Amy Bradley Radford (00:02)
Well, hello friends and welcome back to the Massage Business Success podcast. Now in today's episode, it's gonna be just a little different because we're not just talking about mindset or marketing, we're putting your entire business under the magnifying glass because it's time for the massage business audit. We are going to ask ourselves, where are you leaking time, energy and money?
I would really like this episode to be interactive. So if you're walking or driving or gosh, I don't know, folding those sheets and towels, just listen for now. But if you can sit down and start answering some of the questions that I'm gonna ask you in today's podcast. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about my experience as a coach. Most entrepreneurs in massage therapy are not failing, even though that's many times what they say to me as a business coach.
They feel really frustrated. They feel like they're spinning their wheels. They feel like they're painted into a corner. They can't move forward. They don't know how to move forward. And when they come to me, they have so many things that feel like they're going wrong in their business that they feel like they're failing. And they're not, they're not failing. What it's really about is gaining a real understanding about how incredibly important it is to learn what it means to manage yourself.
So these overworked, exhausted, and burned out massage therapists are all leaking precious energy inside their business by not managing their time or not knowing how to manage their time or even maximizing their time, which I feel is a huge principle behind what I teach: and coach is how to make every minute count and every minute make you money. So it's those tiny drops, it's those teeny tiny drops of time, money, and energy that all
kind of collect together and slowly steal your momentum and ambition and make you frustrated with the business model you're working in. So today we're gonna discuss how you plug those leaks. So let's do this. All right. First up, let's talk about time. And I'm not gonna mention your time on your phone, although, you know, we all need a social media break or Pinterest or YouTube or TikTok, Tiker Talkers or whatever you wanna call it.
But if you're using that ⁓ time on your phone as a way to not do what you're supposed to do in your business, then you might have to look at that a little bit. But I'll leave that up to you. What I want to talk about is how money is time, not time is money. Money is time, especially when you earn a living through scheduled time and you can't make more time. You have to use your time as efficiently as possible.
in order to make you the most money as possible. And we have to take that time concept one step further with massage because there's only so many of those blocks of time that you can physically work. So here's a few questions for our little business audit. You can answer these in your head or like I said, jot them down and work through them. But the first audit that we're gonna look at are time leak observations. I want you to really sit back.
and look at your business and see if these are some of the places inside your business that you're leaking little bits of time. So the first one is, are you overbooking or do you have large gaps in your schedule? Are you continuously going over on your schedule?
Are you continuously going over on your scheduled massage times, therefore not able to take care of yourself or your other business needs throughout the day? You don't even have time to grab a drink of water, a handful of nuts, or maybe even use the bathroom because you've scheduled yourself so tightly? Or are you afraid to move any appointment times around to accommodate your needs? You'll do it for your clients, but you don't feel like you can do it for yourself because you're afraid if you make changes that you'll lose clients.
And do you take one day a month or preferably one day a week or half a day a week to schedule in the time you need to run your business and complete the necessary tasks that make your business run better? Or are you always scrambling to take care of business no matter what you do? So those are some really great questions to think through. ⁓ They're common questions that I see, common problems that people bring to me and they don't really know how to fix them.
And so we work through those because it helps to maximize their time and also maximize their earning potential when they get those things sorted out. So our audit question number two is spinning your wheels and losing efficiency. And this is a big one. A couple examples, I'm just gonna give you two examples of this. So is your marketing planned out in advance? Or are you sitting down every week going, my gosh, I know I need to.
