I had such a blast being interviewed by Darryl Turner for his Massage Marketing Summit, here’s the transcript below:
“Rachel Beider is an entrepreneur, educator, speaker, and mentor. Rachel is the proud owner of PRESS Modern Massage, a group of four award-winning clinical massage studios.
Rachel first studied massage in Thailand on a trip through India and Southeast Asia, becoming certified in Thai Massage at the famous WatPo School in Bangkok. Later she continued her education at the Swedish Institute, and began her career Licensed as a Massage Therapist.
While the success and scale of her business is impressive today, things weren’t always this way. In the early days trading massage with a local chiropractor for free rent so she wouldn’t have to lug her massage table seeing clients all around New York CIty.
Over time she grew from one treatment room, to taking over three rooms in the same building. With the next location having 8 more rooms, and 2 more locations with 13 combined treatment rooms after that, her practice has seen over 30,000 individual clients since opening its doors!
She has made her career about empowering women to start and grow their own practices, via Wellness Business Consulting. She began her consulting practice by working with clients in the wellness field who depended on her expertise and skills to help grow their businesses.
She released her first book, a beginner’s guide to massage, called “Press Here” in January 2019. Rachel started her own practice in 2008 with the intention of combining a medical based massage practice with the relaxing environment of a healing space.
Rachel has also been featured in Forbes, Inc., The Wall St. Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, ABC News, Refinery29, Women's Health, and US News & World Report.
In this interview she reveals her 90 day growth strategy, while breaking down what it takes to truly be successful BEYOND being a great hands on therapist.
For people who may be unfamiliar with you, can you describe your business as it is today:
My name is Rachel Beider. I'm the owner of Press Modern Massage, which is now four locations in New York city. We just opened our fourth about three months ago and this started as my private practice.
In 2008, I had one treatment room by myself and over the years it has grown from one room in one suite to three suites in the same building with three rooms there. I opened another in Greenpoint with eight more treatment rooms, another in Dumbo, which is down under the Manhattan bridge overpass for those of you not in Brooklyn and there's eight treatment rooms there and recently opened five more treatment rooms in Long Island City, Queens.
I’ve brought on an operations manager and an assistant for her recently and a lot of front desk folks who are amazing and the rest are 100% licensed massage therapists, which is really fun.
How or why did you originally go into bodywork?
I was actually traveling on a trip through Asia and so I was in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I had just spent a few months in India too and realized very quickly that backpacking is physically toxic. I also grew up with scoliosis, so I'm very familiar with pain and chronic pain. I have a small background in dance and I feel like movement has always come very naturally to me then I realized I just love working with my hands.
While I was taking a trip through all these countries, I took a time massage class actually in Bangkok and Thailand at the Watt Massage School mostly because I wanted my boyfriend to learn how to give me a massage. As it turns out, I love doing it. The folks in the class loved working with me and partnering with me and that really sparked an interest.
I continued my travels and on the way, I actually met a group of people traveling independently in Vietnam. It was a chiropractor, a massage therapist, and an acupuncturist. The massage therapist and I really connected over the work she was doing. She'd been working on an army base in Florida, on veterans coming back from the Iraq - Afghanistan conflict. She was helping people really recover from their injuries.
I thought that was really interesting because my only context for massage besides the time massage class was just in spas. She opened my eyes to that massage happening in gyms, physical therapy offices, chiropractors, yoga studios. It's not just in spas and there's a very medical component which really interested me, so I decided to apply to the oldest massage school in the country, which is Swedish Institute in New York city. I got in, so I flew back to New York and started going to school.
At what point did you decide that going out on your own was the right thing?
My 5 Year Plan
Well, I had a five year plan and I thought year one, I'm just going to get my hands on as many people as I can. By year three, if I'm really busy, I'll have a private practice. Then by year five maybe I'll think about having a business but what happened was I just did it in six months.
I got out of school and immediately started working for a yoga studio, a chiropractor's office, and a physical therapy place. I was just trying to get my hands on as many places, and as many people as I could. I was at a prenatal soft for awhile and what I realized was there were things about each of those places that I loved working, but there were also things that I really did not like.
