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The mission of Prevent Blindness Texas is to prevent blindness and preserve sight. We are leaders and change agents in the eye health space here to empower you!
Hey, it's your eye health experts, Prevent Blindness Texas, and welcome to Eyespiring, a conversation about all things vision and life. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Eyespiring. I'm Heather Patrick, your host. I'm the CEO of Prevent Blindness Texas. We are a public health agency focused on vision, connecting people to hope and vision care throughout the state. I am excited about our guest today. I actually met Kim when I first came to PBT. She was one of the first people I got to meet in her role as LORD. We'll talk a little bit about that.
Heather Patrick:But this is Kim Schuy Greenberg. She is a strategic leader with a strong track record for accelerating business results during her twenty plus years tenure in executive roles. Kim is currently the owner of Pine and Prestige Worldwide, which is a multi location fitness concept that just opened in January 2026. I can't wait to talk about that because that's something new and very different than what you've been doing.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:For sure.
Heather Patrick:Prior to self employment, she was the CEO of a medical manufacturing and distribution company focused on the dermatology sector. A majority of her career was spent at Essilor and Luxottica, and that's how I know her. She has a great eye and experience with marketing and branding, digital content, so we're going to talk all about that. And also Kim is on our national board. So I am really excited to have this conversation with you, Kim.
Heather Patrick:So tell us a little bit more about you.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Yeah, so I have kind of always been very motivated by finding opportunities to have an impact. And I think most of my career, I started my career in finance and, I was a strategic consultant at Bain and Company, and my my focus has always been where is there an opportunity in whatever it is I'm doing that I can drive something or make an impact on the team or the client, the culture, whatever happens to be kind of presented to me. And I think that's been a little bit of how I've tried to live my life as well. And so it takes energy, it takes some confidence, and it also takes a willingness to learn. You know, one of my favorite books talks about that where they say that you're either going to get better or you're going to learn from something that you're doing.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And I am going to find the name of that book Heather and I'm going to let you guys know the name of that because I'm blanking on that part. I'm sorry for that. But, but yeah, I think, in my background, I have studied finance, I've studied strategy, I did go through my career kind of with a classical undergraduate degree at UT Austin, I got an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania, so Wharton Business School and in that time that kind of learning focus that how do I get better focus I think has helped me a lot.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:My career has as you mentioned spanned almost twenty years in the optical industry in various executive roles primarily focused in The United States, but also global roles. And then I've kind of ventured off a little bit in the last few years and tried a few things outside of the optical industry. And I'm having fun just continuing to learn and find ways to make an impact.
Heather Patrick:That's fantastic. I love fellow learners. I am a learner for life.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Love it.
Heather Patrick:But it really is, I do think when you are like that, when you are constantly hungry to learn and improve, it really does drive, I think, how you navigate different opportunities. So let's dive in. So how do you think your role at Bain and some of your other early career opportunities really shaped how you think and also then kind of navigated you forward into the optical space?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So my first role at Bain was really focused as just an, I was an associate consultant in the strategy firm and worked with very big multinational clients. And I think what I learned very quickly in that role is that you can't boil the ocean. There, you can't do all the different things. I was in particular working with Ford Motor Company and they were working on you know managing costs and making you know operations more efficient and you've got to pick something and we don't have to be good at everything and we can't possibly be good at everything. So let's pick the one or two things that we're gonna do.