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.
Amy Bradley Radford (00:19.896)
When I first went into business, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And I don't mean that in a cute way. People say, I was just figuring it out. I mean, I really did not know what I was doing. My parents took me to their accountant at one point in the beginning because they were trying to help me understand small business, which, you know, that was really nice of them, but I had no point of reference really for what this man was telling me.
He could have given me brilliant information, and I'm sure he did, but when you don't even know what questions you should be asking yet, somebody explaining business to you can sound a little bit like they're trying to explain how to drive a car when you're still trying to figure out what the ignition is. You know, I've talked about this many times. My dad owned a business, but his business was very different from mine. So I couldn't exactly look at what he was doing and say, okay, I'm that's what I'm going to do. What I did learn from him though was
Something I didn't appreciate nearly as much at the time, and that was the mindset of being an entrepreneur, that grit, the fact that nobody is going to come fixing it for you. You make a decision, you deal with what happens, and then you make another decision, and somewhere along the way you hopefully get smarter about it. But as far as building an actual massage business, I did what I think a lot of us do. I just looked around. In fact, in school, they taught us to go out.
And observe our market and see what people are doing because I think that's part of how you figure out where you need to be in business. So when you look around, you look at what people are charging, what services they're offering, how long their appointments are, what they're doing, and what does a massage business look like in the town I want to start it in. And then I copied it. And I think that's what a lot of us do in business.
And I don't actually think that was wrong. When you're stack when you're standing at the beginning and you have no framework of your own yet, you need somewhere to start. And looking at what other people are doing gives you information. It's a great saying, you know, don't reinvent the wheel. So it just gives you a general idea of what the market looks like. The problem is that some of those decisions that I made at the beginning followed me for a lot longer than they probably should have.
Amy Bradley Radford (02:24.472)
I want you to think about this for a minute. When you first opened your business, you were making some of the most important decisions about that business at the exact point when you knew the least about running one. You didn't know your clientele yet. You didn't know what people were going to value most about your work. You didn't know what schedule you could physically maintain. You didn't know how much money you really needed the business to produce. You didn't know which services you were going to love and which ones you were going to hate, or what kind of clients you were eventually going to become.
known for. But you still had to pick something. So you picked a price, you picked some hours, you picked a service menu, and you made a couple of policies. And a lot of the time you made those decisions by looking around at somebody else who appeared to know what they were doing. And here's the part I want you to think about. How many of those decisions are you still living with? Because there's nothing wrong with borrowing information when you are beginning. The problem is when you never go back and reevaluate it.
You can end up five years into this business or 10 or more, still running parts of the company that were designed by a version of you who had been in business for about 15 minutes. And that version of you did the best you could. But they probably should not still be the CEO of your business. And I know I talk about this a lot, but I approach it from a lot of different angles because everybody has a different feeling about pricing. But one of the clearest examples of this starting point for me was pricing.
I was taught to go out and evaluate my market, which sounds like perfectly reasonable advice, and it is to a point. So I looked around at what other massage therapists were charging. I looked at people who had been doing this much longer than I had. And somewhere in my brain, and I think some of you do this too, I decided that because they had more years in practice, I needed to charge less. And that became my logic. They've been here longer. I'm newer, therefore I should be below them.
The problem was that I had no idea whether they were priced appropriately in the first place, and they probably weren't. If they were undervaluing themselves, and then I positioned myself underneath them because I thought I had to, I became what I jokingly called under undervalued, which for me, my price was $25 an hour. And that was still low for $19.93. And that's exactly the kind of thing that can happen when you use somebody else's business as your measuring stick for your business.
Amy Bradley Radford (04:46.016)
At the beginning, it feels safe because you're not making the decision alone. You can look around and say, well, this is what everyone else is doing, so this must be right. But the longer you stay there, the more that starting point can become your ceiling. Because now you're not asking, what is my business actually showing me? You're still asking, what are they doing? And those are two very different questions. My clients were actually giving me information that I wasn't paying enough attention to because I didn't know I needed to pay attention to.
