Make the Most of Massage

Category: Accelerate Massage Business (30K – 60K+)

  • How to Take My Massage Clients (And Potential Clients)

    How to Take My Massage Clients (And Potential Clients)

    Do you need more massage clients?

    I know what that’s like. Early on in my massage career I was barely making a living and it took me a long time to figure out that I needed to hone certain skills. But once I became competent with these skills, I found a good living at the end of the massage rainbow.

    What are these skills?

    They are (1) fostering therapeutic rapport/care, (2) applying appropriate pressure, (3) doing relaxation massage with focus work and (4) executing basic marketing.

    For those of you who are just starting out with massage, don’t freak out.

    You can compete with LMTs who have been doing massage as long as I have—25+ years. (I stopped counting when that number spoke more about my age than it did about my experience.)

    In fact, I think you can “add” 5 years of experience to your massage in a short period of time (6 months) IF you work my plan.

    Ready to try?

    First, repeat after me: I will channel all my energy into developing the following skills and won’t waste time with other less important skills.

    Now, let’s focus on these essential skills starting with therapeutic rapport/care.

    Four Essential Skills To Get More Massage Clients

    Skill #1: Therapeutic Rapport/Care

    You may have noticed that I didn’t say just “therapeutic rapport” or just “care”.

    Why?

    Well, to me “therapeutic rapport” is about caring for the client when she’s in the office.

    “Care” covers all the other times, like:

    Do you return clients’ calls quickly? Are you nice on the phone?

    Do you follow up with the client after the first massage to see how he’s doing?

    Does your advertising show that you care about clients and their needs?

    Caring goes a long way with getting and retaining clients and is easy to amplify since we, LMTs, are natural, caring people.

    So, go deep with caring.

    This article will help you out.

    What about hands-on massage skills?

    Yeah, they’re pretty important, too.

    Skill #2: Pressure

    A top one in my book is being able deliver the appropriate pressure.

    Hell, we even named our business PressurePerfect.

    The right pressure relaxes the client.

    The right pressure helps relieve pain.

    Want to make it so that your client will never leave you for another LMT?

    Then nail the pressure and have outstanding therapeutic rapport.

    This video will help you out with getting the pressure right.

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhl08hkZi4[/embedyt]

    Skill #3: Relaxation Massage With Focus Work

    The last essential skill to cultivate is being competent at doing a relaxation massage with focus work.

    When you’re competent with this skill your client will get off your table feeling relaxed and in less pain/discomfort than when she came in. And that’s some major selling-your-massage-without-ever-saying-a-word. By the way, relaxation massage with focus work is my bread and butter massage.

    And no, you don’t need to know MFR, NMT, MAT or anything special to do good focus work.

    You just need to have a basic understanding of anatomy and be spot on with your pressure.

    Tight traps?

    No problem. Spend more time working the traps with the pressure that provides pain relief.

    Low back pain?

    No biggie.

    Focus on the QL and lower-back, spinal erectors nailing the pain relief pressure as you go.

    Taking My Potential Clients

    Now that you can snag my current clients with your souped-up skillset, you need to be able to take my potential clients, too.

    You’re going to do that by getting customers to walk through your door before they walk through my door.

    How do you do that?

    Step #4: Execute basic marketing.

    Here are two straight-forward strategies that will take care of basic marketing for you.

    The first one is: Get noticed on the Internet by making a website that is engaging and is optimized for a Local Google Search.

    A big, hairy deal?

    No.

    Some work required?

    Yes.

    But it’s upfront work.

    Your phone will continue to ring after the upfront work is done.

    In other words, once your website is good to go, you’ll reap the reward of new clients for many months to come without having to touch your website.

    Here’s how you build a website that makes you money: My Easy Massage Website Guide.

    The second marketing strategy is: Get noticed in your neighborhood by building referral sources.

    This is simple.

    Get your butt out there in your community and start making connections with people and businesses who can refer clients to you.

    But, Mark, I want to stay in my massage room and get more massage clients.

    Been there, done that.

    Psst…it doesn’t work.

    This is how you create referral machines: Get Referrals.

    More Massage Clients in a Nutshell

    Getting a little overwhelmed?

    Let’s break it down to make it easier.

    To take my clients hone these massage skills: (1) therapeutic rapport/care, (2) appropriate pressure and (3) relaxation massage with focus work.

    And as you’re fine-tuning your massage throw in some basic marketing.

    Start with your website or building referral sources in your community.

    Okay, now that you know how to take my current and potential clients, how about showing me a little love and leaving me a few:-)

    Need some more help?

    This is a DIY website, but sometimes you may need some more guidance.

    It’s a free class: How to Build a Massage Business Crash Course.

    Need even more help?

    Click here.