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:You know, I worked on a project where we tried to figure out who the suppliers were that were adding the most value for Ford at the time, and how do you ladder up and partner and leverage the abilities of others to improve, you know, kind of your own position. And so strategy, you know, is a lot about making certain choices and in that process you have to let some other things go. And I think that was something I learned very early on. I also spent time at Procter and Gamble and that's where I think I learned branding and I focused when I was at P and G I was on the Olay brand so it used to be the brand was Oil of Olay. They dropped the oil of to kind of rebrand and reinvent.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And that reinventing the brand required hundreds of thousands of dollars, actually hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing spend. I think we had like a $220,000,000 budget when I was there. The brand was about $500,000,000 brand. So imagine that's a huge investment in marketing. And it was bringing innovation and dialing into consumer insight.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So at the time on the launch of Total Effects that line was really allowing consumers that shop at Food Drug Mass to make a $20 purchase of moisturizer that fights all seven signs of aging, right? And so you're reassuring the consumer you're going to fight all the signs of aging, you're going to spend $20 Then with the REGENERIS line, we kind of tagged works better than department store brands and that was lots of clinical work to get there. That was a $24 product but that we could actually scientifically position it against you know $200 products at department stores.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So really finding ways now that innovation then helped the Olay brand reach $2,000,000,000 so that was a $500,000,000 brand that grew very rapidly to $2,000,000,000 and I there there have been books written on this and it was really fun to be part of that ride. I was a small part of that ride but I learned in that that consumer insight getting into what are people really looking for and how do we deliver that in a meaningful way that we bring value. If Olay had said we're going to charge $99 for our product that would not be meaningful value for what they're delivering.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So it's finding that that right orientation. One of my roles on Olay was also working with dermatology and so in skin care I worked on dermatology. So when I looked to make a career, know, a move from Cincinnati to get back to Texas where, my, family was was living at the time I'm originally from Los Angeles but my parents were here, my brother was here and being back in Texas really is where I graduated high school at Great Fine High School like coming back home.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:That opportunity to join Essilor back then in gosh it was a long time ago 2005 you know twenty one years ago to join Essilor back then was an opportunity to take the dermatology learnings and brand management learnings and bring that to Essilor and my role was Verilux brand manager.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So back in the day in 2005 Verilux brand the Verilux brand was a little stagnant. They had a lot of success with the Verilux comfort lens, they had moderate success with the Verilux panamic lens which was sort of a different design that didn't, you know, have nearly the sales rate that Comfort had. And I had the opportunity to launch within the first few months of being there, had the opportunity to start working on Ipsio which was a head eye movement design which is very specialized and then Verilux Physio. And Physio was really the opportunity I had to reinvent and and reboost the Verilux brand with innovation.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And that innovation message, Physio has done really, really well, we over delivered the first year of the launch, over delivered by $15,000,000 we were selling far more than we expected to in year one.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And then it was our, our approach to launching that product was then adopted globally. And that's when I said, okay, wow, I really am interested in how do I make an impact in our market in The US, but how do I also help colleagues in other markets make an impact there? And so that led me then to not just US roles, but then eventually global roles.
Heather Patrick:So I hear two key words that keep coming up, which I think are really interesting as you look at the progression of your career, but reinventing and innovation. Yeah, and I was actually a marketing major and in the nonprofit space, marketing and branding are usually kind of down near the middle or the bottom on the budget. But I feel like branding is such an incredible part of overall business. I do think it is a missed opportunity very often in our sector not to invest in it. So I'm interested as we talk more about your career, but that branding piece keeps coming up too throughout it.
