Amy Bradley Radford (00:02.616)
Welcome to Massage Business Success. I'm Amy Bradley Radford, and this is the podcast for massage therapists who want to grow their business, strengthen their skills, and create a career they love. Let's get started.
This week I'm introducing something new to the podcast that I'm calling Amy's Corner. Most months give us four Tuesdays, and those four weeks have their own rhythm here on the podcast. But every once in a while the calendar gives us a fifth Tuesday, and I decided I wanted to do something a little different with it. So Amy's Corner is going to be that Fifth Tuesday conversation.
It's a chance for me to step outside of what I normally have planned and talk with you about something I've been thinking about or something I'm learning or maybe something happening in my own business that has made me stop and look at things just a little bit differently. It's not necessarily a formal lesson like I kind of have mapped out for the rest of the podcast. It's really just a chance for you and me to sit down and have a conversation about some of the things we encounter while we're actually building these businesses and living our lives. And I
Could not have planned a more appropriate topic for the very first Amy's corner because I've been thinking about something lately that started with a really small change that I made right here on the podcast. If you've been listening regularly, you may have noticed that new episodes used to come out on Mondays and now they're coming out on Tuesdays. And I know that probably doesn't seem like a very significant change. It's only one day, and I didn't stop doing the podcast. I didn't change what we were talking about.
I just moved it from Monday to Tuesday. But there was actually a pretty important business lesson for me inside that change because the truth is I was failing at Monday. So earlier this year I made a
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much bigger commitment to this podcast. Before that I was putting out two or three episodes a month, probably averaging closer to two, and I decided I wanted to move to a new episode every single week. I wanted to become much more consistent about having these conversations with you. And when I made that commitment, Monday, well AI told me, Monday seemed like the perfectly good day for a new episode to come out. So in my mind, I could see exactly how it was going to work.
I could get the podcast done sometime during the week before it was supposed to publish, and once I got into the rhythm of doing that every week, then I wanted to start getting ahead. Maybe I'd have next week's podcast done before this week's even came out, and then hopefully get two weeks ahead, and so on and so forth until I had this little cushion built into my schedule, and I wouldn't constantly feel like I'm chasing the next episode every week. And this made complete sense in my head. It just
hasn't been what has happened for me at this podcast. And I I think that's worth talking about because sometimes we make this plan based on how we imagine something is going to work and there's nothing wrong with the plan. We simply don't have all of the information yet. We haven't tested it into our lives. And I hadn't produced a podcast every single week before. I had produced podcasts, obviously, but I hadn't lived inside the rhythm and scheduling of creating one every week.
while also doing everything else that I do. I could make a goal and I could imagine how much time it would take and where I would fit it into my week, but imagining a schedule and actually living inside of that schedule are two totally different things. Sometimes you have to get right into the middle of something before you can see how it's really going to work for you. And that's what happened here. I discovered that the the version I had created in my mind where I would finish the podcast several days early
And eventually build myself this wonderful little two-week cushion wasn't actually happening. My weeks were full. I would get to Friday and the podcast still wasn't finished. And I would be stressing about this. And I would think, okay, okay, I'll just get it done on Saturday, which it's a poor choice to try and work every weekend and stay busy because my Saturdays, my my weekends are just as busy as your weekends. And I I just kept thinking, okay.
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If I can fit it in, I'll make it work, but Saturday would fill up and then I would start looking at Sunday. And I'm like, I'll finish it Sunday, I'll record it Sunday and I'll get everything done. And then it will be sitting there ready to go out on Monday morning. And that wasn't happening either. And for a while I kept thinking, I just hadn't got into the rhythm yet. Next week I'll do better. And next week I'll get ahead. And once I had been doing this long enough, the schedule I had pictured in my head would finally become the schedule that I was actually living.
