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Massage Price Wars – What’s a massage worth?

July 10, 2011 Julie Onofrio Self Care, Start Your Massage Business

Whenever massage therapists start talking about setting prices for their massage business the discussion can get quite interesting. There is such a wide range of thinking and also a wide range of pricing.

Franchises have set low rates to try to get more clients over everyone else. Many think that these low rates are hurting the massage profession. Massage therapists who are located near these places feel that they can’t compete with such low prices or they lower their rate to match or undercut the franchises. On the other hand, many of these franchises actually have extensive advertising budgets and have commercials on TV and in major magazines such as Oprah. Not everyone signs up for their memberships so in a way it is advertising for the massage profession.

On the other hand are the MT who charge way more than the going rate. I have heard people who charge double and triple the going rate in an area. It is illegal to do that when an insurance company is paying as far as I know. What are they doing for the profession? They of course also have to target people who have more money. Why should people with more money have to pay more? Are they really worth that much more? When you charge more, you need to have more value or provide a specialized service.

Massage therapists who are just starting out will often feel like their work is not worth charging more. They have less experience and are not as skilled as someone who may have been in the business for 5 or 10 years. I have also seen many MT who have been in the business for 10 year or more who have never raised their rates and started out low to begin with. How can someone charge so much for something so wonderful?

When I first started out in massage, I opened my practice in a health club renting a treatment room. A friend of mine from massage school had just started there and had taken the practice over from a guy who was charging really low rates even for that time. I can’t remember exactly what he was charging but I know we raised them a little to be more of the going rate for the area. A year or so later, I was talking to a client who was also an accountant about raising rates and he said flat out not to raise my rates because I will lose too many clients. I didn’t listen to him and went ahead and raised my rates. I might have lost a few but I also gained many. It was really scary to raise them thinking that I would lose too many clients. What I found though that there were people willing to pay more for my massage services. My schedule was filled with people who were doing just that. Yahoo!!! Making more money!

Every few years I raise my rates. I do give regular clients discounts when they buy packages of massage up front. I have had all sorts of experiences when raising rates. I had one client who was really wealthy and never minded me raising my rates every so often until one year he started complaining saying that he came so often that I should give him a discount. He was also my most difficult and physically demanding client to work on. I did raise his rates despite his complaints and he was unhappy and looking for another MT but was also moving out of town soon so didn’t bother to change. I had another client once tell me – “You never have to explain why you are raising your rates and I would think less of you if you didn’t raise your rates each year. It is just business.”

That brought me out of the fear of charging more and raising my rates each year. That’s what it is all really about I think – the fears. If I don’t charge lower rates than everyone else I won’t get any clients. If I charge too much, I won’t get any clients. Either way it is just fear. It takes time to work through those fears or you can take the leap and charge what you need to to make a decent living right from the beginning. You have to be worth it -in skill and in self confidence. The process can move faster when you have a mentor or group for support.

What is a massage worth? What is your time worth? That is what you are really being paid for – your time away from your family and friends. How many people on their death beds have said “I wish I had worked more”?

My goal is to work less and make more. Yes many will probably think that is being greedy. I see it as one of the highest forms of self care.

A few years ago, I decided to stop taking clients who had a certain insurance plan that paid the lowest out of any insurance company. At first, it hurt my business for a few months but I stuck to it and all of a sudden my schedule was filled with clients who had the insurance that paid the most. I had never had many of those clients previously. I just thought it was because no companies in my area carried that insurance or something. It wasn’t true.

Recently, I have had to make big changes in my massage business. One of the insurance companies who paid the most out of all of the insurance companies, cut their allowable fee almost in half. Half of my massage business last year was working on those clients. This year I have had to focus on getting more cash clients to make up the difference.

It takes time to adjust to price changes usually, but it is well worth it in the long run. Working for less than you need to make can be draining and make you feel resentful. (Yes, massage therapists may have bad feelings toward people who pay less. We are human!)

People are willing to pay more for a massage (or anything for that matter) when you offer something with more value. Value determines price. The thing though is in defining value. It is basically what your client wants or needs. If your massage business looks like and feels like everyone other massage business, then your potential clients can not easily decide on who to go to so they will choose the massage therapist with the lower price. (As I just wrote that, it made me think of the many massage franchises out there. Are they able to have lower rates and be successful because most massage therapists don’t know how to separate themselves from everyone else? Hmm..just a thought.)

Separating your massage business from everyone else can be a challenge for many MT. I separate myself from others simply by writing about massage and what it does extensively on my office website. I don’t do any other marketing or advertising. I provide the information that shows that I am different than a franchise or local chain that has lower prices. My massage is unique. I do deep tissue work but use a lot of triggerpoint work combining the two. It just works for me.

When it comes down to competing on price alone, no one wins. Someone will always be out there offering a lower rate. Someone is always going to charge more.

What is right for you depends on how much you need to make, how many hours a week you are able to work and the rate that you charge. You need to be able to stay in business. You will need to take a salary and pay your bills, stay or get out of debt, take nice vacations, get a massage once a week and save for retirement. Just set your fees according to what you need to make! It is also about what you feel comfortable charging and working towards developing your skills and confidence to be able to charge more. What is your time worth? What is it worth to be able to give someone their life back who has been living in pain for the past few years? What is it worth to provide regular massage to a world class athlete to allow them to be the best in their field? What is is worth to give a massage to someone who just lost their spouse or are in the end stages of life? What is it worth to give a massage to a homeless person who is in pain from living on the streets? What is it worth to give a celebrity a massage or CEO of Microsoft? What is it worth to give a massage to the local grocery clerk or factory worker?

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Using magic to get massage clients – The power of boundaries

June 5, 2011 Julie Onofrio My Personal Thoughts, Self Care

Sometimes it just seems like magic that I get massage clients. Some would think that I am talking about the law of attraction idea but it is much more than that. I used to buy into the LOA and kept reading everything I could but you know it never really worked for me after all that. I’ll write my next post on that but for now back to getting massage clients using magic.

I have written about the many different ways to get clients – there is the big list of marketing ideas, how to make websites, how to get clients through building a referral network and yes I have done many of them with my focus on my website. Since the creation of websites, it has been such a big relief for me because frankly I just hate marketing and networking – yup it’s true. Websites for me are ideal being an introvert and shy – yup that’s true too. For the most part my website is the only thing I use to get new clients. When people are looking for massage online they are already want a massage. Those are the clients I want mainly because I don’t have to do much to turn them into a regular client. They already know what massage does and that they get relief from it or if they are a first time or fairly new to massage -they are at least open to massage. After all they are searching for massage.

So yes sometimes even with that my massage business is slower than I would like it to be but there is a whole other side to that. My business is slow usually when I have something else on my mind or on those days when my heart just isn’t into doing massage. Since the beginning of the year after having my best year ever last year massage wise I found that the main insurance company that I had been working with that also happened to pay the most out of any insurance company was reducing my allowable fees – well not just reducing but cutting them almost in half. That meant I would have to do twice as many massages to make the same amount as last year.

In Feb, I received some distressing health news that further complicated the issues and frankly I just didn’t feel like working much doing massage. I was exhausted from dealing with everything. I didn’t like taking the insurance clients that I was – not because I didn’t like the people but it was just so discouraging not to get paid the same. I couldn’t work more than I did last year with this new health issue- Don’t worry I am OK – just a hereditary high cholesterol issue that was also creating plaque in my arteries. I have lost 15 pounds, stopped eating sugar and gluten and high fat foods, started walking more and am on my way to being healthier than ever. I reduced my cholesterol by over 50 points in about 3 months!

So back to using magic to get massage clients. So there I was feeling like I didn’t want to do any massage, feeling frustrated with the insurance companies and thinking that I too would do an Oprah moment and think about ending my massage career at 25 years which would be at the end of this 2011. One day last week I also tweaked my knee running to the bus and couldn’t work much that week so one afternoon I just laid down on the table and stretched and asked – What is all this telling me? What am I supposed to be doing? What am I missing? What do I need to change? It became clear that with the physical challenges I just need to get even clearer about who I want to work with as a client. My time is limited so I need to make the most out of every hour that I work. I spent about an hour and just came to know that my next steps would be to just stop taking insurance clients. I thought also about how a few years ago I had to put my foot down and stop taking one of the insurance plans that paid the least out of them all. That was a big decision since it seemed those people called the most. I didn’t have any of the higher paying insurance clients calling. It was a scary move to make. I just finally one day said no more. I had about a month of not being as booked as I like to be. (I usually like to do 12 sessions a week.) But soon the situation changed and I had moved all of the clients with the lower paying insurance out and all of a sudden the one’s with the higher paying insurance started arriving. It is sort of like I had to make room for them to start calling. I had to have faith that it was the right thing for me. I was a little worried but I never went back on my boundary – no clients with the low paying insurance any more for me. I did have a few moments when I thought I would have to break that but I didn’t.

So now the day I made the decision to stop taking insurance clients – before the decision my day was just one of those days right from the start. I missed the bus running for the bus and tweaked my knee to boot. After I got really clear about my goals and what boundaries I needed to set for myself the phone started ringing and my email box was lit up with the little red star telling me I had new mail.

