Life, Outsourcing, and Massage Therapy – Part 1

Just reading the title, you may be wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Well, you may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog. Life happened. Life is still happening. I teach, I have a family, car repairs, sports massage events, I’m in school taking classes, and I’m working on setting up a business. I just got busy.

The thing is, so do our clients. Often, as massage therapists, we wonder where our clients go. The truth is that many times it has nothing to do with the client not wanting to come back. Life just got in the way. Very few people I know have large blocks of time in their schedules to do with what they wish. MTs often fall prey to thinking that they are only competing against other massage therapists. Some who see a little bit more realize that they are also competing against other niche products like chiropractic, pain relief, and stress-reduction activities. But in the broader scheme of things, we are fighting tooth and claw with almost every other business (and even person) out there for one thing. Time.

Time and Our Service Economy

We are competing with sports events, TiVo, concerts, charity events, kids’ recitals, theme parks, you name it. Time is our clients’ most precious commodity. It seems that all too often, even when you want to get together with a friend, they have to check their schedule and pencil you in in three weeks. More and more, people are just so busy they can’t get away for anything.

What does that have to do with the service economy? Few would deny that massage therapy is a profession that rests firmly in the service sector. Whether you look at it as health care or a luxury, it is still a service. In one of my business classes recently, I learned that the rise of the service economy in the U.S. really began after World War II. What ended up happening is that incomes rose so that people had more to spend. At the same time, a counter-trend was occurring in that people had more demands on their time. The result was this, people began to pay others to do time-consuming services that they didn’t wish to do. Things like dry cleaning, painting the house, dining out increased. People began outsourcing more of their needs to others.

Outsourcing

The way I see it is that our clients have outsourced some of their care needs to us. We provide a therapeutic service and can rattle off all kinds of therapeutic benefits for massage therapy. We’ve been contracted to provide something that our clients want or need, but either can’t or don’t want to do themselves.

Think for a minute about the things that you want or need and can’t/won’t do for yourself. A person could get in shape without a personal trainer or a gym membership, but isn’t it easier to pay the membership or have somebody else guide you? Massage is kind of the same. People could reduce their own stress, there are many forms of massage that people really could do for themselves. But that isn’t really the issue. It’s time and focus.

General Busy-ness

A month ago, I wrote about my TFL and my plan for addressing it. I was going to chart the progress and write about it here. I know this stuff. I teach this stuff. I recommend it to my clients. Did I do it? Nope. It wasn’t important enough to me at any given moment to do much. Oh, I worked on it a few times. I got some massages at my school. But did I do the entire protocol that I laid out for myself? Sorry.

The point is that our clients are the same way. It’s not that they’re lazy, or uncommitted, or that they don’t want to be healthy. It’s that they have a gazillion priorities and their health is only one of them. Proper nutrition requires a lifetime commitment while McDonald’s only requires a commitment of $5, right now. When so many people demand so many things, something has to give. Unfortunately for us, for many people that seems to be massage and taking care of themselves.

And Back to Outsourcing

The answer to busy-ness for most people is one of two things. Put it on the back burner to be ignored or forgotten OR… outsource it. Our clients are outsourcing part of the wellbeing to us. We just need to know the best way to go about it for our particular group of customers. So what can we do to fulfill our contract as outsourced wellness providers? I’ll save that for part 2… (nice teaser, eh?)

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