For Bernie Lanigan, making the most of unexpected opportunities has been a consistent theme of his working life as an optometrist. Retiring after 43 years in 2022, he reflects on his career highlights, starting as a young Queensland graduate in the 1970s.
A job offer arising from his first – and only – interview initially lured optometrist Mr Bernie Lanigan to Townsville as a graduate in the late 1970s, working alongside Mr John Walcott.
“In those days, you could tender to regional and rural hospitals to supply spectacles and sight testing on a contractual basis. John, who had established a practice in Townsville, decided he would tender to a few hospitals to get some cash flow while his practice built up,” Lanigan recalls.
“Trouble was, he tendered to 17 hospitals and won all contracts against the incumbents, so he had to service them all. Some he had to turn around every four weeks, others every eight, but it meant he was on the road all the time. He ended up putting a locum in his own practice because he was on the road the whole time.”
Needing to recruit an employee, Walcott paid a visit to the-then Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT, now Queensland University of Technology), just as Lanigan was graduating at the end of 1978.
“He came down and sat in the clinic reception room at QIT and interviewed maybe seven or eight of us. I think he had seen me at a conference I’d attended as a student, and I got the job.”
“I remember the three things John told me at the interview: one, you work with me, not for me; two, call every patient by their first name, and three, don’t hang your degree on the wall until it’s 10 years old.”
Lanigan, originally from Brisbane, packed his bags and headed north, but he didn’t work in Walcott’s practice; instead, he started doing the hospital rounds.
“John worked in the practice, and I did the travelling. I didn’t even have permanent digs in Townsville until maybe six months in. I would stay in accommodation run by the Salvation Army two nights a week and then I’d be on the road for the rest of the time, driving west to Mount Isa, north to Cairns, south to Proserpine and Collinsville, visiting the hospitals there, and many in between,” he says.
It was in stark contrast to his workplace experience as a final year graduate student where he would have two hours with a patient alongside four or five other students performing a battery of tests.
“Whereas, on my first day in the hospital, I saw 28 patients – it was a bit of a culture shock. I had a trial frame, a trial set and a handheld ophthalmoscope – and that was it. I had to dispense as well. I had 15 minutes per patient, doing refraction, ophthalmoscopy – there was no time for binocular vision – and then dress them up in a frame. I was going the whole time,” he recalls.
When Lanigan returned to Townsville at the end of each week, after visiting any number of the 17 hospitals, he worked in Walcott’s practice on Saturday, made up spectacles on Sunday, and would be back on the road Monday.
“When the contract was up for renewal after 12 months, John and I got a bit wiser and decided we were going to charge the outlying hospitals a bit more,” he says.
“But once Trevor Henderson Optometry, the Brisbane-based group of practices at that time, realised there was someone up here tendering against them, they tendered and won them back the year after. Then we tendered again the following year and got them back, but we did it more on our terms.”
Business partners
When Lanigan was about 24 or 25 years of age, he and Walcott came to a business arrangement that would set the course of Lanigan’s career.
“John always said that I worked with him, not for him. He said, ‘Your qualifications are the same as my qualifications, so there’s no difference in status within the practice’.
“He said: ‘Buy in now as a partner, because it’ll cost you less to buy in now than if we build an empire and you have to buy in later’. So I became a business partner early on, which was crazy because I was still running around like a puppy with his tongue hanging out. I had no business sense,” Lanigan says.
Their business started to build. In addition to running the practice in Townsville’s CBD – then re-named Walcott and Lanigan – the pair also opened a suburban practice in Townsville, a regional practice in Bowen, two hours south of Townsville, and a part-time practice in Ayr, an hour south.
“I would service the practice in Bowen twice a week, covering 400kms there and back every Wednesday and Saturday. I did that for five or six years,” he says.
Looking back on it, Lanigan says he took opportunities as they presented.
“I’m not a planner, I tend to fall into opportunities, they just seem to envelop me. John was always the brains of the outfit in terms of business, and he would say we need to expand there, or we should look at that, so I’d go along for the ride. But I don’t know that I contributed a lot in moving the practices forward from a business point of view,” he says.
When they decided to dissolve their partnership after seven or eight years, Walcott bought Lanigan’s half of the Bowen and Ayr practices and kept the suburban practice in Townsville; Lanigan kept the CBD practice in Townsville, changing its name from Walcott and Lanigan, to Bernie Lanigan Optometrist.
He remained an independent optometrist for 40 years until he sold the practice 18 months ago to a corporate-style group.
