If there is strength in diversity, then two married optometry practice owners in Western Australia are an absolute power couple, harnessing their very different talents to make a real difference in the wider family that is their community.
Dr Stephanie Yeo doesn’t do anything by halves.
Not only is she a decorated optometrist, researcher, business owner, PhD candidate, author of scientific material, and mother of two.
Dr Yeo is also a musician (at the time of writing she was preparing for a trip to play the cello at Sydney Opera House).
And when she became a Civil Aviation Safety Authority-certified practitioner, a certificate on the wall wasn’t enough.
The self-described ‘nerdy’ optometrist, who is “painfully curious in everything”, had to have flying lessons to get a greater sense of a pilot’s role and the requirements placed on their vision.
Husband Mr Lionel Lim doesn’t have his wife’s long list of optical industry qualifications.
He’s no cellist but neither does he play second fiddle in a powerful partnership that is E Eye Place, which is developing its second Western Australia eyecare practice and working towards plans for a third, which will take their business in a new direction.
Lim’s strength comes from the honest recognition of his own limitations and value in other areas.
The couple met while studying for their optometry diplomas at Singapore Polytechnic. But while the woman who would later be his wife swept all before her with an intense focus and passion for the subject, Lim had to concede that maybe his talents lay elsewhere.
“I realised that I wasn’t a very good optometrist,” he says.
No matter, Lim had a head for numbers, business and commercial opportunities. He earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of WA, majoring in finance (corporate and investment) and marketing.
A career in banking followed – four years with plenty of recognition and a number of awards.
But the couple wanted to start a family, “and by my experience of working in the banks, along with my underlying chronic health issues, I realised that would not have been possible – it takes out a lot of time, a lot of travel. We decided that that wasn’t what we wanted”.
What they also realised was that there were tremendous opportunities in optometry.
One of those was working towards a partnership in a corporate network.
“Everyone was saying it’s such a good offer, you should pick it up,” Dr Yeo says.
Lim looked at the books, Dr Yeo considered what she wanted to achieve clinically, and they decided the better opportunity was in striking out on their own.
“I decided that for what I would like to practise, full-scope optometry with autonomy, it wasn’t the right thing for us,” she says. “So we basically just went against the grain and against the convention, I suppose, and we said that we’re going to try it, and if we fail, that’s fine.”
The pair put their savings into opening their first practice in 2016, in the coastal Perth suburb of Port Coogee. It was a greenfield business in a new shopping mall, where they offer full-scope optometry services and a strong focus on dry eye, myopia control and in-house lens edging.
But it was the next move that indicated the power of their partnership and the depth of their own wider vision for optometry within healthcare.
At the end of 2021 they bought an established practice in Shelley, 25 minutes inland from Port Coogee.
“It’s an older area, a mature suburb where the previous owner had operated for over 40 years,” says Lim.
That meant they had a good number of established patients. But it also meant that many of the practice’s methods and much of its infrastructure were outdated.
“It did not have a web page, it had paper cards, was still using phone recalls and sending out letters.”
Lim and Dr Yeo saw an opportunity to grow the patient base as well as the footprint of the property.
“It was very under-utilised,” says Lim. “It was your typical outer-suburban standalone property that was converted to a consulting room, so we put in money to actually renovate the whole thing, make it youth friendly, and more accessible for elderly.
“We see a lot of pathology such as keratoconus, glaucoma and macular degeneration,” says Dr Yeo. “So we do a bit of co-management with the specialists as well. It’s full-scope optometry.”
That renovation has developed into a multidisciplinary five-room practice, with three of the rooms used by other health professionals, including a chiropractor and a psychologist.
Far from failing, success clinically and commercially has spurred the pair to push on with plans for a third practice that will extend their healthcare vision even further.
Fired by her fierce curiosity and his eye for commercial opportunity, they are working on something “even bigger in terms of its scope”.
They are taking what they have learned in opening a greenfield optometry practice and then establishing a multidisciplinary health centre to develop an interdisciplinary model.
Dr Yeo sees their previous ventures as a “learning curve for me and test to see how there’s synergy between different allied health professions. Now we’re going to extrapolate that to becoming interdisciplinarian, with GP services and other allied health services.”
Still in development, the idea is to establish a “one-stop shop” for patients.
“So, for instance, someone has diabetes,” says Dr Yeo. “They would come in and have their routine systemic health check with their GP, then an eye test, a hearing test . . . it’s about that patient’s journey; they’re not visiting just for one thing.”
They may be in the planning stage, but you wouldn’t bet against them executing that vision.
At the heart of this great endeavour is a mutual respect for what they each bring to their business partnership. And clear boundaries for what happens outside it.
“I’m supportive of Steph’s work in terms of a clinical world,” says Lim.
“When you’re a good clinician, and she is a fantastic clinician, your mind needs to be focused and zoomed in on looking after patient care, and that usually takes up a lot of time and effort of your day already.”
In this, he’s willing to play second fiddle.
“He does a lot of the work that I’m terrible at doing,” says Dr Yeo.
“So he’s a very good dispenser, on top of being very good with numbers, generating complex business proposals, speaking to council and project-managing.
“You’ve got to trust the other party as a working relationship, trust the other person’s input into it,” he says.
They also have trust in and support from national optometry network ProVision, which they joined as they were establishing themselves and their new practice, and getting to grips with how it all worked.
“We were wondering how much we should be paid? What’s the minimum number of patients we need to see in order to be sustainable?” says Lim.
“Then soon we were extremely busy and there’s so many invoices that we have to chase. It helped to take the load off and streamline some of the back-end operations, and there’s support for human resources – those two are really big pain points.”
Whatever that pain may be, the two also work hard to make sure they don’t take it home with them.
“We try to make sure we don’t talk about work at home, unless it’s really something that’s mission critical,” he says.
Two children, aged six and 11, help with that strong familial focus.
“They take up a lot of our time as well,” she says, “and I think the beauty of being an independent . . . I can determine I’m not going to see a patient during this time so I can attend a school ceremony.”
That support for each other in life and work extends to their children. “We try to make sure that we encourage our children to take up their passions.”
And grow this powerful partnership even further.
