Leadership & Massage 3 - Characteristics

Part 1   Part 2

In the last post, we looked at the power that leaders possess. Here, I’ll take a look at what makes a leader a leader. While there are many descriptions and lists of leadership characteristics, there are a few that seem to be universal.

A Compelling Vision

So where are you leading your followers? A leader has a vision of the future. Something that isn’t here yet, and will take work and time to get there, but is possible. An effective leader has a very clear vision, one that is almost tangible. A vision that offers hope of a better future, a place that others want to be. Nobody wants to follow a vision that takes them to a worse place – although they may be willing to suffer hardship to get to a better place.

Having this vision is central to leadership and directly impacts other essential leadership components such as passion and inspiration. It isn’t enough to just have a loose idea of the future, the vision must be clearly defined and articulated. Write it down as best you can. Try to formulate a simple statement that encompasses your vision. It isn’t a good vision or goal until it’s outside of your head. Which leads us to our next vital component of effective leadership…

O Come All Ye Faithful

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the holiday cheer! But it is a very appropriate statement in this case because we’re talking about communication. Not just communication, but creating the faith in others that they want to follow you. This is why it is so important to clearly define and articulate your vision – you have to share it with others. You should be able to describe it easily to other people. And frequently. As a leader, nobody should have to wonder what it is you’re all about. Why? Because you will tell them straight up consistently and often.

You need to tell people where you are going and if your vision is compelling enough they will join you.

Passion, Enthusiasm, and Optimism

These three go hand in hand and all spring from your vision. When the vision is compelling, it is a source of motivation. Most people, even the extremely unmotivated have little trouble getting started when they are working on something inspiring. It becomes a positive circle in which the vision feeds the action, passion, and motivation and they feed back into the vision. It is hard to get motivated and passionate about a ho-hum vision.

Hope springs eternal and it also is the fuel for the journey. A positive outlook is attractive and draws others into following you. People like to be around positive, energetic people. You need to believe that your vision is possible – if you don’t you need to choose something you can believe in. Think Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, he was always depressing to be around – not exactly an inspiring figure.

A Plan

Finally, a leader must have a plan. You must know how to get there, or at least a pretty good idea. Your followers want to see progress, action, something being done to reach the goal. The vision can be a prize that can get a person through a rough patch along the way, but if no progress can be seen, if the leader seems to be uncertain, then the followers will begin to lose interest. Have a plan. Create milestones. Chart the progress. Take the time to step back and reflect on how far you’ve come from time to time. Leaders hate to be stagnant and are always changing and reworking things to better fit their vision.

Control

Leaders will not hesitate to enforce boundaries or redirect the course of events to stay on track. The first sign that things aren’t quite going right is the feeling that things aren’t quite going right. Evaluate it against the vision and if it doesn’t fit, redirect. Non-followers can damage your following through negativity. Leaders employ a “healthy surveillance” to monitor the goings-on within their sphere of influence and act accordingly.

Leadership in Context

Just to bring things into perspective a little, let’s take a look at the recent presidential election. In my opinion, Barrack Obama won because he demonstrated stronger leadership qualities than his opponent. Obama campaigned on a vision of hope, restoring American status in the world, a new energy future, and better health care. He was able to convey the hope well and I think that this was the primary reason that he one so convincingly.

In order to keep us engaged however, he’ll have to fill in some blanks and operate on more than just hope. We’ll need to see a plan and the milestones along the way. He’ll need to repeat the vision often and clearly.