  • Common Sense Ways to Treat Sciatica

    Common Sense Ways to Treat Sciatica

    Good news! You don’t need to be certified in medical massage to treat sciatica. You don’t even need to know the latest myofascial technique.

    In fact, you can do a lot of good with sciatica if you just understand some basic physiological mechanisms and back research which surprisingly (or not) correlates to common sense.

    What is Sciatica Really?

    Sciatica is a symptom, not a condition. The symptoms are pain in buttock and/or down the leg. The cause is irritation of the sciatica nerve.

    We’ve been conditioned to think that most of the time nerve irritation has to do with the spine, like a herniated disc. To this day, I’m guilty of this.

    Aadila came in telling me that the doctor said she had sciatica. Her pain was in her buttock and half way down her hamstring.

    My first question was: Do you have back pain?

    No.

    Have you ever had back pain?

    Yes.

    Where?

    (She points to her mid-back.)

    I see…how about your lower-back?

    No, not that I can remember.

    Are you sure?

    Pretty sure.

    No stiffness?

    Nope.

    How about when you get up in the morning..?

    Well, on occasion…

    Aha!

    Hold on there, Wilbur! You’re proceeding as if sciatica is a condition—specifically, an impinged nerve at the spine.

    According to science writer Paul Ingraham, I’m actually barking up the wrong tree. He says most sciatica arises from muscle “knots” not nerves impinged by a disc or by the narrowing of a vertebral foramen.

    That’s fantastic—for us. If it’s not a nerve issues due to a spinal condition, we’ve a better shot at helping a client’s sciatica improve.

    Which brings us to good vibrations.

    Good Vibrations

    I have to tell you, I don’t always trust something that just “feels right.” Why? Because what “feels right” is usually influenced by experiences and knowledge. And those two things can seriously bias objectivity.

    Here’s an example of how trusting your gut can go really wrong.

    Scott Hornoff was a detective who like his fellow detectives trusted his gut. But then one day, his fellow detectives, trusting their guts, were convinced that Hornoff was the person who murdered a local woman.

    Hornoff was tried and found guilty. The problem was, he didn’t do it. And he spent 6 ½ years in jail before he was exonerated.

    Most unsettling is that the detectives’ gut feelings never changed. Hornoff became a free man only because the real murderer confessed!

    We’re still talking about massage here, right?

    Yep.

    When you have a muscle ache, you rub it back and forth. That feels like the right thing to do. But does this gut reaction actually help with the pain?

    Our survey says…

    It sure does!

    Vibrating a muscle causes proprioceptive confusion. Ingraham says:  “If you move or shake the body at random, the brain gets a deluge of nonsensical proprioceptive data. The nervous system, overwhelmed by the random stimuli, effectively “gives up” and stops resisting the movement: providing you with deep, muscle loosening relaxation!” You can read his article here.

    Here’s What I Do

    Here’s my technique for vibrating muscles when someone comes in experiencing sciatica.

    1. I locate a sciatica pain area.

    Next I need to know how much pressure to use.

    1. I press and hold the pain area.

    This is the tricky part. Too much pressure can cause more pain. I have safeguards for not pushing too hard. One is the client’s reaction.

    I’m looking for him to say “That feels good” or “The pain is lessening” as I press on the area.

    If I don’t get one of those answers, I revert to using the pain scale. The short version is: on a pain scale of 1 to 10, I want to press until the client says it’s a 3 (or 4 it’s not acute sciatica). Here’s the longer version: Pain Relief Massage Video: How to Find the Right Pressure.

    I hold the pain area until the pain starts to lessen. If it gets worse, I leave the pain area alone for awhile. Eventually, I circle back, but this time I’ll apply less pressure.

    Then there’s the piriformis…it can be very reactive because of the sciatica nerve going under it (or in some anomalous cases, through it).

    If the person feels zapping in the buttock or down the leg when I’m pressing the piriformis (or around it), I lighten the pressure. And if I’m using thumbs, I’ll try a broader body part, like fists.

    If direct pressure is just too painful, I’ll try skin rolling.

    Once I get the pressure down, then it’s on to…

    1. Vibrate the pain area.

    I gently pin the pain area and apply the appropriate pressure. Then I vibrate the pain area with a back-and-forth motion keeping my pressure consistent.

    For a client with raging sciatica I don’t apply deeper pressure as I’m vibrating like I normally would when working a tight spot. This is sometimes tough for me to control because by nature I’m smidge-deeper-pressure pusher.

    I vibrate the pain area long enough for it to feel good, but not so long that it feels annoying. I’ll cut it short when in doubt.

    If I really think a smidge deeper pressure might provide more pain relief, I’ll go back to the area and I’ll do the vibration at a smidge deeper level.

