MyEyeDr. CEO Sue Downes Shares Lessons with HPU Entrepreneurship Students
HIGH POINT, N.C., April 28, 2026 – MyEyeDr. Co-Founder and CEO Sue Downes shared several lessons that she learned while building a multibillion-dollar company with a roomful of High Point University entrepreneurship students during her recent visit to campus.
Downes, who serves as HPU’s Health Care Expert in Residence, described herself as a “very engaged and active CEO” while giving a guest lecture to two entrepreneurship classes in Cottrell Hall on April 8. When MyEyeDr. opened the first of its 1,000 locations in October of 2001, she held many roles at the company, including chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and head of human resources.
“I would say that two of the things that really saved me in the beginning of helping me build this was I had a lot of accounting experience, and I have marketing experience and a passion for marketing,” Downes said. “Those are the two things I think that no matter what you start with that you really want to have a good understanding of and stay close to. While you can have people support you, to me, your ideas come when you start seeing things come together.”
Downes said her original concept for MyEyeDr. came as she was helping her father deal with Stage IV brain cancer during the final months of his life. She felt the treatment he was receiving was insensitive and more focused on what his health insurance would cover than actually making him as comfortable as possible.
Downes said so much of the health care industry was focused “on the bottom line” that she wanted to open a company that provided better care to patients. Her initial goal was to open 40-50 MyEyeDr. locations in the Washington, D.C. area, but she has far surpassed that as the company looks to celebrate its 25th anniversary in October.
Along the way, Downes said MyEyeDr. has “disrupted” the eye care industry in a good way.
“My idea was if I could create a process that when the patient walks in, we’re more focused on their eye care and their eyewear and not on what insurance benefits do we have,” Downes said.
What Students Learned
Downes’ message of putting the patient or customer first resonated with Alexa Irons, a freshman majoring in exercise science with an entrepreneurship minor.
“A great business idea means nothing if you can’t connect with the people you’re helping,” said Irons, who is from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. “Sue said that some of the people who started working for her at the beginning are still with her 25 years later, and that just goes to show her impact and the value she brings to her employees. She talked about the importance of vision for her company and how if you keep your passion at the forefront, decision making is much smoother. Overall, I really enjoyed her perspective because it taught me that running a business is not just about the product and service; it’s about being a problem solver for your customers.”
Downes also cautioned students against coming up with too many ideas as entrepreneurs. She said she received harsh feedback from her employees in the first few years of MyEyeDr. because she was “driving them crazy” by giving them one idea after another during meetings.
“When I started the company, we had five employees, including myself. Today, we have 8,000 employees,” Downes said. “So how do I make sure that everybody understands where our focus needs to be, how we’re keeping track of ourselves and where do we keep going at? And that’s been very hard for me with that entrepreneur spirit because I like to color outside the lines a lot.”
Downes said she now has a routine of spending two hours every Friday morning reflecting on the past week and trying to determine where she devoted time that could have been better used elsewhere.
“I walked away from Sue Downes’ talk understanding more deeply the process that was required for her to delegate tasks,” said HPU sophomore Sebastiano DiModica, an entrepreneurship major from Saugus, Massachusetts. “She grew from a ‘I need to do it all’ to ‘Let me invest in my people and cast vision and overhead’. This was helpful for me to hear as I will be starting a business over the summer.”
During her visit to campus, Downes also spoke to health care management students, had lunch with a group of Strickland Women’s L.I.F.T. Fellows and served as a judge in the 16th annual HPU Business Plan Competition.
“No matter what industry you are in, you always need to prioritize people,” said Mason Wolford, a junior majoring in entrepreneurship from Plain City, Ohio. “Even though she is in the eye care industry, she said she was in the people industry because the most important things are how you treat your customer and employees, as well as how well you can network.”
