself because I think there’s a lot of concern out there.
The Three Pillars Of Practice Success
I was having a conversation with a young optometry student and she was like, “Are you worried about the changes in the industry, the profession, and the different players in the industry about disruptors?” I said, “Not really. I’m very conscious of it. I’m very aware of it, but not scared of it.” I think the reason is that I’m actively trying to differentiate myself from those players. I’d love for you to elaborate on the importance of differentiating and then how we go about doing that.
I would agree. I don’t think I am afraid of the disruptors that are out there. I’m aware of them and it’s important that all our colleagues and new graduates are aware of the pros and cons of all the different modalities of practice. Independent optometry is certainly the best way to practice. It offers the most freedom, the most ability to make your own choices for patients, and for your own career. I think that’s the best way to practice. I’m an advocate for it because I recommend it as well. That’s important.
Independent optometry is certainly the best way to practice. It offers the most freedom, the most ability to make your own choices for patients and for your own career.
For differentiating, there are disruptors. There is always going to be a market for some of the budget-conscious patients, but that’s not the large majority of our patients that exist. I think making sure you differentiate yourself on patient experience has to be number one. Make sure you differentiate yourself on technology. Having good technology in place you can show a patient an incredible experience from how well we can take care of them and how we can ensure that we’re the best eye care option for them out there, and then ensure you have the best staff in place. The staff creates a better and more wonderful experience for that patient as well.
Anytime I look at any decisions I make in business, I go through three pillars, 1) What’s best for the patient, 2) What’s best for my practice, and 3) What’s best for the industry. When you think about that and you make all your decisions based on that, it’s very easy to make sure that you create a great experience for the patients and drive them back into your practice.
There’s a lot to unpack there but that’s great insight. The patient experience has to be important. What’s good for your business and your practice is important, but the fact that you also have what’s good for the industry. Something that I spent a lot of time talking about is what’s good for the whole, what’s going to help grow, and what’s going to help to continue to grow optometry and the profession in the long term to help it thrive. I think that’s amazing that somebody at your level has that in mind. I hope that the rest of us and our colleagues will also make those decisions based on that.
When you go into practice as well, having that insight and that frame of thought is going to go a long way. I know a lot of new graduates are saying, “I want to pay my student debt off.” I graduated from a US school and I had a lot of debt coming out of school, but you pay it off fast. You’ll get there and you can start to develop it. I started purchasing a practice before I had my student debt paid off. Banks are willing to do that for you. They understand. They’ll see a business plan and they will help you to thrive within a practice because they know optometry is a very safe profession to be able to lend to. You can certainly be safe to do that, whether it be a cold start or whether it be an acquisition.
Acquisitions are certainly easier than cold starts in terms of bank lending power. I think that it’s easy to jump into that. If you’re a new grad, I would encourage you to make sure to look at where you want to be and what’s best for the industry. Don’t jump into something quickly because you want to pay off your student loans quickly then you’re going to look for a real optometry job afterward. Look for where you want to be long-term. You have to start from scratch again. You’ve developed relationships over a few years with patients and you train your patients on purchasing from you, doing the best for their health, etc., then if you drop all that and start again, it’s a big uphill battle. Jump into where you want to be first and think about your long-term plan.
That’s great advice. I think we might have to clip that and make sure we share that little clip because that truly is the mindset. I was telling you I was talking with a young optometry student and she was talking about, “I’m going to stay in the States for a couple of years, possibly pay off a good chunk of my debt, and then come back.”
I had an associate that did that and she burned out quickly. It’s not necessarily the best way of doing it. Think about your long-term plan, and where you want to be, and find what you identify with as your best match in terms of career. What do you think is best for your patients, best for you, and best for the industry? Think about those things even as a new grad coming out of school, “Where should I go? What do I want optometry to look like in the future and what do I want my career to look like in the future?”
Making those decisions based on the patient, clinic, industry, or profession right from the beginning. It’s very important. I was saying to her that, unfortunately, there’s a notion that you cannot come back to Canada, work in good practice, make good money, and be private. For some reason, there’s this notion you can’t do that. You can and this is what I was encouraging her, “You can practice full-scope optometry in Canada and make decent money and pay off your debt. It’s possible. It’s not like a myth. I promise,” but it’s the allure of that initial salary, that big bonus that some people are flaunting that sounds so attractive and it’s a moth to a flame sometimes.
