Narrow Your Focus: How to Niche Your Massage or Bodywork Business |

Business and Marketing for Massage and Bodywork Therapists

Episode 20.

MINDY TOTTEN: As counterintuitive as it may seem, narrowing your focus is the fastest way to fill your client docket.

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 that they do into successful businesses that they love, all without burning out or selling out.

For the last 15+ 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 souls but also their bottom lines. 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. And THAT’s how bodyworkers Do It With Intention.

Greetings! Mindy Totten here, creator of The Bodywork Project and your host for the Do It With Intention podcast.

Today I’d like to share with you one of the biggest mistakes that bodyworkers make when they're trying to fill their practice. I made this mistake myself, and then realized I could have saved so much time, energy, and money if I had just done things differently.

Let me back up for a second. I used to be an English teacher and  taught middle schoolers and high schoolers literature and writing.

Don't tune me out or turn me off if you hated English in high school!

I taught in the Washington DC area and then I traveled the world teaching in Berlin, Istanbul and Singapore. When I was in Singapore I got really, really sick and nothing the western doctors did seemed to help.

I looked into alternatives -- including something I had never heard of -- Craniosacral Therapy.

Craniosacral Therapy helped me to turn a corner and to heal.

I knew that when I returned to America I wanted to share this way of healing with other people.

So I went to massage therapy school just so that I could one day practice this light touch therapy.

When I  graduated from massage school, I didn't yet have the advanced training that I needed to practice Craniosacral Therapy. While I was taking classes, I needed a way to pay the bills.

And I made the classic mistake of going broad instead of going deep.

Instead of narrowing my focus to work with my ideal clients who at the time were women, I did the equivalent of standing up on a roof and just throwing confetti off hoping that something would stick.

I had this huge menu of services -- relaxation, hot stone, aroma therapy, Thai, and of course craniosacral therapy as well.

I know some of you can relate to this. I ended up looking like everyone else who was trying to be everything to everyone.

I wasn't doing anything to distinguish myself from other therapists, and frankly I wasn’t even particularly good at some of the things I offered.

I thought that I had to do it to be able to keep my doors open.

True confession: One time someone called and scheduled a Thai massage and I hadn’t done one in a year or so. I was madly getting out my class notes from massage school to remind myself how to do a Thai massage. I gave a mediocre session, and the client never returned. Of course.

I wasn't doing anything to make her a raving fan because all my passion was around Craniosacral Therapy.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, narrowing your focus is the fastest way to fill your client docket.

Being all things to all people is a race to the bottom.

Instead, you want to concentrate on getting really good and working toward mastery in the modality or the services that you really love.

Then you can serve the people who will get the most out of your work.

I know that there are some coaches out there who totally disagree with this idea, but think about this.

You don't necessarily have to narrow your practice down to one modality.

I’ll share three of them with you in just a second. These are things that I've seen work not only in my practice, but also in the practices of so many therapists that I've mentored and coached through the years.

You simply cannot be all things to all people. Therapists trying to do this are doing it out of fear.

You're afraid that maybe if you narrow your focus to doing what you really love doing, that you won't have enough clients to keep your practice going.

When you step into your power, when you become really good at the work that you love, you'll be able to serve more people.

Don't let fear stop you.

I'm so passionate about this that I've been interviewed on several podcasts about exactly how I did this in my own Craniosacral Therapy practice, and you can find the links to those podcasts in the Show Notes for this episode.

So let's focus on how you can narrow your practice.

First, you could concentrate on a particular modality.

What is your passion? What modality makes your heart sing? Which modality would you do all day, every day if you could?

When you narrow your focus by concentrating on a single modality, you become really good at it. You start to work toward mastery and eventually you can share that expertise with others, either as a mentor or a teacher or as an author.

If you want to narrow your niche by modality, the secret is to choose something that calls to your heart, not something that you think is going to pay the bills.

You are in this for the long haul, so you want to be authentic and you want to be honest with yourself.

If you're going to narrow your focus by your modality, be sure that it is work that you love.

Second, you can niche down by your people.

What populations or types of people are you called to work with?

Do you only want to work with women, or do you get excited about working with athletes? Maybe your heart's calling is to work with infants?

When you narrow your focus by the population that you work with, you'll become known as the expert for that population and quickly be able to fill your practice with those exact people that you want to work with.

Take really good care to choose people that make your heart sing rather than those people you think you should want to work with. Go really deep and listen to your heart.

The third way to niche down starts with a series of questions: What do your people truly need?

Do you want to work with MS patients? Children on the autistic spectrum? People recovering from injuries?

What can you offer that's different from anyone else to the people who you are called to work with?

If you're called to work with people with certain conditions, you may use more than one modality. You're narrowing your focus in that case by giving people what they truly need.

These three ideas will pave the way for your ideal clients to find you.

You'll stand out to your ideal clients, they’ll love exactly the type of work that you offer, and they will see amazing results.

Because you're doing the work that you love, your services will be outstanding and you'll create raving fans who will tell other people.

Now that we've taken a look at what it means to narrow your practice with passion and purpose and understanding, I am going to invite you to get into some inspired action.

I've created a free episode bonus to go along with today's episode to help you narrow your focus and begin to fill your practice. You can find it in the show notes.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me today. I know what it takes to find time to fit something like a podcast into your busy day, and I so, so appreciate that you tuned in and listened to 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. That's Mindy Totten, T O T T E N.com/podcast.

If you really enjoyed today's conversation, I'd love for you to take a quick moment to leave a review on Apple podcasts. And make sure that you subscribe so that you can download each episode as soon as it comes out.

That'll help us get this podcast in front of more massage and bodyworkers like you, so that we can all work together to make the world a touch kinder.

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.