Doug and Mary Perkins celebrating 40 years of Specsavers
Valentine’s Day should be a restful time of hearts, flowers and intimate meals but for Specsavers co-founder, Dame Mary Perkins, the date has a habit of marking milestones. This February 14, Dame Mary not only celebrated her birthday but also the refit of the Guernsey practice, 40 years of Specsavers and the approach of the multiple’s 1,000th practice in the UK. Needless to say the night ended not over an intimate tête-à-tête with fellow founder and husband Doug but with a big family do.
There was no respite the following morning, as Optician took the opportunity to ask the husband and wife team to talk about four decades of Specsavers past, present and future. Rewinding to 1984, Dame Mary and Doug had already chalked up considerable success in optometry with their West Country chain of Bebbington and Perkins. Optician asked what their goals were in the run up to starting Specsavers.
Doug and Mary in the 80s
Doug says you have to remember the context of the economy back then and the arrival of deregulation. ‘We’d basically had 15 years of really hard graft during that time in a recessionary environment and grew those practices [Bebbington and Perkins] from a single one to 23 and we felt that size and the need to grow were important. There were large multiples like Boots that we knew were going to come into the market and we knew it was going to get commercial so we had to get bigger.’
He says the Bebbington and Perkins practices in the 1960s and ’70s were small. ‘We thought: “right we are going to have to re-invent this”. We realised that, not wanting to become a standard chain, if we did this we knew it would have to be on the basis of a partnership. The driving force was to create a different kind of optics I suppose, a bit of a hybrid between being independent and being corporate.’ Although they did not know how big Specsavers was going to get, joint venture partnership was going to be the formula and the search for partners began.
‘If you cast your mind back it was the time when Margaret Thatcher was changing the rules and regulations,’ says Dame Mary. ‘We had always practiced under our own names in places that we knew, as we lived in Bristol. We even had our own surfacing lab.’ The Bristol shop exterior is pictured below right with the professional’s name highlighted. The couple sold up to Dollond and Aitchison in 1980 for a reported £2m when D&A was in an expansion phase.
Doug returns to the context of the launch: ‘If you remember the depth of the recession in the 1970s, which eventually drove in Margaret Thatcher; people just could not afford the prices being offered by the traditional multiples. Value for money had to be part of that equation.’
Political lobbying was calling for deregulation and change and the couple saw the customer experience needed to change too. They also wanted to modernise the process with showrooms and openness around the whole retail optical experience. ‘Giving customers, or patients, more control was an essential part.’ This process was under way with companies such as Boots and the original Dean Butler-inspired Vision Express entering the market.
The old model was not working, says Dame Mary, even with free NHS eye examinations people were going up to six years without an eye exam. ‘How can you look after someone’s eyes when you have got that long gap there?’ As an optometrist, she says, whether they buy contact lenses or spectacles the most important element is the health of the eyes.
A career break and move near to Dame Mary’s parents in Guernsey followed the sale to D&A. After mulling various plans, such as a move abroad, a chance meeting with a US optometrist galvanised the plans the couple had to continue in a market they knew, understood and loved.
‘Many of our friends were optometrists as well, so it made sense to start again but with a generic name,’ says Dame Mary. Once back on the island the plans for the Specsavers model were devised around the family’s ping pong table. The rest is history.
Even at this early stage the couple understood the power of individuals in the delivery of eye care, hence the model, says Doug. ‘We always had respect for the professionals. Having the joint venture partners with a stake in the business was very much part of that so the professional standards would be moving forwards as well.’
That focus on the individual is as important today as it was 40 years ago, he says, and will become more important as the optical business commoditises. ‘Differentiating ourselves through the professional care will be the deciding factor of who survives.’
Size matters
At the beginning, the ambition for the couple was for a national chain but they had not really thought about how many practices they might reach. ‘We wanted to go for the whole of the UK and thought maybe it might become 100 [practices],’ says Dame Mary.
She saw convenience as a big driver. ‘People want eye care and whether you call them patients or customers they want proper care in an accessible, local setting. It became clear quite early on that convenience for the customer was quite important.’