    And that’s it…well almost…

    More Common Sense 

    Heat is another low cost pain reliever. The heat acts a neurological sedative. When I worked for a chiropractor, we used heat packs from a hydrocollator. But you could simply use a heating pad.

    Education can also help. If you’re client is experiencing sciatica, share this research with her.

    It says that bed rest is no better than mindfully (pay attention to your back) going about your normal life. This tidbit of info could be HUGE for a person experiencing sciatica pain for the first time. For one, she can stop worrying about whether working is making her sciatica worse.

    Fired Up! Ready to Go!

    Don’t back down from sciatica.

    You have a lot of treatment tools to use like vibration and heat. Not medically sounding enough to compete with the chiro next door who is using spinal decompression (formerly known as spinal traction)?

    You can always say you’re using a proprioceptive confusion technique and a neurological sedative device, but you might be on shaky grounds when you whip out the $20 heating pad you had bought on Amazon.

    If you’re looking for more info on treating sciatica, I talk about how to NOT make sciatica worse in this article: Don’t Wear a Fancy Red Tie When Treating Sciatica. I learned the NOTs the hard way—by actually making sciatica worse in some of my clients.

    Hey, what can I say. There’s a learning curve.

    I’m here if you want to talk about a particular case or if you have some sciatica techniques you’d like to share.

    And if you want to know about new articles, videos, classes, etc., coming out, just enter your email below. You can unsubscribe whenever you want:-)

  • Massage Failure? Not. What You Did Wrong.

    Massage Failure? Not. What You Did Wrong.

    Understanding failure can lead to more massage money.

    I bet you think I’m talking about lessons learned from failing. I’m not. I’m talking about something more nuanced. Here’s what I mean.

    You’ve failed at something. I’ve failed. We’ve all failed.

    After the failure our brains add the current failure onto a list of failures. Nice brain… As the list grows, we start to think: Nope, not even going to try.

    But here’s the thing, when you “failed”, did you actually fail—try something and not succeed?

    Or did you just not show up?

    There’s a difference.

    Why You Didn’t Fail

    Think back to a “failure”.

    Oh-oh, me first!

    Once I had a side gig as a new business consultant for a fitness management company. My job was to get this fitness management company in the bid process for managing corporate fitness centers.

    I was pretty good at getting us in the bid process via reaching companies over the Internet. But when it came to developing local business relationships face-to-face, I didn’t deliver. In fact, I spent a year avoiding any of those face-to-face interactions because I hated schmoozing.

    Eventually, it was “Adios, Marcos.”

    I was replaced by someone who would do the face-to-face interactions.

    Added to my list of failures was new business consultant. But in retrospect, it can’t be any more obvious that it wasn’t a true failure because I literally hadn’t shown up to do half of my job.

    Showing Up = Chance for Success

    Recently, Kat, a client of mine, reminded me of what can be accomplished if you show up.

    Kat is currently ranked 12th in the nation in singles tennis in her age group. When I asked her about the key to her success, she smiled and said that are plenty of people better than her, they just don’t show up.

    If you don’t show up, you have no chance of succeeding. Period.

    2 Showing Up Keys 

    For me, showing up involves two key things:

    1. Recognition.

    You first have to recognize when you’re hiding. Then you need to start

    1. Self-negotiations.

    By self-negotiations I mean that you make the “showing up” less painful for yourself by giving yourself outs.

    For example, when my wife, Lisa, and I were doing an on-site massage business, I wanted to connect with local hotels, and there was a hotel association in our area that had a social every month.

    Yay…more schmoozing…

    But if I wanted to get to know the people in the industry, I had to schmooze, right?

    The socials happened at night when I was busy doing massage. This made it convenient for me not to go. And I did that for awhile until I recognized that I was hiding.

    Then I started to negotiate with myself: “I know you just got done work, but there’s an hour left to go at the social. Just go for 30 minutes.”

    So I went to my first social and when I got there, things were worse than I thought they’d be. The handful of people I knew weren’t there.

    I looked at my phone: 28 minutes and 22 seconds to go.

    “Okay, if you introduce yourself to 3 people, you can leave anytime you want.”

    I did and with 7 minutes and 13 seconds left, out the door I went!

    When the next monthly social rolled around, I had zero interest in going back.

    “Okay, Mark, just go to this one and you won’t have to go to amother one.”

    I pinky-locked on that one fast.

    This next social turned out to be easier, and when the third one rolled around, I went willingly, but I gave myself an out: If for whatever reason I want to stop going, I can.

    You can see where this is going. Though I never loved the socials, they got easier, and I never used my out.

    How to Make More Massage Money By Showing Up

    Here’s another way showing up has helped me make more massage money.

    By showing up to the marketing table (consistently working one marketing strategy) for a year, I nearly doubled my weekly income.

    Did I want to show up?

    Hells no.