You have to look at the fine print detail on all of those. Money isn’t free. If people are giving it to you, there’s something tied to it. What’s tied to it? How long do you have to be there? What do you have to produce to do that? Are you going to be run into the ground because they need to pay that money back? Money doesn’t grow in trees and they don’t give it to you for no reason with the hopes that you’re going to stay there for a year. Look at the repercussions of that and why someone might be doing that. If someone is offering a ridiculous amount of money for you to sign on, there’s probably some strings attached and there’s probably a reason that they’ve gone that high because no one else wants to be there.
I’ve heard that from a few different wise people in our industry, which is it’s not a no-strings-attached thing. There’s no free lunch. You have to be very careful about what’s in the fine print and behind the scenes. I was speaking with somebody. We won’t use any names here but of a very large organization in the United States. That’s one of the budget-level organizations. Very large player. This person was one of the higher-ups in the company. We talked about it and I expressed my discontent a little bit with certain types of modes of practice. She was like, “I get it. A lot of people say that.”
She knows or they know that new grads come through a revolving door. She’s like, “They come in for a couple of years and they leave.” They understand that but business almost thrives on that. I was talking to a couple of different students. I’m like, “What if we stopped doing that? That flywheel would stop. We are supporting that flywheel. We are supporting that mode of optometry or that mode of practice.” If we were to say, ‘No, I’m going to go practice full-scope optometry because I can still make good money.
I will burn myself out. I’m not going to go practice in this setting,” they wouldn’t be able to thrive the way that they’re thriving. They might survive. They might do okay, but they wouldn’t be the dominant player in the industry that they are because they’re feeding off of these young optometrists trying to pay off their debt as fast as they can. I saw that and had that conversation. It was enlightening. They know what they’re doing. It’s not by accident. They’re like, “It’s cool. We recruit thousands of new optometrists every year,” and then a thousand more leave. It’s this turning wheel.
Think of what optometry would look like if all of those were replaced with high-quality, patient-focused, optometry-focused practices. It would look the best for the patient and yourself.
Notes On Differentiation
Your entire profession would look a lot better. We talked about this entire tangent here starting from differentiating yourself. Let’s say we have an optometrist who’s practicing primary care or a student who’s about to start practicing and is trying to figure out which way to go. What’s a way for us to figure out how to differentiate which specialty to go into? Because it’s hard. There’s dry eye, there’s myopia, there’s AMD. We can’t do it all at the same time. We don’t want to start all of them at the same time.
If we have patient focused and optometry focused practices, the entire profession would look a lot better.
I think it’s going to come down to a number of factors. Number one, what’s your passion? Do you have a passion for one of them? That’s important. The buy-in from all of the doctors and even staff at the practice have to be there to make that subspecialty thrive. The second one is do you have the patient base for it? If you want to do myopia control, can you take a look at your patient base within your practice and find out how many kids do I see versus seniors versus middle-aged adults? Can I build and thrive on a myopia control practice and build that out and build into subspecialty contacts with Ortho-K, etc. if I’m seeing 2 kids a day, 5 kids a day, or 10 kids a day?
Look into your analytics within your EMR software to find out does this makes sense and do I have a business case for this. The same thing with if you want to do an AMD center of excellence. That’s a great place to thrive in right now because we have an aging population. It’s going to continue to get older. Risk factors for disease are AMD is 1 in 8 at 60 and 1 in 3 at 75. We have a patient population that’s ready to be cared for. I think that’s an easy one.
Dry eye is beneficial to many patients. It is very rewarding for many practitioners, but it is a lot of work for sure to get into and you’ve got to be committed. They’re big investments but they can be extremely rewarding both financially to the practice and the patient. Again, looking at those three tiers. Those are all important things to think about when you’re diving into the subspecialties.
That’s all great advice. Taking a snippet there, paying attention to the different steps that Dr. McCann is talking about. The one that I felt resonated and made a lot of sense is do you have an existing patient base because that would be an easy launchpad then.
It’s an easy launchpad. You can market to grow it but you need a good starting base to be able to try to support that.
Versus I don’t have the patients now, I want to start this specialty and go do external marketing to bring patients in. That’s a lot more work and a lot more cost involved. We did an analysis in our office. That would explain why myopia management took off so quickly for us. We do dry eye and it’s been growing well but at a much slower pace. Myopia management shot up and we see a lot of kids in our practice.
A lot of practices do see a lot of kids. There are the odd ones that have grown with the practitioner over time. They may not have a lot of kids initially, but that grows and changes. The large majority of practices can invest in myopia control. It’s standard of care now in Canada, so we need to all be looking at that as an option.
