How Sticky is Massage?

by | Jan 9, 2012 | Business

Stickability ImageIn the world wide web, “stickiness” refers to how long you can keep a user on your website or how often you can get them to return. It is a measure of user engagement and loyalty.

So how loyal and engaged, that is to say, how sticky are massage customers? Judging by the frequency with which Americans get regular massage, the sad answer would have to be that massage is not very “sticky” at all. [Note: If you want to bypass the calculations and jump to the bottom line numbers, scroll down to the last three paragraphs.]

There are only two professional consumer surveys done for the massage profession. The one commissioned by the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) is annual and the other, sponsored by the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP), is biennial.

While neither of them explicitly states how often American adults get massaged, with a bit of combining and extrapolation of the two surveys, we can arrive at a reasonable approximation.

The most recent ABMP survey reports that, of the number of people who actually got a massage in 2010, their frequency of utilization was as follows:

  • 22% had 1 massage
  • 22% had 2 massages
  • 28% had 3-5 massages
  • 6% had 6-10 massages
  • 17% had 11-20 massages
  • 3% got 21 or more massages

The previous ABMP survey, for 2008, reported these percentages:

  • 32% had 1 massage
  • 21% had 2 massages
  • 35% had 3-5 massages
  • 5% had 6-10 massages
  • 5% had 11-20 massages
  • 2% got 21 or more massages

Now, since both the AMTA and ABMP surveys report the total number of adults getting a massage in a twelve month period, we can use the percentages above to get a range of how many total U.S. adults appear in each frequency category. In the AMTA survey, the total number of adults getting massaged ranges from a high of 24% in 2007 (pre-recession) to their current figure of 18% (between July 2010 and July 2011, unchanged from the prior 12 months). The ABMP figures are strikingly lower. In their latest survey only 16% of US adults got a massage in 2010, up from 14% in 2008.

To chart it out I multiplied the ABMB frequency of utilization percentages by the percentages of people in the U.S. reporting they received a massage in the two time periods surveyed by each organization. Here are the results of each survey by category.

Frequency of Massages Per Year AMTA ABMP
2007/08 – 24% 2010/11 – 18% 2008 – 14% 2010 -16%
1
Massage		 7.7% 5.8% 4.5% 3.5%
2
Massages		 5.0% 3.8% 2.9% 3.5%
3-5
Massages		 8.4% 6.3% 1.0% 4.5%
6-10
Massages		 1.2% 0.9% 0.7% 1.0%
11-20
Massages		 1.2% 0.9% 0.7% 2.7%
21+
Massages		 0.5% 0.4% 0.2% 0.5%

Hang in there. We are almost to the finish line. While I wish that the ABMP survey had broken out the specific number of people who got 3, 4 or 5 massages in a year, using the data we have, we can sort the frequency into three sub-categories:

  • Infrequent users – 1 or 2 massages per year
  • Occasional users – 3-5 massages per year
  • Regular users – 6 or more massages per year (less than the average number of haircuts per year)

With these definitions and using the best case ABMP figures, we can see that, at the most, only 4.2% of the adult population in the U.S. are regular users of massage. The best case data from the AMTA puts the percentage at 2.9%. Ouch! No wonder the associations do not make it easy to get this number and prefer us to focus on the 16 to 24% who got at least one massage in a year. In another article I make the case that this lack of loyalty and engagement, of “stickiness,” is primarily a result of the high price of massage and discuss what we can do to make massage more affordable and accessible.

One final note: We need to have better data and better analysis of the data we currently have. We can’t make good decisions about our future unless we have good data. The calculations above should have been readily accessible to anyone. The glaring discrepancies in the results between the two surveys should be explainable. The ABMP should be congratulated for the relatively comprehensive and transparent way in which it presents its data compared to the AMTA. However, I would urge both organizations to make all of their raw data from every study they commission available to anyone for analysis. The truth is out there, we are just having a hard time finding it.

Make Your Business Persistent with Consistence

by | Dec 19, 2011 | Business

Note: This is the third in a series of four articles called “C”-ing Your Way to Success about  the value of Conviction, Clarity, Consistency and Change-ability in business.

In a sense, consistency is the practical result of a commitment to clarity in your business. As you become clear about the complex nature of the services you provide and the market you have targeted, each small component of your business will add to and reflect the overall purpose and function of your business as a whole.

Consistency has something to do with integration. When anyone encounters a small part of your business, they encounter the whole. Each component reflects the larger service vision. Let’s briefly examine some of these elements.

  • Language: How you talk about your business needs to be consistent with the overall intention of your work. I once saw a flier advertising a massage chair that was comfortable and easy for the “patient” to use. Since the rest of the text did not lead me to believe the business was targeting their chair exclusively for use with sick people, the choice of that word was clearly inconsistent.
  • Marketing tools: Your brochures, business cards, letterhead, advertising, and even phone manner should all present the same image and message about the conviction and intention of your work.
  • Professional tools: Do you use the right equipment in the right way for the market and service you have chosen? Do you use paper towels, disposable face cradle covers or linens for you head rest? Each has a place in the appropriate practice.
  • Environment: Does the environment you create for your practice support or detract from your service goal? If customers find parking a hassle to find, they may feel the frustration is not worth the effort. Or perhaps they don’t feel safe walking in your neighborhood and it makes them nervous to think about leaving your office. For the internal environment, make certain that the flowers and air are fresh. Walk into your bodywork environment with beginner’s eyes and see what type of impression it makes. What do they see, hear, or smell? Get a massage on your table to see what the client will be looking at and experiencing for the length of the massage.
  • Personal style: Some people simply, who function well doing chair massage in the workplace are like fish out of water at a convention center. A New Yorker  may have to be toned down his or her personality a bit to be effective in California. What is your personal style? Does it fit well with the overall focus of your business?

