The Massage Pundit

From a business standpoint, I’m always excited about beginning a new year, and looking ahead to what I’d like accomplish in the next twelve months.  Although I’ve only been in the massage business for a decade or so, I’ve been a business owner for most of the last thirty years.  One thing that has served me well in all that time is having concrete goals.

I left my job as a massage school administrator a little over four years ago and opened my own clinic.  Since the first day, my goal has been to gain one new client a day, 365 days a year.  Since we’re closed on Sunday, that means gaining two some other day of the week.  I’ve exceeded that goal again this year for the fourth year in a row.

I have not accomplished this alone; I have a great staff of therapists who share in that goal.  Every year on January 1, I write the magic number on a sticky note and it stays on my computer screen so I see it every day.  As I make a file for each new client, I give thanks for getting one person closer to the goal.  I keep the staff informed about how close we are getting as the year goes by.  They share in my desire to make it and my excitement when we do.

Another goal of mine, and it’s very concrete, is to have a good time every day at work.  I want to laugh every day, and I want my staff to laugh every day.  Enjoying your work is one of the most important things on the path to success. 

As any of my esteemed colleagues on this blog could testify, succeeding in business is largely a matter of perseverance.  When setbacks happen, you pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and get your eyes back on the prize.  Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” 

I often hear from therapists who have been in practice for a year or two, or sometimes ten, and they’re still not where they want to be financially or still not in the work situation they’d like to have.  Most of the time, I’ve found the problem comes down to their not having concrete goals.  They have dreams–”One of these days I’ll be doing so-and-so or making this amount of money,” but they haven’t given it the breath of life by turning it from a dream into a goal.

If you have a dream you haven’t realized yet, I want 2008 to be your year.  The first step is to write it down in specific terms.  Then put that where you have to see it every single day–your appointment book is a good place, or make it the screen saver on your computer.  Then remember that law of physics, that something will stay on the same path unless a force acts to change it, and realize you have to be that force in order to change your circumstances.  The Small Business Administration has a great piece of advice on their website (www.sba.gov), and that is never let a day go by without doing something to market your business. 

Schedule a half hour every day when your only focus is going to be marketing.  That can mean anything from working up a new advertisement to sending welcome cards to new clients, to calling up old ones who haven’t been in lately to see how they are and jog their memory that it’s been awhile since their last massage.  The point is, do something. Set your goals, and take some action.  Believe you are going to succeed.  Act as if you are going to succeed, and know that success depends on your actions.  Another unknown philosopher said “There are people who make things happen, people who watch things happen, and people who wonder what happened.”  Decide to be one of those people who makes things happen!

May your New Year be filled with peace and prosperity,

Laura Allen

How do you deal with difficult clients?  99% of clients who come in our door are happy to be there, and just as nice as they can be.  Then we get that other 1% that I’d just like to choke!  Since my practice is in a small town where news travels faster than the speed of sound, you just have to bite your tongue most of the time.  Here are a couple of examples:

A woman called for an appointment and said that she had a gift certificate for sixty dollars.  I explained that was for an hour of massage.  She made the appointment, and when she arrived, informed me that she wanted to break that up into four fifteen minute sessions.  I politely told her she hadn’t said that on the phone and therefore the therapist had booked her for an hour.  She quickly became very rude and said that the next time, she’d tell her husband to get her a gift certificate somewhere else.  I remained polite in spite of my urge to wring her neck.  The therapist turned out to be just what she’d been looking for, and she ended up purchasing a package deal for fifteen minute sessions, but it was a rocky start to our business relationship.

I am blessed with a staff of great therapists who are usually booked well in advance.  There are always those clients who never book in advance; they just call when they wake up and can’t turn their head and want to be taken care of right then.  One client who is notorious for doing just that called last week.  I offered to put her on our cancellation list.  During the course of the week, I called her on three different occasions, could only get through to her voice mail, and left her the message that I was willing to hold the appointment for half an hour and that I would then be calling to offer it to someone else.  She called back on all three of those occasions after I had given away the appointment.  The third time, she rudely said that  I should be able to accomodate walk-in clients.  I replied that my therapists weren’t willing to give up their steady appointments in order to sit around and take a chance that someone might walk in, and that all of our treatment rooms were filled with people who had booked in advance.  She was very huffy about it.  I referred her to another therapist in town who is just starting out and suggested that she might have better luck getting in with her on the spur of the moment.  She was incredulous that I was trying to send her somewhere else.

My 20-plus years in the restaurant business have given me plenty of experience in customer service, but thinking back on that I remember plenty of times when I wanted to dump someone’s plate on their head!  I never did that, although I was sorely tempted.  It’s better to take the high road and let the customer be the one who’s behaving badly.

I’d love to hear some of your stories about difficult clients and how you rose to the occasion.  I hope you’ve all had a prosperous holiday season, and wish you a healthy and happy New Year.

Peace on Earth,

Laura Allen

My friend Susan Mccallister cast aside the body that was no longer serving her a few days ago.  Pancreatic cancer snatched her away at the tender age of 54.

