$750K to $2M in 6 Years: Brianna Rhue Explains the Power of Personal Brand

Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands & Links with Linkifi! Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand, where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.

In this episode, we’re joined by Brianna Rhue, founder of Dr. Contact Lens, to explore how she grew her own optometry practice from $750,000 to more than $2 million in six years while simultaneously building healthcare technology companies and raising two children. Brianna shares how Dr. Contact Lens was born from a real problem inside her own practice, why doctors need to think more like CEOs, and how consistent founder-led content, personal branding, technology, and patient retention can drive growth.

 

Key Talking Points

✅ Growing a Practice From $750K to More Than $2 Million. Brianna explains how she grew her own optometry practice over six years while simultaneously developing healthcare technology companies and continuing to see patients.

✅ Why Doctors Need to Think Like CEOs. Brianna believes many healthcare professionals operate like employees inside businesses they actually own. Her mission is to help doctors take ownership of their data, operations, technology, and long-term future.

✅ Building Dr. Contact Lens Out of Necessity. The idea began while Brianna was nine months pregnant, when a regulatory change meant patients needed easier access to their prescriptions. What started as a simple website idea eventually became a SaaS platform.

✅ Becoming a Tech Founder Without Knowing the Language. Brianna entered SaaS without knowing terms such as CAC, LTV, GUI, API, or EDI. She and her co-founder learned through execution, setbacks, expensive mistakes, and persistence.

✅ Losing Hundreds of Thousands While Learning. Brianna openly discusses spending and losing significant money during the early development process because she did not yet understand how to build a technology company.

✅ Making the Practice More Convenient Than Online Retailers. Patients receive a text message, can access their prescription, see available benefits and rebates, and order through the same practice that already manages their eye health.

✅ Why Patient Data Matters. Brianna emphasizes that patients own their healthcare data while entrusting it to their providers. Practices need to understand the value of that data and use it responsibly to improve care and the patient relationship.

✅ Being a Doctor Helped Sell to Other Doctors. Brianna moved from one side of the conference table to the other, using her own experience as an optometrist and practice owner to explain the business problem Dr. Contact Lens solves.

✅ Changing an Industry From Blue to Purple. Brianna deliberately used purple branding to stand apart in an eye care industry dominated by blue logos. That eventually became part of her own recognizable identity as the Doctor in Purple.

✅ Using Conferences to Build the Business. Speaking opportunities gave Brianna access to audiences of optometrists who already needed continuing education. She combined speaking with booths and direct conversations to educate doctors about technology and business leverage.

✅ Turning a Practice Into an Incubator. Brianna uses her own clinic to experiment with technology and understand how new tools can improve operations and patient care before applying those lessons more broadly.

✅ Why Personal Branding Became a Growth Engine. Brianna did not initially think about building a personal brand. Over time, her recognizable identity, speaking, educational content, and consistent presence became central to her authority.

✅ Posting on LinkedIn Every Day for 18 Months. Brianna says she has not missed a day of posting on LinkedIn in a year and a half, turning consistency into one of her non-negotiables.

✅ People Are Watching Even When They Do Not Engage. At conferences, people regularly tell Brianna that they constantly see her LinkedIn posts. The lesson is that visible engagement metrics do not capture everyone consuming the content.

✅ Treating LinkedIn Like a Journal. Brianna does not focus only on business wins. She draws inspiration from books, yoga, conversations, personal experiences, entrepreneurship, family life, and the broader themes she is thinking about.

✅ Your Calendar Should Reflect What Energizes You. Brianna argues that people need to deliberately create space for the activities, conversations, and opportunities that give them energy rather than simply reacting to whatever fills their calendar.

✅ You Have to Care Before Anyone Else Will. For people nervous about sharing online, Brianna says the first step is believing that your own experiences and ideas are worth sharing.

✅ Do Not Try to Be the Smartest Person in the Room. Brianna deliberately seeks environments where she can learn from people ahead of her rather than trying to prove that she knows the most.

✅ AI Should Help With Content, Not Replace Your Voice. Brianna uses tools such as Claude and ChatGPT for ideation but strongly rejects publishing generic AI-generated content that no longer sounds human.

✅ Healthcare Brands Need to Know Who They Want to Serve. Brianna recommends beginning with a clear understanding of the patients a clinic actually wants to attract rather than attempting to market equally to everyone.

✅ Customer Experience Starts Inside the Practice. Brianna’s own clinic focuses on a family atmosphere and builds its patient experience around the community it wants to serve.

✅ Obsess Over the Customer Journey. Practices should continually evaluate how patients move through every touchpoint and use technology to remove unnecessary friction and duplication.

✅ The Future Is Fewer Disconnected Systems. Brianna questions why healthcare practices should need 15 different portals and expects integrations and AI to increasingly simplify practice operations.

✅ Technology Should Support Healthcare Staff. Brianna emphasizes that technology should not ignore the people answering phones, checking patients in and out, fitting glasses, performing exams, and managing countless other responsibilities.

✅ Take Care of the People Taking Care of Patients. Running a healthcare practice means staff are constantly serving others. Brianna argues that owners and managers need to support those employees as carefully as they support patients.

 

Notable Quotes & Moments

📌 “I grew my own practice from 750,000 to over 2 million in six years.”

📌 “I became a tech founder not even really knowing I had become a tech founder.”

📌 “Necessity was the mother of invention.”

📌 “We got thrown back multiple times, hundreds of thousands of dollars literally just taken from us.”

📌 “I have not missed a day posting in a year and a half.”

📌 “You should not be the smartest person in any of the rooms that you’re in.”

📌 “Your calendar really should be full of more of what you want it to have on it.”

📌 “I invest in new patients, but I also invest more heavily into established patients.”

 

About Brianna Rhue

Brianna Rhue is an optometrist, speaker, practice owner, healthcare technology founder, and founder of Dr. Contact Lens.

She grew her own optometry practice from $750,000 to more than $2 million in six years while building healthcare technology companies alongside it. Dr. Contact Lens helps eye care practices reduce prescription and patient leakage by making it easier for patients to access their prescriptions and purchase contact lenses through the practice that already manages their eye health.

Brianna has also built a highly visible personal brand around healthcare entrepreneurship, technology, eye care, leadership, and her identity as the Doctor in Purple, with consistent founder-led content playing a major role in that growth.

🔗 Dr. Contact Lens: https://drcontactlens.com

🔗 Brianna Rhue on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briannarhue/ 

 

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