Marcia Kilgore's 5 Rules — and What the GOC Just Confirmed
Marcia Kilgore built Bliss Spa, Soap & Glory, FitFlop and Beauty Pie without ever waiting for permission, a perfect plan, or someone else's approval of her numbers. Five lessons came out of that career. Every one of them applies directly to an optometrist deciding whether to stay employed or build something of their own.
Kilgore's story, as she has told it herself, starts with no grand plan at all. It ends with a business built entirely on her own terms. That arc matters more to independent optometry right now than it might first appear.
You don't need a perfect plan to leave a broken one
Kilgore didn't start with a five-year business plan. She moved to New York, her tuition funding fell through, and she took a job doing beauty treatments to survive. She was good at it. That was the whole plan, at first.
"You can't sit around thinking, what am I going to do? You have to survive. I knew I had to use the skills I had to support myself and then I would figure it out," she has said of those early years.
Most optometrists waiting for the perfect moment to leave a corporate structure are waiting for a certainty that Kilgore never had either. You do not need the whole plan before you take the first step. You need the clinical skills you already have, and a willingness to use them on your own terms instead of someone else's KPI sheet.
Know the job inside out, then trust yourself to run it
When Kilgore opened Bliss Spa in London, half her trained staff quit in the first frantic weeks. She covered every appointment herself, because she knew how to do every job in the building. "The good thing is I know how to wax and do facials so I could do all of the appointments myself," she says.
Her advice for anyone starting out is deceptively simple: build a business in an area where you already have genuine expertise, so you are never left exposed when things go wrong. Every optometrist reading this already clears that bar. You didn't spend four or five years studying the anatomy of the eye to be told how many minutes you're allowed to spend using that knowledge. The clinical depth is already there. What's missing is the structure that lets you use it properly.
Challenge the idea that this is just how the job is
Kilgore built her career on a simple test: if you can't explain why an idea matters in one sentence, it isn't good enough yet. The same test works in reverse, on the assumptions a whole profession quietly accepts. "Add-on lens conversion is just part of the job." Is it? Say it out loud. It sounds a lot less inevitable once you do.
She also warns against "ownership bias" — believing something is right simply because it's familiar, because it's what everyone around you has always done. A generation of optometrists has been trained inside a KPI structure long enough to mistake it for the only structure. It isn't. It's just the one that got there first.
Expect the sacrifice, and do the deathbed test
Kilgore is honest that none of this comes free. Running your own business means less free time, more research done outside working hours, more attention paid to the market than a salaried job ever demands. But she also uses a test worth borrowing: imagine yourself at the end of your life, and ask whether this is the version of the work you'd wish you had done.
Ask that question about a twenty-minute slot and an add-on lens target. Then hold it against what the GOC's own 2025 Workplace Survey has just confirmed about that slot.
The numbers the profession has been afraid to say out loud
According to the GOC's own 2025 Workplace Survey, forty-eight per cent of respondents said their standard sight test allocation is not long enough for safe care. Thirty-eight per cent said they felt pressured to see a high number of patients each day. Thirty-three per cent said they felt pushed to sell specific high-profit lenses. Thirty per cent said they felt pressure to meet commercial targets over patient needs. Twenty-two per cent said they felt pressured to sell products or services the patient did not need.
Read those five figures together and a pattern appears that no single number shows on its own. This is not a handful of respondents in difficult practices. This is close to half of everyone surveyed describing time pressure that compromises safety, and a third describing commercial pressure that compromises judgement. The survey was published because the regulator has had to formally acknowledge what a commercial structure does to clinical decision-making when the two are allowed to sit in the same twenty-minute room.
The wellbeing numbers are worse than the commercial ones
The same 2025 Workplace Survey found that forty-four per cent of respondents said they had experienced harassment, bullying or abuse at work or study in the past year. Twenty-nine per cent said they had experienced workplace or study discrimination in the same period. A profession where over a fifth of respondents feel pressured to sell products or services patients don't need is a profession where the person in front of the clinician can start to matter less than the number on the screen. Once that shows up in how patients are treated, it tends not to stay contained to patients. It shows up in how staff treat each other too.
What a corporate multiple can live with that you can't
A multiple can absorb a survey like this. It becomes a line in a wellbeing report, a training module, a poster in the staff room. The structure that produced the pressure in the first place stays exactly as it was, because the structure is the business model. Volume and conversion are not a side effect of the corporate approach to optics. They are the approach.
An independent practice owner cannot absorb it the same way, because the owner is also the person standing in the test room. When the appointment slot is too short, they are the one who feels it first and fixes it fastest. There is no regional manager to escalate to and no KPI sheet to blame. There is just the decision, and the freedom to make a different one.
The independence angle
This is exactly the ground The Optical Independent has been standing on since the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe. Staying inside a structure that the regulator has now formally flagged as a source of unsafe time pressure and commercial conflict is not the cautious option. It only looks cautious from the outside.
An independent practice can set a forty-minute new patient appointment because the owner decided that was right, not because a franchise agreement allowed it. An independent practice can refer a patient without a quiet mental calculation about what that referral costs the P&L. An independent practice can say no to a lens target that doesn't exist, because nobody wrote one into the business plan except the owner.
The GOC's figures are not a reason to feel worse about where you work. Kilgore's five lessons are not a reason to feel behind. Both are a reason to ask, properly, whether where you work is where you have to stay.
The path exists. This is where it starts.
