A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your practice for — the associate-optometrist salary they'll subtract because you generate the exams, the managed-vision-care concentration (VSP or EyeMed) they'll grade, and the diagnostic-equipment refresh they'll assume. Built from your actual numbers, not a generic calculator. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Optometry Practices ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
In most independent practices the owner-OD personally generates the bulk of the exam revenue — and patients book with you by name. A buyer sees that as the single biggest transfer risk: they normalize a market associate-optometrist salary to replace your chair time (which lowers the earnings they pay a multiple on), and they price the risk that patients follow you out the door. A PE platform can slot an associate under its own brand; an SBA-backed individual buyer is underwriting whether the practice survives your exit. Documented second-OD coverage is the clearest fix.
If a single managed-vision-care plan — typically VSP or EyeMed — carries an outsized share of your exams and optical, your margin moves with their fee schedule and their network decisions, not yours. A buyer underwrites managed-care concentration the way they'd underwrite customer concentration anywhere: a practice that is 40%+ one plan, with shrinking reimbursement, is repriced for that exposure. Fee-for-service and medical-insurance-billed eye care is the diversifier buyers credit.
The optical-retail leg — frames, lenses, and especially contacts — competes directly with Warby Parker, 1-800 Contacts, and Amazon on price and convenience. Buyers know the contact-lens reorder book and the frame board are the parts most exposed to online leakage, so they probe your optical capture rate and your contact-lens annual-supply attach. A practice whose optical is being commoditized away is worth less than its exam volume suggests.
Optometry is an equipment trade — an end-of-life OCT, autorefractor, or visual-field analyzer is exactly what a buyer marks up to replacement cost and subtracts from the cash flow they're buying. Pair that with a single producing OD (you) and no associate or retention agreements, and a buyer prices both a capex refresh and key-person risk. In a tight OD labor market, a producing associate is among the hardest roles to replace.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1.0m–$1.8m-revenue single-location practice, ~12–18% owner-normalized ebitda — about $200K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Getting yourself out of being the only doctor is the single biggest lever on the multiple. An associate carrying a real share of exams proves the practice produces without your hands — and it's what crosses a practice from SDE pricing into the platform's normalized-EBITDA tier, removing the key-person discount every buyer applies.
adds about 0.5–1.0× to your multiple · usually takes 18–36 months
The annual-exam recall engine and the contact-lens annual-supply reorder book are the closest thing a no-contract practice has to recurring revenue. A systematized, measured recall plus a high contact-lens auto-reorder attach reads to a buyer as durable, modelable revenue — and lifts the multiple.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Shifting the book toward medical eye care — diabetic eye exams, glaucoma, dry-eye, urgent red-eye billed to medical insurance — diversifies away from managed-vision-care fee schedules and online-optical competition, and pays better per visit. A higher medical mix raises both margin and the defensibility of the earnings a buyer is pricing.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
The optical leg is worth defending, not conceding: a high exam-to-eyewear capture rate, a managed frame board, and a strong contact-lens program keep the retail margin in-house instead of leaking to Warby Parker and 1-800 Contacts. A buyer credits an optical operation that demonstrably converts its own exam traffic.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade optometry practices on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Optometry Practices benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~35% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~62% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~14% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 20% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 4.0–7.0× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Optometry is in an active consolidation wave, and the buyer pool splits in two. An independent / SBA-financed single-OD buyer acquires sub-$1M-EBITDA practices and prices on SDE — this is who most owner-ODs sell to. Above that, the PE-backed platform / MSO market pays up for associate-leveraged, medical-mix-rich, multi-location practices: MyEyeDr. (Goldman Sachs), EyeCare Partners (Partners Group), AEG Vision (Riata Capital), Keplr Vision (Imperial Capital), and Total Vision (Bregal Partners). Vision Source is a ~3,000-practice member-owned alliance (EssilorLuxottica) — scale without selling. The platform multiple is what a seller climbs toward by reducing clinical dependence, not what a solo owner-OD receives. The memo maps which pool fits a practice your size.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
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Most Optometry Practices businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 4.0× to 7.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.6×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
If you're the only or primary doctor, on SDE — and a buyer will still charge a market associate-optometrist salary against your earnings before applying the multiple, because someone has to do the exams you do today. EBITDA pricing (and the higher platform multiples) is for practices that already run on associate doctors. The DealStats medians — about 2.0x SDE and 4.6x EBITDA for this code — come from thin samples (around 28–30 deals), so treat them as ranges, not precise numbers.
Sometimes — but only if your practice looks platform-ready: more than one OD, a real medical-eye-care mix, clean books, and earnings that survive your exit. Those buyers pay normalized-EBITDA multiples that step up with scale. A solo owner-OD whose exams are personally generated usually sells to another optometrist on SDE instead, at a lower multiple. The platform price is what you climb toward by reducing your own clinical dependence.
A lot. The exam side is high-margin professional service; the optical side (frames, lenses, contacts) is inventory-carrying retail with thinner margins and direct online competition. Two practices with identical revenue can be worth very different amounts depending on that split — which is exactly why a revenue multiple is only a sanity check, and the real value is built from your normalized earnings and your recall/contact-lens recurring base.
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