845 Ryan Alovis: CEO of LensDirect

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Cara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:Today, I'm joined by Ryan Alovis, CEO of an incredible brand, really interesting brand, called Lens Direct. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur who has built and scaled multiple successful businesses, all while staying true to a family-first philosophy. So, Ryan's journey is one of grit and discipline and long-term thinking from bootstrapping in the early days, Magazine Discount Center. I'll let him talk a lot more about that. But Lens Direct was acquired by Ryan in 2009. And since then, he's transformed it into a nationally recognized brand offering everything from contact lenses to eyewear and lens replacement services, you name it.

1:35Kara Goldin:So I'm a huge fan, not only of LensRec, but also of Ryan and his story and how he's been able to grow this incredible company and also category as a whole of online contacts and iSolutions. So I'm really excited to dive into everything Ryan, everything Lens Direct, and how he's ready for you. I'm so ready for it. Amazing how he scaled the business into a modern brand as he has. So welcome. So excited to finally meet you. I'm so excited. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I'm excited to share the stories. Absolutely. So you took a company, well, I should say you're not the founder, the original founder of Lens Direct, but you acquired the brand and turned it into a leading online vision care platform.

2:31Kara Goldin:Can you talk about that moment when you decided that you had to go and do this? the the moment i i don't i don't know it wasn't a definitive moment but i will say that the opportunity to buy back lens direct which was originally started by my family in 1992 and sold off for pennies on the dollar to have that opportunity to go back and bring that company back into our ecosystem under the Alovis family was just incredible. And I mean, for so many reasons, I mean, in a million other scenarios, it never would have happened. And the only reason that I felt like I was capable of bringing and owning LensDirect was because of the company I had previously, which was the magazine subscription space called Magazine Discount Center.

3:29While running that business, I fell in love with the subscription model and recurring revenue that I remember sitting at the table with my family. And I said to my dad, I'm like, you know what? I'd like to get Lens Direct back. I feel like it's just in the ether, you know, it's gone. And we agreed that that let's do it. So I went and I was able to get back to business. And the group that sold me back to business, you know, I'm grateful for them because they didn't have to, you know, it's easy to say no, it's often easier to say no. You know, there was limited upside of them selling back the business.

4:04But in 2009, I was able to buy back the company and Lens Direct. The mission has been clear, no pun intended, ever since. Not without tremendous hurdles, though, I will say.

4:16Kara Goldin:So interesting. I mean, such a different time in the 90s. I mean, the internet was barely started, right? I mean, such a different model. Wild, wild west. Right? I mean, such an interesting time. Well, there was nothing available. Yeah. Just to be clear on what the world looked like then, when I started Magazine Discount Center in 2006, there was no Shopify. There was none of these things that we have access to today. The website was built with me on Skype, if you remember Skype. Me on Skype at three in the morning, two in the morning, speaking to the team over in India. It was just a different world.

4:55And I think, you know, obviously the barrier to entry was real. Even when I took back Lens Direct, the barrier to entry was still super real. Now it's amazing how simple, even now between Shopify and AI and everything that exists, how simple it is to turn the car on for e-commerce. Different time indeed.

5:13Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kira Golden Show is brought to you by Scribe, the workflow AI platform that helps teams scale how work actually gets done. Here's the reality. Most teams don't struggle because of headcount or budget. They struggle because critical knowledge isn't documented. So people do things differently. Tools don't get adopted. And when someone leaves, that knowledge leaves too. That's exactly the problem Scribe was built to fix. Scribe captures any workflow in real time and instantly turns it into a step-by-step guide. No manual writing, no screenshots. you just turn on the extension, go through the process once, and it builds everything for you automatically.

5:56Kara Goldin:I've had so many moments where I was re-explaining the same process over and over. With Scribe, I could record it once and send a link. What used to take 30 minutes took seconds, and it was done. It also automatically redacts sensitive info like emails and account details, so nothing slips through. And with their GuideBe feature, your team gets real-time on-screen guidance showing exactly where to click so everyone does it right the first time. Plus, Scribe actually helps improve your workflows with AI, showing where steps can be simplified or automated. It's not just documenting how work gets done, it's helping you do it better.