But eventually I had to stop measuring myself against the plan I had imagined and start paying attention to reality, what was actually happening in my life and my schedule. Because I kept arriving at Monday with a podcast that was supposed to be finished and published when what I actually needed was Monday to finish it. I needed that day to sit down and pull together whatever pieces were still unfinished. And sometimes that was finishing writing up what it was I was going to talk about. And sometimes I needed to record it and then edit and then load it.
And write the email to let you know that it's available. And sometimes there were all of these little pieces that go along with getting an episode out that still needed my attention. And after enough weeks of this happening, I finally had to admit something very simple to myself. My original plan was not working, and I needed Monday. I needed Monday to be part of the process of making the podcast, not getting my episode out on Monday.
And once I finally allowed myself to see that, moving the podcast to Tuesday was actually a very easy decision. It was kind of a letdown at first, but then I realized it was the best thing for me. I wasn't changing my goal. The goal was to put out a podcast every week. The goal was to create something thoughtful and useful for you, massage therapists, and to have these conversations with you because I know they make a difference. I hear from you every week about how one little segment of that podcast made so much sense to you.
And it completely changed how you ran your business. That's that's what I love to hear. So Monday was never really the goal. Monday was just a decision I had made about how I was going to accomplish my goal. And somehow, without really realizing it, I had started treating that decision like a rule that I had to have it done here. And I was measuring myself harshly against that rule. I wasn't being very nice to myself because I couldn't make it happen.
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And I think we do this inside our massage businesses a lot more than we realize. We make decisions when we first build our businesses, or sometimes we don't even consciously make them because we we don't even know what to expect. And so we just start a business and go. We just start doing things a certain way. Maybe we decided we're going to work Monday through Friday because that's what a work week looks like to us. That's all we know. Maybe we decide we're going to work until seven because we assume
Our clients need evening appointments every single day. And maybe we open Saturdays because somebody asked for a Saturday. Or maybe we decide we can see six clients in a day because when we sit down and do the math, that's how many massages we think we need in order to make enough money. We set our prices based on what other massage therapists around us are charging. We decide how much time we're going to leave between appointments. Sometimes that's enough, sometimes it's too much.
We decide when we're going to do our charting and our laundry and our bookkeeping and our marketing. And most of the time we're making all of those decisions before we actually have very much information about what's actually what's actually gonna feel like to live inside of them. Then we start living inside this business, and that's when the business begins giving us information about our goals, good and bad. And some of you may have found that six massages in a day, while that looked
Perfectly reasonable on paper after doing six massages four days a week for six months, your body is telling you something very different. Or you discovered that you thought you would love working evenings because you could have your mornings free, but every time you look at that 6.30 appointment, you wish it wasn't there. Or maybe you discovered that you actually like working Saturdays because Saturday is a great massage day for you, but then you desperately need Monday off so that you can keep doing that.
Or maybe you realize that you keep leaving your administrative work or your charting until the end of the day because that's when you thought you would do it, except at the end of a full day of massage, you don't have any brain left for bookkeeping or marketing or even returning emails. So all of those things just get pushed into tomorrow. They the can gets kicked down the road, and then tomorrow has its own clients and its own responsibilities, and so it gets kicked down the road again, and you're not getting to it.
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And you know, we collect all of this information about ourselves, but instead of using the information to change the business, a lot of time we use it to criticize ourselves. I should be able to do this. I should be more organized. I shouldn't be this tired. Other massage therapists see this many clients all the time. I just need to get better at managing my time. Next week I'll get caught up. And I understand that thinking because I was doing exactly the same thing with this podcast.
I kept expecting a different version of myself to show up next week and magically have the podcast finished by Friday, even though the version of me who was actually living my life kept needing Monday. There is a point where repeated frustration becomes information. And I think learning to recognize that point is part of becoming a better business owner. It doesn't mean that every time something feels difficult we have to rearrange our entire business. Running a business requires discipline.
Flat out discipline. There are things I don't particularly feel like doing that still need to be done, QuickBooks. And there are times when the answer really is that I just need to sit down and do the work. But there's a difference between something being difficult and something repeatedly failing in the exact same way.