Other characteristics that I’ve seen described as essential to leadership are:

1. Sacrifice – This one goes with passion. If you’re fired up about your vision, you’ll go to great lengths to see it through and be willing to put up the time, money, and effort to achieve it.
2. Moral Character – People hold their leaders to a different standard. We expect them to be better than us. Make sure you demonstrate the qualities that your followers expect. A part of this is to “practice what you preach”. Related to this are credibility and honesty
3. Self-Confidence – When you have a clear idea where you’re going, there is a degree of certainty about your actions that creates confidence in yourself and your followers.
4. Emotional Intelligence – AKA empathy, it’s the ability to recognize emotions in yourself and others. Great leaders are able to feed off of, address, and even develop desired emotions in their followers.
5. Desire – You have to want it.
6. Comfort Zone – Ironically, although leaders push their followers outside of their comfort zones in the pursuit of a better future, the leaders themselves create a new comfort zone within the vision. They provide a structure or framework from which to operate. The leaders don’t have this safety net however, and must draw on their own drive and passion to persist.
7. Win-Win Thinking – Leaders get the advantages of power, but they have to bear in mind that following is voluntary and that the power is received at the whim of the followers. In other words, the followers must see the advantage of following. For that to happen, the leader must operate from a position of mutual reward.

Leading & Massage Therapy

Your clients come to you to be led. That’s a part of the therapeutic relationship. It’s up to you to exercise that power in the most effective manner for your client. Pay respect to client-therapist boundaries; to the effects your actions, words, and attitudes can have in either a positive or negative way. Understanding leadership is an important part of leadership.

Where are you leading your clients? Are you on the same page? Are the benefits balanced? Do you have clarity about your vision? Do your followers? How can you use your power for the most benefit? These are all questions you should ask yourself in your massage practice so that you can truly own your role as a therapist… and a leader.

So where are you leading your clients?

Compiled from various sources (Human Relations, Dubrin), (Supervision Today!, Robbins & DeCenzo), (Leadership, Chapman & O’Neil)

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Leadership & Massage 2 - Power

<<< Part 1                                                                       Part 3 >>>

I know that you didn’t get into the field of massage therapy because you wanted power over people, so don’t get your bonnet in a twist. You do have power, however. A leader’s power is derived from the followers. In other words, they give it to you! There are three different kinds of power:

Role Power

As I mentioned in the last post, power is inherent in the therapeutic relationship. The client has lost power over their condition somehow and is turning to you for help. This kind of power is called Role Power – or the power of your position. You are the therapist and they the client. They have given you power over their healing. As we facilitate the healing, we gradually give their power back, but there will always be a degree of role power in play.

Other examples of roles that are given power (to a greater or lesser degree) are parents, your boss, teachers, police officers, or the president of the United States. Sometimes these roles have authoritative power attached to them – such as the police officer’s ability to have you do something against your will.

Role Power is effective when you need to “lay down the law” such as with enforcing boundaries when someone in your charge has stepped out of bounds. However it becomes less effective the more you use it. It is best to rely on role power only when necessary.

Personality Power

Charisma. Likability. The power of persuasion. This power comes not out of respect for the role you occupy, but because of respect for who you are. Are you courteous, respectful, trustworthy, optimistic, communicative, amiable, welcoming, helpful, and/or a whole bunch of other good things? Have you ever convinced (I won’t say manipulated) a friend or family member to do something they didn’t really want to do but you could get away with it because of your relationship? Personality power in action!

Knowledge Power

People like to be led by others that have the answers. It is a cliché that knowledge is power, but clichés only become clichés when they are true. The more knowledgeable you are about something, the more power others will give you with regards to it. Never stop learning! The more knowledge power you have, the more credibility you will have when you give you clients helpful information.

Use of Power

Obviously we need to wield our power effectively and appropriately. Our job is to gradually give our clients back much of their power. We use our power in our clients’ best interests. That is part of the essence of being a leader – the proper use of the power that has been given them. The most effective leaders apply these different types of power at different times and in different situations, something called situational leadership. There are times where you need to put our foot down and use your role power to redirect the ship. At other times, you convince. Others you educate. Wise leaders learn when to do which.

Next, we look at the characteristics of leadership…

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Leadership & Massage 1 - Intro

Massage Therapy and leadership? What do those have in common? You might say, “I got into this profession to help people, I don’t want to lead them!” But you do.

Why Leadership?