6:39Kara Goldin:To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how slash Kara Golden. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash Kara Golden. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive. In time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast.

7:29Kara Goldin:That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn HiringPro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. HiringPro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed.

8:15Kara Goldin:Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Totally different time. So LensDirect, how do you define the brand today for anyone who is not familiar with LensDirect? Yeah, I mean, LensDirect, we are a vision care company at our core. But what I would say is we're much more than that. You know, you look at the playing fields that exist in the optical space today and you've got stores, you've got big chains, and you've got websites and companies that are publicly traded.

9:09They're private equity funded. You know, you're dealing when you buy from Lens Direct, you're really buying from a family. You know, my brother is at the front lines doing the customer service still. I'm there. I'm all in. You know, if I need to come in and pack product, I'm packing product. So how do I define Lens Direct? I think Lens Direct today, and something that I always will hold super close to the heart, is we're a family-first vision care company that does our best to give you the best prices and the best experience possible. If there's a problem, you might hear from me. But who we are today is likely going to be different from who we are tomorrow.

9:49we are in this sort of position where in the next few months, Lens Direct is going through a full rebrand. We will be a different company and a lot of what we're becoming is built by or driven by craftsmanship, heritage, fashion, which today, if you look at Lens Direct, you're not going to see a lot of that. When you look at Lens Direct, Harry, you're going to see a company that is contact lenses and just great prices, and that's good. But what we believe and what I believe, the thesis of the future for us is how do we become a heritage-driven optical company that has the finest product and great prices, not just great prices?

10:36Because, you know, that doesn't help you win the big game. You want to win it all, you've got to have all these things. So that's the future of Lensirect and I'm really pumped about it.

10:45Kara Goldin:So when you bought the company back, how long did it take you before you actually felt like this was going to be successful? Oh, very good question. The answer is many, many, many years. You know, I still am wondering, what the hell am I doing? But in reality, it took a lot of time. And actually, it took a lot more time than I anticipated. I did not expect it to be such a slug and fight. So the answer really is, in 2009, we bought back the business. In 2015, I sold Magazine Discount Center to Time Inc. It definitely allowed me to have the funds and the resources to put back in the lens direct and make it better than what it was.

11:35But I'll tell you, that still was not nearly enough. That helped us go from literally$100 ,000 in sales when I took over the company, which is crazy to imagine. You know, that in 2015, that got us to a couple million dollars in sales. We still were sort of this like, you know, discount contact lens company. The real switch, the thing that made it was in 2020 when Lens Direct made a big investment and decided to go into the optical business and not just be a contact lens company. We launched our lens replacement program and we bought machines and these machines were not cheap. They were very expensive and I could barely afford them, but we bought them.

12:19And lo and behold, what happens right after we make this tremendous investment? COVID. The world shuts down. We're completely unclear of what the next steps. My team doesn't know, do they go to the office? Do they stay home? I have orders that are sitting in limbo. So 2020 was this unique period of, you know, deep, deep in the unknowns, but then out of nowhere, the business quadruples. So suddenly we're like, holy crap, we've got all of these orders. We've got all of these customers. We're barely, we're struggling to even service the customers. So it wasn't even about the revenue anymore. Back then, if you told me I could shut off the sales and just like coast, I almost probably would have said yes.

13:04I mean, you have to remember, I was going and driving three hours some days to pick a product because our contact lens distributor was closed because someone came in contact with someone that had COVID. So 2020 was the defining year where we made this thing absolutely special. And it was from being deliberate with, you know, we said, I saw the demand. I felt comfortable in the team and they were motivated. And we said, screw it. Let's turn the spigot on. And our marketing, we put all the chips in the middle of the table and we spent as much as we could to grow this company. And that has allowed us to get to this point where we are what I believe, you know, one of the largest and best, most reliable vision care companies on the internet.