They were praising my work. Good job, Amy. Good job. A lot of them were tipping me. Some of them were literally telling me you're not charging enough. But I still had this idea in my head that I was supposed to be lower because I was newer. And I think a lot of us get stuck there. The decision made sense when you made it, but it's not making sense now. Maybe you chose your price because that's what people around you charged. Maybe you chose your schedule because that's what you saw everybody else working. Maybe you took every kind of client because you needed bodies on the table, which we do.
And maybe you offered every service that from every class you ever took because you were trying to make yourself as marketable as possible. And all of that may have been perfectly reasonable at the time, but reasonable at the beginning does not mean right forever. That's the piece I want people to really hear. Sometimes your business isn't stuck because you failed to grow. Sometimes your business is stuck because you did grow, but your decisions didn't grow with you at the same time.
You are still operating from assumptions you made before you had enough experience to question them. And eventually you have to stop asking whether your old decisions were wrong and start asking whether they're actually useful. Because there is a big difference between saying I made a mistake and saying that got me started, but I have actually outgrown it. And I think that distinction matters to us. I don't, you don't need to beat up the version of yourself who made those early choices.
You just need to stop making that person responsible for every decision you're making now. So then the question becomes, if you know something is off, why don't you just change it? And I think this is where the fear comes in. And I talk about fear a lot in solopreneur or entrepreneurship business because I lived there for a long time. I know what this feels like. I was flat out scared of losing what I had worked so hard to build.
Amy Bradley Radford (07:05.578)
It took me about two years to build my clientele, which now I look at it and go, well, that was pretty fast. But there were a couple of things that helped me get there faster than I might have otherwise. I had referrals coming from a physical therapist in the office I was working in, and I was willing to work with pain, which gave people a reason to seek me out. So my clientele got identified very quickly, and that helped build my practice quickly.
But at the time I wasn't sitting there analyzing all of that really objectively in my mind. All I was thinking was, I finally have clients and I finally have a full schedule. Amy, don't screw this up. And that fear was running in the background all the time. You know, if I changed my prices, would people leave? If I changed my schedule and people didn't like it, then I was going to lose clients. And if I changed some kind of policy like holding people accountable to their times, what if somebody gets upset and leaves? And so I was accommodating when I shouldn't have been.
And what if I stop doing something people are used to? What if I really don't want to do that relaxation massage? Am I going to lose them? And how many am I going to lose? You know, that's what fear-based business ownership looks like. You become more focused on protecting what you have than evaluating whether what you still have works for you. And I think that is one of the reasons people stay stuck much longer than they realize. Because once you have worked that hard to build a business, you do not want to be careless about it.
And you know, that part is reasonable. We shouldn't be careless with our businesses. But there is a difference between being careful and being afraid to move. And for me, business became very personal. Massage is personal, anyways. What we do comes through our hands and through our judgment and how we communicate and how we connect with the people on our table. So when something in business felt off and uncertain, it didn't always feel like a business problem. It felt like a me.
And that makes it really hard to stay objective. So instead of observing the business, I just was reacting to it all the time. And I think we need to understand that part about ourselves because I know for a fact, coaching, I have seen this over and over and over again. This isn't just me. This is how a lot of us run our businesses. And because your business is constantly giving you information, your schedule is giving you information, and your clients are giving you information, your income is giving you information, and your exhaustion.
Amy Bradley Radford (09:25.802)
Is also giving you information. But if every piece of information immediately turns into fear, you can't read it very well. You just react. And when you react, you usually choose whatever feels safest in the moment, which means keeping things exactly the way they are. And when the way they are is no longer working, that is how people end up years into a business still making decisions based on the version of themselves who is just trying to not lose anybody.
And eventually you have to ask yourself a harder question. Am I protecting my business or am I protecting myself from the discomfort of changing my business? At some point, you have to realize that your business knows more now than it did when you started, and hopefully you do too. And you know, I kind of talk about a business as another person. It's almost like you have a relationship as the business owner with your business. It's this marriage of sorts. But your business has a life of its own. Once it gets rolling, it has behaviors.
And mannerisms and rules and different things that it does, and you can literally take a step back from it and see all of those pieces working. You can have actual information that you simply did not have in the beginning that helps you determine what you need to know. You know who keeps coming back, who refers, what kinds of clients you naturally attract, what kind of work gives you energy, and what kind of work leaves you wondering why you thought this was a good idea in the first place.
It tells you all of those things. You also know more about how people respond to you. You know when a client feels understood, when they connect with the way you explain something, when they are clearly looking for something different than what you were offering, and when they are telling you directly or indirectly that what you are doing has value. That is all information. And I think sometimes we overlook it because we're still looking outside of ourselves for the answer.
We keep asking, what should I charge, or what should I offer, or what are other therapists doing? Because those questions feel easier to answer. Those are answers in front of us. They give us something concrete to compare ourselves to. But the more experienced you become, the more useful question is, what is my own business already telling me? Because by this point, your business has its own history. You may have five years of client behavior to look at, or 10 or even 15. You know who rebooks and why.
Amy Bradley Radford (11:49.4)
Who refers and how often? What people say about your work, what willing what people are willing to pay, where your schedule gets a little tight and where it's falling apart and what kind of clients are easy for you to retain, and where there may be some kind of disconnect between what you think you're offering and what the client is actually experiencing. That is a lot more useful than continuing to build your business around what someone else is doing now, even or even when you first started.
And when you really think about it, we would never do this clinically. We would never do this with a hands-on technique. We would never say, well, this is what I knew when I graduated from massage school. So I guess I'm just going to keep doing that forever. Of course not. You learn, you develop, you learn judgment, you notice things you could not even see in the beginning. And your hands change because your understanding changes. Well, your business should be allowed to evolve in the same way.
At some point you have to stop running the business from the original instruction manual, your two-year business plan, especially if you wrote that instruction manual yourself when you were brand new, mildly terrified, and charging $25 an hour. I'm speaking to myself. The goal is not to look back and say you were wrong. We all made the best decisions we could with the information we had. The better question is, what do you need to know now that you did not know then?
What do you know now about your clients, your value, your energy, your schedule, the kind of work you really want to be known for or do, and the amount of money this business actually needs to produce for your life? Once you start answering those questions, you stop needing comparison quite as much because you finally have context of your own. And that is really the shift. You stop asking, what is everybody else doing and how do I compete with them? And you start asking, what is my business telling me and how do I grow it more?
You know, for me, one of the clearest examples of outgrowing the business I had originally built came through pricing, but not in a neat, healthy way. I wish I could tell you that it happened. I did not calmly look at my schedule, evaluate my value. That sounds kind of funny, but it is evaluating your value, raise my rates and pat my little self on the back on making a wise business decision. No, I burned myself completely out.
Amy Bradley Radford (14:03.596)
And this was actually the first time I quit massage. I've quit massage three times in my career and gone back, which probably deserves its own episode at some point because apparently I needed several rounds of evidence before I was willing to finally understand myself. But this first time, people, I was done. I had worked myself into the ground, buried myself. It was to the point where I could not keep doing it. So I just stopped. I just, I actually.
let all of my clients know that I was I was retiring. I mean I was all of like twenty-five years old or something. But I took about a month off, I started looking for another job, and during that break, I realized that I wanted to go back to massage. And you know that was confusing to my clients because I had basically said I'm done, disappeared for four weeks and then was like, actually never mind. Hey, but there's also a price increase. When I returned, I went from twenty five dollars an hour to forty dollars an hour. And that moment taught me something I have never forgotten.