The Yoga Studio
The yoga studio was beautiful. I love the clients, but it was very loud. It was often disorganized, and was kind of dirty. For me, those are like big, big, big no’s. At the spa, I liked that it was a beautiful serene space, but the pace of it was like 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, back to back to back and it wasn't paying very much.
You had to sell products, and I suggested some product lines but they weren’t interested, and I just felt like a bystander. I didn't feel like I was impactful and I was not in control of my career. Same thing with the chiropractic office, it was cold paper sheets, and 10 minutes quickly going through the sessions. It just didn't feel like the kind of relaxing setting that I wanted. I realized I really wanted to be doing a very clinically focused massage, very precise and curated but in a very warm and comfortable setting. I couldn't find it so I decided I wanted to do it myself. The problem was I didn't have any money.
I had debt from school and I couldn't afford to rent a space so initially I was seeing friends of mine out of my apartment, which was a fifth floor walkup with roommates, but that's not particularly appropriate because you could still smell the last night's dinner in the living room.
I tried bringing my table to other people's studios, but I'm small and carrying a 40 pound table on the subway is really not a good idea for me so I realized I needed space. I started looking around my own neighborhood for businesses that maybe had space.
I found a physical therapy office a few blocks from my house and I just walked right in and asked them, “Do you have a massage here?”. They said, “We don't”, So, I said: “Your clients are more likely to come back for physical therapy if they're getting massage regularly for free, would you be interested? I'll tell you what, I'll work for you for free too. Two mornings a week in exchange, let me use the space when you're not using it. I'll set up a room, I'll put up a table, I'll get my oil in my linens, let me just treat your clients”..
Then they said “yes”, which was a huge surprise to me. At that time I was still working for two other jobs because I needed to make income.
Then I added two days a week in the mornings of my schedule for four hours. It was like an eight to 12 on Tuesdays and Thursdays seeing their PT patients, but what was great about that is it gave me a lot of experience working with injuries and chronic pain.
A lot of those folks who were coming to see me for that 10 minute massage were like, “Hey, can I come back for a whole hour?” I was like, “absolutely! Here's my card”, then they would send their friends and family. That's how I got started with my private practice.
You suddenly lose everything, your clients, your name and your reputation…What do your first 24 hours look like? What's square one?
Step 1. Create A Digital Footprint
For me, the first 24 hours would be immediately grabbing a domain name in hover.com because they will suggest all kinds of different variations. Then throwing up a website super quick into Squarespace. It doesn't take more than a couple of hours to log. You just have to pick out a template and bust out a whole menu of services.
If you know what you love to do, it's pretty straightforward to get together just a minimum menu. I think people overdo it with 10 items to choose from yet clients want to choose from just like four to five.
In terms of naming business, there's a great book called ‘Hello, My Name Is Awesome’.
It's a branding book and it says, “a great name makes you SMILE” because it is:
Suggestive--evokes a positive brand experience;
is Meaningful--your customers get it;
uses Imagery--visually evocative to aid in memory;
has Legs--lends itself to a theme for extended mileage;
and is Emotional--moves people.
It's a really nice way to think about a litmus test for how quickly your clients will understand what you're offering.
I would also immediately snag that Instagram name, squat on that Facebook name, just all across the board, decide what it's called and throw everything at it.
Set up infrastructure that's scalable.
Set Up Online Booking
Having online booking is massively important. There are so many booking websites now that are very inexpensive or even free. There’s a totally free one that I like which is setmore.com, even Google calendar. There are so many things that you can do with Calendly, you can book appointments completely for free, but definitely having that structure that’s able to accommodate multiple appointments is really helpful.
What actions will be taken further in the first week?
The second thing I would do once that website is up would be to snag a free Google voice number and throw that on the website so that I have an immediate phone connection which you can forward it to your personal cell phone or somewhere else eventually if you need to.
I would definitely snag a Google business listing too and toss that up on Yelp. I'm a huge fan of everything digital because it's free and it's super easy to set up.
The next thing I would do is go to vistaprint.com and immediately make a thousand like postcard sizes that read $20 off your first appointment.