That is an interesting term, standard of care. I use that. It’s easy for you, of course, but I would say it’s even easy for me to say that myopia management is standard of care because I do a lot of myopia management in our practices. Tell me your thoughts on this. I think some of our colleagues and some of our friends who don’t do myopia management might be a little, almost offended to hear that myopia management is the standard of care because they don’t maybe practice it.
Do you think that’s true? Do you think some people are like, “You’re calling it a standard of care? I think I practice standard of care in my practice.” Do you think we should be a little bit more direct like, “No, sir. You need to raise your standard,” or should we be a little bit more like, “That’s good. You’re a good practitioner, but I think we should level up a little bit.”
I think now there is enough literature out there to support the fact that managing myopia is important. I think of it like a disease. If you had a glaucoma patient who came into your practice and you chose not to monitor them because you didn’t have the technology, you’d have the responsibility to refer them out to someone who does. If we look at myopia and we look at the epidemic that it’s going to create over the next half a decade, we’re going to see major vision problems associated with long-term health complications from patients when they get older. I would argue how is that any different than managing glaucoma?
You’re ignoring a disease early that you have the ability to curb. If you ignore it, are you doing as bad to your patient as you are by ignoring glaucoma until they get significant vision debilitation and then manage it? If you look at it like that, I don’t know why you wouldn’t manage glaucoma and I don’t know why you wouldn’t manage myopia. We have the option to do it. The studies show that it’s effective. The studies show that the risk factors that exist if you let it get to high myopia and every diopter counts as well. Every diopter you go up, it’s a 67% increase in myopic maculopathy, so why wouldn’t you want to reduce that risk?
It sounds like you’re in the first one of the, “No sir. I believe you need to get on this right now.”
I am and I know it’s difficult. I know there are investments and such into that. You can start early by managing it and I think everybody should be working towards having a biometer in practice to be able to manage axial length because what’s the disease? The disease is the eye getting larger so how do you manage that without measuring how big the eye is getting? The challenge is certainly there’s an investment there, but it’s no more investment than buying an auto-refractor. It’s about the same cost as an investment. As long as you’re charging appropriately for having a myopia control program, it will pay itself off and you’re doing the best for the patients at the same time. If you look at those three pillars, I think we’re doing the best patient practice and industry.
Thank you for that. Back to dry eye for a second. You mentioned it’s a bigger investment than some of the other specialties. Certainly, from the patient’s time investment, it’s a greater investment I found in that sense too. There was a little bit more handholding and a psychological component to it, but let’s go to the technology investment side. Let’s say I want to go into dry eye. There are many toys, diagnostic equipment, treatment technologies, and all these things.
When do you think is the right time? Let’s say I’m at square one. I have a proper private practice optometry clinic, but no fancy technology related to dry eye. I got a slit lamp of fluorescein and all that stuff. When would you say is the right time? In your opinion, how could I make that decision of when should I buy a piece of equipment for dry eye diagnostics? Where’s the right place to start?
If you want to get your feet wet and understand if there is a need for dry eye in your practice, you need to express everybody’s meibomian glands and see what meibum comes out. Do fluorescein staining and do a symptom score. Start with that as a questionnaire. DQ5 speed is what we do with all our new patients. Start with that and you’ll be convinced that a lot of your patients have dry eye disease. Once you do that, you can convince yourself, “I need to manage it at home and I need to consider in-office treatments.” Pick what suppliers you want to use in terms of at-home therapy and then pick what you want to consider in terms of in-office treatments, as well as diagnostics.
Your next step is getting a meibographer and osmolarity is a great tool to have. If you can invest in it early, it’s beneficial. We’re treating patients whose symptoms and signs don’t always match up. When you have a patient that comes in and they’re struggling with dry eye, you make significant improvements. If you don’t have measurables to show the patient that they’re improving, whether it be starting with at-home therapy or going to in-office therapy, it’s difficult to have that patient buy-in, the staff buy-in, and the doctor buy-in that it’s working.
Meibography isn’t going to change necessarily, but it’s a good way of educating that patient in terms of why they need dry eye disease management. We have non-invasive tear breakup time. Those things are valuable tools that we can invest in as we move down that path of more advanced dry eye treatments. We jumped in with iLux to start because we wanted something that had a low barrier of entry, and low cost and see if we could sell UK to patients on dry eye treatments.
Can we show a patient that they need it and will they invest in doing it? That got us to a point where we were convinced we could manage this and we saw the outcomes were positive so then we moved into, we have LipiFlow, we have RF, we have IPL. I think you need to pick a thermomeibal expression device, whether that be LipiFlow, RF, or iLux and you need to pick an IPL. Those are important technologies to have once you move into that next phase of advanced treatments in the office.