13:53Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

14:38Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

15:21Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Scribe, the workflow AI platform that helps teams scale how work actually gets done. Here's the reality. Most teams don't struggle because of headcount or budget. They struggle because critical knowledge isn't documented. So people do things differently. Tools don't get adopted. And when someone leaves, that knowledge leaves too.

16:04Kara Goldin:That's exactly the problem Scribe was built to fix. Scribe captures any workflow in real time and instantly turns it into a step-by-step guide. No manual writing, no screenshots. you just turn on the extension, go through the process once, and it builds everything for you automatically. I've had so many moments where I was re-explaining the same process over and over. With Scribe, I could record it once and send a link. What used to take 30 minutes took seconds, and it was done. It also automatically redacts sensitive info like emails and account details, so nothing slips through. And with their GuideBe feature, your team gets real-time on-screen guidance showing exactly where to click so everyone does it right the first time.

16:53Kara Goldin:Plus, Scribe actually helps improve your workflows with AI, showing where steps can be simplified or automated. It's not just documenting how work gets done, it's helping you do it better. To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how slash Kara Golden. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash Kara Golden. So what is something that not a lot of listeners, consumers, potential consumers know about the business in terms of one of the toughest points, I guess, of the business that is something that keeps you up at night? keeps me up at night. The thing that makes Lens Direct unique and deeply, deeply challenging is, and I would say it's our moat now, right?

17:49Like that's got to be the moat because it's really hard to break into. You know, at the end of the day, we're not selling a widget. We're not selling, you know, a basketball card. We're not selling a toy. We are selling prescription eyewear, right? Like you, you get, you get your contact lenses, you go online, you make the purchase. You still need to upload your prescription. You need us to call the doctor and verify it. How about your glasses? You know, when you get your glasses, there's so many variables at play from not just fit, but where your pupils are sitting, where if you get progressive lenses, like the complexities associated with selling prescription eyewear is like Mount Everest.

18:32Granted, and we have to be very flexible. You know, we're competing with every optical store on Main Street to every all these websites and all these, you know, chains. And what I think the biggest and hardest part of Lens Direct is, is we want our customer to be so happy. It's pathetic. We want our customer to tell everyone about us. But sometimes there are mistakes that happen that are just so out of our control, whether it's a doctor not sending the right information or the customer not entering the right information. And these are custom cut lenses half the time for their for the glasses. We often will just give you a full refund and make you a new pair.

19:14And that's what the customer has come to expect in the world of e-commerce. You know, call it the Amazon effect. You can order anything and for whatever reason you return it. Now, that's OK with almost everything. But when When it comes to something that's prescription driven, where we spent a ton of time cutting the lenses, putting the prescription on those lenses, assembling those frames and shipping them to your door so they are perfectly sitting on your face. That's hard. And it's and I just yeah, I think I wish I wish if I could do anything, I wish the customer knew how much we cared and how how much we tried.

19:55Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. I think the customer journey is always something. And you're right. The consumer, you know, they don't care, right? And they're spoiled. It's not their fault. It's their normal. It has become their normal. So you've grown LensDirect without outside capital. Can you talk about the advantage of doing it that way? And maybe also some of the challenges. There's, yeah. I mean, I've always, in the beginning, I definitely never thought of fundraising. In the early days of Lens Direct, it wasn't even a thing. I didn't even consider it. And frankly, I didn't know anything about it. Like, I didn't know that there were VCs and you go to New York City and you just go out and raise money.

20:41So I think the lack of knowing that was a possibility or available almost helped me in a way. Because I already had built Magazine Discount Center with no investors. And that was, you know, I believe a successful business. So with Lens Direct, without even like planting my flag in the ground, I became this like spokesperson I felt for like not raising money and doing it the long and hard way. The advantages of not raising money, well, listen, you get to control your own destiny. And every entrepreneur, I mean, I'm being honest, I don't think there's one that I've spoken to where they haven't been bummed that they don't get to control their destiny, that they spend more time on the phone with boards than they do with growing and running their company.