The reason I like to use dollars and not percentages is “who gives a sh*t about 20%?”. That doesn't resonate with people but if you have a dollar amount, people understand what $20 feels like.
It's very important that these postcards be valuable and not just something that ends up in the trash.
So what's the main method of marketing? What's the main way you're going to get those first few clients?
My favorite way to do it is guerila style, door to door. There are two pronged approaches which are online approach and a physical approach.
First thing I would do is create a list of one, two, or even three local businesses in each of the following categories. I would want to see who are the local:
Local Shops
Chiropractors
Acupuncturists
Palladia studios
hair salons
dance studios
wine bars
yoga studios
fitness centers
juice bars
health food spots
facial studios
bar studios
cycle studios
personal trainers
I would make a list of three directories in each category. If you're in a smaller town, you may have fewer wine bars or maybe even none, but at least make a list of all of those kinds of places.
First things first, follow them on Instagram, like them on Facebook. Get a little bit of brand awareness so that they know who you are and you know who they are. Then I would start checking down the list where I would straight up going to those places and saying,
“Hey, I would like to introduce myself. I'm opening up a massage studio in town and I'm so excited to be here . I would love to leave some of our $20 off cards for you and your members.
Do you have any marketing materials that I could use to promote you? I would love to promote your local business and would give my clients to you. Maybe we can do some kind of partnership together later on with a newsletter or blog.
I would love to even trade a massage for a haircut or massage for a training lesson. Let's see what we can work out.”.
One thing that we didn't touch on here is you need to have a space to see them because it's really exciting if you have clients calling you. I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have is they think they need to rent some big treatment center with 10 rooms, or even one full time room. You don't have to have something full time yet, especially because no therapist works seven days a week.
I would actually suggest speaking to those yoga studios, acupuncturist, or chiropractor, seeing if they have an extra space in the back that you can rent by the hour, or could just say “do you have a space that I could rent? Even just one to two mornings a week, all I need is a little bit of space for a little bit of time”.
You'd be surprised how many of these practitioners have extra rooms or have days that they don't use.
By the end of 30 days where you'd expect to see yourself? What sort of numbers or benchmarks would you be looking for?
In the beginning, the work that you do tends to be either free, demonstrated, discounted or trades and that's okay. I would keep that discount out in my own pocket. I would not recommend using a third party company like Groupon for those $20 off cards because of the amount that they take.
I think it's really important to empower yourself and keep this in your own hands. You could put up a banner that says $20 off your first appointment on your website, or that kind of juicy, beginner offer that will get people in the door.
I've seen another business do “buy one full-price massage and get one for free” , but they had to use it in the next 10 days just to start that habit. I thought “Ooh, that's aggressive”, but I like it.
Also, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. The name of the game in month one isn't making money. It's making connections, planting seeds, all of the work that you'll do with search engine optimization with those incoming links from relevant sources, from review sites, from Google maps, and all of that stuff is meant to plant seeds and they will sprout.
But know that the first month is always a struggle.
Are there other tools or resources that you plan to use throughout this journey?
I'm a big fan of free.
My favorite website for high res free sourcing imagery, either if it's for like Instagram, Facebook, for the website, or for anytime you're doing a marketing promotional thing is unsplash.com.
When I think about Instagram, I think about having the same songs on an album, the same kind of music if you don't want it to look too crazy.
One of the things I see often is that people make it look really cluttered, messy and not professional but you just have to pick a color scheme, choose one to three colors and keep it consistent.
There's a great resource for lining up Instagram posts called later.com. You can do up to a hundred at a time. I know they have a free plan and they also have plans which cost $7.50 to
$41 a month. It’s great sitting down for an hour lining three months worth of Instagram posts, scheduling them to go out in whatever time of day you want on the calendar but make sure they line up beautifully and they look lovely and cohesive.
Now that I know my posts are scheduled, I don't need to think about it just by spending a couple of hours just to get it done. You don’t have to spend every single day fixing what are you going to post, and how are you gonna post it.
What are some early warning indicators that you might be looking out that are telling you, “yes, I'm definitely on the right track” or “I need to change or pivot somewhere”.