Find out what works best for your practice and what works best for your flow and your practice too. The same thing goes with a meibographer. We incorporated meibography into our primary care exam and increased the exam fees when we included it. That gave us such a great educational tool to show patients disease, dropout, and why we need to manage it both in the office and at home. That was a huge turning point for us in terms of ramping up our dry eye management. Look at all the meibographers that exist and what works well in your flow. If you’re going to do it in primary care, what’s the best place to put it? For us, it was on the pretest table.
What meibographers exist that can fit on your pretest table and what might integrate with your EMR in terms of exporting a PDF so that you can look at it in your exam room? Think about not just what the technologies are, but what helps with flow and what will integrate well into the flow of your practice because if you have a whole separate device in a different room and you’re moving patients between rooms for every single patient, that’s not great for flow. If you want to put it in every single exam room, that’s a big investment and does it work with your flow in terms of if you have somebody pretesting that patient to then bring them in and do meibography in an exam room? What’s going to work best in your practice in that respect that’ll give you enough data to be able to educate your patients well on that?
In your case, starting with the basics, the questionnaire, the staining, the meibomian glands, that’s all stuff we can do now without investment in at-home therapies. We’re going to get into that a little bit, but as far as buying a piece of technology, you’re saying meibography seems like the best place to start as far as diagnostic.
Some devices come with an in-office treatment with a meibographer. You can look at that like if you look at LipiScan and LipiFlow. You buy them together and you get both devices. I would argue that’s probably one of the better meibographers, if not the best meibographer on the market because it’s easy to use. You can sit on your pre-test table and it works with their flow.
A Word From Our Sponsor
We found the same thing with the meibography in our office. It is having it for pre-test versus the ones that are attached to your slit lamp and things like that having it pre-test. We do lower lid on both eyes on every adult, then we show them in the exam room, “Here’s what it looks like.” I found that that works well. It adds a couple of minutes to the pretest time, but it’s worth it in the exam room to have those pictures already there. It doesn’t change the flow very much like you said. Let’s go to the treatment side of things. There are so many drops and these types of treatments that we can sell to our patients in the office. There are so many vendors that we could work with. If somebody is starting out with dry eye, how would you recommend I go about picking a vendor to sell eye drops?
You don’t want to be a Shopper’s Drug Mart where you have a whole shelf of all these different kinds because a patient gets to the front desk.
That’s interesting because I always thought the best thing is to have a whole bunch of different drops.
We found over time we did have a bunch to start and then we found these skews were going through a lot and these were not doing as much, so why are we not doing these as much? You also have confusion when the patient gets to the front desk and you or the staff says, “The doctors recommended X, Y, and Z,” and they say, “What about those ones? Why can’t I get those? They’re $10 cheaper,” or they’re $5 cheaper, or whatever it is.
That’s not the one the doctor recommended and we already went through a talk track in the exam room. They only might remember 20% of that then they get to the front desk where they reiterate everything that we said because we have a nice sheet that we hand the staff and the patient takes it home. It’s got QR codes on it that link to clinical studies for the patient or instructions or videos, etc. We bring that to the front desk and the staff goes over that.
If there are other options that are there, it confuses the patient as to, “Why’d they recommend this one and why can’t I get that one?” It takes more time at the front desk for the staff to try to explain it and then it makes it more cumbersome. We looked at all the products on the market and we figured, what are the best products for the patient practice and industry? What products offer the best result to the patient? Look at the clinical studies. There are companies that have a ton of clinical studies like Thea.
They have over twenty published papers in peer-reviewed journal articles about their products. Thea is a great one. We tend to gravitate to Thealoz Duo Gel. The Blephacleans got a great clinical study in terms of blepharitis and the reduction of it peer-reviewed. They’ve got their Blepha eye bag. Do I have to work with six vendors or can I consolidate to one or two vendors? Maybe they have great products and groups like Eye Recommend help you to get good value in terms of pricing and such too. They offer different programs for us.
Looking at all of those options, what’s best for the patient? They have a ton of clinical studies to back up their products. What’s best for my practice in terms of the good relationships we build with the group and then who sponsors things? Who comes out to events, who helps to move the industry forward, who works with ODs and does educational events, and who does dinners where they bring in people to help those practices accelerate their dry eye program? I think that’s good for the industry.