Everytime in my career that I have set such boundaries, the more successful I have become. I felt better the minute I made the decision. I hadn’t been doing much to market myself because of my health challenges yet still the phone started ringing – OK I do have a website that is at the top of the SE for my keywords but it’s like magic – it knows when I am feeling like I can’t work so it doesn’t get me new clients.

Boundaries are so important. They are what support you in the process of building a business and throughout your personal life. Getting clear is the process of getting to know yourself better each time. You often don’t know how decisions will work out but you can learn first hand when you see the contrast between your choices – how does each one feel? Your feelings are what tell you when you are on track. Keep making decisions that help you feel relief – just the slightest bit of relief will do! It doesn’t have to be a major life change. Your boundaries are there to guide you and keep you on track for your goals and for your purpose or mission. They will help you make difficult decisions – the one you have to make to stop seeing clients that don’t pay enough. You might see that as being greedy or materialistic – I used to also think that. The more I go through this though the more I see that it is just good self care. What can you do right now to practice good self care right this minute? What boundary do you need to set that supports the belief that you are valuable and are worth it to have as many clients as you need?

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Boxing day for Massage Therapists

December 26, 2009 Julie Onofrio Self Care

Today is traditionally Boxing Day or gathering all of those gifts from under the tree and putting them away or taking them back to the store! The significance of this really is to just start cleaning up everything from the holidays and you can take it a step farther and make it a total clean up from the last year. Clean ups and completions feel good to get things out of the way and start fresh for the new year. Things that have been hanging over you can drain your energy and you most likely do not even know it. It can also decrease your productivity and impact your success. These things left undone can actually end up holding you back from accomplishing what you want. These uncompleted tasks and clutter when cleaned up and completed can bring you a new wave of positive energy for the new year and your massage business (as well as your social groups.)

So what is on your to do list?Even if it isn’t officially on a list it is spinning around in your head taking up your time and energy.

start a website for your massage business?
washing the car
cleaning the house/office
doing a mailing to local businesses
networking with doctors or other health care providers
phone calls to make or return
clean your desk
clean out your clothes closet
clean off your bookshelves
backup your computer and organize your files
clean up old magazines
get that oil change for your car
organize your photos
contact people you have been meaning to connect with
take a second look at all of your projects and organize them in the order you want to work on them
return items that you borrowed
clean out that garage and storage area

Whatever you can think of that is just hanging over your head it is a good time to start taking care of it all. There are basically just a few options – Clean it up, complete it, or delete it (forget it!) but there are a few ways to take care of these options. You can just do it yourself, delegate it to someone, put a date on it as to when you will complete it or just delete it (or get rid of it)

Whew! Doesn’t that feel better already? The whole basis for building a successful life actually revolves around constantly trying to find relief from your unconscious thoughts and feel more positive (even if you are facing a difficult challenge!) This is just one small way to start.

With all of this stuff out of the way you can jumpstart your creativity and start thinking outside of the box (as they used to say) and start planning for the New Year and a very successful year! I already have so many things in the works, I can hardly wait!

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Financial Self Care for massage therapists

September 20, 2009 Julie Onofrio Self Care

Financial Self Care is not really talked about or addressed efficiently in massage school. Coming out of massage school most start out indebt or without much money to start a massage business and are often forced into taking low paying jobs because they don’t have the luxury of waiting and finding a high paying job. Failing to create spending plans in massage school is a sure way to lead to a life as a struggling massage therapist.

Many massage therapist also struggle with the money part of being a massage therapist and often say things like they don’t want to charge much so that it can be affordable to everyone. This is a common pattern that I believe is a part of caretaking others and not taking care of yourself. Sure if you don’t have any bills, have enough savings for retirement, are independently wealthy then you can open up a free clinic or low cost clinic. But if you are like most massage students entering the massage profession chances are you are already a struggling massage therapist.

Taking a look at your money issues ( and everyone has them – not just massage therapists) can do just as much if not more for the success of your career. Money beliefs are created at an early age when parents say things like ” what do you think that money grows on trees?” What do you think about people who have money? That in itself will tell you a lot about your beliefs about money.

Doing a money autobiography can help you to connect the dots from your childhood to your current financial status. Once you start taking the emotional charge off of money it just becomes money – a math problem. Working with a financial recovery specialist can help you create a spending plan and to take control of your finances.

Change Your Beliefs About Money

July 25, 2009 Julie Onofrio Build Your Massage Business, Peer Supervision, Self Care

Many think that just by thinking positively that it will help them make money. This is just really the first step. What it really requires is changing your beliefs about money.

To Change your beliefs about money requires the understanding of how beliefs are formed, questioning your beliefs and changing your perspective through the process.

The process for me has been quite painful and I also recommend that you work with a good therapist or life coach. I have both and a supervisor and a peer group that I meet with regularly.

The thing about money is that it is just money. The problem is really that we tend to attach so man emotions to it and equate it to our own self worth. Massage therapists have a tendency to say things like “It is not about the money” or not need much in the way of money.

Steve Capalleni talks about this in his book “Making the Switch to Being Rich
“. If you haven’t heard of Steve -he is one of the prominent leaders in the spa industry and has written on spa therapies and working in spas. In his book he talks about how massage therapists become massage therapists to keep themselves in the moneyless bubble. They think that being a massage therapist is more about helping people than making money and often wonder how they can charge for something so loving and caring. We keep proving over and over again that we can’t make a lot of money and then defend the position of having no money by saying we are doing more good than anything. He says “if there is an entire group of people who are almost all inside the moneyless bubble, it’s massage therapists”

Where beliefs about money come from.

Beliefs are formed at an early age. Beliefs are really just the opinions of others that are handed down to us by our families and in school. The whole grading system and having to do good and not be wrong in school instills fear of making mistakes. The most common belief that people have about money is that money is the root of all evil. You can tell what your belief is about money when you think about people who have a lot of money. Do you feel jealous of someone driving a Mercedes or even a Bentley? Do you wonder what they had to do to get that? Do you think that they must have had to sell their soul to get it or that they are greedy or doing something like taking advantage of people to get that kind of money?

Your beliefs can be found in your feelings and reactions to the world around you. Since most of our beliefs are really unconscious because they have become so ingrained in our brains and bodies, feelings are the only way to get to them. Whenever you are feeling anything but love or joy you can know you are buying into an old belief that just isn’t true. It does sort of bend your mind to start thinking like that. It is sort of ironic that the whole field of being a massage therapist is based on feeling. You can learn whatever technique or special type of massage and the only thing the client will know is how it feels to them. The don’t care if it is myofacial release, cranio-sacral therapy or effleurage. They just know how it feels.

There are so many other beliefs attached to making money. We think money will provide us financial security. It won’t. I know people who are multi-millionaires and they can’t sleep at night because they worry they don’t have enough. We think money will bring us freedom. You can have a ton of money to do what you want when you want or you can have no money at all and be a beach bum and have all the freedom you want. The other motivation for making money is Power. You can be like Donald Trump and Mother Theresa – yes Mother Theresa was all about power. She basically ran the richest church in the world. Some people look to money to feel loved or get love. Someone who does is the massage therapist who charges less than they need to make or doesn’t charge for no-shows or last minute cancellations. Instead of setting boundaries around money, they feel that it is more important to be nice to people and let them slide and they incur the loss of income.

Beliefs about money are also seen in things like how you promote your massage business or not. People can easily blame their lack of success in getting clients on the economy being down. While yes the economy is struggling, it doesn’t mean that you have to be struggling. It is easier to blame the economy than to take responsibility and do whatever is needed to get the clients that you need. Do you have a website that is at the top of Google for your keywords -massage, your city? Do you have a network of other caregivers that refer to you? Just doing one mailing to 100 people and not getting any response does not mean anything. Do the same mailing once a week and keep changing the wording until it works and send it to targeted potential clients until it does work.

Teach classes to groups of lay people on massage – like for couples or friends or co-workers. Offer free classes at your church or other group. Go out into the community and give and you will soon find yourself on the receiving end. The struggling economy only means you have to do things differently and start finding things to do to get the clients that you need. It isn’t easy and it takes also planning financially to start a business. Do you have enough in the bank to live for a few years before you start your business?

Tools for changing your beliefs.

The biggest thing that I think helped me start changing my beliefs was learning that my feelings are really the key to figuring them out. Your feelings tell you what you are unconsciously thinking. So since you can’t really know because it is unconscious – you can start asking -”What would someone be thinking that had that in their life”. Just start guessing.

The other part of this is that while you can’t really change your feelings – you can change your thinking. Figure out what you can do to start changing the feelings. Esther Hicks has a great explanation in one of her books The Astonishing Power of Emotions: Let Your Feelings Be Your Guide She uses a great analogy of having bad feelings is pointing you upstream in a river. It is hard going and difficult to get anywhere. You can just change the feeling one little bit to turn your boat around and head downstream. You change the feeling by changing what you are thinking or saying.

Your emotions are what indicate the difference between what you desire and your belief or your expectations around whatever it is that you are struggling with. Your emotions tell you that you are moving away from your desires. Your emotions are your guidance system to understanding why you are getting the results you are getting.

It takes much more than a few blog posts to really get this. I read and studied and worked with a financial counselor to start challenging my beliefs about money and success. It is still an ongoing process and always will be. The more conscious you become about one thing it has a way of bringing up things in other areas and you can also see deeper aspects in the same area.

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