Today I’ve got Dr. Travis Zigler, who graduated in 2010 from The Ohio State University College of Optometry with Magna Cum Laude honors. He is the co-founder of Eye Love, eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to end preventable blindness. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free and low cost clinics in South Carolina and Jamaica. They also started a charity called the Eye Love Cares Foundation, eyelovecares.org, which provides exams, glasses and sunglasses for those in need, free education, and scholarships for students that align with their mission.

Eye Love does an average of $180,000 per month on Amazon and Shopify. He has created highly engaged communities of over 2,000 people and growing daily.

In this episode you’ll learn,

• How Travis started his business


• How Travis acquired businesses and leverages them together


• How he’s built a business from passion


• How to build a brand leveraging SEO and content


• The people behind Eye Love and the charitable actions of the company


• The growth and decisions behind the company


• Strategic decisions and business operating


• Lots of golden nugets. Did I say lots!?

Transcript coming soon

Dr. Travis Zigler

1. Business Igniters on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Business-Igniters-165108987349546/

2. Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/Dr-Travis-Zigler-261315727610737/

3. Eye Love: https://eyelovethesun.com/

Ashlin Hadden Insurance Agency

http://www.voldico.com/find-an-agent/ashlin-hadden/

DAVID ALADDIN: Great having you on the show, Travis.

TRAVIS ZIGLER:  Hey, David thanks for having me.

DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before you guys were selling on Amazon and Shopify? Where did your journey begin?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: Now it began I mean back in college. I mean, we, my wife went to the University of Michigan, I went to the Ohio State University for under grad and we ended up meeting and started dating when she came to optometry school in 2007 and I was a second year she is a first year. We dated throughout Optometry school and started practicing in Columbus, Ohio from 2010 to 2015. And 2015, we worked for my uncle in Columbus, Ohio, and we decided we wanted to go off on our own and do our own things. So we actually pretty much quit our jobs, moved across the country to South Carolina and started two new practices from scratch and then with, whenever you’re staring up a new practice it tends to be a little slower at first while your gaining that initial clientele similar to your Amazon business.

You’re not selling two to three hundred units a day—you’re selling one to two units a day and you’re building up from there and practices the same way. And so I was bored and we found the amazing selling machine was on its fifth version in May 2015 and we bought it and just went through the course and didn’t follow the training for picking out a product. Just did what we know and what we loved which is eyes, and just going to went from there. So May or July 2015 in when we got our first sale and we did the typical rookie mistake of only ordering a hundred units, selling out in seven days and realizing, wow, this is real. So then we brought in an investor and we dump about twenty thousand of our own dollars in and grew from there.

DAVID ALADDIN: Okay. So like before the whole Amazon thing, you guys joined the practice for five years. When did you get the, you had this concept of just like living you know the safe area of the job and whose idea was it first, you or your wife’s?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: My wife is definitely. She likes to be safe. Very, very safe so it was definitely my idea but probably back in 2012 or 2013, I read a book, called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which I’m sure a lot of you readers have read and I’m sure it has changed a lot of their lives. And so we got in the real state. We bought our first duplex about a year later and we still have the duplex actually. It’s in Columbus, Ohio, and we just have two tenants rent from us and we just realized that the path to ultimate wealth is owning a practice. We looked at the owning a practice up in Ohio and we just wanted to get out the winner and that’s why we kind of made the plunge to come all the way down here in South Carolina.

DAVID ALADDIN: What does it take to start like a practice?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: A lot. A lot of patience and so, when you’re first starting out a practice you pretty much—we actually bought an existing practice but it was actually on the downhill. It would—did to about 220 its first year, 180 at second year, and then the third year it did 120,000 and that’s when we came in and purchased it. We got a really good deal on it and unfortunately, it was kind of had a bad rep in the community so we had to build that back up and we did that pretty well just by getting out and getting involved in the community like a typical business that’s local does. And you just accept every insurance plan possible even if it’s not profitable, and very similar too when you launch a product, you just try to do things for free for people, you find influencers in the community, and you are the sneezers in the community, whatever you want to call, and you give him free eye care, or you give him free glasses and don’t tell everybody.

DAVID ALADDIN: So, do you mind saying how much you guys bought that business for?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: Yes. So we bought it. We bought both locations for about $67,000.

DAVID ALADDIN: Did that include like the physical property and everything?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: So the one location has a physical property included everything inside of it. It was actually a rental. So they rented the—it was a duplex building and we rented half of it and then all the stuff that was inside of it that came with it: glasses, all the equipment, computers. The other location is inside a Walmart so we don’t own any of the equipment. We just own the patient’s charts.

DAVID ALADDIN: Why do you think the people sold it?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: I know why they sold it. The owner was going through a lot of problems in life and he was battling a couple different diseases and he was young like us, and so he just decided that it wasn’t for him anymore. And it was perfect for two doctors to come in and grow and he just didn’t have the time and at the energy, definitely not the energy to commit to growing it anymore which shows in the early revenues. So going from 220 to 180 to 120 over a three-year span shouldn’t happen in any practice.

DAVID ALADDIN: Definitely not. Like the margin on that type of businesses is—it’s mostly service business, right?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: It’s all service base. We do have an optical, we did have an optical on our old office that we sold and that old optical—the optical makes up about 60%-70% of our revenue which is glasses, contact lenses, everything like that.

DAVID ALADDIN: So, at these clinics you can also sell your products as well, right?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: Yeah, we do. And so, we didn’t have products at beginning but now we do in our Walmart location. We sell all of our consumables there.

DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool and then, okay, so you guys acquire this business for about 66K and then you guys sold it at some point?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: Yeah, we sold one of them. So, we sold the private practice which had all the equipment and the glasses and everything and we went up selling it for about I don’t—yeah, it was around 150 mark.

DAVID ALADDIN: Nice.

TRAVIS ZIGLER: And then we still have the other location which is kind of our cash cow and that doesn’t really have any overhead. It has three thousand dollars a month in over head so after we see thirty patients in a month it pretty much pays for or that’s all profit.

DAVID ALADDIN: And are you guys the one’s running the business or do you have like employees that do it now for you?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: We still run the business. I work a day and half a week and my wife works two days a week, and we only work three and a half days per week. And those three and half days rotate so, we don’t work… we work like a, it’s called a schedule crunch. We work Thursday through Saturday one week and then we work Monday through Wednesday the next week and so it makes it very nice because we’ll have sixty seven day weekends to work on our business on our eCommerce business and then it allow us just more freedom to travel and do what we love.

DAVID ALADDIN: You guys are in a very interesting situation because you have this retail side and then you also have this eCommerce side. Do you see the eCommerce starting to take over the retail side?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: Head to the first year.

DAVID ALADDIN: Jeez. So what’s, I know we’re jumping ahead but what’s the plan?

TRAVIS ZIGLER: The plan right now is we have a contract with Walmart that we’ll stay in there until January and then we’re pretty much evaluating everything right now if we want to keep it or if we want to get rid