I didn’t even think about that aspect of it. That’s interesting. Which companies are patient practice industry? I never thought about how valuable it is to work with a vendor. We’re supporting the vendor that’s supporting the profession. It’s a positive cycle. You mentioned Thea and I said Thea off the top as well. We see that they’re quite present.
Patient, practice, industry.
Some people find it. I find some practitioners love the fact that some vendors are exclusive to eye-care professionals and some people find it a challenge. It’s good because it helps us to monitor compliance for our patients too. If a patient can only get the product from us and they’re only purchasing it once a year, I know how compliant they are unless they’re buying it elsewhere. Generally, that’s not the case.
They generally come back to us to purchase it. You can get a good measure of compliance strictly based on patients’ purchasing patterns and if they only purchase it from us. If you make it convenient by having it on an online web store through your office, we ship it for free to patients if they are over a certain dollar amount. All of those ways can help us to elevate the practice, but also help us to understand the patient’s compliance.
It’s so true. Compliance is maybe the number one factor when it comes to efficacy. If it’s not going in your eye, it’s not going to be effective. That’s a huge factor as well. That’s excellent. I love this throughline of how to make decisions in your entire career here. Is it good for the patient? Is it good for the practice? Is it good for the profession? I love that and as you said, use that decision-making tree in almost everything when you’re coming out of school, when you’re trying to open a practice when you’re deciding which vendors to work with. I love that. Excellent.
When it comes to the clinical side, I know you’re the clinical mastermind as well and you talk a lot about clinical pearls and things like that. I don’t do a lot of clinical discussion on the show but I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t at least ask you a couple of questions. Just a high level, any tips or tricks or pearls or fun facts about certain eyedrops or products that you use that you found are working well for you?
Thanks for Thea sponsoring this and that’s not the only reason we’re highlighting their products. They’re a great company. They have great evidence-based products. When we look at corneal healing time, when we look at inflammation marker reduction, when we look at tear film thickness, they have a plethora of other studies that exist in terms of why Thealoz Duo is a premium eye drop. When we have to explain to a patient why we’re recommending a specific product, if you can’t back it up with reasons or clinical studies, I would feel like I would second guess my recommendations. Everything we prescribe for glaucoma, anything is all evidence-based so why wouldn’t an over-the-counter product also be evidence-based?
If we are going out there to say, “I want you to do this, this, and this,” I should have data to back up why I’m suggesting that. As I said, Blephaclean is one within fourteen days can reduce the bacterial load substantially and they’ve got to put the peer-reviewed journals on that. Blepha Eyebag was used in the dues two, Let’s look at all of the data that exists and make sure that we’re communicating that to the patient and patients want to do their own research.
If you’re recommending to a patient, patients want to do their own research, so provide them with the research. In our little handout sheet that we give them, we do QR codes linked to clinical studies so the patient can look it up if they want. It helps to justify our recommendations because some patients do want to double-check things. They don’t take the doctor’s word for gold. If you provide all that information for the patient, it makes them much more confident in your recommendation as well.
The sheet with the QR codes, that’s interesting. I’m going to try to put some like that together myself. Do you check some boxes and next to the check-boxes is a QR code, they’ll go to scan that one versus a different one.
We’ve got a lid hygiene section. We’ve got a gland-warming section, a nutraceutical section, and then a drop section. There are a couple of different options for each. The gland warming, we have one option. Nutraceuticals, whether we do liquid or capsules, but we’re specifically sticking to one brand because of the peer-reviewed literature on it. In terms of drops, we’ve got a gel, a regular drop, and an ointment. You don’t need to recommend five different types of drops because, generally, recommend what you think is best evidence-based and then go from there.
In terms of lid cleansing, we do have a lot of options, but that might be because is it due to demodex. Is it due to blepharitis? If it’s due to blepharitis, is the patient going to be most compliant with a wipe? Are they going to be most compliant with the gel or are they going to be most compliant with a spray? We look at the patient, understand their needs, and prescribe what we think is going to be best for them in terms of a compliance perspective. On the other side, we’ve got all our in-office treatments with videos of each. It’s a checkbox thing.
Marketing Your Practice
This is going to lead us into the next part of the conversation. You’ve differentiated yourself. You’ve figured out which specialty works well for you. You have the patient base for it. You’ve bought equipment perhaps, you’ve leaned into it, your staff and your doctor’s all on board, then we’re going to get into how do you market that? How do you reach people? How do you share that information?
This is one you’ve already seen the patient but you’re sending them home with something where they can link to videos. I want to talk about that as we get into how we market these things to our potential patients or existing patients. Those videos, are you or somebody in your office in that video or is it a generic video from somewhere else?