I need to be posting something on social media so I have a better presence and yada, yada, yada. Are you taking the time to be proactive and lay that all out, an hour even, or are you sitting down and going, what am I gonna do today? How am gonna do this? And you spin your wheels and waste time trying to come up with something because you're in a hurry. The next one, which some businesses require this and some don't, but how about getting backlogged on charting?
because you're scrambling from one appointment to the next and then you have to take it home or as a mistake I've made, you know, in the earlier parts of my career was I wasn't getting it done and then I was trying to take one day and get everybody's notes done. But you know, after three or four days and after 10 or 15 bodies, I didn't remember everything that I did with that one client or some, most of them. And I wasn't providing great customer service.
by not tracking my client's progress better. And so then I'd have to take it home and finish it on like a Sunday. And it just, it's not the most efficient way for you to manage your practice, but also your clients. So those are two ways that we can spin our wheel. So audit number three, healthy time boundaries. And I see this one a lot. So do you have a certain number of massages that you know you need to stick to, but you keep scheduling someone on your day off or
Giving up a lunch hour because you're already full and you don't know where to put that one client? Or you don't know how to say no? Or you rearrange your Saturday plans to fit in just one more client and gosh, gee, since you're already there, we may as well just work the whole day. And then by the time you go back to work on Monday, you haven't had enough downtime to recover and you become more and more exhausted each week because it seems like client demand is running you over and you don't know what to do.
You don't know how to set those boundaries that protect you inside your business and keep things going in the right direction and instead give in and say yes when you want to say no. So does any of this sound familiar? And I know it does because I've been there and I see so many of my clients in this place. And you know, this isn't judgment. This is just clarity because we need to fix this. And you know, the way I'm going to talk to you about fixing this probably isn't what you're going to think.
we're gonna talk about shifting your thinking by redefining time and money in self-employment. Many of us have a belief that time equals money and that comes from spending time in the employment world where you punch in and you punch out and you put your time in and you get paid for your 40 hours for completing whatever it is that you were hired to do. But when you are self-employed, that model no longer works. So.
Most the time leaks in this time leak in self-employment comes from not having a clear what I call operator's manual. And what this is is a personalized set of boundaries and systems that guide how you run your business. And when you create it and stick to these, they protect both you and your time. But here's the key. Running your own business is fundamentally different
from being employed by somebody else. Many of us step into self-employment carrying beliefs that were formed during our time as employees. For example, I was raised by parents who owned a business. What I learned about time and money was very different than maybe what others might have learned. And to me, money was tied to finishing a job. It was not the number of hours it took. And so that is a contrast. You can contrast that this with what many people experience in traditional employment.
When you're in an employed position, you're part of a team, typically. Everybody's doing their job and everybody doing their job makes the business run. You usually have a defined set of tasks, but you're not covering all the tasks. And you clock in and clock out. But most importantly, your time is directly converted into money. So when stepping into self-employment, people often carry this time in, money out mindset with them.
And that's where the trouble begins. Because if you use an employee mindset in your self-employed life, here's what's likely to happen. You will become exhausted. You become exhausted because you think, okay, I need more money, so more money means I work more hours. And that's not the case. It will not work that way. You will become injured and burned out because you're working too many hours. I think that's, you know, a lot of people come to me because they wanna raise their prices, but inside of raising their prices,
all these questions, all these boundary issues, all of these things that the people I work with are unsure of how to handle, and so they handle it with this employee mindset, and they end up working themselves to death. So when you do this, you actually become overwhelmed without even knowing why you're overwhelmed, and then you don't know how to make different decisions because it doesn't fit that model of work.
like you've been trained when you're an employee. So I want you to realize that in this situation for so many people, you're using the wrong measurement system. There is no time clock in self-employment. There is no nine to five. There's no automatic paycheck. You know, you now manage all of your time. And if you don't learn how to do that well, it'll run your business and your health into the ground.
So learning to manage time without a direct monetary reward is actually one of the hardest shifts that people have to make when they are an entrepreneur. So in the beginning, you may not see immediate financial return for your time and it may feel like you're working for free, but you're not. And that, you know, that can feel very defeating unless you change the way that you define this value. value in self-employment is not measured by hours. It's measured by the results.
your business produces and the outcomes you create. It is the amount of money you take home at the end of the week. So when the job is complete and your job is completing, you know, 15, 16, 18 sessions and all of the paperwork that goes along with that and all of the cleaning and all of the laundry and all of the business tasks to keep your business running efficiently, that's the job to complete and the money will follow.
