Michele Self is the Program Facilitator at Cleinman, a consulting firm that helps independent optometry practices improve operations, strengthen teams, and grow sustainably. She facilitates FrameWorks, Cleinman’s peer-to-peer program for opticians, where she guides discussions, shares optical best practices, and helps teams improve performance, patient care, and profitability. Michele is also the Owner of A Spectacular Gaze LLC, which provides on-site optician training and inventory management for private practices.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [2:41] Michele Self’s journey from private practice optician to educator, consultant, and Cleinman facilitator
- [5:23] How education can help opticians turn a job into a profession
- [7:28] Michele’s breakdown of why remakes matter to practice success and patient trust
- [11:34] What product warranties reveal about lens quality, patient expectations, and remake patterns
- [15:01] Why Michele recommends using lab reports to track errors and spot training needs
- [19:33] Michele’s warning about remakes damaging reputation, confidence, and future eyewear purchases
In this episode…
A successful optical boutique depends on more than stylish frames or strong sales. Small operational details shape patient trust, profitability, and the practice’s reputation. When mistakes happen, how can a team use them to improve instead of repeating the same problems?
Optician educator and optical practice consultant Michele Self explains that the answer starts with tracking remakes and understanding what they reveal. Remakes are not just isolated errors; they can point to issues with lab work, doctor changes, product warranties, staff training, or how products are explained to patients. Michele emphasizes that practices should review remake data consistently, categorize errors accurately, and approach mistakes with kindness rather than blame. With the right systems in place, practices can reduce costly errors, strengthen patient confidence, and make smarter decisions about staff education and product offerings.
In this episode of the Cleinman Connect Podcast, Kim Carson chats with Michele Self, Program Facilitator at Cleinman, about taking ownership of your optical boutique through smarter remake tracking. Michele explains why remakes affect success, how to identify training opportunities, and what product warranties reveal. She also touches on patient education, staff accountability, and protecting the practice’s reputation.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Kevin Wilhelm on LinkedIn
- Kim Carson on LinkedIn
- Marketing4ECPs
- Cleinman
- Michele Self on LinkedIn
- “Adding up the Pieces of Your Practice’s Financial Puzzle” with Annelies Calnan on the Cleinman Connect Podcast
- A Spectacular Gaze LLC
- American Board of Opticianry
- National Academy of Opticianry
Quotable Moments:
- “When you stop learning, you shouldn’t do the job anymore. I do regular continuing education.”
- “Remakes has everything to do with how successful your business is. If you have lab remakes, you have a problem.”
- “There should be someone in the practice tracking remakes for your practice. That is the only way.”
- “Even if these errors don’t cost you money, you don’t want it to cost you patients.”
- “We need to make sure that they understand their job. But really, it comes down to not only just that.”
Action Steps:
- Track all remakes consistently: Monitoring lab, doctor, and warranty errors helps identify patterns and educational opportunities for staff.
- Analyze product offerings carefully: Evaluating which products generate remakes ensures patients receive high-quality lenses and frames, protecting satisfaction.
- Provide targeted staff training: Using remake data to guide education improves accuracy, reduces errors, and builds team competence.
- Assign a dedicated supervisor for oversight: A responsible team member ensures errors are tracked, addressed, and communicated without blame.
- Communicate openly with patients about products and processes: Educating patients builds trust, reduces misunderstandings, and strengthens long-term loyalty.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Marketing4ECPs.
Working with them is like hiring a full-time marketing professional who knows the industry and understands your goals. Except, instead of one experienced marketer, you get a whole team in your corner.
Whether you’re an optometrist, ophthalmologist, or optician, they can help you grow your business with a plan that’s completely customized for you. Learn more here.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:07
Welcome to the Cleinman Connect Podcast, where we discuss marketing, ownership, growth strategies and everything else surrounding the business of optometry. Cleinman is Optometry’s trusted business partner for over 35 years.
Kim Carson: 00:28
Hello, I’m Kim Carson hosting Michele Self of Cleinman on this episode of the podcast. You can check out a recent episode of the show that I did with Annelies Calnan, the Director of Practice Transitions here at Cleinman. And she can answer all the questions that you may have around EBITDA. That episode and more can be found at Cleinman.com or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
This episode is brought to you by Marketing4ECPs. Working with them is like hiring a full time marketing professional who knows the industry and understands your goals. Except instead of one experienced marketer, you get a whole team in your corner, whether you’re an optometrist or ophthalmologist or optician, they can help you grow your business with a plan that’s completely customized for you. Learn more at marketing4ecps.com.
