Guernsey-founded Specsavers moves to safeguard future of family business

Friday 06 January 2023

Specsavers has been placed into a family trust to help prevent it being sold to private equity.

Dame Mary and Doug Perkins set up the business in a spare room of their Guernsey house in the mid-1980s.

They both now sit on the executive board and she told The Times that the trust had been set up as a cautionary measure, given the couple's age.

"We are coming up to our 80th birthdays so we have to be sensible and think about how we want it to progress after we have gone. It is not going to get sold to some private equity firm when we pop our clogs, which I don't intend doing for a long time."

Dame Mary said that she had held her first meeting with the next generation of the family before Christmas to discuss her wishes for the business.

She concluded by suggesting that she wanted Specsavers to "go on and on for ever".

Specsavers Group CEO John Perkins said: "Specsavers has always been one big family of locally owned and run healthcare businesses led by Joint Venture partners, of which there are nearly 5,000 around the world.

"Ultimately, the business that provides support services to each of those partners is owned by a family trust, ensuring that optometry, ophthalmology and audiology professionals can continue to focus on what they do best - delivering expert care to their communities and putting customers and patients at the heart of everything that they do.

"This underpins the Perkins' long-term commitment to the future of Specsavers, which next year celebrates its 40th anniversary."