So until you truly shift your thinking and release that belief that money is tied to time, your business will likely feel stuck and hard. But once you embrace this truth that money is tied to outcomes, you can start running your business more effectively, sustainably, and profitably. So this is kind of a perfect bridge into the next time leak, and that is a lack of planning. Planning is the backbone of successful business.
And I'm sure you've all heard this quote, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And boy, boy, can you see this when you are your own boss. To fix this leak that makes you run around like a chicken with your head cut off, always behind, never prepared for lots of things from book work and taxes to being to work before your client is there to start on time, you have to set an appointment in your schedule to make all this happen.
And if you don't sit down and plan out all of those things, it won't happen and nothing will change. You know, I was talking to one of my clients and they were like, I guess I never really thought about, you know, setting up an appointment to go in and do business work in my office. I only went to work to do massage and then I went home, but there were so many things that I needed to be getting done at work that weren't getting done, but the time wasn't created to get them done. So they just, it's the can that got kicked down the road.
And so when we started setting time, and it was a three hour block in this person's schedule on Wednesday mornings, and they showed up for themselves on time like an appointment, and they worked for three hours, within about six weeks, so many things had been resolved inside their business, and their business was moving forward, and it was fun again. It was easy, because things had been cleaned up. ⁓
The operators manual had been outlined and they had a really firm set of time boundaries that were supporting them as a person So they felt like they were in a relationship with their business and they were being supported So the first thing you do to start cleaning up your business is you take the time and set at a time and you do it and It will take more time in the bidding in the beginning. It's like, you know kind of cleaning out the basement You've got you got a lot of things you got to sort through you got to divide things into piles You've got to figure out what you want what you don't want
It takes a little bit of time, but once you kind of figure things out, then it takes less time. So I challenge all of you to start with a half a day a week. Just grab a half a day a week and dedicate it to your business. Two hours, just have a great business lunch for yourself. Take two hours and start mapping out the things you already know that you need to do in your business, but you haven't allocated the time to do it. And I'm gonna tell you to show up on time for yourself and your business.
and then start writing out everything you know you need to do and assign it a time, like an estimated time you think it's gonna take for each task, because it helps us kind of propel ourselves through this task list instead of getting... ⁓
off track, lost in the weeds, maybe playing on our phone, you know, that sort of thing. So within a few weeks, you and your business will be different. And the negative mental load, it's a negative mental load you're carrying will start to lift. So another thing I like to tell people to do is, know, efficiency, maximizing your time and being efficient really takes on ⁓ this thought process of batching your business tasks together.
It's I believe we call this multitasking, but when you're doing it for your personal life and your business life, you're trying to eliminate anything extra that you're having to do because we separate business and personal in our mind. So.
I want you to start thinking about this differently and combining this. So a really great example of this, and of course this model changes depending on how you shop. Some people shop online and pick everything up. Some people ship it all to their door. Some people actually walk into a building and buy stuff. It really depends on who you are. But let's just take this example of grocery shopping. So you always have two lists. You have a business list and a personal list.
And I'm gonna tell you, you're always gonna have two lists. I don't care if you need to buy a pack of pencils or maybe some paper clips or maybe just some markers or something for your business. You're always gonna have two lists. And when you go to the store, you're gonna make sure you use those two lists. You're gonna make sure that you're not making an extra trip. You're gonna be getting business needs and personal needs and you are going to make completely different purchases because you're gonna have a business debit card and a personal debit card or whatever it is.
that you separate your business out with, but two separate purchases. And when you go to pick these up, or when you drive to the store to get your supplies for home and work, you're going to write the mileage off as a business expense because you were shopping for your business. That's why I say, make sure you organize and batch everything together. Don't run to the store just because you have to. Map it out, plan it, put your time together, utilize your time as efficiently as possible.
and make sure your business is the one that's fronting all of that. You had to get stuff for your business. You just happened to get home stuff while you were there, not the other way around. And it's thinking about things differently. So this type of behavior batches lots of tasks together at one time. You had made one trip to the store instead of multiple trips to the store or sitting down to buy stuff for home and then having to sit down and buy stuff for work. So you're actually getting things done.
quicker, you tracked your mileage for tax write-offs and if any of you know me, I preach mileage. If you own a car and drive a car, then you make that car make as much business, know, expenses and mileage as you possibly can because it is worth it to track it if not create the opportunities to have more mileage to write it off for your taxes. So it's a way of thinking and planning. I usually
set out my business tasks of things I need to do and I attach my personal ones to it so that I can utilize my mileage the best. So and then the other thing is when you operate this way and you separate your business and your personal expenses all the time, you automatically separate out your expense categories and have receipts as you don't have to like figure out what was in your business and what was in your personal. It's very clean.
