Newport Beach-based Nvision Laser Eye Centers has moved beyond its base in Southern California with a recent buy of two Sacramento-area eye surgery clinics: Meister Eye and Laser Center and The Eye Surgery Center of Northern California.
Both were acquired from ophthalmic surgeon Richard Meister on undisclosed terms.
Nvision performs what’s called laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis, or Lasik. The process uses lasers to cut and reshape a patient’s cornea to restore vision. The centers also offer cataract surgeries.
The recently acquired clinics are the 16th and 17th in the Nvision chain, which had added five clinics in Southern California through new openings over the past year or so.
The move into Northern California signals a faster pace on acquisitions going forward.
“We already made the determination that acquisitions were going to be the driver of our growth, (and) we looked at where it made the most sense for us,” said Todd Cooper, Nvision’s chief executive.
More Deals
Nvision plans to make more deals in coming months. Cooper said that the company wanted to get the deal in Northern California under its belt and fold the newly acquired clinics into its operations before moving on to others.
Nvision wants to “learn from that—learn everything from deal structure to financial components to how we integrated internally,” Cooper said.
Once the model is down, “we can start to accelerate” potential buys, he said.
There are several potential deals to be pursued, and Nvision recently hired a vice president of business development, James Pereyra, to guide the effort.
“We want to make the best financial decision,” he said, adding that Nvision doesn’t want to buy “anything broke; we are not in the business of turning things around. We want to buy things that can be accretive.”
The company doesn’t disclose specific revenue or profits, but it is on track to reach an annual revenue goal of $50 million, according to Cooper. It has about 250 workers.
Its website also does not say precisely how much it charges. The price of Lasik ranges from about $1,600 to $3,200 per eye, depending on the surgeon’s experience and technology, according to David Harmon, president of St. Louis-based industry tracker Market Scope LLC.
Meister, an ophthalmologist who has practiced in Sacramento since 1984, will stay on with Nvision and serve as chief surgeon for Nvision’s Sacramento locations.
Nvision was attracted to Meister’s practices because they have “a nice cataract (surgery) business. That’s important to us as we go forward,” Cooper said, adding that Nvision plans to further develop the Sacramento centers’ Lasik practices.
Cataract surgeries also bring some reimbursement from Medicare, although Cooper mentioned that much of Meister’s practices involve premium intraocular lenses, which sometimes are not reimbursed.
“He’s doing a combination of both but certainly doing more of the premium lifestyle lenses than probably your average surgical ophthalmologist is doing,” Cooper said.
Origins
Nvision has its origins in the 1999 establishment of Laser Eye Care of California LLC. It was a partnership between Nvision founder and Medical Director Thomas Tooma and Canada-based TLC Vision Corp., which licensed the TLC Laser Eye Center brand for a national chain.
Proposal
Tooma approached TLC officials in 2010 with a proposal to buy the Southern California centers from the chain.
“I felt it was best to acquire TLC’s interest in California (to) basically give us the freedom to expand into any territory,” he told the Business Journal in 2011.
Tooma launched Nvision with eight locations in late 2010.
Cooper, a former general manager of dental healthcare company Henry Schein Inc. of Melville, N.Y., became chief executive shortly afterward.
Nvision generally gets its patients from fellow eye doctors versus the typical direct-to-consumer marketing model for laser vision correction.