I’m joined by Michele Self. She owns a Spectacular Gaze LLC offering on site training and inventory management for private practices. She is also an optician supervisor, optics educator at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, Birmingham. Ooh, I don’t say Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham very often at the School of Optometry. And she did retire after 20 years there. Very prestigious career. In 2015, Michele was named one of Vision Monday’s 50 Most Influential Women in optical. She has received the optician of the year award back in 2019, and she is the first female president of the American Board of Opticianry and served on the National Academy of Opticianry boards. Michele is an ABA approved speaker and honored fellow of the Opticians Association of America, and is an American Board of. Or sorry and is. American Board of Opticianry certified and is also a fellow of the National Academy of Opticianry. Wow wow wow. Thank you for joining me today, Michele.
Michele Self: 02:15
Thanks. It sounds so impressive when you say it out loud. I know when I list all the.
Kim Carson: 02:19
Things in a row, right when I list someone’s whole life.
Michele Self: 02:23
That’s funny.
Kim Carson: 02:25
No. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for having the time for recording with me today. Me of course. Yeah, I honestly going through that whole bio, I’m like, I, I want to know more about the journey to get you here.
Michele Self: 02:41
Oh my gosh. So I married my husband and we had four children. And when my fourth child was three months old, I went to college. Wow. Yeah.
It took me a long time to get that degree. But then I got a job at an optometry practice that offered my daughter free glasses through the Lions Club because my husband was a policeman and made no money, and when it was time to go to work, they offered me a part time job and it started from there. And my love started and I knew I was good at it. Insertion, removal. I was good at helping people pick out frames.
And then a year later, my husband retired from police work and decided to move from the Chicago area to Alabama, where I eventually got the job. After working at a couple of private practices, I got the job as someone working in the lab at the University of Alabama, Birmingham School of Optometry. It was the joy of my life. I’m telling you, training and teaching optometry students was. I don’t know if I could ever top that, honestly.
I mean, that’s just was my love. But when I retired and it was just time to retire, I’d gone through three deans and I’m like, okay, I’m good. Decided to start my own consulting business training opticians on site in the practices. So I’ve been doing that since 2019 and I love doing it. I travel all over the country, and I was honored that Cleiman asked me to come and help with their frameworks group, and eventually I kind of worked into the management group as well, kind of backing away from that a little bit now, because we’ve got a new direction, a great direction going on with management work.
So I can kind of focus back on frameworks and my love and it’s just how it’s been going. I love it.
Kim Carson: 04:31
That is stunning. I can’t, you know, you said, oh, it took a while for you to get a degree, but you had, you said four children. Yeah.
Michele Self: 04:41
And now 17 grandchildren.
Kim Carson: 04:43
Oh my God.
Michele Self: 04:45
Yeah.
Kim Carson: 04:46
Yeah. I’m kind of sitting over here like, what can’t she do?
Michele Self: 04:52
Oh, there’s plenty, trust me. My husband will tell you.
Kim Carson: 04:56
Oh my goodness. Well, no, honestly, I mean, the honor is all ours. At Cleinman to have you on our team and to have you leading frameworks like you do. It’s just, you know, thank you so much.
Michele Self: 05:09
I love them all.
Kim Carson: 05:12
I do want to know you, you know. Is it it the teaching the opticians of tomorrow that is maybe your favorite part or somewhere else?
Michele Self: 05:23
I mean, honestly, I think it’s just knowing that when I retired from the School of Optometry, talking to and meeting so many opticians around the country, realizing that there are only 22 states that license opticians in the country, and people have to have a license for hair, but they don’t have to have a license to be an optician. And other than 22 states. So it’s always been my passion that no matter where there’s licensing or not, there’s going to be education. And, and it’s my passion that opticians understand that their, their, their work is not just a job, that it can be their profession and they can be great at it. And really and truly what it comes down to is I want private practice to succeed.
I don’t want private practice to go away. That’s my goal in life. And it’s probably going to be the goal until I die.
Kim Carson: 06:19
Yeah, I agree. It’s important. That’s a great goal. Yeah, it’s very important. How do you keep expanding your knowledge?
I feel like after so many years teaching and training and growing that maybe you’d run out of resources.
Michele Self: 06:36
I never stopped learning.
Kim Carson: 06:37
Yeah.
Michele Self: 06:38
When you stop learning, you shouldn’t do the job anymore. I do regular continuing education. I read every periodical. I read everything that comes across my computer. I want to learn and grow and never stop learning.
I think the mind goes away when that happens, and I’m not going to let that happen. It’s my passion.
Kim Carson: 07:03
And she won’t let it happen.
Michele Self: 07:04
Nope.
Kim Carson: 07:06
Oh my goodness. We are set to talk about remakes in this episode. Do you want to maybe give a brief like why knowing about remakes and tracking how many practice has is important?