A lot of the videos are from the distributors or the company. They’ve got videos that exist already. We utilize those videos to help educate the patient and show them what the procedure is. That works well for the in-office treatments. Some of the products also have videos. Whether it be an eye wipe, a brooder, or a Blepha eye bag, they all have videos that you can get. You can add to your own YouTube and then you can link to your YouTube with the QR code that you can create online.
They’re going to your YouTube channel not some other YouTube.
I can track the viewership. I can track how many views there are based on the QR code.
This is why he’s on the show. Honestly, there are all these topics we’ve covered. We probably could have broken into individual episodes. We’re trying to cram it all into one. On that note, before we get into the marketing side of things, one thing that I want to do in our office and we’re hoping to do soon is, I want to create some content that’s with me and my business partner, maybe our staff, to talk about some of these things. It’s nice to use some of the generic videos. That’s a good first step. That’s a big one and I probably need to do that since they exist already.
I want to create some videos where it’s me talking like, “Here’s what we do in radio frequency treatment. Here’s what we do with the IPL treatment. Here’s how to perhaps do a Blepha eye bag and so on,” like little instructional videos like that. I want to give a quick shout-out to Akira Media Marketing who’s helping us film this. Using a company like this is a great way to start. There are companies out there that can come to your office, film this content for you, edit it, clean it up, make it look good, and help you put it on YouTube and all that kind of thing. That’s maybe a following or a next step if you want to get a little further into that. Let’s talk about marketing. Tell us about some of the ways or different ways that you’re using marketing to maybe attract new patients.
In terms of attracting new patients with myopia control, for instance, we do have Instagram and Facebook ads that are targeted specifically to a parent age group so that we can try to educate parents and drive them to our website and information. We do blogs on our website as well. Those help in terms of getting more people driven to our website. Those have been great for external, but I think you have a lot of opportunities for internal marketing as well.
Internal-wise, we’ve got monthly emails that go out to patients and one email will be an educational component and one will be a promo or something that we have ongoing maybe even a promo that helps to drive that patient to the email. Our click rate is quite high on those types of emails that we send to patients. We have a monthly one for that, but now we’ve started a drip campaign educational component for our patients as well in an email marketing.
When we look at our patient demographic and we look at a parent, what would be the age range of a parent? We picked 25 to 45. For that age range, that parent or anybody in that age range will get an email about myopia control. The first email is about what is myopia and the disease in general. The second one is how do we control it. The third one focuses on a specific technology we want to grow within our business. Ortho-K for instance. If it’s dry eye, we pick a different age group and we picked from I think it was 40 to 80. Anybody in that age group will get an email thread or again, a drip campaign, of what is dry eye, what are the opus treatments, and then what are some at-home therapies, etc.
It starts in a broad and then you go a little bit more specific and then specific of a specific treatment you would want to focus on.
Same thing for AMD. We did a campaign for that for 60-plus. What is it, how do we diagnose it early in an AMD center of excellence, and then how do we monitor it, manage it moving forward, treat it, and such?
That’s excellent. Are these emails done through your EMR?
No. We use a marketing agency, Marketing4ECPs. They create all of our email content as well. We have a session where we sit down and they ask us, what we want and what areas we want to focus on. They develop all the content and all the graphics and everything for you then they also execute the emails for us.
How about creating those little cohorts, those segments of your patient population? How do you extract the 25 to 45?
Our EMR exports our patient database and it’ll have the age of all those patients as well. We would submit to Marketing4ECPs the email address and the age. They would be able to then take that and select, separate it, and send it out.
That’s good. Excellent advice. I appreciate that. That’s super helpful. Anything else you want to share on the marketing side of things before we get to wrapping up?
In marketing, it’s important to show your brand presence online and show what you’re all about and make sure that you get Google reviews to reinforce the peer group in the community and what they think of your practice. A lot of people pay attention to social media and Google reviews to make a decision as to where they want to go. We make sure we create the most premium patient experience that there is. You charge appropriately for it and we are not the cheapest in the city.
It’s really important to show your brand presence online and show what you’re all about.
When we talk about disruptors, it doesn’t mean that people are going to flock to a disruptor because they’re the cheapest. They look at, “What’s important to me? What do I look for in an eyecare experience?” If I can provide the premium one and I have peer feedback that’s saying that we’re a great experience. We’ve got a great brand presence online through our website, social media, and Google business page, which helps to reinforce that image to a patient that that’s a place I want to go. It drives new patients to our practice and some of our practices have over a 40% new patient rate and they’re well-established patients. It has to do with what’s your external image that you’re portraying and how you get patients to come to your practice.