I would say right away that you should start to be getting clients in the door and engaging with people. This is an industry where we're touching people, so we have to be friendly, welcoming, and warm.
I had a big ‘fake it till you make it’ scheme. I started out super shy and that does not serve me or my customers and my business. Channel someone who is not shy, someone who's really bold. I always think like, “what would Stevie Nicks do? How would she approach this conversation?” She's walking in there so fierce and like “how would she handle this?”.
If in the beginning, you're not getting a whole lot of response, rethink your approach and how you're coming in and what energy you're bringing into the conversations. Because those connections that you make can last years.
One of the first people I spoke to was a chiropractor, and he looked at me at age 24 right off the street and he was like, “yeah, right”. It was kind of dismissive and I could have taken that and really let it hurt me and gotten down about it and given up. But instead it's par for the course name of the game and that guy's going to miss out cause I'm not going to give him all my clients.
I kept knocking on doors and met a wonderful chiropractor who I adore, who took me very seriously, and told me “I love your go getter attitude”. He still sends me clients 11 years later and I've sent him a ton of clients too. It's all about building relationships.
Firstly be patient, but if you notice that it's not bringing in folks, rethink your approach. Maybe there's something that isn't professional that you're coming off but try not to get discouraged by it. It's a muscle that you practice flexing just like anything else and that there will be some rejection in the beginning, but you should also see a lot of excitement because it's not like you're the new dentist in town that is trying to like drill people's teeth.
This is a message that everyone loves and people are going to get really excited about working with you.
Given your experience, what mistakes do you see most massage therapists making when they're trying to grow their business?
Make sure to make your website easy to use and professional.
The first thing is to make sure that you have your menu items on the homepage with a price point because that's what clients are looking for.
Don't make people go looking for things because they can get frustrated if they can't find it and they’ll just go onto the next website. There should be a bunch of ‘book now’ if you want them to book online, and a number to call if you want them to call. They don't care.
Make sure that your website is also professional looking and up to date. The way that the internet works and the way that the pace of things work. You have to update it frequently and make sure that it's mobile friendly so that when people are on their cell phone, it doesn't look weird, too small or hard to read.
When I'm a client and I'm looking at something, I want to know what it is, what it looks like and how do I book it. If every image on your website is stock, I don't know if you're a creepy guy in a basement somewhere, if you have a beautiful space, or what your approach is. Use actual photos. Even a cell phone photo is better than nothing in the beginning, but just make sure it looks tidy, clean and bright.
Ask for reviews.
Also, have a strong presence on Google maps using images, and reviews. Ask everyone:
“Hey, you know what, you've had my work before and it would really mean a lot to me if you could just take five seconds, leave a five star review or leave a few words about your experience working with me. It means so much to me as a small business”.
When people leave a review, reply and thank them. Engage with them and use it as a teaching opportunity to say, “check out my Instagram”, “check out my Facebook”. Follow along for specials and discounts.
Update your pricing and impose a no show policy.
Make sure that you are updating your prices pretty regularly but it doesn't have to be every year. It could be every year and a half or two for a price upgrade because you need to keep up with the cost of rent, changing economy, and your skillset changing.
I call the kind of clients I love ‘red velvet rope clients’. Those are the clients who show up on time for their appointments and pay and tip really well. If they accidentally have no show or a cancellation, they're paying that full fee which brings me to another point to enforce a cancellation policy to have good boundaries with clients by taking down credit cards when they’re booking.
Those red velvet rope policy clients, they're not going to care if you raise your prices by
$5. They're thrilled to pay it because they know that you're worth it.
If you're worried about losing clients, let them go, cause frankly, they will be replaced with people who are happy to pay your fee. If you have to raise prices and you're scared to do it, one thing that's nice to do rather than grandfathering them at a different price point, just say:
“In 30 days, there will be new pricing. If you'd like to lock your current rate, please go ahead and buy as many sessions at the current rate as you'd like, pre-purchase as many packages, as many sessions as you'd like and I'll always honor that rate.”
And then when those run out, they are at a higher rate like everyone else. This works every time without losing customers.
Set up Google Analytics.
You can be the best marketing person in the world, but if your website isn't converting those potential clients into actual clients, we have a big problem.