Today that convenience is often associated with the internet. Despite this, says Doug, people love proper care so he is cautious about how far the internet can meet those needs. He says internet providers are looking for professional networks they can refer patients to but believes offering that total care, eye care for all, is the answer.
‘People realise that total care is the answer to eye care, they have had that since 1948 and they are not going to give that up lightly so we are very much practice-based for the future. If we can get that right that is a complete defence against the internet in the future.’
An early advertisement
When asked about the milestones throughout the 40 years, Doug takes a characteristically practical line. He says optometrists back then, as the ones today, got no proper business training so support services are a massive part of the operation and recognising that was a milestone.
He said he and Dame Mary learnt how to offer support service through hard graft but what they underestimated was what could be achieved by combining those services with the professional’s skill. He estimated that independents spend as much as 50% of their time on administration. Enabling the professional to concentrate on their core roles was: ‘massive – a huge gain’.
‘We’ve got an astonishing number of people in support, they enjoy being part of Specsavers. Mary sends them birthday cards,’ he jokes. It is all about allowing people in the organisation to spend all of their time doing the role they are there to do.
When pressed to recall more emotional ‘magic moment’ milestones, Doug recalls 1994, when Specsavers was already market leader and at its annual meeting at the ICC in Birmingham one thing sticks in his mind. ‘There must have been five or six hundred people there and we shaped them up into the logo, which was new at the time, and took a photograph from above.’ That was a kind of a landmark,’ he says, in a rare moment of nostalgia.
Personal development
Dame Mary says casting her mind back as the company rapidly grew you quickly realise that you cannot know everything and you cannot be everywhere. She says she was always really pleased that so many young optometrists wanted a partnership and how optometry has progressed educationally and clinically.
An early glazing machine from 1989 and the Bristol shop exterior
‘That’s been my biggest thumbs up.’ Doug agrees and says young optoms today really consider themselves to be the GP of the eyes and they push for further qualification. ‘The feeling that you get your degree and your development stops is not there’.
That self-starting desire to be more clinical and the increasing levels of education through initiatives like Specsavers PAC conferences that are available to all, not just Specsavers employees, are a highlight, say the couple. ‘We didn’t sit down one day and decide to do it. It was just the right thing to do,’ says Dame Mary.
This access to education, says Doug, complemented by a lot of support in practice to make sure people’s clinical skills and experience are maintained and advanced, ensure a level of consistency of care. In areas such as referrals there are massive differences from optometrists of different ages. ‘We provide development opportunities to help people improve their clinical skills; this isn’t a spy in the cab type of thing, we are doing this for the greater good.’
Highlights having been aired, Optician asked if there were things the couple would have done differently. Not surprisingly it is harder to get Doug to describe some of the less positive things that have taken place in the 40 years. One scenario he does describe is the danger of assuming all territories have the levels of optometry education and skills to be found in the UK; Europe being the closest and most sobering example.
He says: ‘In some European countries there is little expectation that the optician is little more than an optical salesperson.’ That is the reason he says that the countries Specsavers selects to go forward in are ones where there is a history of clinical care because they know they can add value.
‘If it’s a pure retail concept, as exists in France, Spain and the Netherlands, it’s very difficult when there is no professional advancement. They are shopticians and that is why we have to hang on to the structure we have in the UK.’ When pressed further on having to retreat from such territories Doug smiles and says: ‘We have never withdrawn, it’s a work in progress.’
The focus now is on Canada; a huge country where there is only one optometry course but a similar model to the UK. Specsavers is set to change that. ‘We first visited there 12 years ago so you can see how long these things take,’ says Dame Mary.
Primary eye care
Turning back to the UK, Optician asked about Specsavers’ near-crusade to bring primary and secondary care together in the high street and their reactions to the Labour Party’s recent announcement on using opticians to reduce NHS waiting lists?
Visibly enthused by the opportunity to talk about optical politics, Doug retorts: ‘We have got to be given the mandate of minor eye care conditions (Mecs). The ophthalmologists have been hugely protective of medical functions and the barriers between ophthalmologists and optometrists is much greater than it needs to be.’
