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. Maybe I should just get a job. Isn't that the conversation that runs around in the back of your head a lot of self-employed people's minds? And I know that because it has run inside the back of mine for most of my career.
Maybe I just need a job. Maybe I need something with more security, or I need benefits, or I need retirement, or maybe I need somebody else to be responsible for making sure there is money there every two weeks instead of me having to create it all the time. But if you're a massage therapist who has built a decent clientele, you know there's actually another side of that conversation. You start looking at jobs and realize, I might have to work 40 hours a week to make what you're making in 20 hours at the table. So
you don't really want the job either. So now you're stuck in this strange place where you don't necessarily want to leave massage, but you don't know how to make massage take you any further than it already has. I think that's where a lot of us mistake the limit of what we know for the limit of what is possible. You know, I had a coaching call recently with a massage therapist who has been doing this for more than 20 years.
She has a great clientele. People come back. She has demand. She's built what most therapists are working really hard to build. And she was charging about $85 a session. So she wasn't failing, but she had reached a place where she didn't know what came next. And I think that's an important distinction because you can look successful from the outside and still feel completely stuck inside your business. Nobody ever really sat down with her and said, okay, you've been doing this for more than 20 years.
Your hands aren't the same and your experience is so big and your understanding of people isn't the same, and your life isn't the same. So why is your business still the same as it was 20 years ago? And that's really what I want to talk about today. It's not another blueprint and not five steps everybody should follow. I want to talk about how you start thinking differently as a business owner because sometimes the thing keeping you stuck.
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is not a lack of clients or even a lack of opportunity. Sometimes you just haven't learned how to look at your business and see what it is capable of becoming next. You know, I had another coaching call recently also with someone I know personally and she had been listening to the podcast and hearing me talk about raising your prices when you're full and she was full. So she raised her prices $5 and she lost clients. Enough that it was alarming to her.
And that doesn't mean she should never raise her prices, and it doesn't mean she isn't worth five more dollars. What it told me was that she had taken the action without really looking at what made the action make sense in the first place. Her business wasn't giving her the signals that were telling her it was time to raise her prices. She wanted more money, so she heard raise your prices and thought that was the answer. But if your schedule isn't full,
If people aren't constantly rebooking, if you're not getting referrals, if you're not getting tips, if the demand isn't there yet, then raising your prices may not solve the problem you actually have. And this is where I think we get into trouble as business owners. We hear somebody say, raise your rates, so we raise our rates. We hear somebody say, hey, you should sell some things. It's a great way to make more money. So we order some products. Or we hear someone say, hey, hire another therapist because you're so busy. So we start looking for someone to hire.
But if you don't have enough people coming through your door, retail isn't going to fix that. Now you don't have enough people coming through your door and you have a bunch of stuff sitting on your shelf that you paid for that you can't sell. If your schedule isn't full and you hire another massage therapist, now you're in charge of two schedules you're trying to fill. You didn't solve the original problem, you just made it bigger. And I think that's where we have to stop scrambling and gambling with the business we have and start learning how to read what it's actually doing.
If people are coming in once and not coming back, that's telling you something, people. If people love you and stay with you for years, but you never have any new people coming in and you still have gaps in your schedule, then that's telling you something different. And if you're packed and booked out and people are asking for cancellations, well, your business is telling you something there as well. And the same tactic does not belong in all three of those business models. And that's the part I want you to pay attention to. Business growth.
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Isn't just knowing what to do. It's knowing when it makes sense to do it. Because once you take a step back far enough to see the behavior instead of just reacting to like your frustration, the next move gets a whole lot clearer. You start to know what you need to do. And once you start reading your business instead of just reacting to it, the next question becomes: what do I want this business to actually be able to support? Because there's a difference between saying, I want to make more money.
And deciding that you want to build a business that can legitimately produce more money for you. And I think this is another place where massage therapists can get stuck. Anybody in a service industry can get stuck because we tend to think value is something that just happens to us over time. We work another year, we take another class, get a little more experience, and somehow the business is just supposed to catch up to that. But I don't I don't actually think it works that way. You can actually decide to become more valuable.
You can decide to get better at understanding what your clients are asking for. You can become more adaptable. You can become more specialized and learn how to communicate better and create a more consistent experience or how to solve the kinds of problems your clients are coming to you with more effectively. And that does not mean you need to run out and collect 20 more certificates. It means there has to be a willingness behind it. And this is a willingness to look at where you are now and say, okay.