Leading your clients is an unavoidable circumstance in massage or any other healing profession. It is inherent in the therapeutic relationship. They look to you for guidance. In the therapeutic relationship, one person is always in need. They seek out the therapist to address that need. Your clients will have varying needs, some common themes, but they all are coming to you for help. They look to you for guidance, expertise, assistance, and yes, they want you to lead them to their goal. Sometimes a client won’t even know what they want from you, so again it takes leadership to help them to discover it!

Leaders and healers are both involved in empowering their followers.

You steer the ship. You chart the course. You choose the destination. When you allow your clients to participate in the planning, you are still the one that decides upon how to get there. In some ways it can help to envision your massage practice as a kingdom with you at its heart. Your clients are the people who live in your kingdom (just don’t get too carried away with this image!). People choose to live in your kingdom or not, they must have a reason to stay there. You control that for them. No matter whether it is your private practice or some regular clients at your work, your practice (your little universe) is centered around you (take that Galileo!). If you cease to lead, your universe (or massage practice) ceases to be.

So what makes a leader anyway?

Are they born or made? Most sources will say that although some characteristics of leadership come naturally to some people, most leaders are developed. The good news about that is that it means it is something you can learn to do. If you truly want to be successful in your massage business/career, you need to learn to develop these skills.

Even better news for us all is that there is no standard definition of what it means to be a leader. How is that good, you might ask? Because it means that there is flexibility both in how you choose to emphasize your leadership, and on the leadership characteristics that you choose to develop!

Defining Leadership

In my studies, I have come across numerous definitions of leadership. Here are a few to wet your appetite (not my definitions, although I modified a few slightly):

1. “Leaders have the ability to influence others towards challenging goals.”
2. “Leaders bring about constructive change”
3. “Leaders get people to think, believe, see, and do what they might not have otherwise without your presence”
4. “A person with a compelling vision that he/she can communicate to and inspire others with.”
5. “A leader is a conductor, director, or guide”
6. “One who has influence or power”

In a later segment we’ll take a look at specific leadership characteristics, but first, let’s see where leaders get their power in part 2...

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Creating a Safe Space

I just returned from a trip (not by choice) to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Murder rates are sky high, crime is rampant and there is a three-way (at least) drug war going on. And the only place in Mexico to get a US resident visa happens to be there. Go figure.

When we got back onto American soil, I had a vision of how it is in the movies - where the hero returns home and kisses the sand of his homeland - and believe it, I understood exactly how he felt. It was good for my companions to have me there, even though as a gringo I stuck out like a sore thumb. And it was against this backdrop that I began pondering the idea of "creating a safe space" for your clients.

I've taught the concept of creating a safe space to my massage students for years. However, my recent experience very much deepened my understanding of it.

Everyone needs to have a safe place to be - to work, to play, to be. Good old Maslow placed safety in second place on his pyramid of needs - second only to physical existence needs like food and shelter. When we exist in a place in which we don't feel safe, our body's natural defense mechanisms kick in. Stress chemicals flood our bodies - cortisol, epinephrine (aka adrenaline) - as our bodies prepare to either flee from danger or to fight it. (More on stress in a later post) When we are stressed, we seek a safe haven to retreat to - a safe harbor to weather the storm and recuperate.

A Safe Space For Healing

Massage can be a truly therapeutic form of healing if this idea is taken to heart. Most of us therapists understand this on some level - Our clients seek us out to find that safe space for healing. This safe space can be physical - such as our office space, a quiet room, seclusion from the hustle and bustle of life outside, privacy. And it can be conceptual as well, like an invisible bubble that shields your client in the same way a physical space can - a blanket of trust, warm and welcoming energy, moral support, encouragement.

You see, all healing takes place when we are at ease. Relaxed, stress-free and safe. Stage 4 sleep. Massage. Studies have shown that we heal at least 50% faster when we are stress-free and relaxed. Interrupted sleep, high-stress jobs, constant activity all interfere with our bodies' ability to cope and recuperate.