What I like to do is I take this information and I download my bank statement and there's all my transaction and expenses for the month. So it makes things very easy when you batch all this together and make it work for you. And it really is about organizing your time and disciplining yourself to run your life and your business this way. So the next thing I'm going to tell you is if you can automate anything, you need to take the time to do it. And this is some of the stuff you do in your business planning time.
Text reminders if you're if you're needing to do text reminders for your clients get it worked out figure out how to do it auto and get it done and Take that off your plate so you're not having to sit down and do text reminders Intake forms figure out how to do digital get all your bills on bill pay Stop getting paper bills or bank statements in the mail because if you don't know what to do with them and they sit there That's more time you have to you have to use at home to open up the bank statement figure out what you're gonna Do with it when you can go online and download it all
or have a system set up so that you know exactly what you're doing with that and you're efficient with it. So set aside a couple hours a month to make sure you are on top of everything and keep track of your business and life. I talk to a lot of people who don't have a system set up to manage their bills, their taxes and bookkeeping every month. They do it once a year and it's a disaster. That is not efficient for you and your business.
So make sure to schedule it in as an appointment with yourself and you keep that appointment. And then the last thing I'm going to tell you is when it comes to scheduling anything, whether it's a client or the time with yourself to run your business, you need to book with intention. I call this reverse engineer your schedule. You need to figure out what you need, what you need to earn, what it's gonna take to run your business efficiently, and then you set your schedule up around it.
and then that is the schedule you keep. You don't wait for all of your clients to tell you the times they need, you set the times. And as you are redesigning your schedule, take into consideration what your clients need, but make sure that it fits both you and your clients. And don't waste not one second of your time at the table earning less than you know you need to earn. So when you do some of this and you put it all together, can you imagine,
Can you imagine if you just got maybe five hours a week back because you were just a hair more organized and you were plugging some of those time leaks and then you were able to take that time home with you? What exactly would you do with five extra hours a week? If you maximized your time at work and you came home and your workday was done, would you do something for yourself that you really wanted but couldn't seem to find the time? How about get a massage?
Your time is your most valuable asset. Protect it. Learn how to use it wisely and train yourself to use it correctly. So next up, this one is therapists we feel the most and these are energy leaks. And I don't mean needing another cup of coffee or a Red Bull. I mean those clients, those routines or even beliefs that drain your life force. And this is so true in the work that we do where we touch other people and
take care of other people for a living. The things that repeat inside your mind that you need to make decisions about and change instead of constantly wasting your precious energy trying to deal with them by not dealing with them. So audit question number one for energy leaks, which, which clients leave you feeling the ones that complain during the whole session. They question your price every visit. They want you to go over on the session.
for free. When you see them in your schedule, you shrink just a little bit inside and you silently wish that they would no show or perhaps cancel. You have to create and then you have to create more fortitude within yourself and your energy to get prepared to work on them. So what do you need to do? What should you do? Do you ignore these feelings or do you sort through them and figure out what you need to do? So
Again, I mean, I think you hear this on my podcast every week. The very first thing you need to do if this is happening inside your business and you have a full schedule is you just need to raise your prices because if your schedule is packed and you can't take new clients, then you can create the opportunity to get new clients. Most of the clients you struggle with will move on when you increase your prices. And it's because you make this silent statement to them of your own self worth. These types of people show up when we are desperate.