Heather Patrick:All right. So what was your what has been your toughest leadership moment and what did it teach you?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So before I jump into that, just want to say I'm very excited that Prevent Blindness is now investing in branding and brand building as well, which is a huge movement and a huge opportunity because education without the security of a brand behind the education is, you know, gonna necessarily have the same impact. Yeah. And it's not as action oriented. So, but yeah, so I've had a number of tough challenges in my time.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I guess I'll speak to the the last role that I had at Essilor before I decided I wanted to kind of leap into and try something new was with Helix and Helix was new for me because we for for those that don't know so the Essler Luxottica kind of enterprise has been very committed to helping independent eye care professionals and their own retail locations be successful with bringing consumers into the industry.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Getting people to get their eyes checked, to have exams, to think about their vision, and to invest in their vision and one of the challenges of that has been just that consumer journey. So the patient journey in eyewear is something has to trigger somebody to decide they suddenly want to go get an eye exam. It's not necessarily the same as the dentist where your insurance covers every six months and you just go every six So in eyewear, we were really looking for how do we connect education in the marketplace, brand education or just eye education and the importance of vision.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:How do we connect that to actually getting someone to find a location, book an eye exam and come in and then that optical company, that optical provider easily being able to navigate all the different hundreds of thousands of products that are available, and order that and efficiently get that through and communicate with that client that patient all along. So Helix was, a big idea to connect digitally all of the steps of that patient journey and in that patient journey each of those individual steps, each of the whether they're buying contact lenses right which was a CLX product it was a software built around contact lens purchasing and repurchasing versus eyewear versus frame selection.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Now people are trying on frames virtually. All of those digital interactions Helix was over the kind of umbrella of all of those within us or Luxottica. So first of all, I had never worked in digital. So I was SVP of Helix and we had, you know, massive team, hundreds of people, and it what was new for me was the way digital technologies, digital solutions work, very iterative. You know, you're having stand up meetings with your tech team every single day.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Every day is iteration, every day is progress. You know, remember back in the old days with Verilux, we would set up focus groups and I'd spend months going around and talking to optical employees or opticians, optometrists, sometimes ophthalmologists, but how do we engage the professionals in the industry and then the clients? Those projects would take months. In digital, you know, you're doing things almost in a twenty four hour world. Had employees in The U.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And then we had some employees supporting globally. And so 20 you're kind of working through how do we make this software work better? How do we make it connect? What are the product features that we really need? What are the ones that well, we really need, but we don't have?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Mhmm. And I think the challenge for me, learning that world of digital and how it works was fascinating. The challenge for me was, as you're building this solution you don't know what the end product looks like yet you have to bring people along to it not even knowing what the final solution is. Know how are we going to link appointment booking with all of the different locations that are in The U. S.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:That want to sell let's say a Verilux or a Crizole lens? So something like So I mean it was a huge challenge and of course what it comes down to is team. It comes down to trusting and relying on the people that are each showing up each day committed and passionate about solving this need, this issue, and trust. It comes down to a lot of trust. Yeah,
Heather Patrick:I think people, right? Comes down to relationships and people.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Yeah. And in our case, one of the things that we struggled with was appointment booking systems. There are a lot of standalone systems out there. And these standalone systems will work for getting a man for appointment booking for a hair salon. There's appointment booking systems for all kinds of patient care and to recreate that is expensive and so just having the adequate resources to do it resourcing what resourcing obviously in business is also a really big factor in what you can do.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:You just mentioned it in marketing right? It's one of the you know, most companies aren't spending 40% of their revenue on marketing. TNG we were, but that's not most companies and so investing in innovation and development is a big commitment as well.