There are lots of reasons that a website doesn't convert so make sure that you're approaching things from a client perspective rather than just a business perspective. It's important that you can throw on Google analytics for free on your website to notice the bounce rate, which is when people are going to your site, how quickly are they leaving it.
Looking back into a 90 day journey, what's your focus in the second month, and what are some things you're expecting to see by the end of 60 days?
Returning Clients/ Rebooking
I would hope to see a lot of returning clients. My retention rate should be pretty good so if I've already worked on a bunch of people in month one, I would expect for you to see them again in month two.
Just make sure that you're following up with your clients, and make sure that you're asking them “how was your session? Would you like to schedule another session? Here's what we worked on today. Here's what we would focus on next time”.
Do not let a client leave without suggesting to them that you should see them again and be honest if they're in a lot of pain. If they have a lot going on, I would say “my treatment plan for you would include weekly massages until this gets sorted or biweekly massages”.
If it's a maintenance thing, I always tell people, “don't wait for your car to break down before you change the oil”, “Make this a monthly recurring thing so that we can do preventative medicine with you and make sure that you're not injuring yourself cause you're really active”.
Remind them that you exist.
It’s really important to create content that people can engage with your audience on social media, be engaging with the reviews that you get. If you reached out to all of those places from the long list that we made and you haven't heard back, reach out again, sometimes they just forget they have other stuff going on.
Remind them that you exist, and after that second reach out, start reaching out to a whole new bunch of people by making another list. This process never stops, not like a one time.
Diversify.
There are clients everywhere but it's very important to diversify all of the ways that you're getting clients in the door. Let's say that the chiropractic office who sends you 50 clients a week closes, you’re in trouble. To make sure that our sales channels are as diversified as possible so that we have clients coming in from the web, from Facebook, from Instagram, and from all of our local efforts from various different businesses.
I always leave those $20 off cards in my purse as well, so that when I'm going to the laundromat, I'm pinning it to the board. When I'm going to a restaurant, I'm putting it down with my gratuity.
Don't be afraid to put yourself out there.
When I started out, I believe I was in a coffee shop one day with a friend, and there’s a girl sitting there. I noticed she was holding and pressing her shoulders often, so I approached her and said “It looks like your shoulders are really bothering you. Actually, I just opened a massage studio down the street. If you need anything, here's my card”, you know? She laughed at me and she was like, “Oh my God, you're such a hustler” then until now she's still our client.
Know your pitch
Have that 30 seconds elevator pitch, “Here's who I am”, “Here's who I help”, “Here's what I do”, “Here's how I do it”.
That's really helpful because I want people to know I'm not a spa and don't do wraps or scrubs, but I do a clinical approach to massage. I do precise curated work that's wonderful for people with chronic pain, with lower back issues, with neck injuries and also to pregnant ladies.
Really speak to what you do and say it excitedly and passionately.And don't be afraid to just talk to people and constantly be putting yourself out there. That's the name of the game, especially in the beginning.
By this point, would you seek out any sort of help, free or paid?
Free Resources.
In terms of more free resources, get your clients to refer you to other clients. Make sure that you have a referral program where you're rewarding people like they’ll get $10 off your appointment and they get $20 off their first appointment. We've found that this is successful and people are really stoked about it.
Paid Resources.
The other thing is that Facebook is wonderful. You can easily make a sponsored post if you really want to start to consider reaching new audiences. There's also Google ad words, which has never been easier to use. They'll usually send you like a hundred dollars credit for signing up with them when you spend a certain amount.
In the beginning I was very paranoid about spending money because it takes time to build up a practice. What I realized is whenever you get in your head about like, “Oh, is this exactly the right thing?”. I don't want to spend money on this unless I'm absolutely certain it's going to have a certain return on investment ROI. The way that I've kind of hacked my brain into trying new things is running it as an experiment.
I'm just going to try and throw a little bit of money at it for two weeks and then let's revisit it after two weeks and see how it went and if it did, bring someone in. Then let's repeat it and give it more money, but if it didn't, let's try something else.
