Massage Practice Builder

When I first started out 20 years ago, there was no such thing really as a job in massage.  People became massage therapists because it was more of a lifestyle choice.  People were looking for independence and the freedom to do as they pleased while making a good living.

Today while the statistics from ABMP and AMTA don’t quite reflect the increase in job opportunities websites like www.citytowninfo.com make it out to be.  Our professional associations still say that more massage therapists start their own business.  I am not sure if that is still true or not.  These type of career and salary sites show such a wide variety of salary ranges it is impossible to really know what is going on out there.

I do know that having more massage franchises has opened up more job opportunities but with the rate of pay so low is that really an advancement?

I get more emails from massage therapists asking me to hire them or tell them where the good jobs are which show me they are really lacking in job seeking skills to begin with.  But the trend from being self employed business owners to more employees seems troublesome to me.   People looking for jobs are seeking security in the form of a job and income.  While there is nothing wrong with that really, it is the rest of the things that go with it.  Massage used to be more of a calling and a way of life.  People came to the massage profession wanting to help others and learned to be of service to others.   Now people are just looking for a job to fill their time and get paid.

How will these recent job trends influence the massage profession?  We don’t even really know since we seem to get such conflicting statistics.

I was also wondering about the increase in the number of Massage Envy like places and was wondering if it would be possible to have franchises that charge more and pay the massage therapists more and also use tools like supervision (not in the usual sense but as in clinical supervision ) which would seem like more of an advancement to me.

I was also reading a really good book by Robert Kiyosaki called “The Cash Flow Quadrant” which describes the employee, self employed person and business person really nicely.  You can read more about it on my blog but it got me thinking that maybe more Franchises are needed that do provide better working conditions, better massages, and charge a reasonable fee (as compared to the cheap fees of some franchises.)

Since jobs seem to be on the rise we may as well figure out how to provide more and better paying jobs.