One of the most profound benefits that you can offer to your clients is that safe haven. A place where they can go to get away from it all and focus on what they really need - healing at every level, emotional, spiritual, mental, physical. This safe space is one of the most important, yet most intangible qualities about the work we do. It is vitally important to our clients and our success as massage professionals, and it is one of the hardest things to communicate.

Creating a Safe Place

Trust
We all know that it is difficult to relax with somebody that we do not trust. We keep our guard up and remain wary and suspicious. But we also all know (I hope!) the feeling of ease we get when we are with someone we can trust and let down our guard, take off the mask we show the world and just relax. Trust is something that can be granted in a surprisingly short period of time when the stage is right. It is impossible for our clients to trust us if we don't first start with the wholehearted intention to do well by them (see point #3)

Consistency
Consistency will build trust over time. We humans enjoy the stability that comes with regularity. It is difficult to trust and relax when we are on edge from not knowing what is coming next. When we do know what to expect, we get "in the groove". Consistency is comfortable. Think of all of the little things that you do the same way, just because it feels right. Brushing your teeth, crossing your arms, even the way you walk - it's all habitual. Clients will come to you not just because of the great work you do, but that you have a groove they can relate to, that is comfortable to them. They don't want things shaken up every time (or to come and listen to your drama). They want the stability and strength that rises from the Earth element. We can foster this consistency by creating little rituals - starting and ending your session the same way, greeting our clients the same way, finding out what they like and making sure it is there for them every time. Clients are attracted to the familiarity you create, if they aren't, they go elsewhere to find it.

Intention & Attention
These two go hand in hand. First you must start with the intention to build this safe place, then you must pay attention to the details to make it so. Make sure you ground yourself sufficiently before each and every session - clear your thoughts of your to-do lists and the guys who cut you off on the freeway on the way to the office - those aren't client-centered thoughts. Bring your whole attention to your client, because that is your role to play, the "safe space maker", so that they can heal the way they need to.

Remember the Process
Healing occurs in its own time. Let it take its course. Your job is simply to create a conducive environment. That doesn't mean that healing will take place, only that it can.

Playing It Safe

A key to remember is that healing only occurs when the client is ready. I have known many therapists (massage and otherwise) that have grown frustrated that a client doesn't seem to be making any progress. Well they never will until they're ready and I always say that

"You can't inflict healing, it must occur from within."

Creating a safe place is the first step in the process as the client's mind will never allow the healing to begin in an unsafe environment. Healing requires one to drop their defenses. If you can do this for your clients, you can bring to them the same feeling of overwhelming relief and joy as I felt as I passed into El Paso and touched home again. The funny thing (or not so funny) is that the stress of the trip has lingered and I still haven't been able to fully relax yet.

I think I'll head over to my safest massage therapist to find my peace of soul.

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Stacking Services with Massage Therapy

Would you like to be able to earn more money for your work?

The real question is who wouldn’t? There are several ways you can earn more money by increasing the value of your work – making it more convenient, offering better results with advanced techniques, et cetera. Today I’ll talk about stacking you services.

What does “Stacking Services” Mean?

Stacking services means performing more services that you can charge money for within the same amount of time. An example from my spa days was to have a base rate for a one-hour massage and then charge more for add-ons. For instance, you could charge an extra $10 for deep tissue or aromatherapy, or $15 for both together. The key here is that you are increasing revenue without increasing time.

Stacking services is a way to become more efficient with your time. Let’s step into the shoes of a spa manager for a moment. You’d know that you have a certain number of treatment rooms and that you are open for a certain number of hours per day and per week. That means that there is a certain dollar-value in revenue for each room. What stacking services does is to increase the revenue that each room would make every hour.

Doing More with the Same

The same thing applies to large spas or private, individual practices – you have a certain amount of work that can be performed and it is limited. For an individual therapist, that limit would be the number of massages one could do in a week. For a simple example, if a MT can do 20 massages a week and makes $50 per massage then they are limited to a maximum of $1000 per week. In a perfect world, this MT would earn that much, but in the real world we know that they would seldom be fully booked and would be lucky to make 75% of that.

