Dispensing Frontiers
Partnering with Vendors
Many companies you buy from offer services designed to help grow your practice. Here's what you may be missing.

BY LEONA MEDITZ

If your practice includes a dispensary, you've already developed relationships with frame manufactures and distributors. What you may not realize is that many of them offer services and training that can help your dispensary grow.

One of today's most successful frame vendors is Marchon. Eighty percent of Marchon's 300 million dollar business comes from small, independent practices, including many ophthalmologists. I recently had the opportunity to interview Al Berg, president and co-owner of Marchon, and I asked him about the programs Marchon offers to help ophthalmology dispensaries.

Q: What do independent practices need to succeed?

A: "The typical doctor hasn't developed extensive business skills. As a result, he has four options:

• learn the necessary business skills
• delegate the business aspects of the practice to someone else
• partner with a vendor
• all of the above.

"Most doctors don't have time to learn about and operate every facet of the business. And even the most efficient business manager may not have the time to "do it all." Vendor partners add skill sets by providing resources not otherwise available to the practice."

	ILLUSTRATION: AMY WUMMER

Q: What does "vendor partner" mean?

A: "The average practice deals with 20 to 30 frame vendors and purchases frames piece by piece with no plan. When we partner with a practice, we look at the patient base and design an inventory model using 30% Marchon frames and 70% frames from other vendors. (Our product lines include Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Nike, Disney, Nautica and Flexon, styles with enough variety that everything doesn't look alike.) This reduces the number of vendors you have to deal with to 10 or less, lowering your administrative costs.

"In addition to taking responsibility for product sell-through, we can reduce costs on Office Mate computer software (including training) or Eye Designs furniture, by 10% to 40%. We have 350 professionals available to train your staff in selling, inventory control, merchandising and product knowledge. We can help with merchandising and point-of-purchase displays. We can coordinate in-office "trunk shows" featuring entire de-signer lines. And most of our sales representatives have been with us for more than 10 years. They're seasoned veterans."

Q: How can you afford to do this?

A: "We know that to succeed we have to build client relationships, and partnerships must be win-win. A practice that partners with us is committing about $30,000 to Marchon over the course of a year. That makes the doctor a VIP -- "very important partner" -- so we allocate our resources in exchange for the doctor's loyalty. Marchon depends on thriving private practices, so we do our best to help them thrive."

LEONA'S ADVICE

Today, vendor partnerships are offered by a wide range of companies. Yet only about 10% of practices take advantage of them. Why? I believe practices are afraid of getting too "locked in" with one or two suppliers. So, they buy a little from everyone.

Instead, why not choose a few vendors and then decide if they "measure up?" You can be a little fish in a big pond, spreading purchasing dollars far and wide, or a big fish in a little pond, carefully choosing who gets your business.

Which fish do you think will get eaten first?

Leona Meditz has 25 years of experience opening, owning and operating optical dispensaries. To learn how to choose vendors, measure their performance, train your people or manage products, visit her Web site at www.3ps4profit.com or e-mail Leona@3ps4profit.com.