The #1 Question I Get Asked by Massage and Bodywork Therapists |

Business and Marketing for Massage and Bodywork Therapists

Episode 14.

MINDY TOTTEN: The truth is that to build your bodywork or massage business, you have to do the work, period.

MINDY TOTTEN: Welcome to Do It With Intention, the podcast for massage and bodywork therapists. I'm your host, Mindy Totten, a mentor and coach for bodyworkers who want to turn their passion for the work they do into successful businesses that they love -- all without burning out or selling. 

For the last 15 plus years, I've created a successful six-figure Craniosacral Therapy practice in a small city in coastal North Carolina. Over those years, I've met so many skilled, big-hearted therapists who are struggling to make their bodywork businesses work for them. Not because they weren't terrific therapists, but because they didn't know how to make the business side of their practices work. 

It became my mission to help other massage and bodywork therapists build practices that support not only their soul, but also their bottom line.

On the Do It With Intention podcast, we'll dive deep into what it takes to build and to sustain a profitable massage or bodywork business. We'll have honest conversations about what really works and what doesn't as you create the ideal practice for you. 

After all, you do great work in the world and you deserve to make a great living doing it. But you've got to be intentional about it not only in your modality but in your business too. That's how body workers Do It With Intention.

Hey there! I am just wrapping up the January, 2020 Bodywork Project launch. It has been outrageously busy. We only open The Bodywork Project three times each year, so it's a lot of intensity around those launches, and then things will begin to settle down.

I hope that you have been doing well and that you are taking baby steps each and every day to create the practice of your dreams. It has been a remarkable week for me working with talented big-hearted massage and bodywork therapists in the Step Up & Fill Your Practice Challenge.

And I really, really love connecting with other therapists to help them move their businesses forward so that they can not only serve more people but as I always say also making a great living doing it.

Today I want to talk about something that I get asked all the time and I was asked it over the week of the challenge and so I wanted to do a quick podcast episode about it.

I get asked all the time, what is my biggest piece of advice for bodyworkers who are just starting out, or a bodyworker who wants to take their practice to the next level, whatever that means for you.

And I could say something really inspirational, like believe in yourself, believe in your dreams, something like that, or have a clear vision for your practice. And both of these things are really true. This is wisdom that is true and important.

But at the end of the day, my biggest piece of advice is more practical and down to earth. So are you ready? Here's my biggest piece of advice for massage and bodywork therapists: there are no shortcuts.

I know I hate this so much. We all want there to be a shortcut or some kind of hack or something that will magically transport us from where we are in our businesses now to where we want to be.

And believe me, Sister, if such a thing existed, I certainly would have found it by now. Lordy knows I have looked and looked through the years. But the truth is that to build your bodywork business, you have to do the work: period.

First, you need to create a solid foundation for your practice, and this is usually done most efficiently by finding someone who's done what you want to do and then learning from them. And that can be through a book or a program or a mentor, someone who will guide you so that you don't have to try to figure out every dog gone thing on your own.

Once you and this mentor or this book or this program or whatever, have got a roadmap of the way forward for your business, then you actually have to show up and do the work.

I know it's hard: it's not easy, but it can be done with ease.

You have got to show up and do the work. You have to talk to people, you have to give exemplary bodywork. You have to create a safe container for your business in order for it to thrive, and each of those things takes work.

Finally, you've got to keep learning and growing and evolving, so as you become more skilled and your practice fills, you may want to serve more people by reaching even larger groups of people, and that might mean hiring others, or writing a book, or teaching, just to name a few ways to expand your reach.

But here's the thing — for every step of that process, of those three steps that I just said, you've actually got to show up and do the work. And that work is going to take time, or it's going to take money, one of the two.

There are no shortcuts.

I want to share a story with you today that illustrates this whole point and it's really an embarrassing story for me to share and that's how much I love you all.

I'm going to put it out there and tell you my embarrassing things so that you don't make the same mistakes that I have made!

So we recently put our house on the market to sell, and if you have followed me for a while, you know that I love home improvements. I love painting, I love building bookshelves, I love all of it. I mean, I think I have this really bizarre, probably undeserved confidence that I can do just about anything.

I remember a couple of years ago I was like, I think I can cut that tree down. My husband was like, that's like a 50 foot tree. And I said, “Yeah, but I saw a YouTube video…” and I can just get so ridiculous.

I didn't cut the tree down, I'm happy to report, but after we put our house on the market, we spoke to our realtor and she made a couple of suggestions for sprucing the house up to get it ready to go on the market.

And I love color. So our rooms, you know, every ceiling has a light color on it, and all of the rooms have different colors, and we have an old 1964 ranch, so it has smaller rooms.

The realtor said, you know what, you need more neutral colors here to attract more buyers. So she said, I recommend that you paint not only the walls but the ceiling as well.

So I did exactly what I'm advising you not to do right now.

I said, “Oh, we can do this ourselves. We can figure this out. I've painted a ton of rooms through the years and I love painting — you get to see how your room comes alive with the color that you want it to be. Well I told my husband: I know that we can do this.