Now if this same MT stacked some services and raised the average profit per massage to $60, then the weekly income would go up by 20% without working any extra hours. Nice improvement!

For a real-world example, at my old spa, we charged an even $100 for our base one-hour service, a one hour Solace Massage (more on branding later), but our average billed service ran $128 for an hour. All due to stacking. Needless to say, this improved our profitability by 28% without any more hours.

What Can I Stack?

The key to stacking is to do more things in the same time frame. It is fairly common for massage establishments to charge more for specialized massage treatments that require additional training – clinical deep tissue, pregnancy massage, manual lymph drainage, hot stone therapy, and so on. This reflects the fact that fewer people know how to do it. Do you have skills that you could charge a premium for? If you are looking to acquire some skills, find a good balance between what you want to do and what your clients are looking for. If you don’t know what your clients really value about your work – find out! Here are some examples of things you can stack easily:

1. Hot Stone Massage
2. Aromatherapy
3. Deep Tissue work
4. Sports Massage
5. Reflexology
6. Body Treatments – Exfoliations & Body Wraps
7. Eye Zone treatments
8. Signature treatments (i.e. your specialty scalp massage)
9. Postural Evalutations

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Do some brainstorming and think about what you can do to add value for your clients. Will they all jump to take advantage of your add-ons? No, but if you really take into account what they want and look to you to deliver, these add-on services can tailor their treatment to even more perfectly fit their needs.

Adding Time

Another relatively easy way to increase the efficiency of your time is to increase the length of your service. I found that when I was doing outcall massage to the hotels in San Francisco that maybe half of the time if the client had booked a one-hour massage and I asked if they would like to go for a 90-minute session they would say yes.

Now this is different than stacking because it actually does take more time, but especially for outcall massage it is more efficient because it maximizes your travel time.

You see, it would take about 30 minutes to get to and from each appointment for me. That meant every appointment actually took me 2 hours for a one-hour massage. However, with the upsell to 90-minutes, I got paid for 90-minutes of 2.5 hours instead of one-hour out of two. That’s 10% better. You’re already there, so why not make more while you’re at it?

The only problem with this one is when you’re already working close to your limits. Adding time isn’t the best option in that case.

Wrapping It Up

Make sure that when you think of these things that you are looking at it from your clients’ perspective. What do they value about your work and how can these add-ons make it better? If an add-on isn’t a win-win for both you and your clients, don’t do it. They’ll resent it and feel you are trying to gouge them if it only works for you. And you’ll resent having to do it if it only works for the client. If you own a massage business, it has to be win-win-win: for you, the client, and for the massage therapist doing the labor.

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Repeat Clients Are Golden

Have you ever noticed how cell phone companies always seem to offer the best deals to new customers? To customers that switch from other carriers? How you, as a loyal customer only get ho-hum deals on upgrading a phone or changing your plan?

Another one I love is when you’ve been a customer of a company for a while, you call to cancel and they transfer you to “customer retention” where they offer you a deal at half the rate you’ve been paying. Why didn’t you offer me a better rate before?

How does this make you feel as a customer?

In many business and marketing classes, you are taught how to find new customers – a necessary and worthy endeavor. The trick is to balance the quest for new blood in your practice with honoring those who have been with you all the while.

The Cost of a New Client

What many people don’t realize is that gaining new customers costs money. If not money, it costs time; but as the old saying goes, time is money. So just how much money does gaining a client cost you?

Well first you have to determine how much money you are spending on your marketing efforts. Tally up what you spend on business cards, mailers, maintaining your website, open houses, charity functions, etc… so you have a dollar amount. The next part is a little harder – figuring out the intangible costs.

To figure out the intangibles, ask yourself, “Are any of my promotional efforts costing me money in time or potential lost business”? If your time is plentiful, this may not really be a cost. But if it isn’t, you might be “spending” money that way. Also factor in things like transportation, refreshments and any other costs direct or indirect.