Thomas Alva Edison portraitConsistent persistence
 According to Thomas Alva Edison, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” That perspiration is what I call persistence and persistence is just another facet of consistency and is an essential element for business success.

Consistency brings an essential level of stability and predictability to your business operations for yourself and your clients. Without consistency clients wouldn’t know when to call for an appointment or how to budget their time and money to make certain your service is a regular part of their lives. They also wouldn’t feel comfortable referring your service to a friend if they thought you were unreliable. Consistency means creating and sticking close to a business plan. How many clients can you expect to have this month? What will your expenses be? What type of referral network do you need to set up?

If you know you need to send out appointment reminders every week or make a presentation to the local nursing group in order to keep clients coming in, then do it. There are no shortcuts to doing what needs to be done. If you pay strict attention to accomplishing the small details of your marketing strategy, you will find yourself worrying less and less about cash-flow crises. If you take care of your bookkeeping every week, you will have little to fear from the IRS or the phone company.

When you operate a business with consistency it is easier to make changes and know whether or not they are effective. If everything is done differently every day, it is impossible to develop true expertise or intuition because you never know which actions cause which results. In a similar sense, consistency puts the qualities of conviction and clarity into a feedback loop. If a particular marketing approach does not seem to be working, perhaps it is because it is inconsistent with your overall vision or is not being communicated clearly to your market. Consistency provides a check and balance system for your business.

A good recourse policy is the best guarantee of consistency. Having a recourse policy, such as a money-back guarantee, says that you believe in the quality of your service and trust that the client will appreciate it. When you trust a client, particularly a new one, it is easier for them to trust you. If you don’t have a recourse policy there is no way for client feedback to alert you to problems with your business.

The impact of consistency on the success of your business is undeniable. Consistency provides the nuts and bolts, day to day operational stability that keeps you going in the direction intended. It is a type of consciousness that brings together the motivation provided by conviction and the communication provided by clarity into an organized plan of action. Without consistency your business is merely a ship without a rudder, tossed about by the waves and going in no particular direction.

“How often should I get a massage?”

by | Dec 19, 2011 | Business

This is one of the most common questions I hear from customers. It’s an important question and the response needs to be considered carefully because the answer will set the character and tone of all future interactions with that customer. I am going to offer a response that I have found creates the healthiest relationships with my customers.

The real question

Any question containing the words “should I” is always directed toward someone the inquisitor thinks is an “expert,” that is to say, someone more qualified then himself or herself to offer an answer. And, while some of my egocentric, “Dear Abby” parts just love it when people ask my advice and treat me as an expert, the truth is, in this case I am not.

I actually feel totally unqualified to tell someone else what his or her needs are in the way of massage or touch.

Perhaps I would feel differently if I were a massage “therapist” treating a particular problem or condition and could guarantee that a fixed number of sessions would result in the problem being resolved. But I am not a therapist. I am a simple massage practitioner providing structured touch to people who are seated in a chair or laying on a table and want to feel better.

From that perspective there is only one, quite definitive way to respond to the question, “How often should I get a massage?” and that is by asking for more information.

“If time and money weren’t considerations,” I query the customer, “how often would you like to feel this way?”

While this reply often engenders momentary confusion, the reply, often accompanied by a little laugh, is most often something along the lines of, “Why, every day, of course.”

Thus, the customer arrives at the best answer to their original, literal question, but we are not quite done yet. We still have to find the answer to the underlying question that they were also asking. “So now we know how often you should get a massage.” I say. “Now factor in time and money and you can figure out how often you can get a massage.”

Don’t miss the moment

Since skilled touch practitioners are primarily educators, let’s not miss this significant “teachable moment.” By not answering their question directly, we teach people some important lessons:

  1. They are the ones in charge of their bodies, not some perceived expert.
  2. For better or for worse, they are in charge of the feelings inside their bodies.
  3. They can change how they feel for the better at any time utilizing a simple tool called “massage.”

Realizing that, to a great extent, how one feels physically and mentally is a choice can be transformative. The pace of change in the external world is so fast that literally no one can keep up with the flow of information and innovation that surrounds us leaving most of us feeling powerless and out of control.

But, what we do have control over is our internal, subjective world. Massage is an effective tool for managing our inner experience in a way that almost always effects our external world for the better. Structured touch reduces stress, induces the relaxation response and allows us access to states of awareness that enhance our coping, caring and problem-solving abilities.

Don’t tell your customers how much massage they need. Let them tell you and you will probably end up with more frequent visits from people who understand the true, personal value of massage.

The Commercial Viability of Massage Approaches

by | Dec 12, 2011 | Business

Laura Allen recently blogged about the reasons why some practitioners have a difficult time getting repeat customers. One section mentioned how some practitioners try to sell energy work or other non-massage techniques to people who think they are buying massage.

That reminded me that one question rarely addressed by massage schools and the profession as a whole is the ranking of the commercial viability of various approaches or techniques in massage.

Here is a list of some obvious hierarchies here that, when addressed realistically can contribute to success.

  • More people would prefer to lay on a table than on the floor when getting a massage.
  • More people are looking for simple relaxation/stress reduction/circulation massage than a treatment for a particular condition.
  • More customers are able to pay $15 for a chair massage than $75 for a table massage. As Massage Envy and the thousands of Chinese immigrants in malls across the country have irrefutably demonstrated, massage consumers are highly price sensitive.
  • