Jun 09
17
Cash Flow Quadrant for Massage Therapists
Rich Dad, Poor Dad 2: Cash Flow Quadrant – Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom
In it he describes his theory of the cash flow quadrant. There are people on the left hand side of the table that are Employees and Self employed people. Employees look for job security and want employers to take care of them. Self Employed people want their independence more than anything. They often work the hardest for that independence. Their business can not run without them. It makes them indispensable to the business. It makes it harder to take time off and take vacations. SE people want their freedom and independence first over money. He calls SE people the “do it yourself” group. They end up not having the freedom that they thought they would get. Yes they can set their own schedule but most can’t just up and take a vacation today or stop working for a month to travel or just be with the family.
I would have to say that describes massage therapists to a T (and yes even myself!) I was working in photography before I went to massage school working for a guy who was building his own custom made sail boat in which he was going to sail around the world it (and did!) while I was there slaving away so he could do it!
On the right hand side of his cash flow quadrant chart are the Business People and Investors. The Businesses are run by leaders who hire other people to do the work. They are leaders. They do the thinking for the business. He says : “Leadership is the ability to bring out the best in people”.
If you have a regular business that creates cash flow and runs on it’s own with out you or if you invest in real estate or other ventures to create cash flow your chances of being rich increase significantly. Now being rich always seems to be a buzz word with massage therapists. They don’t want to be rich because they want to help others. Being rich somehow always seems to be equated with people who do bad things to get the money.
He also goes on to describe various business models and one of them is the franchise system. Systems are usually tested and put into place and work better than most other business models. McDonalds is such a system. It works no matter what for the most part. Site Build it! is a system! It is what has taught me about making passive income online and it is a great way to start learning how to get out of the SE box except you probably will need to do some of the work until you make enough to hire someone to do it all for you!
I started thinking about the Massage Envy Franchise system that seems to be working very well for their owners that is. I also think many massage therapists are happy to just take these low paying jobs because there isn’t much else out there and they are happy to have steady work and be working on many clients. How else could they be so successful?
The Franchise system is a way to reach more people and offer massage to many people. While we can argue as to the quality of massage and defend ourselves by saying our massage is better – this isn’t about that. What I am thinking about is could there be a system that gave reasonably priced massages and provided a way for massage therapists to make a decent living too? Could supervision and peer supervision be introduced into a system like this to support the therapists and create better therapists? Could a system like this reach as many people as Massage Envy does? What if they had custom websites that drove people to their companies just like mine does for me?
I have to say after reading his work, if I had know some of his principles of doing business back when I started doing massage 20 years ago, I would be more interested in setting up a business that provided massage than doing all of the massage myself all of these years.
So I am sure that many would say that they don’t want to have their own business and lead others. It is too much work or it is too hard etc. To move from one quadrant to the other it requires that you change your thinking and actions. The left side of the quadrant (the employees and self employed) are motivated by security and the right side ( business and investors) are motivated by freedom! Having job security does not mean you have financial security.
Moving into the right hand side requires that you learn about becoming a leader and business person. In doing so you can actually help more people!
It is also a process to get there because you have to learn and take the steps to get there.
Anyways I digress – getting back to the idea… I wonder if there could be a system of massage businesses that support the massage therapist while reaching many people and offering them reasonably priced massage!
hmmm… off to my massage!
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