If I want this business to support me more in the future, what do I need to grow inside of it? Maybe right now you are charging $85 a session, and when you really sit down and look at your future, your retirement, your time off, your physical limits, your expenses, all of it, you realize you probably need to be closer to $125 per session. Well, that doesn't mean you're going to wake up tomorrow and jump $40. That that doesn't work that way. But it does mean that now you have a direction. And once you have a direction,
you can start building towards it. And maybe your work needs to become more specialized. Maybe you need to get better understanding client expectations so people feel more value inside the session. Maybe your schedule needs to become more efficient. Or maybe you need to get better at retaining people. Maybe you need stronger demand before that price moves. And maybe there are things about the experience itself that need to change. Maybe several things. The point is that you don't just pick the number and hope the business will tolerate it.
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you have to grow yourself into that number. And I think that is actually a really empowering way to look at this because it means you're not just sitting around waiting for someone else to decide that you are finally worth more. You actually have some control over that. You can choose a direction. You can decide what you want your business to be able to provide for you. And then you can start developing the skill, the experience, the service, the demand, and the confidence that allows the business to support that next level.
And then you watch the business and you pay attention to what happens as you change. Because eventually if you're growing and the value of what you are offering is growing, the business should begin reflecting that back to you. And I think this is where the whole conversation about getting a job starts to make a little more sense. Because a lot of the time when we say maybe I should just get a job, what we're really saying is I just want some security. I want to know there's a paycheck coming. I want to know what I'm making.
And it have it be consistent. I want to know that there's some structure around me that makes life feel a little less dependent on whether I can keep putting people on my table every week. And I understand that because that is exactly what I was looking for when I went into owning a massage school. That was kind of a difficult time in my life. At that time, I was a single mom and I had a child to support. And I wanted something that felt stable. And to me, that paycheck felt stable. So I jumped in.
with both my feet and became a co-owner in a startup massage school in another town. But you know what? That paycheck came with a price. I was working 60 and 70 hours a week. I was driving back and forth and it was sometimes up to two hours a day. I was preparing classes at night after my son went to bed. And if I wasn't working on clients on the weekends, I was running the clinic at the school on a Saturday. And there was always something. There was always more and I had that paycheck.
But what I didn't have was my time. And after a little over two years, I got to the point where I could not keep doing this. I was exhausted. I hardly saw my kid. And then I sat down and I started looking at what it would actually take for me to go home and support myself with massage again. And you know, this is the part that still gets me. I only needed to charge about $10 more per massage than I had been charging before I went to the school.
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To replace what I was making there, and I could do it in a fraction of the time. That was it. Ten dollars. All of those hours, all of that driving, all of that work, all of that time away from my child. And part of the reason I had gone there in the first place was because I thought the paycheck was providing something I couldn't create for myself. But you know what? I could. I just didn't understand how yet. And I think that's where a lot of self-employed people get stuck.
We start a business, we see money come in, we see money go out, we pay bills, we keep working, but we don't always stop and build enough structure around that business to make it feel secure. So if you feel insecure because you don't have a paycheck, maybe the answer is to not automatically go find one. Maybe the answer is to make your business behave more like the thing you think you're missing. How about paying yourself consistently? How many of you do that? How many of you get money in your account and pay the bill that's due? And we never actually see.
what it is you're earning. You need to track what the business is actually producing. You need to build the cost of taxes, time off, insurance, retirement, and a reserve into what the business needs to make instead of treating all of those things like they're somehow separate from your income. And I'm not saying every massage therapist needs to run out and form a corporation tomorrow, but you know that is a conversation that you and your accountant can have because you could create that corporation and give yourself a paycheck if that's what you need to fill
Secure. And what I'm saying is that you can create your structure. You can build your predictability. You can make your business provide more than just enough money to get through this next month or the next week. But you have to know what it is you're trying to build. Because if all you ever see is money coming in and money going out, then of course a paycheck is going to look more secure to you. Somebody else has already created that structure for you. The big shift is realizing that as a business owner,
you can create that structure for yourself. And that takes a different way of thinking. You have to stop looking only at what the business made this week and start looking at what you want it to be able to provide you over time. Then you have to start making decisions around that future instead of just reacting to whatever's happening that month. And maybe that means changing your pricing or maybe it means tightening your schedule or increasing your value or changing the way you save.
Amy Bradley Radford (11:57.516)
or putting some systems in place that give you some more consistency. The point is you stop waiting for security to show up somewhere outside of your business and start building it into the business you already own. That's the part nobody really tells you when you open a massage practice. You are not just learning how to get clients. You are learning how to become the person who can build the kind of business that gives you the life and the security you thought you had to go somewhere else to find.