He says the response to the Labour Party’s call from ophthalmology echoed that idea and the two had to work together. ‘We need to understand the needs of the NHS.’ He laments the lack of joined-up thinking and the fact that the many commissioning bodies take a different view on involvement of the primary sector.
‘Despite the best efforts of the NHS, the service people are getting from GPs is nowhere near good enough,’ he says, adding that the pharmacists have already been drafted in to help. ‘There is clear evidence to show how much GP time is wasted on Mecs and what could be saved if patients went to an eye care professional instead.
This had led to a call for Mecs to be mandated for optometrists. We need to achieve that and have acknowledgment that an eye examination is to be thought of as more than just a new pair of glasses,’ he says. This happened during Covid when care was opened out and huge progress was made.
So in five years’ time what extra roles do they see their practices taking in eye health? While Mecs is the first target there are other roles such as follow ups for glaucoma and cataract that optometrists could fulfil, says Doug. ‘It needs to be the whole profession as one body,’ stresses Dame Mary.
Doug agrees this is not just about Specsavers and says while some regions of the country are moving forward the important thing now is to establish what closer working looks like and lobbying to get that standardised. ‘I think it will be Mecs first, then glaucoma and other things as well.’
The Green Giant
Despite, or perhaps because of, its success Specsavers has come in for flak from some sections of retail optics over the years. Optician asked if that had ever bothered them. Dame Mary said a lot of that could be put down to the dislike of change. ‘I know a lot of independents and if you talk to them they are fine about it.’
She said she often finds they benefit when Specsavers advertises as it puts the idea of eye care into people’s minds and their business goes up too. ‘People have the choice, they can go to their independent or they can come to a multiple like us.’ Asked if it hurt them personally, Dame Mary replies: ‘We were too busy working to have time to think about it, getting on with things.’
Dame Mary at Buckingham Palace
Doug turns the question around to personal development of young professionals. ‘We are living in a time of uncertainty and there is some apprehension about the future among the people that are going to be in the profession for some time, let’s say the under-35s. To a person, they think Specsavers is a leader in training and development in the UK.
Their image [of us] is not the same as the one that was around 20 years ago. So things have changed and the image is there but people are always afraid of size,’ but, he insists: ‘We are using that size for the greater good.’
The couple agreed with Optician’s suggestion that attitudes towards Specsavers had thawed and that many of those independents who may have criticised Specsavers in the past are now part of a chain through the Hakim Group which fulfils many of the support functions pioneered by Specsavers.
‘I think Hakim is very clever commercially,’ says Doug. ‘This was the opportunity that existed and the question mark now will be “will he stay with this?” We have avoided acquisition completely because, however much maligned acquisitions are, they bring a different agenda.
We have got 50 years of experience feeding into Specsavers and it’s basically one model and we have thousands of people feeding into that one model that moves it along in a strategic way. That’s not possible for Hakim.’ But, he adds independents had to do something. In conclusion, he adds that Hakim’s practices are running good businesses though it has got a long way to go for strategic consistency.
Not a personality cult
Succession and the future is a question often asked by Optician of Specsavers. Despite being advised not to ask Dame Mary and Doug the ‘retirement question’ Optician suggested that milestones and birthdays raised that very question in people’s minds.
‘We have planned it so that it goes on,’ says Dame Mary, adding in a typically self- effacing manner that: ‘It probably doesn’t need me here.’
But seriously, she says. ‘It’s important to both of us that it [Specsavers] continues as it is with the joint venture partnership, with all the vision and the values that we have. We took steps a couple of years ago that, should we get run over by a bus, it would continue onwards in the way that we were thinking and that’s important.’
She says commitment of continuity was also for the reassurance of all of the staff around the world who know that the future of the business is not dependent on the two people sat here. She stresses that Specsavers is about the whole team and not two people. Doug says for a business of its size the succession plan has to be for everybody, not just its founders.
Son and daughters: From left, John Perkins, Dame Mary Perkins, Julie Perkins (back), Cathy Perkins and Doug Perkins
In a complex business like optics he adds the management had to be built from within the organisation to understand its culture and values. On occasions people were brought in from outside but more generally Specsavers grows its own very strong team. There are boards throughout the organisation and some of those may contain family members if they choose to be in the business. Most notable perhaps is the founders’ son, John Perkins’s role as CEO. Those boards are made up of people who understand the culture and are in for the long term, concludes Doug.