Heather Patrick:Yeah, Yeah. So you know, through your career, who has inspired you and why?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So you know it's funny, I think about this a lot. So when I started after my MBA and I started in brand management at Procter and Gamble, I was in the beauty care business and so Olay was one of many beauty care brands and 70% of that floor of brand managers and directors and general managers, they were women. Jenna Drosis was our general manager and Susan Arnold was the president of the whole division. And I would see them day in and day out, passionate and committed and drivers. And they were women and they were moms and they were married and they were all those things that prior in my prior life at Bain the women that were rising to the top sacrificed a lot of everything else.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:They didn't have children, they didn't go on dates, they were committed to working a lot all the time. And so then after business school when I went to P and G, I saw what an organization looked like in my beauty care department, that division, that the leadership were women, a lot of them. There were a lot of amazing men there too, but a lot of them were women. And so that is different than every other job I've ever had otherwise, until now, because I'm now in the world of Pilates.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:There's a lot of women but but I think what inspired me was that I grew up for the years I was at P and G knowing that being a woman, not being a woman, it doesn't matter, you know, what results you're driving is what matters and it was such a globally minded organization and I felt like we were making an impact again in The US, but also that was translating to other parts of the world.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So, you know, and one thing I didn't mention is I spent time, I was at Essilor for a while and then I left and I went to Alcon. And I was at Alcon and I was in the contact lens business at the time Novartis had recently bought Alcon and there weren't any women at all and I'll share with you very I'll share with you it's not confidential because it's gonna be public but there was a day I was a single mom at that time when I was at Alcon and I went to my general manager who was Jim Murphy and know, astute guy, been there a long time kind of doing the Alcon thing, dealing with Novartis coming in, dealing with, you know, all these different things going on with SEBA vision now rolling in and this was a lot of challenges and a lot of pressure.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:But I was a single mom and I needed to have a parent teacher conference at 2PM. And I wasn't trying to like take a vacation day. I just wanted to go have the parent teacher conference, use my laptop, go home and work. Okay. This is in 2011.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And I said to Jim, hey, I, you know, I'm a marketing director. I need to go do this parent teacher conference. You know normally I'm at work at 07:30 in the morning until about 06:30 at night. I commute an hour to Fort Worth like it's a long day it's It's a little tough as a single mom doing all that. Yeah.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:But I need to go to the teacher parent conference. And he said, well then you need to take a vacation day. And I said, no, I mean we need, I need some flexibility. And he said, if you want to, work from home after the meeting, all these other people here are going to want to do that. And I said, all these women that you're pointing to?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And he said, yeah. I said, they're executive assistants. So executive assistant jobs don't necessarily have work from home. Now with COVID we all learned otherwise, but the other women on the floor are executive assistants and I am not, I'm a marketing director and at my level, being able to work from home should be something that is possibly allowed. And I said, and this actually isn't a women's issue, this is a, this is my entire team, my dailies team, those guys are in their, you know, late 20s, early 30s, there are moments they may need to work from home.
Heather Patrick:Yeah.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And I said you know flexibility when it comes to compensation flexibility is worth a million dollars to people. Yeah. And it was a shift in what I realized was probably Al Khan at that time was a culture that wasn't going to work for me as somebody who had a life that I also needed to maintain. We would have 6PM executive meetings, I was the only woman in the room and all of the men were married and all of the men had someone making dinner at home and picking up kids and doing these things and I did not have that.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I had my parents, so they were doing But some of that for I would just say that learning and shaping like who was meaningful to me, it was people that were either out there leading, charging and looked like me, they were women, or they were the leaders that I had a lot of those leaders at Essilor, men or women, who wanted to think different, wanted to be open minded, wanted to bring, wanted to respect your life and your work.
Heather Patrick:Yeah. Not just your work.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And so I don't know I've had a lot of learnings and those experiences and hopefully I've made a difference because when I left Alcon they told me this is a big loss for us, you know, what could we do different? And I said, you need to think about flexible work schedules. And they said, we would like to do that, we're not ready for that yet. At the like senior senior level they said that and then lo and behold COVID happened. I mean it was many years, it was ten years later, but COVID happened and it was an amazing thing in the sense that it shoved everybody into thinking different.
