Making a Living with Massage Therapy pt1

What to Charge for Massage

As a teacher, this is one of the most frequent questions that I get asked. The answer is $75. ;)

I wish it was that simple. The truth is that there a number of factors that go into deciding both how much to charge and also in determining if a job is going to pay you enough. As I began writing this, I realized that it is too large a topic to cover in one post, so welcome to the introduction for a series on Making a Living with Massage Therapy!

In this series of posts I’ll examine some of the factors that go into setting prices and taking jobs. There are no cut-and-dried answers to these questions. As much as my students would love me to be able to just hand them a number, it is different for everybody. Each part of this series will pick apart a FAQ (frequently asked question).

I’m sure I’ll come back later and edit this list, but here are some of the questions I’ll take on in this series:

1. Should I charge while I am in school (and how much)?
2. Will people pay $xx?
3. This job pays $xx (insert rate here). Is that good?

Your comments and questions will help to make this post and series more illuminating, so please, fire away!

EDIT: By the way, this does seem to be a hot-button topic, as described in this blog "Do Massage Therapists Work As Slaves?

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Traveling with the Team: Sports Massage

Although this isn't what I would probably write about for my first real post, it did just happen this past weekend, so I thought the timing is right.

My sister plays Ultimate Frisbee. Passionately. This past weekend she had a tournament in Denver, CO. Fortunately for her, she has a brother who is a massage therapist and has thoroughly indoctrinated her into the benefits of massage therapy for the past 10 years. The cool thing is, she took it upon herself to arrange it so that 10 of her teammates all pitched in to fly my wife (who is also an MT) and I to Colorado and put us up in a hotel for 3 days for us to work on them. Granted, we didn't make any money on top of that, but my wife and I had been hankering to go to Colorado anyway. There were a couple of things that I'd like to point out about this trip.

First, massage can be a great tool to use to travel. This is one example, but traveling to take a Thai Massage class in Thailand can be another example. If you look for the opportunity, massage can really take you places. Incidentally, I laid the groundwork for this trip last year simply by proposing to the team that I could do sportsmassage and coming down to one of their local tournaments.

Second, massage is one of those things that is almost infinitely barter-able. I have traded massage for merchandise, discounts, services fees, business advice, and even paid for more than half of our $20K wedding that way. You can use your skills to trade for most anything you can think of (if only the DMV took backrubs...). Use your imagination.

Thirdly, this trip also emphasized the dynamic educational relationship that MTs have with their clients. Most of the people that pitched in to pay for us to go had some appreciation for massage, but had no idea that sports massage was something different. Most of them had the impression that it was just about feeling better afterwards. As my wife and I started to educate them about the value of pre-event massage and how it was different than your typical spa massage, I could see how their viewpoint changed. Some of the best comments that we received were "After that massage, I had the best warmup ever", "I felt so much looser. It was great", and "My calf didn't cramp up on me at all today". I could see their level of respect rising.

Finally, this leads me to my last point. It is vital that we Massage Therapists really know how to speak to our clients. Speak to them in their language and in terms of what they care about. Carry it a step further and use words and terms that they can remember and talk about themselves. It is great for your business when your clients can describe what your work has done for them to their friends - the way you'd like it to be described! You create an evangelical client that will spout your praises to everybody they know.

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What is the Massage Continuum?

We all know that to be the best you can be you need to keep on learning. This blog is dedicated to the idea that the more we learn, the better we can achieve our potential. The massage profession is constantly evolving as well, never static, and as massage professionals we must evolve along with it.

So why blog?
I’ve been a massage therapist for 10 years now, and a massage instructor for 4. It’s very gratifying to help a student grow into becoming a wonderful, effective, and successful massage professional. As a teacher, I get bombarded with questions all the time about where to learn more, for more detail about a particular subject, or for my opinions about some aspect of the profession. I decided to start this blog to answer some of those questions and to extend what I do beyond the walls of the classroom to help the greater massage community. If you want to know a little more about me click here.

I love to teach. I have found that there is great variety of often conflicting information out there – some of which is very difficult to even find. I hope to provide some of those resources here. I’ve never written a blog before, so please bear with me as I get the hang of it.

Who is this blog for?
Practicing and aspiring massage therapists. In my experience, many practicing massage therapists have as many or more questions than massage students do. What can I do to be more successful? What do you do? What techniques work best for what conditions? Where are the best places to work? How much do I charge?... The list just goes on. If you work in massage therapy, you should find this blog helpful. I won’t make any claims about being the final authority, but I do have experience as a massage therapist and a spa owner, a consultant and a teacher. My hope is that my experience can help your career flourish.

Topics
While I already have pages of ideas to write about, this blog is more about you, the reader, than about me, the writer. I want to know what you want to know. If you have any topic that you’d like me to write about, send it along and I’ll do what I can to help. Here are some sample topics I already have in the works:

1. Professionalism in massage massage therapy
2. Building a career vs. finding a job
3. Two-tier licensing
4. What state certification means in California
5. The magic of M.E.T. (muscle energy technique)
6. Why doesn’t everybody know about Trigger Points?
7. The insidious (and much farther reaching than you think) effects of stress
8. Massage CEUs and DVDs: Which one should I buy?
9. Massage DVD and book reviews
10. Creating opportunities to grow your massage business

Like I said, this is just a sample. My intent is to build a body of work here in relatively short order. Let me know what you think!

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