Think about that. And it's our energy that draws them to us. And it is your new self-worth energy that will no longer align with their energy. Will they say something negative about you raising prices? Well, probably. Most likely, they will get frustrated with you. But I want you to not be scared. I want you to actually be prepared. I want you to sit down and write up something very professional, very neutral, and
Practice what you will say so that you will have the words ready to be gently and lovingly ready to set some good boundaries for yourself. Now we could talk a lot about boundaries and energy leaks, but I want you to take a good hard look at how you act inside your business and your relationships with your clients and on a case-by-case basis. Think about what you can do to shore up those energy leaks with all of them. If you will just take the time to sit back
and give yourself a moment, you can sort this out. You can keep some of these people, but you will have better boundaries so they're not taking from you as much. So our audit question number three, where are you saying yes when you mean no? So I'm gonna tell you a secret, and this was a secret I learned. We say yes when we don't want, we say yes when we don't want to,
more often when we are out of control. Your business and how it operates is a mirror of you. When you begin to take control of the little things and make things work better for you, you become very aware of how much better you feel and you begin to protect yourself in your time, which in turn helps you make conscientious decisions to be more present for yourself, have healthier boundaries, which in turn makes saying no
much more easier because you're doing it for your own self-worth. So here's the thing, if you don't take the time to run your business, your business will run you and you will begin to hate what you do for a living. Then you create this scenario quietly in your mind where you get injured. We create it and then you have to quit because secretly you want an out. I know that some of you are listening and hearing me very deeply. You can turn this runaway train around. It all starts with planning the time
to change it all. Okay, on with the next one. We're gonna talk about money leaks. Okay, my friends, let's dive into money. I want you to take a deep breath. There's no shame here, just a splash of math. And you know, that was chat GPT, that wasn't me. But he gets my humor and I kinda, we have a good relationship. I like it when he throws some humor in there for me. So audit question number one.
Are you charging for all your time? Or are you giving a portion away for free every session? You know, it may not seem like it matters to you mentally, the few extra 10 or 15 minutes you tack onto your session for free, but to quote something popular right now, the body keeps score. So this is yet another mental game. If you do four massages a day and you go over 10 to 15 minutes each,
That is another whole hour of massage that you did. And if you were working within your physical limits, you know, like you can only perform 16 sessions a week and stay physically healthy, you are actually performing four more hours of massage than you realize. And our brain says we saw 15 clients, but our body says we saw 20. This is a leak not only in money, but it is your number one resource. It is your energy. And if you're gonna work 20 hours,
then you should be getting paid for 20 hours, not working 20 hours and earning it for 15. So ignoring this fact starts to create a lot of resentment inside of you that you really question where it comes from because you don't see it, but you feel it, but you ignore it, but it's there. And this comes from not being authentic and honest with yourself about how you're managing your time and clients. And at some level, you start to lose faith and trust in your business.
and you don't know why. So audit number question number two. Do your no shows cost you but not them? So you know this could be a really hot topic of debate and I'm just gonna cut through the crap and ask you a question. What is your time worth? Is it worth so much more than that paycheckker who works 40 hours a week? One hour of your time is
is potentially equivalent to one full day of work for them. But because they're paid differently, one hour of their time doesn't feel as impactful to them. They don't understand that one hour of your time makes a huge dent in your income. So you should be charging for no-shows. It is the fastest and easiest way to make sure your clients keep their appointments and eliminate those that are hurting you, your income, and your business. Trust me, you can find more clients.
you can find clients that show up and respect you. So audit question number three, are you undercharging loyal clients from 2012 because you're scared they'll leave? Are you charging different prices for different people depending on how long they've been with you? You know, that's an interesting one because people want to, entrepreneurs want to reward their long-term clients, but after a while, it gets to be really unfair.
So if you have different fees for long-term clients, that's not about them. That's actually about you. That's you not wanting to lose clients or hurt clients' feelings or think you're being nice and giving away time because they've stuck with you. That is not a reflection of your self-worth and value. This type of behavior requires a clarity session with yourself or maybe even a mentor. But I want you to look at your schedule, your budget, and what you are doing and see where you are cutting yourself.
short. Then make the conscious decision to bring everything into alignment and have all of your clients on the same fee. Yeah, it's going to take some hard conversations. It might mean you lose a client or two. But the reality of this is that again, the body keeps score. And this is one more leak that we need to plug to make sure that your success
to sure that you are successful. It can be very impactful on your success. So really you don't need 50 new clients. You need to serve the ones that you're serving them and you want the ones who have a deeper.