Let’s take an example (numbers entirely fabricated) by evaluating all you spend on marketing broken up by category. Then, you have to keep track of how many clients you get from each source. And finally you divide to see how much each new client costs you…

Biz Cards	$25	5 clients	$5 each
Paper Ad	$150	3 clients	$50 each
Online	$50	2 clients	$25 each
Health Fair	$400	8 clients	$50 each
Mailer	$100	5 clients	$20 each
Totals	$725	23 new clients	$31.52 average

What this does is allow you to see how effective each effort is. In this example, our imaginary MT spent $31.52 to gain each new client. New clients are expensive! But wait, there’s more! If you give an introductory discount, it can be even more.

Say your normal rate is $70 per hour. If you give a $20 new client discount on top of that then those clients from the newspaper ad and the health fair were given a free massage. You’d better make sure they come back! The business cards were more efficient, but during this time frame their appointment was still given for:

$70-31.52-20 = $13.48

New clients are vital to any business, growing or established, but don’t lose sight of the big picture and focus all of your efforts here. Not many of us can afford to do all of our work for $13 an hour. It can be an eye opening experience to find out exactly how much we can spend to get those clients in the door. The added bonus to this strategy is that it can really help us focus on our most successful and efficient marketing efforts.

Repeat Clients Are Golden

Now that we’ve seen the sticker shock of how much new clients can cost, how much do returning clients cost?

Nada.

Quite often a client will come back with a simple “would you like to book your next session now?”? Don’t miss this opportunity to ask the client to come back. Show your appreciation for their business and to let them know how much you genuinely value them. Gratitude can go a long way.

Going back to the cell phone company example from the start of this post, why don’t you go a step further and offer a VIP program, a “frequent flier” type program, or a discount for booking a massage at least once a month?

If you look back to working with new clients, you have to look at your conversion rate – how many of those new clients come back for another massage? And another? Personally, unless there is a major clash of personalities, I consider it a problem with my service if a client wouldn’t come back for another session. I use that as an opportunity to evaluate if I could do something better. Of course there could be any number of reasons why a client doesn’t return, so find out what those reasons are! You can’t do anything about it if you don’t know!

Invite those clients back, entice them for more, and as they say in show business, always leave them wanting more (but not wanting what they came for in the first place).

The 80/20 Principle tells us that 20% of your clients will provide 80% of your bookings and income. Make sure you know who they are and you treat those 20% the way they deserve. (More on the 80/20 Principle to come)

I had a client once that turned to me as he handed me the check with a bemused grin on his face and said “wow, with all this money I’ve spent on massage I could have bought a car!”. He followed that statement up by saying that he had enough cars anyway (much to my relief) but it also made me realize that he had spent thousands of dollars with me. When I looked at the books, it turned out that this one client had provided almost 10% of my income for the year!

Follow Up

If you haven’t heard from one of your regulars in a while, make a point of calling them to see how they are doing. Although many new massage therapists blanch at the idea because they are afraid it seems pushy, it has always been a good thing for my practice. In fact, I usually get a booking out of it and I have had quite a few clients thank me for calling – genuinely grateful because I was concerned for their well-being. You’d be surprised how many of your clients think about coming to see you but life gets in the way and they don’t get around to it. Make it easy for them.

There are any number of strategies out there to maintain contact with your clients, so look them up and use them! Ask your colleagues what they do. Ask your old teachers. But above all…

Don’t neglect your repeat clients!

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Building Your Personal Network To Build Your Massage Business

This is a very simple, yet powerful technique to kickstart the best way to build your business – word of mouth. I’ve taught this method in my business classes for years, and the students who apply it meet with great success.

Building Word of Mouth

This is far and away the most effective long-term strategy for a healthy business. It involves building a reputation and confidence in your customers that if they send their friends to you that they will be well taken care of. It starts with exemplary service to your customers. Provide top-notch customer service to every client and potential client. They won’t recommend you if they did not have a good experience.

But how do you take the next step, getting them to refer their friends and family to you? With some clients, you don’t have to do anything – they will sing your praises to anyone within earshot. It’s the others that you should focus on (without forgetting these wonderful people of course!)