I’m sure many of us have that Google reviews are a self-perpetuating thing. Once they start to increase, you start to see more people come through, which gives you more Google reviews. I certainly have seen that as we’ve hit a threshold above. Once we crossed 100 Google reviews, you start to see, all of a sudden, now we’re getting Google reviews fast, whereas getting to 100 was a bit slow. It’s this positive cycle when you get there. Do you do anything specific to get more Google reviews? Do you ask patients?
We use software where we send a text message to patients after they arrive. We say, “How would you rank your visit on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5?” That feedback comes back to us and they may leave a Google review or they may decide to leave internal feedback. The nice thing is that we get a good idea of our net promoter score and we get an idea of what patients appreciate and what do can we improve upon to elevate the experience more. Feedback is a gift.
Whether it be positive or negative, it’s a gift and it gives you the opportunity that if someone had a non-optimum experience, how do we turn that around and make that correct, make that right for that patient, and then have a discussion with the team to figure out, “This is how the patient perceived the scenario.” It may not be that that’s how we intended it to be, but they may have perceived it in that way, but perception is everything. If the patient perceives it that way, then that’s what we got to fix.
It almost doesn’t matter what actually happened. We had an unfortunate scenario. The patient came in and saw one of our associates. She had an eyelash or something stuck under her eyelid. I wasn’t there when the appointment happened and the doctor removed whatever the foreign body was in a normal process. She flipped the eyelid, removed the foreign body, the patient went on their way, and they left a one-star review. Even though the reason that the patient came in, the chief complaint was addressed. She left. Her eye felt better.
We thought we had a win there. It turns out she was upset that he pulled her eyelid a little too hard when he flipped it. She didn’t say anything in office. Now we’re trying to contact the patient. Let’s talk about what happened there because no matter what, even though the chief complaint was dealt with, she perceived the process as being unpleasant. Unfortunately, these types of things will pop up.
You’re going to get those negative reviews that happen. Sometimes, there’s nothing you could have done differently and you’re still going to get that. It’s all about how you deal with that. Could you have improved that relationship with the patient afterward or is there no hope in that because there are some types of people that are going to be upset no matter what? You can’t make it right no matter what. How do you respond to that online to show you’ve done everything you can to try to resolve the scenario and to make it right so that people read those and see, “They went out of their way to make this okay,” and I think that may have been a difficult person.
From what the staff tells me, she seemed quite pleasant in the office. That’s the interesting thing. There are always those tricky ones too but yes, we made the effort to reply. That’s an important one too. Make sure you reply to every single Google review, positive or negative, and then maybe do a follow-up. We’re trying to connect with her over the phone to see if there’s something we can do to help make up for the perceived poor experience. Thanks for all the tips on marketing. That’s helpful.
Let’s wrap up here. I have a few quick questions that I’d like to ask. It’s rapid-fire and then we have a couple of constant questions that ask every guest at the end of every interview. Let’s do the rapid fire. It’s one word to one sentence, whatever comes off the top of your mind. Let’s go with the first one here. What gives you energy? What do you do in your day-to-day that gives you energy?
My kids.
What drains your energy?
Can it be my kids? I’m kidding. I would say what drains my energy still, which doesn’t happen often, but having nothing on the horizon or nothing new and exciting.
I like that. I have a bad habit of saying we’re doing rapid fire and then I tend to elaborate and take five minutes to share my two cents. There’s something I heard a long time ago, which I keep in mind. It’s not maybe always relevant, but it’s something like, “What makes a person happy?” Is it you’d like to think it’s what you’re doing in the present moment? I love doing this. This makes me very satisfied doing this.
However, one of the things that determines our happiness is what do you have going on next. What’s on the horizon? What are you growing towards? I think that’s important. When we become stagnant or unhappy or less pleased with our lives because we don’t have something to look forward to. That doesn’t mean cheap pleasures like, “I’m going to go eat McDonald’s and binge-watch Netflix.” It means, how am I doing to grow? What’s coming up?
Whether it be as a business or as a person.
What would you do if money was not an object for work? What would you do for work or to keep yourself busy If money was no object?
Specifically to work.
Just to keep yourself busy, what would you do when you get out of bed to make a day productive, let’s say?
I love spending time with my kids and traveling. Those are great. In terms of work, I don’t know if I would do much differently. I enjoy what I do.
That’s amazing. What task or activity takes you into a flow state where time disappears?