Michele Self: 07:28
Well, I think remakes is a topic that everybody should discuss. The doctor should understand remakes business owners. Of course, the opticians should understand remakes and everyone should be tracking it. So until recently, Cleinman wasn’t tracking it and I asked if it could be because remakes has everything to do with how successful your business is. If you have lab remakes, you have a problem.
If you have too many lab remakes, you have a real problem. The only way to not have remakes is to pay attention to what’s going on. There should be someone in the practice tracking remakes for your practice. That is the only way we know if there are educational opportunities for the opticians, the doctors and educational opportunities are the most important for the patients.
Kim Carson: 08:33
What could happen? Like what would lead to a remake being needed?
Michele Self: 08:38
Well, there are three subcategories of remakes. There’s lab errors, there’s doctors changes, and there’s product warranties. Okay. So lab errors can be whatever’s happening at the lab, that there was an error that happened at the lab. Okay.
That delays a job or causes the job to be remade. Maybe the job was sent to the practice, and the practice verified the finished product and found that the powers were incorrect. The lenses were incorrect. Whatever can happen through the lab. Doctors changes can be anything.
Doctors changes can be. Order entry errors. SIG heightened pupillary distance. Incorrect. Incorrectly ordered.
Wrong powers being ordered. Progressive non adapts. Maybe the frame didn’t fit frame changes or doctor’s errors because those happen as well. And everybody needs to understand what that is. And then there’s product warranties.
So that’s a pretty big one. That’s usually a, a, a large amount of your remakes. And sometimes those are for good reason. And sometimes they need to be investigated. Okay.
So product warranties are one of those things that you want to warranty your products for your patients. That’s what keeps your patients happy. And warranties are good for certain lengths of time based on the products that you’re offering and selling. So let’s say you have a lot of. Remake warranties or warranty remakes for products that you offer that perhaps you’re only selling the best products.
And if you have a ton of warranties, that just means the, the, the patients are taking advantage of those good warranties that you’re offering and you’re offering good customer service. Okay. So, but if you’re offering, let’s say good, better best products. So if you’re selling the best products, those products have amazing warranties because they have the best coatings or hard coatings or or. They have hydrophobic anti-static, three layers of, of, of a scratch coat warranty.
And you’re getting a lot of those. It just means your patients are taking advantage of the warranty. But if you’re selling products that are not the best, you’re just selling good and better. You need to pay attention to the inferior products that you’re selling to give your patient a lesser expensive product. Does that make sense?
Kim Carson: 11:34
I think so, yeah. If you’re selling a premium product, it should and probably does come with its own warranties because it is a premium and it comes at a premium cost to the customer. But then if you have a, a good or a better, and they are offering the same warranty on a not as valuable product Then we have remakes happening and some issues.
Michele Self: 11:58
Right? So if you are selling the best, those warranties make sense. If you’re selling good and better, those products don’t have. As much, let’s just say hard coatings on them like a best product sells a hard coating with three coatings, and that’s going to be less likely to scratch the good and the better. Only maybe has one layer of coating on it, and it’s not going to be as scratchable.
But the patient still feels like I spent a lot of money. You know, why is this scratching? And that’s going to cause problems. So you have to pay attention to the products that you’re selling. So if you’re selling the good and better and you’re having a ton of remakes, you need to reevaluate the products that you’re selling.
That would go down if you sold the best products. Yes. They have the hardest coatings.
Kim Carson: 12:50
Yes. Okay. I’m with you. Okay.
Michele Self: 12:53
So that’s where that’s what we’re looking at.
Kim Carson: 12:56
Okay.
Michele Self: 12:57
Okay.
Kim Carson: 12:58
So then once a practice has evaluated that, what is kind of the next step, like, let’s say that they are selling good and better, not best. And they do have a lot of remakes happening, whether it’s warranties or even outside of that. Like if it is, there’s errors happening. Like what could someone do in a practice to mitigate these remakes being needed?
Michele Self: 13:27
Okay. So there are a lot of things that you can do. First of all, you’re going to pay attention to all of it. Okay. You can and should get a daily report on where.
Jobs are in the lab. Okay. And you should be paying attention to that. Somebody should be tracking that daily. How do you mitigate the errors?
Well, as far as lab errors, only the lab can take care of those. As far as the long list of things that can happen on the doctor’s side, you know, if somebody is making a lot of errors in order entry or PD errors or wrong power. Those are things that can be tracked and educated. So that’s an educational opportunity for the practice to say, okay, let’s see what’s happening. Let’s say there are 15 remakes due to opticians errors of some kind or order entry errors for the month.
Let’s find out where those are happening. And let’s have an educational opportunity with that, let’s do a training. Why is that happening? Let’s track that. Is it one person making the errors?
Is it multiple people making errors? Either way, it’s an educational opportunity.
