Building Your Ideal Massage Practice starts with first creating a vision for yourself and your massage business. Since massage is such a personal business it also helps to have your vision be compatible with your personal vision for yourself and your life. A fun way to create and develop your vision is to create a “Mind Movie” for yourself.
Your vision will of course evolve as you do. Start with thinking big! What do you want for yourself from your business?  How many clients a week do you want to be seeing? What kind of office do you want? Do you want to share space or even rent space out to others? Do you want to work alone or have others who can be a support network? Do you want to be close to home or in a busy or quiet section of town? What types of clients do you want to work with? Start with describing the type of work – like working with pregnant women, elderly, athletes or some specific population. If you can’t narrow it down – don’t worry. You can develop that as you go when you start working with some so that you can learn more about what you like and don’t like. Most importantly though your ideal massage practice will include clients who value their health and their well being and are willing to pay for services that support that personal value. (more on this later!)
Learning everything you can about marketing and business is also necessary to build your ideal massage practice. Most massage schools have a few hours or maybe even a weekend on this. I usually tell people right out of high school to get a degree in business or marketing before going to massage school!  It is a constant learning process – something that you can do everyday. There are many resources and support groups out there to help you along the way.
Another thing you can do is take the time to plan for your business and create a business plan and marketing guide. This also includes creating a website for your massage practice. I am sort of a website junkie as you may be able to tell. In today’s world with all of the economic challenges having a website can help you get a regular stream of new clients. People are looking for information online. With a website you can give them more information than they ever dreamed of and become the expert in your area. When people find your site by searching for “massage, your city” they start out without having to be ’sold’ on the idea of massage. They are already looking for it – but not necessarily you! With a website you can tell them why YOU! are what they are looking for. There is a lot to creating a website like this but I have it all outlined on my website www.thebodyworker.comÂ
The process of doing all of the things and learning all of the things that you need to know to create a successful practice can be very overwhelming. To make the journey lighter one of the best things you can do is to get support for yourself. When you work on yourself and get the support you need to uncover your unconscious beliefs about yourself that are holding you back you increase your chances of success. Participate in online discussion groups.  Start or join your own peer supervision group. (Peer Supervision is a fairly new concept for the massage profession but a much needed one!)
I’ll be writing more about it here. When I started my own peer supervision group about 6 years ago, it is then when all of my websites and writings and massage practice started to really come together.
So what is your biggest challenge in creating your ideal massage practice? Posting questions on blogs like this can also help with getting traffic to your website – not that potential clients will find you from this link – but search engines love to see links to your website. It makes them think that you are popular so they give you better page rankings.)