Administrative work. I could be doing work and hours could go by and I’m like, “Wait, what time is it?”
This explains why you’re good at what you do. Now we have the answer, everybody. Everybody is wondering how Wes does well at what he does. It’s because you enjoy doing those things.
You know what’s funny? My Oura Ring tracks stress. The time I am least stressed is when I see patients. We run a tight schedule and lots of complexity within patients, but it’s my lowest stress time of the day.
You’re a unicorn. That’s amazing. I love that. This is off-topic, but you wear an Oura Ring. I’m looking into that. Have you heard of Whoop?
No.
It’s a wristband, but it’s similar to Oura in terms of the metrics that it gives you, measuring stress and sleep and all these things. Anyways, have you heard of heart rate variability?
Yes.
Do you know much about that? This helps you track that.
Oura tracks it.
That’s supposed to be the more heart rate variability you have, technically the healthier you are. The more range that your heart rate can travel, you can manage stress. I want to start to try to track that stuff too, once my one-year-old sleeps better. Thanks much, Wes. Before we get into the last couple of questions, where can people find you or learn more about you?
Yes. You can find me on Instagram, @DrWesMcCann. You can email me. I’ve got [email protected]. Those are two ways of contacting me, either/or.
Also, your Calendly link?
Yes, my Calendly link. You’ll only get that if I get an email.
You’re going to get an email first, then you get the Calendly link and you need to set up the call. The last two questions that I like to ask every guest, I’ve gone through phases where I stopped asking these, but I had them for a long time. The first of the two questions is, if we could step in a time machine and go back to a time when younger Wes McCann was struggling, you were welcome to share the moment and what the experience was, but more importantly, what advice would you give to younger Wes at that time?
I would say probably elementary school. I got bullied in elementary school. I’m also gay so that was a different time. I have a husband and two kids that are awesome. We had it through surrogacy. I would say when you’re younger, to know that life is different as you get older and you build resilience by having challenges in your life. Having challenges when you’re young and having any adversity builds strength and resilience because you learn how to deal with them, how to manage them, how to manage stress, and how to manage challenges in life. I think that a message back then would be to say, “Stick with it. This is going to make you stronger.” When you get older, life is going to be good because you’ve developed skills to be able to be resilient.
You build resilience by having challenges in your life.
Sorry that you had to go through that, but I’m also glad that it’s led you to be where you are now because it seems like life is flourishing now. Thank you very much for sharing that. The last question that I like to ask every guest is everything that you’ve accomplished to this point in your life, personal or professional, how much of it would you say is due to luck, and how much is due to hard work?
I think everyone gets chances for good luck in life, but working hard predominantly put me where I am now. Also, make sure you have a good balance. Don’t work hard that you forget about everything else in life because the other things in life are what you work hard for. Make sure that you don’t take those for advantage and that you work hard but keep those boundaries in place so that you can enjoy your family, enjoy your kids, and enjoy traveling. You only live once and your kids are only young once so make sure you get the time to spend with them. Those are very important.
Thank you. You only live once. Drake said it the best, YOLO. Anyway, the best note to end the show on Yolo. Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate this. This has been amazing.
It’s my pleasure.
I’m so glad I got you on finally. This is not the one and only though. We plan to do another one in the near future, maybe six months or so. A lot of stuff we didn’t cover today, we certainly will and if you’ve tuned in to Wes and you’re like, “I have questions about something that we talked about,” message me on Instagram. You can message Wes as well or DM me. We can save those for the next time. I’d love to ask and answer some of the questions that maybe some of our colleagues have out there.
If you’re tuning in, go to Instagram, message me there, HabirSian.od and we can add those to our list of questions for the next episode. Once again, thank you, Wes. Thank you to Eye Recommend for hosting us and giving us the space here in the beautiful Delta Hotel in beautiful Kelowna, British Columbia. Of course, the biggest thank you to Thea Pharma Canada for supporting the show, for supporting Wes and me as professionals, and for supporting the industry. Thank you very much. We’ll see you guys in the next episode. Thank you.
Important Links
- Dr. Wes McCann
- Eye Recommend
- Thea Pharma Canada
- Akira Media Marketing
- Marketing4ECPs
- @DrWesMcCann – Instagram
- DrMcCann@DrVisionGroup
About Dr. Wes McCann
Dr. McCann earned his two Bachelor of Science degrees (both with honours) at Western University in London, Ontario, before going on to earn his Bachelor of Vision Science, accelerated MBA, and Doctor of Optometry degrees at the Nova Southeastern University (NSU) of Optometry in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
