Jennifer Tabiza, OD, began moving into the dry eye spa and medspa concept with one treatment room in her eye care practice and a focus on dry eye. Four years later, the practice, Total Body Aesthetics in Los Angeles, California, is a seven-room medspa where eye care sits alongside skin, body, peptides and biohacking. The result is a single, unified brand that lets patients choose a focused eye visit or a broader aesthetics and wellness experience. After launching the eye care practice, medspa, Dr. Contact Lens and Techifeye, Dr. Tabiza has built a coaching practice built to teach other clinicians how to do the same.
ONE PRACTICE, MANY CHOICES
The clinic’s mix is roughly 40% dry eye and primary eye care (with a small boutique optical) and 60% aesthetics and wellness. Early on, Dr. Tabiza faced a decision common to independent practices: expand optometry lanes or lean into aesthetics. When patients who came for IPL and RF dry eye treatments asked whether it was possible to get treatments for their whole face, she followed the demand. Adding injectables and more invasive aesthetic services required a medical director and tighter clinical protocols, but it also opened a much larger revenue stream.
She treated the business as a single operating unit within her practice: shared devices, unified front‑desk systems, common marketing and workflows that let clinicians and nurses cross‑refer naturally. Devices and rooms are used across specialties. Packages let patients opt in for eye‑only care or add full medspa treatments. That integration drives retention and efficiency. Aesthetics and cash‑pay services, she estimates, are about three times as profitable as traditional eye care. Clinically, she still sees patients, but only a few days a week. The majority of growth comes from systematizing offerings, hiring the right staff and scaling operations.
FROM OPERATOR TO COACH
Running this hybrid medspa exposed gaps most consultants couldn’t fill—especially for optometrists who want a practical, clinic‑forward path into cash‑pay services. Indeed, Dr. Tabiza had to navigate much of this journey herself. So she began coaching to share what she learned.
- When to hire a medical director,
- How to structure consults that lead to treatment plans,
- How to share devices without chaos, and
- How to evolve a brand without losing patients.
“Last year, I only sent two newsletters for coaching, and I took over 300 calls,” she says. To her, that’s a clear sign that hands‑on, real‑world guidance is in demand.
Her workshops start with a gap analysis and then focus on implementation: the art of the consult, sales and conversion systems, branding and positioning and operations for scaling while maintaining clinical quality. She also works with device companies to help buyers of their equipment to realize repeatable revenue. Many ODs are cautious about aesthetics or they feel trapped in the day‑to‑day of patient care. Her coaching pushes owners to step back from clinic work when they want growth and to build repeatable systems when they don’t. “If you work in your business, seeing patients all day, you won’t be able to work on it. If you want to move to the next level, you have to remove yourself a little,” she says.
WHY IT WORKS
The blended medspa model creates resilience: diversified revenue streams, cross‑referral that deepens patient relationships and better use of rooms and devices. For those willing to learn sales and branding and operations—and to accept a bit of risk—the payoff can be substantial financially and professionally. Dr. Tabiza’s message is pragmatic: you don’t need a separate building to build a medspa. You need a clear brand and reliable systems. And it helps to have a guide. “You need someone to show the ropes because for many clinicians, the hardest part is knowing where to begin,” she says.
Learn more about Dr. Tabiza here.
Read how other female ODs are building a special focus in their practices.