If I miss one Monday with my podcast because I had an unusual week, which most of my weeks are unusual, but that doesn't tell me very much if I just miss one podcast. But if I repeatedly hit Monday, needing Monday in order to get my podcast done, well, now there's this pattern to it. And instead of continuing to ask myself why I can't get this right, I can just sit back and become curious about the pattern and ask what it's trying to tell me.
I think that's a really useful question to ask about your massage business because there are probably places in your week that have been giving you information for a long time. Maybe every Thursday you're exhausted. Not occasionally, every Thursday. So instead of simply accepting that Thursday is the day you come home completely depleted.
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What is happening on Thursday? Maybe Thursday has just one too many clients. Maybe you've scheduled too many physically demanding appointments back to back to back. Or maybe Thursday isn't the problem at all. Maybe you've already done too much Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday is simply the day your body says I've had enough. Maybe there's an appointment at the end of your day that you resent.
Every single week and you feel terrible about resenting it because the client hasn't done anything wrong. They're a wonderful client. They're consistent. They are the type of repeat client you want. They show up, they pay you, they hardly ever cancel. They appreciate you and your work. But maybe the problem isn't the client. Maybe the problem is that you've learned something about yourself. When you started out doing those late night appointments, it was okay, but it's not okay anymore.
You don't want to be doing massage at seven o'clock at night anymore. So now what do you do? Or maybe your schedule is full and that's the thing that doesn't make sense to you. I've heard this more times than I want to tell you. You're looking at your calendar and there aren't many places to put another person. You're working and you're tired and you are doing all of the things, all the things that you thought a successful massage therapist was supposed to do. And then you look at the money and think, how am I working this hard?
And still not making enough. That's where I really want us to be careful about, assuming the answer is always more. More clients, more hours, another day, another evening. Fill the empty spot. Squeeze somebody into lunch. Open up your Saturday. Because if you're already working hard and the business isn't producing what you need it to produce, adding more work may not actually solve the problem. It might create some. There comes a point where we need to stop looking at how many people.
we can fit into the schedule and start looking at what the schedule is actually producing for us. You know, this is one of the reasons I spend so much time talking about knowing your numbers. When you understand what you actually need your business to earn, what your available hours are, what each hour needs to produce, what your services are worth, and how your schedule fits together, you start making different decisions about your business.
Amy Bradley Radford (13:24.224)
you can finally see whether the business you built is capable of giving you what you're asking it to give. And I think that's the part many of us just skip, or we don't even know that we need to look at. We start a massage practice because we want to do massage. We don't necessarily sit down first and design the business that's going to surround the massage. We simply go out and find a room to rent and then we figure out what we're going to charge and then we start taking clients.
And if somebody asks if we have a Tuesday evening appointment, we give them a Tuesday evening appointment. And somebody can only come on Saturday, so we open up Saturdays. Then there's an empty space on Thursday at two, and we weren't going to work Thursday afternoons, but we take them and put them in at two. And we need more money. So we try to find more people to put into the empty spaces. And little by little we build our business haphazardly. And building a business and designing a business many times have very different outcomes.
You can build a very busy business without ever stopping to ask whether it's the business you want. And then one day you don't want that business anymore because you only feel like it's draining you. And that distinction becomes really important to me because I've watched massage therapists get to a place where from the outside everything looks successful. They have clients. Sometimes they have more clients than they know what to do with. People love their work, their schedule is full.
They've developed a really good reputation. They've done what they were supposed to do, and yet they are tired, completely exhausted on the weekend, and they're still frustrated about money. They don't have enough time for themselves or their families and their body flat out hurts. They look at another full week on the calendar and instead of feeling grateful that the business is successful, they feel this little sinking feeling. Do you know what I'm talking about? Because they don't really want to do another week.
That looks exactly like the last one. You know, I remember looking at my schedule and I was booked out over eight weeks and just feeling so overwhelmed. Not because my schedule was full, because I was so tired. I was already tired just looking at that full schedule. And that was the schedule I tried so hard to fill because that's what you were supposed to do. And it made me want to hide and quit and stop because I was tired. I was too tired going in.