And he said, “I don't think that's a good idea. Mindy, I think that we should get somebody else to paint.”

And I made the mistake that so many of you may be making when you're thinking about getting support around your massage or bodywork business, which is: “I can do this myself. I don't want to spend the time. It's going to take more time, it's going to take more money. I can just do it myself.”

Now, I know that if I hired a painter, he or she could do it much more quickly than I could. But the problem with that in my mind — I'm rationalizing right now — the problem with that in my mind is I didn't want to have to interview all these different contractors, and contractors are notorious for not showing up for when they say they're going to, and I thought, “That's going to take forever.”

We can just get started right now. I estimated that it would take us three days to paint the house. And this is just interior to paint inside the house, everything, the same color, basically a very neutral shade on the wall and then paint all the ceilings white.

Okay. First of all, and I shouldn't poke fun at this I guess, but Ranald, my husband and I, we almost ended up in divorce court. I swear. It was just endless what we had to do. And it took eight days instead of three days.

So every single day we worked, you know, five or six or seven hours. We were exhausted at the end of the day you know, cranky with each other to, you know, I'm the one who cuts in, he rolls. It was just endless. We had to do two coats on every ceiling, two coats on every wall.

It was just a nightmare. So the embarrassing part of the story is that as we went along, I was trying to do this (obviously) as quickly as possible. So I was up on the ladder cutting in — those of you who like to do your own DIY, you know what I'm talking about — cutting in at the ceiling at the top of the walls with a paintbrush.

I had a cup of paint in my hands so I dip into the cup of paint, cut in a little bit and then I would have to get down off of the ladder, move the ladder and get back up. So I wasn't going to put my paint cans down every single time to do this. So what I did was, I would put the paintbrush into my mouth, grip it with my teeth, come down off of the ladder, move the ladder back to steps, all of this with the paintbrush in my mouth.

And then climb back up the ladder, cut in a little bit more. So this went on for, I don't know, three or four days and I was doing that. I got off the ladder, had the paintbrush in my mouth and I thought that I broken the paintbrush. But actually I chipped my front tooth on the paintbrush.

You guys, I couldn't believe it. I was just like, I was not really in shock, but I was just like, what the hell has just happened? What have I just done here? And you know, it wasn't a terrible accident or anything. I actually was in a moped accident when I was 13 so my front teeth are bonded. So it was the bonding that broke because I was crunching on this paintbrush every time I got up and down a ladder. So I was beside myself. I called the dentist who did the work and I got the recording.

This was like December 20th or so. I got the recording that they were out of the office and wouldn't be back until January 6th and I was like, Oh hell to the no, I am not going around the holidays with a chipped front tooth! And I was like, what am I going to do?

And, and that's when Ranald came to the rescue because I was a big puddle of mess. What am I going to do? So he called a dentist. They say, where do you live? Can you come now? We went, and the emergency dentist fixed my tooth.

The moral of the story of course is that I spent just as much, if not more money on the emergency dentist as I would've spent on the painters, and I spent hours or days more than I would've spent.

And you know what? It's not my area of expertise. It's not my Zone of Genius. So it looks fine. It looks pretty good, but it doesn't look as good as it could have.

I share that really embarrassing story with you so that you don't make the same mistakes that I did. The moral of this story is that it's going to take an investment of time, or it's going to take an investment of money, to build a solid massage or bodywork business.

That doesn't mean that you have to throw money out the window, but it's either going to take time or it's going to take money. Usually it takes a little bit of both. There are no shortcuts for this.

Whenever I have other practitioners on the show here or I'm interviewing them or I'm talking to other people, their number one piece of advice for bodyworkers (because I always ask) Every single one of them says the same thing for their number one piece of advice.

They say, “I wish I had reached out for help with my business long before I did.”

So my wish for you is to take that advice and take my embarrassing story to heart, and don't make the same mistakes that I did. I wasted countless hours and tons of money trying to figure out on my own how to grow my business.

I want you to find someone whose approach resonates with you, and reach out for support because I know that you can do this.

The people that you serve are just waiting for you to get over your fears.

They're waiting for you to step into your power and become the massage or bodywork therapist that you know you can be. Remember, you can do this and there are no shortcuts.

Enrollment for The Bodywork Project ends on January 22nd, tonight at midnight, so if you are looking for someone to support you, if you're looking for a group of like minded big-hearted practitioners to be part of a community, I encourage you to check out the link in the show notes, and if you have any questions at all, you can reach out to me or to my team and we'll get back to you.

Whatever you decide to do, remember, find someone who resonates with you, who you want to work with, who has done what you want to do and can help you do the same thing because there are no shortcuts.

MINDY: Thanks for coming on this journey with me today. I know what it takes to make time for something like this in your busy day and I so appreciate that you tuned in and listened all the way to the end. 

We've got all the links from today's episode in the show notes that you can find over at MindyTotten.com/podcast.

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Once you do, just send a quick email with a screenshot of your review to hello@mindytotten.com.

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Okay, that's it for today. It's my pleasure and my privilege to be with you on this journey. I'll see you next week, same place, same time. Until then, get out there and Do It With Intention.