I had to get all the way to the point where I was physically and mentally, I could not do any more before I felt like I had, and I want you to pay attention to this word, permission to ask for more money. And that was the problem. I had been undervaluing myself financially, yes, but the bigger damage was what that undervaluing was teaching me about my own importance inside the business. I had built a structure where the clients, the schedule, the income, and keeping everybody happy.
All mattered, but there was no clear line where I mattered enough to stop. And if you do not draw that line for yourself, nobody else is necessarily going to draw it for you. And that was the lesson. I had no point of reference, so I just kept working. I worked my guts out until I could not do it anymore. And only then did I step back far enough to realize, okay, this isn't how this is supposed to work.
I do not want people to have to get to that point before they give themselves permission to change something like me. And once I came back at $40 an hour, something shifted for me. From that point forward, every year or so, I would raise my prices again, usually by about $5. And every single time I did, I was relieved. And that was the part that was really interesting to me. The money mattered. Yeah, the money mattered, but the feeling was bigger than money. Every time I moved closer to what the work
Amy Bradley Radford (16:24.884)
actually felt worth to me. This was me not looking at people around me. This was me going internal and saying, what is this really worth? When I would align my prices with that, there was this emotional, mental, and even physical breath that was taken. It was almost like some part of me was finally saying, thank you. This is what you should have done. And that was when I started understanding that pricing is not just a financial decision. When you cross
Chronically undervalue yourself. There can be a message underneath it that says your time is less important, your energy is endlessly available, which it's not, that your body will just keep producing the work and that everything you need can just wait. And that does something to you. And I think that's where people get themselves into trouble because they keep thinking the problem is I need more clients or I need to work another day. When sometimes the real problem is that the business has outgrown the original agreement.
you made with yourself almost like a sacred contract. And for me, $25 an hour was one of those original agreements. It got me started. It also helped burn me out. So when I finally changed it, I did not just make more money. I started learning that I was allowed to matter inside my own business too. So this is really where I want you to look at your own business because I think sometimes when something fills off we assume we need a whole new business plan or a whole new direction.
or some dramatic reinvention of what we're doing. Sometimes that might be true, but sometimes the problem is much, much more simple than that. Sometimes you are simply still living inside decisions that made perfect sense five years ago and just do not fit you anymore. Maybe the price you chose made sense when you were trying to get your first 10 clients or 20 clients or 50 clients, but now you were booked out and still charging as if you're trying to convince people to give you a chance.
Maybe the schedule you built worked great at one point in your life, but your body or your family or maybe even your priorities have changed so much and you are still trying to force yourself into an old structure because that's what you've always done. Maybe you still offer something because it's on the menu and people know you for it, but every time somebody books it, you think, I just really don't want to do that. And you have this little moment of regret. That does not necessarily mean you built the wrong business. It may just mean the business did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Amy Bradley Radford (18:49.964)
And now you've outgrown parts of it. I think this is where people can get really attached to old decisions because there's almost a sense of loyalty to them. You think, but this is what got me here. And you know that's true. You can appreciate what got you there without assuming you have to drag it with you forever. I mean, a lot of things got me from one stage of life to another that I have absolutely no desire to keep using. Your business should be allowed to evolve too.
And I think the harder part is being willing to look at the places where you already know something is not fitting anymore. And usually we know. We know deep down. We may not know what to do about it yet, but we know where the friction is. We know where we feel irritated over and over again, where we are exhausted, where we're resentful, or where we keep saying, I cannot keep doing this. And then somehow we get up the next morning and do exactly the same thing again. I did that for a long time. I kept assuming that the answer was to just work harder.
Dig in, pay your dues, hold on tighter, make everybody happy, and somehow get better at tolerating a structure that wasn't working for me anymore. And eventually I learned that if I refuse to make a decision long enough, well, honey, my body was perfectly willing to make one for me. I don't particularly recommend that method. It works, but it's a fairly aggressive management style. So instead of waiting until you are completely done, I think there is a much better question to ask yourself. And it is one I wish I would have understood earlier.
