The question
Why should where you live decide whether you can see? My partner Satish, a qualified optician, noticed that care home residents, people who are housebound and people living with dementia or limited mobility were going months, sometimes years, without an eye test, because the service never came to them.
In 2009, working from our flat in Ealing, we started a domiciliary eye care service to bring professional care to the people who need it most.
Complementary by design
Satish owned the clinical side: making every eye test meet the highest standards, sourcing portable equipment and building relationships with laboratory partners. His rigour is the foundation of the trust care homes and families place in us.
I owned the operational and strategic side. I designed and built a custom CRM and workflow system from scratch, covering scheduling, patient records and the coordination of a growing team of mobile optometrists. I shaped our market strategy and the infrastructure that let us scale without losing the personal touch.
Growing with purpose
2009
The question
Two founders, one flat, a conviction that vulnerable people deserve better eye care.
2010 to 2015
Growth
From Hertfordshire across the Home Counties and into North West London, driven by word of mouth from care home managers.
2015 to 2020
Beyond vision
Domiciliary hearing care, dementia-specialist vision care and a digital portal for care home managers.
2020 to now
450+ care homes
A team of 15 optometrists, dispensing opticians and support staff, serving thousands of residents every year.
Designing the operation
Simplifying complexity is the thread through all of it. I designed Opticall's patient management system, which took the business from paper to paperless, with modules for patient and care home management, scheduling, dispensing, deliveries and analytics.
Today I design and build our internal tools myself. I built our clinical team performance dashboard in Next.js and Supabase, deployed on Vercel, and I use Claude to automate the operational workflows that used to eat our admin team's week.
What it taught me
I don't just research operators. I am one. That changes how I weigh every trade-off I make for a client.
The numbers that matter most aren't commercial. They're the residents who can see their grandchildren's faces again, and the independence restored by glasses fitted in the comfort of a familiar room.