21:29I don't have to do that. I don't answer to anybody. You know, there's partners, but beyond that, implicit trust to grow and run this company. And I think that's the great pro. But remember, listen, what happens when you raise a lot of money? Of course, you answer to people, but you grow really fast. So there's a whole other argument to that. There's the, you know, fail fast. It's better to fail fast than fail slow. That sucks, right? Oh my God, I spent 15 years of my life growing this company and it's out. So I have the luxury and it may not be fair, but I have the luxury of saying not raising money is the right approach.

22:15but also it depends what business you're going into and what you're selling. If you're going to be starting a company that requires a ton of capital, you have to raise money. You need to, but if you can do it slowly, but surely and thoughtfully methodically and be profit driven, well, that's the dream. That's Nirvana. And, um, I'm so proud of, of having that ability to make these decisions without having to knock on doors and worry about this. but I know I'm going off on this because it's so important. The beauty of not raising is that I had to be profit-centric and service-centric, but certainly profit-centric.

22:54If the business shit the bed, no one's bailing me out. There's no this whole other, oh God, there's this lever I can pull and John and Jane Doe is going to give me 5 million. I'm in. If I fucked up, the business was fucked. Excuse my language. So I had to be so careful every month to be profitable. And months that we weren't profitable, well, let's roll our sleeves up and figure it out and fix exactly what's wrong. Because I would rather be profitable and grow slowly than be burning cash and losing money and grow quickly. I don't care what anyone's doing.

23:29Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Scribe, the workflow AI platform that helps teams scale how work actually gets done. Here's the reality. Most teams don't struggle because of headcount or budget. They struggle because critical knowledge isn't documented. So people do things differently. Tools don't get adopted. And when someone leaves, that knowledge leaves too. That's exactly the problem Scribe was built to fix. Scribe captures any workflow in real time and instantly turns it into a step-by-step guide. No manual writing, no screenshots. you just turn on the extension, go through the process once, and it builds everything for you automatically.

24:13Kara Goldin:I've had so many moments where I was re-explaining the same process over and over. With Scribe, I could record it once and send a link. What used to take 30 minutes took seconds, and it was done. It also automatically redacts sensitive info like emails and account details, so nothing slips through. And with their Guide Me feature, your team gets real-time on-screen guidance showing exactly where to click so everyone does it right the first time. Plus, Scribe actually helps improve your workflows with AI, showing where steps can be simplified or automated. It's not just documenting how work gets done, it's helping you do it better.

24:55Kara Goldin:To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how slash Kara Golden. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash Kara Golden. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive. In time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast.

25:45Kara Goldin:That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn HiringPro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. HiringPro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed.

26:31Kara Goldin:Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, no, I love it. So you've had huge experience and subscriptions and I guess as it relates to LensDirect, auto refill has become the big part of your model. So can you talk a little bit about recurring revenue and kind of, you know, overall growth? And is that more important to brands than actually getting new consumers?

27:21Kara Goldin:Or is it all important? Yeah, well, it's definitely all important. Without new, you know, it's the faucet stops running. I think they're both so important. And you spend a lot more money acquiring a new customer than you do keeping an existing customer. You know, we have this whole sort of, you know, acquire, acquire, acquire. And believe me, that is so critical for the growth of your company. But in terms of what's going to really drive the profit and make us a great company, it's going to be the recurring revenue and the returning customers. So we go above and beyond for our returning customers.

28:02I've, and this is, I usually say this as, as like when I was starting, I would always be like, listen, it takes, you know, it takes an okay company to buy a customer. It takes a great company to keep a customer. So for us, that auto refill, that's the holy grail of our business. We want to make sure that we are accommodating and we're taking care of the customers that bet on us and trust us. So I think you have to be really thoughtful about budget. You have to be smart. You know, we know that we have to allocate a certain amount of money every single month to just straight up marketing that new customer.