What Do You Want Them To Say?

One thing that I’ve seen very few people pause to think about is what people are saying about you. Remember that everybody has their own view about what massage is and what it means to them. People will talk about what massage does for them, not necessarily what it can do for their friend.

To tailor this message a little more, first you need to understand what it is that you deliver. That involves several pieces…

1. What do you do? (Frame it in terms of what the client gets out of your work) and what do you enjoy doing? What are the challenges that you like to face in your practice?
2. Who do you work with? This ties in to what challenges you like to face, but what kinds of clients do you work with? Athletes? Pregnant women?
3. What environment do you practice in? Clinical? Spa? Outcall to clients’ homes? This is tied heavily to the clients you work with. It can also include the kind of “functional” environment that you create. You can create a spa feeling within a clinic and vice versa.

The final step in this process is to create a mission statement that includes these pieces. Try to make it clear and concise – preferably something that is easy to say aloud. Why? Because you will be saying this to your clients in so many words and more importantly, this is what you want your clients to be saying to other people.

Get The Word Out

Once you have refined a mission statement, you need to get it out there. Let all of your current clients know about it and use it in your marketing and in conversation with potential clients. You don’t have to say it word for word every time, but it should be clear enough that every person hearing or reading your message will be able to describe fairly accurately what you are all about.

It is not limited to only potential clients though, and here is the magic. When you make a simple, clear statement about what you do (that really communicates your mission) then that is what sticks in the person’s mind. You’ve created an association in their mind, you’ve created a special category for you, your brand of massage therapy, who you work with, what environment you work in, and what problems you deal with. From that point on, any time one of those topics comes up, they have a much better chance of recalling you.

Recruiting Your Army

Finally we get to the simple, yet powerful, technique I mentioned at the start of this post. The Friends & Family Letter (FFL). To understand how this works, think about what you do when you need something you don’t know about. Where do you turn to first? Simple, you turn to the people you know to ask about their experiences. Then you rely on other people’s testimonials and personal familiarity (like you drive by the business every day but have never been in it). Then, and only then, do most people turn to marketing. Of course that doesn’t mean that you should neglect your marketing, but that shouldn’t be your first effort.

The FFL is designed to recruit the people you already have a relationship with to be your sales & marketing force. The good news is that because these people know you they will hear you out. They care about you and they want you to succeed. You can sound like a dork in the letter and they won’t care because they already like you!

To write it, discuss the following:

1. What you’re up to: Are you just graduating or still in school? Are you starting a private practice? Are you job-hunting? Give them an update
2. What you do: Here is where the personal mission statement kicks in. Make sure you frame it in terms of how you can benefit them (your friends & family). Make sure it is in terms of how they should talk about it to their friends and family. It is very important to be clear here, because what you say here heavily influences what they say about you – which is exactly what you want.
3. What you want them to do. ASK! Make sure you come out directly and ask them to help you. They like you already so it isn’t a great imposition. Do you want them to come in and get a massage? Do you want them to tell all of their friends and family about you? Do you want them to ask their friends and family if they have heard about any massage jobs for you? All of these? Make sure you ask them directly – don’t just hope that they understand what it is that you are looking for.
4. Thank them and let them know what they get out of it. You might have a referral program or you might offer your undying gratitude. Make sure you show your appreciation.

You can tell your friends & family that they can forward it on. Send it as a letter or as an email.

Effective?

So does this work? I had a student who sent out a FFL by email the night of this class lecture. Over the next 2 days she got over 20 new appointment bookings from people she knew, booked herself out for that weekend, and ended up getting established with a successful weekend BBQ massage business – all by referral. In fact it was so successful that she turned it into a monthly newsletter that continued to help grow her business.

These people know you, so they are likely talking about you already. But are they saying the right things? Do they know what you’d like them to say? Do they know you’d like their help? Do they know what they can do to help? This FFL helps to answer all of these questions.

Good luck! And let me know how it works for you!

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