You need to serve the ones you have. You don't need 50 new clients. You need to serve the ones you have in a deeper, better, and more clear way for both of you.
All right, this is my favorite part. Once you found a leak, time, energy, or money, don't beat yourself up. Leaks don't mean you're failing. They just mean you're ready to evolve. So this is your realignment moment. I want you to ask yourself, what part of my business still lights me up? What do you really love about it? What's actually working that you want more of? Where am I doing things just because I have to?
What would I like to get rid of that I don't really want to do anymore? Where do I need to make small, consistent changes that will put me back on a path where my business is a positive aspect of my life instead of a negative? Those are all really great questions to start asking yourself. So let's talk about some of the realignment tools that we've mentioned in this podcast. Number one, we're gonna start scheduling a CEO hour.
One hour, no hour, no oils, no clients, just you and your business, or two hours, or even three hours, I highly recommend three hours. You're gonna use monthly or quarterly check-ins to spot drifting areas before it turns into a burnout. You're gonna bring yourself back into alignment, because even after you create your handbook and your boundaries, you're still gonna have to work through them. You're gonna still catch yourself giving in or saying yes when you mean no, and it's gonna take a little bit.
a little bit of time to clean all of this up. So use some check-ins so that you can keep things moving forward as best as possible. And you need to let go of shoulds. Should is not a business strategy. I should do some marketing. I should schedule something every week with myself and get things planned out. I should be more organized. You need to have a goal you want to reach and then set the steps you know you need to get there. You won't get there if you don't know where you're going.
Well, my friends, that was a lot of truth, But I hope you feel energized and not overwhelmed. And I hope you can see how each one of these areas inside your business perpetuates the other. They're all a system working together. And as you clean up one area, it allows you the ability, time, and energy to turn around and clean up the next area, and then the next area. And then you start to create that forward
Positive momentum in your business that you were trying to get to but you were spinning your wheels and feeling stuck So here's what we're gonna do next schedule that meeting with yourself every week. I want you to pull out your calendar right now I want you to look at it and I want you to figure out where you're gonna block that timeout for you And if you can only do an hour, we're gonna start there. Okay, you don't even have to know what you're doing I want you to sit down and I want you to really start thinking about what it is that's bothering you
what you already know you need to change. And I want you to just write and write and write and write, journal, I guess if you wanna call it that, until it's all out of your brain. Drain it all out of your brain and look at what's in front of you. And then you're going to start thinking about what you need to do to help yourself. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to screenshot this episode and tag me with your biggest leak you're plugging this week. I want you to tell me what you're doing. I want to know, I want to know what changes you're making that are
creating positive energy inside your business. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to click on the free guide below about how to discover your value. It has some really great tips and maybe even some new goals to reach for that you can take and put into your CEO meeting with yourself this week as a direction for you to start working towards.
So take this guide and utilize it. This guide is really about how to increase your value and increase your money inside your business. And I wanna see that happen for you. So click on that, get that guide, and let's get moving forward. And the last thing I'm going to ask, this is actually a favor I'm going to ask of you. I am listening to my audience and ⁓ I'm humbled by the number of people that are listening to this podcast.
and they're using it in a very positive way inside their life and their business. So I'm developing these podcasts around questions that you are truly interested in having answers for. So I'm gonna ask you, what are some of the topics that you want me to talk about? You can leave your answers in the comment section of this podcast, or there's a form you can click on and fill out for me. But I truly want to help you be successful, and this is your opportunity to get to ask me for help.
So lastly, I want you to remember this. You don't need to build a new business from scratch. You just need to fix what's leaking and let your magic flow again. So until next time, stay aligned, my friend, stay powerful and give yourself some grace. You're doing better than you think you are.