There's a concept called AB testing where you tried two different kinds of ads. Don't be afraid to try things and if you don't know where to start, ask for help. There's so many resources. There are so many people who do this professionally, Daryl included, who can really help you with this. Take courses on exactly how to do it.
Don't think that you just need to know how to do everything because in the beginning you really don't. You just need to know where to look for it.
What factors do you think will contribute the most to your success?
It’s more than just massage
The biggest thing that I see that separates folks from people who are working for other businesses to people who are actually successful working for themselves is that they know they cannot just show up and do massage.
You can hire a whole lot of people to work in your business, but only you are working on your business. That’s why to be successful, you really need to spend the time educating yourself, taking those online courses, and reading a lot of business books in the beginning.
Read more books
I read probably a business book a week and I was actually keeping that pace until just very recently. There are wonderful, wonderful books like The Four Hour Workweek, which discusses a lot of automation and delegation. There's books like the Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, that's phenomenal. If you hate marketing and you hate putting yourself out there, it gives you such a straightforward plan on how to do it. Marie Forleo also came out with an interesting content for her book called Everything is Figureoutable, which I think is a really nice spiritual book.
Work on your business, not just in it.
Make sure that you're constantly working on your business, not just in the business. It is a seven days a week project in the beginning and people get really excited about chasing money. They don't realize that in the beginning you don't have any money, but you do have time and that's your precious resource that you need to be spending every single day, if that's what you want.
As we look forward to, what's your focus and where do you expect you to see yourself at the end of those 90 days?
Get exposed.
I think now that we've got that online reputation, that we've got some reviews coming in, we've got some content that we've created, and our website is humming along, I would start to look at, having a little bit of a following.
Offer a trade with other businesses.
I would start to look at things like newsletters and blogs that you can trade with other businesses. If a local yoga studio who might have 30,000 readers of their newsletter, or might have a huge Instagram following and include you whether through their newsletter, their highlighted guest blog posts, or to their Instagram stories for the day or they take over your stories, then they can expose you to such a huge group of their own audience.
Offer to write that blog post for the local yoga studio and say, “okay, here's how massage can help with lower back pain in addition to yoga”, “here are the yoga stretches with massage that can be helpful”, or something to the extent of just getting people to know your brand and who you are.
Established Yourself As An Expert
Another thing that I love, a good free resource is Haro, H-A-R-O. It's called helping a reporter out. There are constantly increasing being made every single day rear for national news, asking for specific advice about health, wellness, medical stress, anxiety, anything to do with what you can offer, so they're always looking for expert advice.
What's great is when you get on a national news, media attention, you know, a quote in a national news item so it's really important that you establish yourself online as an expert because when clients are looking for you, people Google you and want to know who you are, and what your experience is. You can share that on your Facebook and on your blog.
Another way that I like to grow is to get really good press for the business. Incoming links from relevant sources make your listing go higher. In Google it's called search engine optimization or SEO.
“PR Hacking”
If the New York times quotes you and links to your website, Google will think that it's more of an important website than a website that doesn't have incoming links. I do have a little bit of a press hack for this one. It's a numbers game basically, if you can search for any business that has any business to any newspaper that has written anything about what you want to talk about.
I was looking under the news section in Google, looking for writers who've written about anything remotely relevant to what you want to talk about for the last six months to one year. The important thing is if you reach out to these magazines independently, they don't give a crap. They don't know who you are and they don't know what you're about, but if you reach out to the writers who need pitches desperately and if they've already successfully pitched a story to this publication before, they're more likely to be able to do it again.
If you're looking for their email, just stalk them online. Find their social media accounts, or their personal writing website that might have a contact page. If you can't find their contacts, go to the next writer.
Don't go too crazy, find their email, send them an email:
Subject: A question about your article.
Body: “Hey so-and-so, I loved your article on X, Y, Z in so-and-so's publication. I have noticed this trend with my clients. Have you done any research on this?” or
“I've noticed this thing that people do wrong. I've noticed my clients are especially stressed out because of the election”, or
“I've noticed that people are having extra injuries recently because of the local hurricanes. People are surfing the hurricane waves. They keep hurting themselves. Have you done any research on this?”
Just three sentences, your name and your signature line which includes your company, your website and your phone number.