Which is one of the reasons why I have this podcast. I want you to understand these things much earlier than I did. So if I were building this business today, knowing everything I know now, would I build it the same way? Nope. I wouldn't. Would I choose the same prices? Probably not. Would I work the same hours? Most definitely not. I was doing I was seeing eight clients a day, five days a week. Would I offer the same things? Yes, I would. Would I take the same kind of clients? Yes.
I would. Would I structure my week the same way? No. No, I would change it. You don't have to answer all of those questions today, and you certainly do not have to change everything at once. I don't recommend it. Small changes make go a long ways. But if your honest answer is no, I would not build it this way now, that is not necessarily evidence that you did something wrong. It's just evidence that you're no longer the person who built the first version of your business. And that's a very different way to look at growth. And that brings me back to the title of this whole episode.
Amy Bradley Radford (21:14.626)
Whose business are you building, anyways? Because if you're not careful, you can spend years running a business that was built out of other people's ideas and their fears and decisions you made before you really understood yourself as a business owner. At some point, you have to stop asking, what is everybody else doing? And start asking, What am I actually trying to do? And that sounds simple until you really kind of sit with it, because most people can tell you what they do.
They can tell you what they charge, what services they offer, what days they work, maybe how many clients they see in a week, but that is not the same thing as knowing what you're trying to build. Are you trying to build a full schedule and maximize income from the table? Do you really know what that means? I would hope you would know what that means by listening to my podcast of how to truly earn a great living at the table. Are you trying to work fewer days and make those days more profitable? Do you know how to do that?
Are you trying to become known for one type of work? You have something in your soul you want to offer, but your clientele is all a different type of work that you started with in the beginning. How do you change them over? Are you trying to create enough room in your schedule that you actually still like being a massage therapist five years from now? And what does that look like? How do you plan for that? How do you move forward? Those are all different businesses. And if those businesses are different,
then the decisions inside them probably need to be different too. And that's where comparisons stop being very useful. Because another therapist can have a beautiful business and still have absolutely nothing to do with the business you need to build. They may want to work five days a week. Maybe you only want to work three. They may love seeing eight people a day. I didn't. And that's great for them. Slightly horrifying for me. They may want employees. You may never want to supervise another human being as long as you live.
I've had employees, not my favorite thing. None of those choices are automatically right or wrong. The question is whether they fit the business you are trying to create. And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. They are trying to improve a business they never consciously chose. They are trying to get more efficient inside a schedule they don't like. They're trying to attract more clients into services that they are just flat out tired of offering and they're bored. They are trying to make more money from a structure that has already shown them.
Amy Bradley Radford (23:38.122)
It has some pretty heavy limits that aren't going to match what they want to earn. And sometimes the next step isn't doing more. Sometimes the next step is finally deciding what you want your business to become. And what that may mean is you change your prices or you change your hours or you change who you work with, or you you change over who your clientele is over time, or how much of your income comes from the table. It may mean doing something small.
Or it may eventually change the whole direction of your business. But the important part is that the decision starts coming from you and not the therapist down the street. And it's not from what you were taught was normal, not from the version of you who was $25 an hour and terrified of losing everybody. And it's not from fear. It's from the information you have in front of you now and the experience you have now and the person you have become.
I think that's really what business ownership grows into. In the beginning, you're trying to figure out what to do. Later, you're trying to decide what still belongs. And eventually you start building your business on purpose. So if there's one question I want you to take away from this episode, it is this. If you were building your business today, knowing everything you know now, what would you do differently? Because you may not need to start over. You may just need to stop letting an old version of your business
Decide what happens tomorrow. You know more now. Your clients have taught you things. Your schedule has taught you things. And your body has probably taught you a few things too, sometimes a little more aggressively than others. And if you were starting today with everything you know now, what would you change first? Because that may be exactly your next stage of growth starts. Thanks for listening. 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, and free resources, visit amibradleradford.com. And until next time, keep building the business and the career you love.