Heather Patrick:Yeah, I mean that is a great example, great example. All right. So let's shift a little bit and talk about reinventing yourself. So after twenty years in executive leadership, what prompted you to kind of make this change to being an entrepreneur?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Yeah. So I knew that I had spent almost twenty years in the optical industry, and I knew that the things that we deal with in the optical industry have a lot of parallel situations. So veterinary care is a parallel situation, dermatology is a parallel There are lots of situations where you have independent practitioners and those independent practitioners are trying to navigate big corporate providers, manufacturers, insurance, all these different factors are coming into play and you're also having to make product decisions.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So, in optical, we're a medical device, but at Alcon, you know, it's also surgical and so there was some pharmaceutical involved there. When I decided to I left Essilor only when I had a job offer that was very compelling and the job offer was a CEO role, which I had know aspired to something like that.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I didn't think it was going to happen at Essilor Luxottica, because it's a $26,000,000,000 company and that would have taken a little bit of probably living in Europe and maybe being European perhaps. But in my world, this looked like an interesting challenge to go back to skincare, to be in the dermatology space where I had worked twenty years prior and to work in private equity and work for private equity. So all of these things sounded really interesting and compelling. Yeah. And I made that leap.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I learned in that process, I had I had a great team, I inherited some, I hired some, I was only there a year. My value system and the value system of the private equity group that I worked for were just not aligned. Yeah. We were I was organizing a sales meeting they wanted me to fire the sales director the day before the sales meeting. Like there were just things that I just wasn't wasn't authentic to me, let's say.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So what I realized is sometimes the CEO is the leader and sometimes the CEO is the person that executes what the board wants. I didn't know that, I didn't understand that, I was completely ignorant of the different dynamics and that's, I guess that's on me. Mean I have a lot of friends through business school or otherwise locally in Dallas who are very very senior executives and I realized maybe I didn't ask enough questions, maybe I didn't talk to enough people. So I thought, you know, gosh, why did I leave Essilor?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Essilor, everything was going well. Now Helix was, you know, obviously dealing with the complexity of digital, but I did kind of beat myself up a little bit about making that leap. But I chose to make that leap and I learned a lot from it and I also learned from it that I do want to be the one making the decisions and I also turned 50 years old and in turning 50 years old I realized time is going by like life is passing by and I have been at a desk from 07:30 in the morning until 06:30 at night almost my entire life.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Except for COVID when I had a reprieve and I couldn't in this office at home, but still it was 07:30 in the morning till 06:30 at So what like maybe life is too short and maybe I need to think a little different. Also a major thing that happened for me Heather, you know, is I got married and so I had been a single mom for fifteen years and I found an amazing partner, shout out to Ben, and he was extremely supportive of maybe you get off the you know the the track of maximizing income maximizing income or the track of all that ambition and you think about what do you really want in your life and in doing that I said I still want to contribute to society,
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I still want to make an impact, I love community, I'm 50 years old, I'm looking for workouts, ways to stay healthy and I found this this brand, and it's called Jet Set it's a pilates, brand and I realized this reformer workout is low impact, I'm I'm getting stronger even though I'm in my 50s my body I'm getting stronger and I love this and I wanna share this.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And so I went through the franchise process and decided to open three locations here in Dallas. Signed the franchise agreement in March 2025 and opened the first location in December. So it was very fast. Now we're working on the second location. And it's just a lot of fun.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:It is very different world, Heather. Like, when you've spent your whole time just getting a paycheck from someone and then you're doing your job every day and then instead you're now doing this on your own huge learning curve but I definitely wouldn't change it for anything.
Heather Patrick:Yeah yeah. Well, and that's, you know, I think ultimately when you are true to what matters to you, what your values are, you will find your path. Right? So I think it takes a lot of courage to make that decision and pursue those values, but ultimately it opens those doors for impact and being authentic to yourself. So kudos to you for being brave enough to follow the path.
Heather Patrick:Thank you. All right. So let's talk a little bit about kind of the business of eye exams and your perspective and more along the lines of, you alluded to earlier, right, consumer engagement. And so very similar when thinking about from our perspective too, although they're not our consumers per se, but our clients, but it's still the same idea of even with the general public, right? How do we personalize the message?
Heather Patrick:How do we move them to action? Because ultimately this is where I think for us industry and our organization are aligned in the sense of we want people to invest in their eye health and understand the connection between eye health and overall health. So what role do you think personalization now plays for a small practice or even a mid sized practice? How do they personalize out to their consumers, their clients? How do they get involved in building those relationships and how do they get involved in the community?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Okay. So I'm gonna start with an insight that I had ten years ago when I was working on global marketing and we were working I was working specifically on sunwear globally and eyewear because sunglasses, even if you're not corrected, you should be wearing sunglasses when you're outside. And that's a global issue. And even if there's a shortage of optometrists and you can't get a real eye exam because there's no providers or very, very few providers per capita, you still, we should be bringing access to somewhere to protect eyes. And in that time, in that global role, what I found fascinating was a lot of the places I went globally, people were illiterate and they weren't needing glasses per se, the way they might need sun wear because they weren't reading.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:But to do fine tuned work, the people that could do fine tuned work were the people that had good vision, until cell phones started to populate the whole world. And when cell phones came along, suddenly we had a lot of people that suddenly wanted to be consumers of vision care because they needed to see their cell phone.