‘It’s our belief that structure is superior to a public company board where there is a bit of a conflict. Our shareholders are the partners whereas a stock exchange shareholder may think “why should we share our profits with these guys out there?”. Our view has always been that optics is complex,’ he says, ‘requiring care and technology investment. If you don’t allow that to be owned for the long term by stakeholders there is a risk and that’s why it [the Specsavers’ model] doesn’t work so well in a retail shop environment.’
Personalisation
The new Project Boost refit has highlighted the joint venture ownership in the stores by highlighting the partners within the stores, is that a cue for the future?
‘My mantra is “owned and run with a lifetime of care”; it is the thing that I wake up thinking, and it is an absolutely brilliant concept to share in communications,’ says Doug. ‘Why didn’t we feature that before?’ He says in the past the approach was to emphasise the Specsavers brand but that thinking had changed.
Dame Mary says her experience of people’s reaction is that they do not understand that Specsavers staff own the practices they work in. When customers find out, they are surprised and are more likely to use their local practice. ‘They say: “I never realised that, I thought you were a chain, I’m going to go to you next time.”
It’s obvious to us now but it’s a phase that optics has gone through. At the beginning the practice fascia had the names of the optometrist and Specsavers with equal billing but that confused patients. Later, the stores had pictures of the principals in the window but people did not take much notice.
Now, we are going back to that but inside the store.’ Doug says customers also like the idea that the business they go to for their eye care has a strong structure behind it; while liking the individual approach in practice. They want to know that there is someone in the background driving the business on and overseeing the clinical excellence.
The future
The milestone of 1,000 stores comes as Project Boost is rolled out and the couple will not be drawn on how many more stores might be added in the future. ‘I think the focus now is on improving the quality of the stores and the services, in other words; bigger and better fitted,’ says Doug. ‘That programme has got quite intense, so the amount of money being spent by practices in upgrading is huge.’
Alongside the refurbishment programme, known as Project Boost, Dame Mary adds that there have also been quite a few relocations to increase space. Upgrades are running at around two or three a week. ‘I like the way we are separating the retail side and the clinical side, not separate but in a different area, creating a different ambience and that is helping.’
Casting their eyes to the future it is clear the internet looms large. How will that play out, asks Optician? ‘In the next five to 10 years we know there is going to be a big growth in internet trading,’ says Doug. ‘Our focus is: “What are we going to do about that?”’ He says expect increased efficiency to compete with any competition that lies ahead. ‘People want convenience and will drift towards the internet as it becomes more efficient.
That meant Specsavers can’t be inefficient in store or charge high prices. Technology has to be joined up more efficiently and productively. He says the stores have to be ready for customer levels to return to pre-lockdown levels, while cost of living pressures meant prices had to stay competitive. ‘We are trying to ensure that we are efficient, we have an e-comm offer so we are ready when the competition comes.’
Dame Mary says you have to listen to the customer. ‘We have a lot of people working on making the patient journey seamless. Are they [customers] going to sit in their armchair or are they going to visit Specsavers? We want to make it seamless so they can do both and make it easy for them. Not separate: here’s the internet, here’s a store, but marrying the two in together, which is the secret. We’re not waiting for it to happen somewhere else.’
This still relies on real people in real stores, she adds, making the point that although young people might think the internet is enough to meet their needs there will come a time when they are older when they want more personalised care and to see a human being. It comes back to seamlessness. ‘Marrying the two together. You have different age groups and different attitudes and different needs,’ she explains.
When asked if they realised how synonymous the Specsavers brand would become with eye care Dame Mary is typically modest. ‘We didn’t plan out at the beginning that would be the way that it would go. It just happened.’ Given the current emphasis on professional development, technology and clinical care Optician plays devil’s advocate and asks if, in hindsight, choosing the name Specsavers was wrong. Doug insists that as well as offering high quality care ‘we are still good value.’
Dame Mary reveals that the couple still argue over who thought the name Specsavers up but concludes: ‘It’s a good name. It does what it says on the tin.’