Amy Bradley Radford (15:48.322)
And when that goes on long enough, I think it's very easy to start believing that you're just tired of massage therapy. And you start thinking you need another career. Am I talking to some of you out there? Maybe you've lost your passion. Maybe you're burned out. Maybe you just can't do this anymore. I just can't touch one more person. And you know, sometimes that may be true. People change, and there's nothing wrong with deciding that you're ready to do something different. But before you decide massage itself is the problem.
I think it's worth looking very carefully at the business you've built around massage because maybe you don't hate massage. Maybe you hate doing massage until 7.30 at night. And maybe you don't want to leave the profession. Maybe you just need to stop doing six massages a day. And maybe you don't need 20 more clients. Maybe you need the hours you're already working to produce more income to support you better.
And maybe you don't need to become more disciplined. Maybe you need to stop putting an important business task into a part of the week where you have repeatedly demonstrated to yourself that you don't have the time or the energy to do it. And maybe after all, you're not failing at the business. Maybe there are parts of the business that are failing you. And once you begin looking at it that way, you have choices again. You know, that's really what
Moving my podcast to Tuesday gave me, it gave me a choice I hadn't been allowing myself to see because I was so focused on trying to make Monday work. Once I separated the goal from the method, I realized there wasn't actually a problem with changing the method. My goal was to create a podcast every week. Publishing on Monday was one way to accomplish that. Publishing on Tuesday is another. And Tuesday gives me Monday, which gives me a much better chance of accomplishing the thing that actually matters.
Getting my podcast out every week. I think there are a lot of places in a massage business where we confuse the goal with the method. Maybe your goal is to earn a certain amount of money every year, but somewhere along the way, you decided that the way you were going to reach that goal was to see six clients a day. Six clients aren't the goal. The income is the goal. If there is potentially a better way for you to produce that income, you're allowed to look at that.
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Maybe the goal is a stable full practice, but somewhere along the way you decided being available every evening was how you had to build it. And evenings aren't the goal. Stable clientele is the goal. Maybe your goal is to take really good care of your clients, and you've decided that taking good care of them means saying yes whenever they ask you for an appointment. But your availability isn't the same thing as the quality of your care.
And when you begin separating those things, it creates room to ask a much more interesting question. Is there another way to get where I want to go that works better for me? And to answer that, you have to know yourself. You have to know how many massages you can realistically do and still feel good doing them. You have to know when you work best or how much recovery time you need between appointments and days. You have to know whether you want to work mornings or evenings.
Four days or five days or three days, whether Saturday is a good work day for you, or whether Saturday is a day that you need to be with your family and you need time off. You have to know what you need to earn and you have to know what you want your life to look like outside of the treatment room as well. And those aren't selfish questions, my friends. They are business questions. Because the business has to work for the person who owns it, not you simply working for your business.
And the answer isn't going to be the same for every massage therapist. That and you know that's the beauty of being a solopreneur. We don't all need the same schedule and we don't all need the same number of clients. We all have different income needs in the same inside the same business model. What works really, really well for one therapist may make another therapist absolutely miserable. The important thing is that at some point you stop simply running a business and begin designing it.
So I want you to think about that this week, not by just rushing in and changing all kinds of things inside your business, but by observing your business almost as if you were standing outside of it for just a minute. Watch what happens during your week. Notice the places where you continually feel behind. Or notice the things that you keep moving into tomorrow. Or notice the appointment times that drain you before the client even walks through the door.