Heather Patrick:Interesting.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And so cell phones drove in a lot of third world the desire and the need finally for an eye exam and what can I do and how can I how can I access something and should I go should I travel to the city and do that such that when I'm back home in my village I can use my cell phone? So cell phones was a key driver of growth of eyewear and likewise, I think nowadays my theory is that augmented reality, is going to technology basically is going to once again bring people along in thinking about their vision.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I will give you an example for Christmas, my husband purchased for his daughter, she's at the University of Denver and she's going skiing or snowboarding all the time and she travels with a friend she'll go snowboarding with a friend but you know when you're on the mountain you lose track of who you're with right and there are now ski goggles with augmented reality and in there there's an arrow and it will point 400 meters that way or feet you know 400 feet that way is your friend and it will tell you where to go and you know I don't know like if you ski sometimes you don't know how do I get down the mountain, which path am I supposed to take especially like I'm not a great skier so I have to go the easy way.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Imagine that augmented reality that in your goggles you're actually being told where to go. That is coming right we all know that right like the smart glasses, smart wear, the ability to cook in your kitchen and the recipe is there and you know how long this pot's going and that pot's going and the eyewear is giving you guidance in your day to day life. So I think our old school way, our eye exam way of you can detect diabetes through an eye exam, you know, you can detect other diseases through eye exams. All that education that we've been trying to do, we're gonna keep trying to do it, but there are gonna be other forces that I think bring people along much more quickly. And then we just need more optometrists.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:We need more ophthalmologists. We have a shortage as well. Like The US has a shortage relative to other markets as well, where there's just access for all healthcare is is you know a constant issue. So you know I think in terms of the eye, you know the optical place, the optical optician and the optometrist personalizing and building relationships with their clients, we know through data that if you're let's say you're buying a list of of people in a zip code to market to, twelve to eighteen months later 20 to 30% of those people are changed. They've moved.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:The amount of moving that people do is astounding to me and I don't honestly I don't know the difference between rural and urban so I'm sure there's a difference there between urban and rural but people are moving all the time and so to maintain the relationship and the use the customer, you know relationship management softwares, the CRM softwares to keep in communication with your patients obviously is critical. Yeah. But along those lines I think personalization I'm learning this right now in my business in the Pilates business so if you told me going into you're gonna open a Pilates studio and you need to do social media, wonderful I can take a picture and make a post every week. That's great. I'm gonna do a great job with that.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Well, if you look up Jetset Preston Hollow, Jetset Pilates Preston Hollow, is my first open location, what you see at the beginning of the social media chain, that was me. It was not great. And I realized I don't know literally how to, you know, impact all the different things that happen with social media. But there's DMing people and there's influencers and there's content creation that's static and content creation that's reels and there's collabing with other organizations and there's probably eight different ways of leveraging social media and I'm not sure how many of our optometry studios or optometry clinics are optimizing all of those. Yeah.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I would guess most of them aren't. At least at Essil Exotica we had a program called Practice Builder. We were I was very involved in starting this thing. We were trying to help practices grow their business and do all those things. Social media wasn't on that agenda.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I'm sure that program has evolved multiple times over and there are now digital screens that you can put in your practice and they will run content for you and engaging content and tie that into your social. So there's a lot of these things now that can be a little more turnkey but I think personalization at the end of the day comes into it's a very noisy world and you have to break through that noise and that clutter consistently and regularly. Yeah. And it's just a lot of work. Yeah.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:It's just a lot of work as noisy as everybody else is, we have to even be noisier.
Heather Patrick:I love that perspective though because you're right. My first kind of thought isn't about social media and practices, but the practice that I go to, are on social media on a pretty regular basis. And they do a lot of cool, fun things. And so I do think it comes down to, and it's even something we talk about, being able to help people see the people that are part of the practice, right? Who they are and build those connections against.