You would reply, “Oh, that's really interesting. Can you tell me more about this? What data do you have and can you talk me through what that looks like?”. Then literally the next day, “Rachel Bider in Greenpoint noticed a 12% uptick in her businesses in the wall street journal”.
When we were in the wall street journal, putting that on our Facebook, our Instagram, our website, people get really excited to engage with it. Like, “Oh my gosh, this person that I know is doing something really cool!”.
It establishes you online as an authority in your industry. It's amazing how quickly and easy it is to do this. It's just a numbers game that you just have to reach out to a whole bunch of people.
An ongoing thing that we do regularly as well, and then sometimes it'll happen that the writer will actually just remember you and they'll say, “Hey, I need a quote for a story. Can I bug you for five seconds?”. Then I’d say, “Yes you can”.
Beyond the 90 days, what are the things that you'd be looking at next to for continued or sustained growth?
Get yourself your own space.
Once you start getting booked solidly with clients, which by three months, I expect, you should start getting a pretty full schedule. You might want to consider opening up your schedule to more and more days to more and more customers. You might want to consider looking for that full time space that you can rent.
Consider help from others.
Now that you've proven a concept, you know that you have enough money to sustain you. You might even want to think about hiring your first employee, which is a really scary but very exciting step.
If you're not quite ready to hire, you might think, “okay, well I have this treatment room for seven days. Maybe I can split it with another practitioner, an acupuncturist or someone in an adjunct service who I can refer them and they can refer me”, or “I want to find a chiropractor and acupuncturist where we can start a whole wellness suite and each of us have one room and it becomes its own referral network”.
I did it in about six months after I started my practice. Ironically, I was actually very scared so I was still working at a spa at the time, but I was like, “okay, well the three days a week that I'm at the spa, I'm going to have my employer work on clients that call in because I can't see them anyway”. Therefore, I doubled my income those days, which is really neat. I don't suggest you not, it's a little bit nuts cause you're like taking calls in between your appointments.
Maybe you want to have a treatment room where you're splitting your day in half where you know that 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM you're working and then that 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM someone else's working.
You don't need multiple treatment rooms to sustain a whole business. If you do your day and half like that, there's actually 14 shifts in a week with just one treatment room. Most therapists only want to work three, maybe four shifts in a week.
Share your success with others.
You can already have two employees working the days and times that you're not working. Don't be afraid to share your success with others because that passive income that happens is really valuable and important.
While it can seem scary, hire someone that you trust. Go through a process. Take them to an interview, talk to them, bring on people whose work you think is representative of yours, and train them on what you want them to do.
Finally, don't be afraid to share it because you know by hiring people earlier than you might be comfortable, because your own income relying on your time is very dangerous. What happens if you get sick, if you have a family member get sick, or when you go on vacation? You have to have income coming in, and I think it's really scary to tie it to your time.
Every bit of growth is a stretch. Although stretching is never comfortable at first, it opens up space to create really wonderful, amazing things.
Can you just tell us a little more about how you help other massage therapists?
I love my massage business and the reason that I got into the practice in the first place was to help people. I know when I started out I was doing a lot of struggling, crying, making mistakes, screwing things up. I had no idea what I was doing, then I figured it out and I got over it. But there are definitely things that I wish I had done a little bit differently.
One of the things I wish I had done earlier was get more mentors, more coaching, and more help. I still work with a business coach. I've worked with many coaches over the years.
One of the ways that I have enjoyed giving back is by doing business consulting and coaching for other folks who are starting in growing private practices. I started a side project called wellnessbusinessconsulting.com.
I had been helping out classmates who were like, “Rachel, how the heck are you doing this?”, then they were referring me to their friends and their friends of friends. I realized I needed to put my money where my mouth is and actually charge for my time. I just put up a website truthfully based on testimonials that I had gotten from other folks that I worked with for free.
Building that reputation has been really fun and helping lots of people who are totally unrelated to me now. It's not friends of friends anymore, but strangers from the internet. I just think it's really fun to work with people whom I'm starting and growing their practices.”
This interview was originally from Darry’s Turner’s Massage Marketing Summit. What a blast!