Susan was an equine massage therapist who loved her horses.  She liked to ride off into the woods and camp. She also loved to dance, to good old rock-n-roll by the likes of Delbert McClinton, Van Morrison, and her husband Kenny Ray’s band, Drop of a Hat.  She had a tiara and sparkly shoes. She loved good wine, and her friends, and her dogs, and all animals big and small.  She worked part-time in an animal hospital, and part-time in administration at a massage school.

Susan was in a lot of pain for most of the past year, pain that even strong drugs couldn’t take away, the kind of pain that doesn’t let you eat or get good quality sleep.  She passed away peacefully at home surrounded by friends and family.  She’ll be missed by us all.

Happy Trails, Susan Mac.

How many pieces of SPAM do you receive in your email every day?  Am I the only one who is irritated by this?  Am I the only one who thinks it’s an unethical way to advertise?  I’d like to hear how others feel about this.

A couple of months ago, I received an email from a chiropractor, who is an approved provider, advertising his courses and books he was selling about carpal tunnel syndrome.  The occasional unsolicited email doesn’t bother me; once in awhile it even turns out that it’s something I’m interested in, but this man emailed me three and sometimes more times a day for weeks.  When it first started, there was no disclaimer on his ad and no way to unsubscribe, so I just started replying and putting “REMOVE” in the subject line, which is the standard practice.  It had no effect.  It went on for weeks.  Even though I put him on my SPAM blocker, he apparently used several different addresses for his mailings and it kept coming through.

He finally put instructions on the email that unsubscribing takes two weeks.  What’s the excuse for that?

After a couple of months of receiving three or four emails a day from him with no regard for my repeated requests to be removed, I called the phone number on his email and left a less than polite message about being removed from his mailing list.  It had no effect; the spam continued to arrive three times a day.  By this point in time, I was so irritated by it that I wouldn’t buy anything from him or attend a class of his if he was the last provider on earth.  I finally wrote a letter of complaint to the National Board.  I don’t know if they took any action or not, or if he finally just got the message that I wanted to be removed, but his emails finally stopped–until today.  This morning, once again, he’s the first person in my inbox.  Out of spite, I immediately sent him a dozen emails telling him to remove me.  If I get another, I’ll send two dozen!  I’ve decided to just give him a taste of his own medicine.

I’m an approved provider myself.  My advertising channels are magazine ads, my own website and some others I have paid to be listed on, the AMTA website, and email.  My email advertising is only sent to people who have attended my classes before and given me their email address specifically because they wanted to be notified that way, and I also have a link on my website for people who request to be added to my mailing list.  My website does not harvest cookies, and a visit to my site does not mean you are going to start receiving email from me.  You have to ask, and if you ask to be removed, it happens immediately, not two weeks from now.

The Internet has made the world a small place.  I use it for research on a daily basis.  I love being able to communicate with friends and acquaintances across the world without having to pay for a long distance call.  I appreciate every email I get from the massage therapists who contact me for one reason or another; sometimes it’s a comment on my writing, or a hello from someone I met at the national convention, or a catch-up email from a former student.  I love those; I don’t consider those SPAM. 

I do consider what the above-mentioned chiropractor is doing to be SPAM, and I think that’s an unethical way to advertise.  If he had sent one email, and then honored my request to be removed, I wouldn’t be mad, but three times a day for weeks on end is just over the line. 

Thanks for letting me vent, and I’d love to know how others feel about this.

Peace & Prosperity,

Laura Allen

Do you have a policy in place for dealing with no-shows and last-minute cancellations? 

The first year I was in business for myself, I operated without such a policy.  By the end of the second year, when several more therapists had joined forces with me, I was appalled to see how many wasted appointments (and thus lost income) were caused by people who either waited until the last minute to call and cancel, or heaven forbid, didn’t call at all.  I decided to take a hard line when I saw that a year’s worth of blown appointments added up to over 8,000.

I put a notice on our website, another in our newsletter, a prominently displayed sign in the lobby, and added a paragraph to our intake form explaining our cancellation policy, which new clients must initial, and therapists inform all new clients of our policy.  We allow everyone one freebie per year–one missed appointment without penalty.  Even the best client will sometimes have a brain freeze or oversleep, or have a genuine emergency.  After that, if they miss they’re going to pay.

We maintain a list of people who are not welcome to make an appointment at our office unless they gaurantee it with a credit card.  Our cancellation policy states that if you are asked to gaurantee with a card, you can assume you’re one of those people we consider a repeat offender.

I haven’t lost any noticeable business, and the incidence of no-shows went way down after I put that word out about the policy.  The one or two people who defected were the above-mentioned repeat offenders, and we don’t want them anyway.  I worded the policy in such a way to make people realize that while one person may not think blowing off their appointment is a big deal, if three or four people in a week do that to a therapist, there goes someone’s groceries, their car payment or their rent.  Maybe it just made people think of it in a different way, but it made a positive difference. 

Busy physician and dental offices commonly overbook appointments, secure in the knowledge that a certain amount of people are going to cancel.  Massage therapists really can’ t do that, so you need some way to protect your income.  Having a cancellation policy, and enforcing it, will serve you well. 

Peace & Prosperity,

Laura Allen