And I think that's the part I missed for a lot of years. I kept assuming that there was some point where massage had given me everything it could when there were really things I just hadn't learned how to do with myself and my business. My value wasn't standing still. I was. And I think that can happen to all of us because we get better almost without noticing it. We become more experienced. We build stronger relationships with our clients. We learn how to listen differently. We become more skilled with our hands.
We understand people differently and better. We start recognizing things sooner, adapting faster, communicating more clearly, and giving people a better experience than we could have given them when we first came out of school. But nobody necessarily stops us along the way and says, do you realize what you've built here? No, we don't get that reinforcement from anywhere outside of ourselves. As a society, we are really good at recognizing education when there's a degree attached to it.
We understand that somebody went to school, put in their time, learned something different, practiced it, and came out with a credential that says you know more than they did before. Massage doesn't work that way. No one hands you another diploma after your 5000th massage. Nobody gives you another certificate because you have spent 10 years learning how to understand people with just your hands. Nobody walks into your office after 20 years and says, congratulations.
You now have 20 years of enhanced judgment, experience, mistakes, corrections, new problem solving skills, and how to build client relationships and skill built into what you do. And sometimes I think we forget to count that. And I want to give you permission to realize that you have built that into your hands. And I want you to look at what you know now that you did not know when you came out of school and acknowledge that there's value in that.
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Not imaginary value, not ego, earned value. You worked for it. I know I've worked for it. And I know what that feels like because I had to learn to see it in myself too. And once I finally started recognizing what I had built, I stopped looking at my value as something somebody else had to give me permission to have. And I started wondering how much further I could take it. And you know, that's when things became really exciting for me. Because once I understood that
I could increase my value on purpose. I wanted to just keep going. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to get better. I didn't have limits anymore. And I wanted to understand why something worked instead of just knowing that it worked. I wanted to deepen what I could offer people. And then I wanted the business around that work to reflect what I was becoming. And that's a huge part of why I have the business I have today. It's also a big part of why I created that class, Maximize Your Massage Business.
That class did not come out of some generic business blueprint I found somewhere. This was my experience of learning how to look at my massage business differently and then sitting across from real therapists and coaching calls and seeing how often they were dealing with the same kind of problems. They were working hard, they had clients, they were doing many things right, but they could not always see what needed to change next. So I started putting those pieces together in a way that helped them look at their own numbers and their own schedule.
and their own income ceiling and the value of the hours they were already working so they could start seeing what their business was capable of doing differently. Because that's really what I want for you. Not for you to copy my business, not for you to charge what I charge or work the hours I worked or build the same thing I built. I want you to be able to look at your own life and your own business and understand what has to change for the two of them to fit together better.
And that's what I mean when I say you have agency over your own value. You don't get to pick any number you want to charge, decide you're worth it, and then expect everybody else to agree with you or your clients to pay it. But you can participate in what you become worth. You can choose what you want to get better at. You can deepen your skills. You can learn to understand your clients better and you can become more specialized.
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You can improve the experience you provide and become more consistent and more adaptable at the same time. And you can decide what direction you want to grow in and then do the work that takes you there. And once you begin doing that, your business has something new to respond to. And I think that's the part that I think is so powerful. You are not stuck with the therapist you are today, and you are not stuck with the business you have today. But first, you have to be willing to see.
What is already there or isn't there. So if nobody has ever told you this before, I'm telling you now, your years of experience count. The practice you've put into your hands counts. The mistakes you've learned count. The experience you've built counts. And the way your hands have changed, my gosh, it counts. The way you understand people now compared with five or 10 or 20 years ago, it counts.
And once you begin recognizing that, you can stop treating your business like something that just happened to you and start really shaping it around the person you have become and the life you actually want it to support. You know, and that brings us all the way back to the question we started with. Have you reached the limit of what you currently know how to build? Before you decide that massage has taken you as far as you can go, I want you to look again. I want you to look at what your business is doing.
Look at what you are doing inside of it. Look at what has grown or what hasn't grown. And don't be afraid to really see what's wrong with it and also acknowledge the value you have already built there. And don't be afraid to look at the things you need to fix or the things that need some work or be afraid to attack those things and create some changes. But also don't be afraid to acknowledge the value that you have built into your hands.
Because your value does not have to stand still, and neither does your business. And maybe you haven't reached your limit at all. Maybe it's just time to find out what comes next. Thanks for joining me this week on Massage Business Success. I'll see you next Tuesday. 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,
Amy Bradley Radford (18:56.928)
And free resources, visit Amy Bradleyradford.com. And until next time, keep building the business and the career you love.