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And pay attention to when you have your best energy and when you don't. And notice where you continually tell yourself you should be doing better. And pay attention to your money too. If you're working the number of hours you want to work and the money isn't there, don't immediately assume you need to work more hours. That's just information for you. If you're full and still not earning what you need, I want you to look at that. If you need cancellations just to have enough energy to get through the week,
That's life data. If you've built a schedule that only works when absolutely nothing unexpected happens in your life, that's probably some more important information you need to know. And none of those things automatically tell you what the solution is, but they do tell you where to start looking. And maybe that's really what adaptability in business is. That's actually one of the things I love about massage business. When you can truly design your business around your life, there is
No job in the world that can do that. And when you've designed your business, it's not having to constantly change because something is uncomfortable. It's becoming really observant enough to recognize when reality is giving you some information and then being willing to use that information to make a better decision. The person you were when you started this business is most likely not the same person running it today. Your life probably looks really different.
And your body may be different, and your financial needs may be different. You know things now that you couldn't possibly have ever known when you started. And it would be strange to collect years of information about yourself and your business and then insist that none of that information is allowed to change the way you operate. I think sometimes we need permission to say, this worked for me then, but it doesn't work for me now. Or maybe it never worked really well.
And you've just gotten really good at forcing yourself to just do it. Either way, I want you to take a deep breath on this and listen really closely. You are allowed to change, and you are allowed to make your business work best for you. So I think the question underneath all of this is what I want you to spend some time with on yourself. What do you actually want this business to give back to you? We talk constantly about what we give our clients.
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And and we should, because we take care of people, we help them, we create an experience for them. We continue our education because we want to become better therapists. We put an enormous amount of ourselves into this work. But the business has a responsibility to you. It needs to produce income. It needs to leave room for a life and fit within what your body can sustainably do. It needs to give you some degree of control over your time.
And ideally, it should become something you can continue to enjoy rather than something you have to continually recover from. And maybe that's what you're realizing as you're listening to this. Maybe you already have a massage business and you have clients and you know how to provide a great massage experience. You're working hard, but you've never really stopped long enough to ask whether the business you've built actually matches the income, schedule, and life that you want. And if this is you,
This is exactly the reason why I created the Maximize Your Massage Business class. I I didn't create this class because I think massage therapists need someone telling them to work harder. Everyone that I know as a massage therapist works incredibly hard. I created it because there comes a point where working harder isn't the same thing as building a better business. And sometimes we don't know which direction to go and we just need a little bit of help.
You need to understand your numbers and you need to understand what your schedule is capable of producing. And you need to understand the value of your time and your services. And then you need to make you need to start making decisions intentionally instead of continuing to just add clients and hours and hoping eventually that the numbers will work. That is what I want you to learn. And if no one ever told you, I'm going to tell you. I want you to be able to look at the business you have right now and begin seeing where you do have choices.
Because sometimes all you need to make is just a little adjustment and it changes things in a much more positive way than you could ever expect. Like simply increasing your prices $5 and you bring $400 more home a month. Or you look at how to take your evening hours and and then how to start transitioning them up earlier in the day, giving you time at home that you desperately want. And sometimes the smallest change is just so freeing in your time and in your mind.
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For me this time, it was Monday. I needed Monday. It took me a while to stop arguing with the that reality, but but once I did, the answer felt really right to me. And I the podcast moved to Tuesday. And I didn't give up on the podcast. I didn't lower the goal. I simply changed the structure around the goal so that I had a better opportunity to succeed. And maybe there is something in your business right now asking you to do the same thing. So this week I want you to look for it.
Look for the place where you've been trying harder and harder and harder to make something work simply because that's just the way you've always done it, or you don't know a different way to do it. Pay attention to what keeps happening and instead of immediately judging yourself for it, just become curious about what it's trying to tell you. And you may discover that you don't need to work harder. You may not need to see more clients, you don't need to start over, you may simply need to understand your business well enough and yourself well enough.
To build it just a little bit differently. And sometimes the best move really is to just pivot. If you want my help beginning that process, you can find the Maximize Your Massage Business class at amibradleyradford.com. And I'll see you next Tuesday. Have a great week. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. If today's episode helped you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another massage therapist. To learn more about today's topic,
Explore continuing education, coaching, and free resources, visit amybradleradford.com. And until next time, keep building the business and the career you love.