Heather Patrick:I think that's a really great perspective on personalizing the experience for your clients is really letting them get to know who you are, right? And seeing that connection. So that's a great perspective, Kim. Great perspective.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And one thing, Heather, I wanted to mention, I mentioned a book that I really love and I think everyone should read. It's Growth Mindset. So Growth Mindset, phenomenal book. My son was at a private boys school in Dallas for a few years and they asked all the fourth grade boys in the school, maybe it was the entire school, read Growth Mindset. And of course I got a copy for him, not sure he read it, I read it.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:It's an incredible book. And in the first chapter you realize when kids are learning something, if they don't do it right they just try it again and then if they don't do that right they just try it again. But as kids grow up they start to get more fearful about trying things or more self judgment or no I don't want to try x y z because I might fail at it and growth mindset is you just put yourself out there and it might not work but you're going to grow. And so that growth mindset I think has been one of the factors that set me up, that mindset, not necessarily the book, of how do I think about my career? And it helps you take some risks.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Right?
Heather Patrick:Yeah. Yeah. Well, as I have learned through my career and even where we are right now, it's hard to find that ultimate success. How are you to find that without taking involved. And that means failure is probably involved too.
Heather Patrick:But I think it also goes back to love of learning. I may fail, but I know I'm going to learn from it and it's going to help me keep going. I'm fine again. As long as I'm true to what I'm trying to achieve and authentic in really trying to make a difference, I'll find the path. I may veer off, I may stumble, I may fall, but I'm going to find that path.
Heather Patrick:And so I think that love of learning also helps in growth, right, because you're willing to take the risk.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:That concept of growth mindset and that concept there's another book called Grit that has been kind of an influential piece of how I think about things. There's one other one I want to throw out there which is nice girls don't get the corner office. It's something like why nice girls don't get the corner office and it's actually not a book you have to sit down and read and it's good for men too actually, but it's not a book you have to sit down and you know a few hours and read.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:It's a book that at the beginning they ask you some questions and they direct you to a specific little insert, you know two three pages of insight and I try to reference that book once a year and kind of see what my latest thing is. But you're self diagnosing which part of this book is actually important to read and in less than an hour you'll get insight on where are you at, what could you be doing a little bit better and again you just focus, focus in one month on maybe one or two things and then the next month.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So it's just that that hunger for learning and getting better, having some grit along the way, having a community of people that can support you so that when you're beating yourself up on something that didn't go exactly right, you can kind of pick up and move on.
Heather Patrick:Yeah, I love that. That's great. Thank you for those recommendations.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Yes.
Heather Patrick:All right. So we'll move into what you think the future of the consumer looks like. And maybe just a little bit obviously around eye care, but also just in general. So just health and wellness, now you've got a why perspective. So what do you think the future of that looks like in five years?
