You'll Give 30 Years to Someone Else's Business. Why Not 3 to Yours?
The average optometrist will hand over thirty years of their career to somebody else's business. Ask that same person to give three years to their own, and watch how fast the excuses arrive.
Too risky. Not the right time. Kids are young. Mortgage is high. Maybe in five years.
Five years, incidentally, is nothing compared to the twenty they've already given away. This isn't just an optometry problem. It's an everyone problem. Solicitors do it. Engineers do it. Marketing directors do it. Millions of skilled people spend the best years of their working life compounding value into a business they will never own a single share of.
The maths nobody does
Work for someone else for twenty years and what do you actually walk away with? A pension, if you're lucky. A leaving card. Maybe a nice email from HR.
The business you helped build? It gets sold. Someone else pockets the multiple. Your name isn't on the completion statement. It never was.
Build your own for even a fraction of that time, and the equation flips entirely. Every patient relationship, every process you improve, every hour of unpaid overtime you put in — it all compounds in your favour instead of someone else's. That's not a nicer story. That's a different asset class.
Job security is a myth you were sold, not a fact you were given
Somewhere along the way, "employed" got rebranded as "safe." It isn't. It never was.
A consolidator can acquire a practice overnight with no interest in you. Hours can be cut. A role can be restructured out of existence in a single meeting you weren't invited to. You didn't choose any of it. You don't get a vote. You get a letter.
Security was never the deal. Convenience was. Somebody else handles the risk, the rent, the recruitment headaches — and in exchange, somebody else keeps the upside too. That's the actual trade. Most people never say it out loud.
You show up. You don't get the final say.
This is the part that stings most for skilled professionals. You can be the best clinician in the building, the one patients specifically ask for, the one holding the whole place together on a Saturday — and you still don't decide what the practice charges, what it stocks, who it hires, or what happens to it next.
Someone else makes that call. Someone else always did. You can pour in ten, fifteen, twenty years of clinical excellence and still have zero say in the one decision that matters most: what this business becomes.
The franchise trap: same deal, sharper logo
Here's the one people miss. Buying into a franchise, or a JVP arrangement dressed up as "ownership," often isn't independence at all. It's employment with better branding.
You put your own capital in. You take on the personal risk. You work the hours of an owner. But the pricing is set centrally. The supplier list is set centrally. The brand standards, the marketing, the exit terms — set centrally. When you eventually sell, a chunk of the value you built goes straight back to the franchisor, because the equity you were "building" was theirs to begin with, licensed to you for a fee.
That's nothing. For some people it's a genuinely useful stepping stone. But be honest about what it is: you are still, in large part, building somebody else's business. Just with your own money this time, and your own name over the door for the years they let you keep it.
Two or three years. That's the actual ask.
Nobody is asking you to gamble thirty years on independence. The people already handing over thirty years to an employer never had to ask themselves that question — they just drifted into it, one comfortable pay cheque at a time.
Independence asks for two or three years of genuinely hard graft. Building the client base, getting the systems right, and surviving the lean early months. That's the whole bill. Against thirty years of building equity for someone else, two or three years of building it for yourself isn't the risky option. It's the cheap one.
What this actually means for you
If you're weighing this up right now, the question isn't "is independence risky?" Every path carries risk. Employment carries the risk of decisions made about your future in rooms you'll never sit in. Independence carries the risk of a hard first eighteen months.
The real question is which risk you'd rather own. One of those risks, at least, comes with equity attached to your name at the end.
If you've already given years to someone else's business, the next two or three could finally be spent building your own.