“The price you pay as an independent is that you’re never really away from your practice. I’ve never had long service leave, for example. I think the longest I spent away from the practice in the 40 years was 18 days, so retirement is going to be interesting.”
Out of the blue
Lanigan says he was fortunate too, in that Townsville’s CBD fell out of favour as a commercial centre, which worked to his advantage.
“Anyone who opened up a practice subsequently – or any of the retail-focused optometrists that came to Townsville – came to the suburbs, not to the CBD, so I ended up the only optometrist in the CBD,” he says.
“I ended up becoming a destination as opposed to having to rely on walk-ins. I always had reasonable foot traffic, but I was able to work more by appointment.”
Years later, having built a successful practice, Lanigan and his wife, who helped manage the business, started considering their retirement.
Unlike Walcott before him, Lanigan didn’t consider visiting QUT on a recruitment drive.
“I’ve never gone down the line of looking to employ another optometrist because I’d seen what heartache so many others have gone through,” he says.
“They’d get optometrists to come to Townsville, and none of them seem to want to buy into a practice or seem to have any commercial impetus. They just wanted to come and work and if they lasted 12 months, they lasted 12 months, and if not, someone could replace them. They didn’t look around as if Townsville was a place to come and live; it was only seen as the place to stage the beginning of a career.”
That tendency led Lanigan to believe his own practice would be difficult to sell.
“We believed there weren’t a lot of individuals out there, there weren’t a lot of independent people looking to buy a practice, and it may get to a point where we end up having to walk away from the practice. We’d almost resigned ourselves to that maybe six or seven years ago,” he says.
“Then, out of the blue, I had two phone calls; two large corporations came to me within a week and said, ‘Are you interested in selling?’. This is what I’m saying about opportunities; they seem to look for me rather than me go looking for them.”
Both companies interested in Lanigan’s practice offered to look at his books.
“They both made an offer within pretty tight margins of each other. That gave me a solid indication of what my market value was going to be, so I didn’t even have to go out and price my practice.”
Lanigan and his wife declined both offers.
“It gave us some idea of what sort of figures we could generate if we wanted to give it four more years, so we did. And blow me down if one of the corporations didn’t come back to me three years later, still interested,” he says.
In that time, two independents also interested in purchasing the practice approached Lanigan, putting him in a strong negotiating position.
He ultimately reached an agreement on price, and terms and conditions, of the sale, remaining in the practice for a further 18 months as part of the deal.
Lanigan has now officially retired, having finished his 18-month term in November 2022.
Then and now
Lanigan has seen many changes in the profession during his 40-year career.
Optometrists were not permitted to prescribe therapeutics when Lanigan started but later, when legislation was introduced, he decided not to pursue a qualification in prescribing therapeutics because, he says, he had such a good working relationship with the ophthalmologists in Townsville.
“I felt that there was an open relationship between GPs, ophthalmologists and optometrists in Townsville that I was able to co-manage rather than have to self-manage my patients,” he says.
Lanigan says one of the most significant changes that’s taken place in the years spanning his career is improvements in diagnostic technology.
When he was at university, a fundus camera would take Polaroid-style shots, and the practitioner needed to clip the Polaroid shot inside the file, to ensure it stayed intact.
“Tonometer readings also came out on facsimile paper and if you didn’t write them in the file, the readings would fade. And we didn’t have diagnostics in the early days, so we couldn’t dilate. But all that changed.”
Almost by accident, Lanigan became adept at fitting contact lenses for keratoconus patients. He was thrown into it because there was no one providing that treatment option in Townsville.
“I followed John Mountford through university, and often he would have a patient in Brisbane who would move to Townsville, and he’d asked me to monitor them for him. So, I fell into keratoconic contact lenses, and then I had to move forward with the advances in technology, when it was never my intention to become a keratoconic contact lens practitioner,” he says.
“It became part of my practice because there was no one else doing it. It started building in its own right, because then I started getting referrals from ophthalmologists who were looking to have some of their patients fitted with RGPs. I would never classify myself as an expert, but it became an area of interest.”
He continues: “Again, little opportunities have thrown themselves my way. But I’ve always enjoyed the interactions with the patients.”
“When someone is buying your practice, they ask you what your KPIs are. I never had KPIs – the KPIs for me were patient outcomes. My aim was always to give them comfortable, useful vision, so we tended to work as problem solvers together, me and the patient, to find out where the problem exists, and design its resolution.”
More reading
An insider’s view on rural ophthalmology – Dr Ed Boets
Stop under-estimating healthcare isolation