Heather Patrick:What's different than today on that consumer side?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Yeah, I think that's a really good question. So I've been surprised at how generations, people of this age group versus people of that age group, there are similar behaviors. I'm fascinated by that and you know the Gen Z versus the Millennial and all know all of this and there's special hiring practices for how do you get I think it's now Alpha is the newest generation and I think they're too little to be hired at the moment but you know that's going to be the this next group that we're trying to hire for you know front desk jobs and studios or whatever you know whatever those roles might be.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:I think that personal relationship being able to connect with people is always going to set set us apart in the and the more we get distracted and removed from that with video games or Netflix series or all the different entertainment vehicles that you can just sort of do on your own in your home without necessarily engaging other people. I think that where our future generations will stand out is if they can kind of set aside a little bit of that too much of that insulated way of spending time and maintain that community connection, right?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:My dad likes to say, Oh, I went to church today, but he's watching it online. And I say, Okay, but part of church is being in person, right? And my father's Catholic and my mother's Jewish and they're they have very different approaches to what is spirituality and all of that but either one, both of them are about community. And we find that in college when we start out, we're around a lot of other people like us and we sort of find friends and all of that. But then we all start to get isolated as we're at work all day and all that.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And so that's honestly, that's how boutique fitness I think has taken off industry over the last ten-fifteen years. It's there's a community there because it's a smaller setting and frankly most people don't love working out but when you're doing it and you've got other people around you it's a it's a boost it's a support. Right?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So but yeah I think that the other the other trends or the other things about the future we as an American society so I think generationally I guess and then I think logistically like we are Americans, we're in The United States and we have certain values and certain things that our kids see on TikTok and certain things on these brands and those brands and this type of car and that type of car and all these all these indicators of wealth that is a lot of a focus for for Americans but this is not necessarily how people are thinking in other places.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So you know culturally The U.S. Has a lot of influence out. I lived in Sydney, Australia for a while and I was amazed at how much American TV they had in Sydney, Australia. Why would they want to watch Three's Company? You know like whatever it was.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:It didn't make any sense to me but there's influence globally and I don't know my hope is that as in The US we get more input in versus us just watching our own we're just watching our own content and spiraling our own culture versus that bringing other perspectives and and, international film and and all of that in. I think our culture is missing missing a lot of that global mindset. And and so yes you have generational, you have geographic culturally, you know, how how are things gonna look in five years.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:And I think there's always going to be an emphasis on academics there's always going to be an emphasis on learning but what happens with AI now and how kids are having their papers written in high school and then kids are having their essays for college and then they're having like I guess colleges now are requiring the essay to be a video of a kid talking versus an essay because AI could write the essay but AI cannot be the video of the kid talking though they probably can in a few years do that as well.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:So I don't know I just think that AI and keeping up with how do you leverage technology to be better but how does it not just overtake your thinking and your analytic skills and your problem solving skills and all of that.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:But I'm surrounded by a lot of people that use AI every day for lots and lots and lots of things that never occurred to me. So I think I'm not very savvy with that. Like people in newer generations are going to be much more savvy about how do I get smarter with my time? How do I not spend twenty five minutes writing an email? I can spend five minutes writing the email because AI is gonna do the first draft.
Heather Patrick:Yeah.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Those things five years from now, can you imagine? Like we're gonna be even more efficient. Like if I think back to the 1950s and 60s and people would type a letter to somebody, a correspondence, right? Then email came along. I was in college when email came along and then email came along and I had professors at UT Austin saying, I'm going to email you your homework so you have to go get an electronic account and you have to check it and that's how you're going to receive your email and I'm like just tell me my homework like what?
Kim Schuy Greenberg:You know it's an electronic mail now you're corresponding with 200 people a day whereas the letter was maybe five people a day. Well now AI, that's going to be a whole another kind of way of being overwhelmed. Right? Where we have to get back to nature. We have to get back to people that, you know, real connection with people so that we still can find the joy of life.
Kim Schuy Greenberg:Like, you know. And the magic of turning 50 has been for me last year all of a sudden I realized there's a clock and time time's happening and I want to wake up in the morning and be excited about what I'm going to do that day and and know I can make an impact and a difference in a positive way not necessarily just on a stock price or whatever. So
Heather Patrick:Well and I I love that and I think that's a great place to bring it home of finding the joy, right? I think that in all areas, I mean we certainly are going to get more efficient and more effective. You know that's the big push, but it's keeping being connected and finding the joy in each other I think is really key. So that was great. Great.
Heather Patrick:Well, thank you so much, Kim. This was a great conversation. You have such wonderful perspectives. Again, you can know someone, but this is what I love about this because I know you, but now, I mean, I just have really enjoyed getting to know more about how you think about things and now putting all the dots together and just have really thank you. A lot of wisdom.
Heather Patrick:So I'm sure our listeners will agree. So thank you. And of course, we always end with, we are always looking for volunteers. We serve the entire state. So if you are interested in getting involved with Prevent Blindness Texas, you can always reach us.
Heather Patrick:We're on social media, our website, email us, join our family and help move our mission forward. So thank you so much. Have a great day. And we always end with tell us what your vision is.