Kim Carson: 14:47
Okay. And you said there should be a report from the lab. So that does come from the lab. Just a kind of a you know, where everything is at. What’s the status of all the projects like that comes from the lab.
Michele Self: 15:01
It does request daily report telling where everything is in the lab at the time. And then you will get a monthly report saying these were your lab errors for the month. So you will get a report. If you’re not getting the report, you need to seek out the report. I found by going into practices that a lot of the practices aren’t getting that information.
And I think that that’s it’s an opportunity. Okay. So we make sure that those practices are now getting those. But what you do have to understand is what’s sent in as words for the doctors. Change is going to depend on what the optician wants to call it.
Okay. So you need to make sure that someone is investigating. Are those Opticians errors. Are those lab errors really a doctor’s change, or was it a problem with somebody doing the wrong PD and they put in the optician error or the doctor’s error as something other than an actual optician error?
Kim Carson: 16:12
Right. Are they the issues or the mistakes being categorized correctly.
Michele Self: 16:18
Exactly. We need to make sure they’re categorized, categorized correctly to be able to better track them for sure.
Kim Carson: 16:27
And then when you get that report back, who do you think is best to be looking at that and tracking that information?
Michele Self: 16:37
Well, it probably somebody in a supervisory role, but it really, it just need to be somebody who is kind. Yeah. Can I just say that easily?
Kim Carson: 16:49
Of course. Yeah. Michele, you can say whatever you want, right.
Michele Self: 16:53
Right, right. It needs to be somebody who is truly tracking the errors. Okay. Because it has to be somebody who can go to the doctor and say, okay, doctor, I’ve noticed that you’ve had 15 doctors changes this month. Maybe we need to look at that.
You know, it’s one of those things that the doctors never they don’t like hearing that they might have made a mistake, but they’re human, right? But what we have to realize is opticians have to realize is sometimes the doctor makes that change to make that patient happy. Okay. It’s not always about whether they made a mistake. It’s whether they’re going to admit that maybe something needed to be different to make you happy.
Okay. It’s not it’s not 20 best. It’s 20. Happy is what we always like to say in this business. Right.
So? So maybe we have a doctor in one practice that’s making a lot of errors, and then the doctor has the opportunity to have a discussion with the associate doctor. Or maybe there’s one optician in the practice who’s making, you know, three fourths of the PD errors. And somebody needs to be in a role that can go to these employees or talk to these people and tell them without doesn’t have to be gossip in the neighborhood.
Kim Carson: 18:24
Yeah, yeah. Without the blame game. Yep. For sure.
Michele Self: 18:28
So we need to find out how to fix it. Not na na na. And who did it?
Kim Carson: 18:33
Yeah. Yeah. Not you had 15 errors and you need to change that.
Michele Self: 18:38
Yes. It needs some again needs to be somebody kind because what’s happening, Kim, is that these errors are happening. And if anybody isn’t tracking them we’re losing patience. People have to stop and think this. Even if these errors don’t cost you money, because sometimes they don’t cost money.
The labs will sometimes remake a. An error, a doctor’s error, a doctor’s change at no charge one time. Maybe they’ll do it twice, I don’t know. But even if it doesn’t cost you money, you don’t want it to cost you patients. And what I mean by that is your patients, your clients, your customers can lose confidence in your office’s ability to make a pair of glasses correctly for them without having to remake them.
That’s really what it comes down to.
Kim Carson: 19:33
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there’s the old adage too, like, if you have excellent, amazing customer service, you’re going to tell maybe one person, if you have a bad time, you’re going to tell them maybe ten.
Michele Self: 19:46
Bingo. Bingo. That’s exactly, exactly right. Yes.
Kim Carson: 19:51
So yeah, remakes are a sign of your reputation as well.
Michele Self: 19:55
Exactly. Yes. And that’s what it comes down to. We can’t lose our patience because Jane didn’t measure something correctly or Tom didn’t fit a frame correctly. We need to make sure that they understand their job.
But really, it comes down to not only just that you need to be able to know that your opticians or the opticians need to be able to educate patients on the products that they’re offering so they understand the products. So there’s a bunch of folds in there.
Kim Carson: 20:28
Yeah.
Michele Self: 20:28
Yeah. But we don’t want to lose patients because of that. So what I like to think now is, and I don’t like to think this, but I have to think it really is. Are people leaving private practice and not purchasing glasses from offices anymore because we’re not selling products that we should be selling. We’re not selling the best products or or are the opticians not educating the patients on the products?
And then the patients say, well, I’m going to get my eye exam done here because I’ve always gotten a good eye exam. I’m going to take my prescription and I’m going to buy glasses online. Why shouldn’t I? Why should I continue to purchase glasses from Doctor Jones’ office when they can’t make my glasses? Right, I might as well buy them online.
That’s what’s setting them apart.
Outro: 21:30
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