A couple of hours before putting this column together, news that the Hakim Group had welcomed both Barnard Levit Optometrists and Tompkins Knight & Son (TK&S) into its bosom landed in my inbox. I’ll be honest, I was shocked.
In both Barnard Levit and TK&S, you have two businesses that have been at the very forefront of clinical eye care for decades and have the industry accolades to show for it. In Brian Tompkins, you have an optometrist who’s about as high profile as the sector gets and Simon Barnard and Alex Levit are hugely respected around the world. The Hakim Group owns what were, once upon a time, the most unremarkable of optical practices, but the same thing cannot be said of the latest businesses to join the group.
If there were dark clouds over independent optometry in the UK before, it now looks like it’s starting to rain. For decades, independents have been squeezed by multiples and, more recently, done battle with online retail. When owner optometrists reach the autumns of their careers, they often have a lack of succession options.
To practice owners, the Hakim Group looks like a perfect exit strategy with a retained sense of independence, but the extent is unclear. Providing practices with back end managerial infrastructure support and leveraging economies of scale with suppliers are two of the Hakim Group’s selling points to would be suitors, but that does mean giving up control of parts of a business. The group may describe itself as a collection of independents, but it feels like the notion of independence is pushed to the very limits.
This wouldn’t be such a concern if the rest of independent optometry was in a great place, but recent years have seen the emergence of the optical business guru, with large followings of practices – that might be independent by name, but not independent in thought.