    I had to negotiate with myself like crazy.

    “If you don’t get a referral after 3 months, you can stop.”

    How You Can Make More Massage Money: Show Up

    If you’re a little in the dumps because you think you’ve failed at marketing or starting a side business or taking your business to the next level or asking for a raise, think again. My guess is that your “failure” might be directly related to NOT showing up.

    Give yourself a chance.

    Recognize when you’re avoiding “showing up” and then try self-negotiations to stay on track.

    Let me know what I can do to help you.

    If you haven’t joined my email group, jump in.

    You don’t have to say anything or do anything.

    I send you links to my latest information. If you’re working on something specifically and want to let me know, I will send you links to material that can help you out.

    It’s free and you can sign up below:-)

  • How to Create Predictable Massage Income

    How to Create Predictable Massage Income

    One week you’re dining at your favorite restaurant. The next week you’re eating P&Js.

    We all know what happened during P&J week–clients disappeared.

    That’s just how the massage business is, right?

    Actually, no.

    You can create steady and predictable massage income every week.

    Here’s how to do it.

    Predictable Massage Income

    First, think about how many clients it will take per week for you to make the money you want.

    We’ll call this the weekly average of massages needed to meet your income goal.

    Next, take your weekly massage average and add 5 more massages per week.

    Did your hands just curl up in the fetal position and scream out “No Mas!”?

    This should help them uncurl: You won’t ever have to hit the “weekly average + 5” number if you don’t want to.

    The “weekly massage average + 5” number is to help you figure out how much marketing you need to do.

    Here’s what I mean.

    Average Weekly Massage Goal = Unpredictable Massage Income

    For easy math let’s say you want to make $1000 a week.

    You charge $70 an hour.

    To get $1000 at $70/hour you’d have to do 14.28 hours worth of massage.

    Let’s round that up to 14.5 hours of massage.

    So, you go out and market to get 14.5 hours of massage a week. When you hit a week or two of 14.5 hours you get excited and continue with the same marketing plan.

    But at the end of the year your marketing efforts yield these results:

    1. You hit your 14.5 hour week about half the time.
    2. A few weeks you did better than your average.
    3. Some weeks we’re really bad.
    4. The rest of the weeks were below your average.

    Is that reliable and predictable massage income?

    No.

    Weekly Average + 5 = Predictable Massage Income

    Now, let’s keep the same setup ($70/hour, $1000/week, 14.5 hours of massage), but this time we’ll plug in the concept of marketing to hit your weekly number + 5.

    So, we’ll add 5 more massages per week to bring the total to 19.5 hours of massage a week needed to meet the goal of averaging 14.5 hours a week. Let’s round that up to 20 hours per week for easy math.

    To average 20 hours a week you’ll have to really ramp up your marketing efforts, much more so then when you were trying to hit the 14.5 hours mark.

    When you do that it’s almost guaranteed that more clients will start to come in.

    But wait, Mark, remember my fingers curling up in the fetal position? I don’t want to do 20 hours a week!

    You don’t have to.

    The trick to predictable weekly income is overflow.

    Once you have 14.5 hours filled for the week, you push the rest of the clients into the next week.

    Or if one week you want to make more than your weekly average, like before going on vacation, see the overflow clients that week.

    It’s completely up to you.

    Oh, Crap

    If you’re thinking, Oh, crap I have to take marketing seriously!, you’re right. But you don’t need to turn into this:

    You can just be you by picking the marketing strategies that don’t conflict with your core values or compromise your integrity.

    I wrote this article to help you find the salesperson within in.

    You Have to Sell

    And I wrote this article to help you cultivate the salesperson within.

    How to Get Someone Sell Your Massage

    Quick Version for Predictable Massage Income

    Hyperventilating?

    It’s not as bad as you think.

    If you’re not hitting your target, predictable income mark then you’re not marketing enough.

    Determine how many massages you need to do a week to meet your annual income goal. Then add 5 more massages per week.

    Increase your marketing efforts to reach the “weekly average + 5” number.

    This article will help you market without feeling cheesy.

    2 Marketing Tips, Not 10

    When you have your first week of clients coming out of the woodwork don’t freak out.

    Do this instead:

    Source: WikimediaImages

    Or this:

    Source: Open Clipart-Vectors

    Better yet, this:

    Source: Open Clipart-Vectors

    Because now you have a waiting list of clients.

    See the overflow this week, next week, in a month–it’s your call.

    Hello world of steady and predictable income:-)

    Need more help growing your massage business?

    Here’s a free course: Jumpstart.

    Also, I have an email group. I’ll let you know when my latest articles, videos and tutorials are out. And if you to tell me what you need help with, I’ll make sure you get the material that you need. My email group is free and you can unsubscribe anytime. Sign up here:-)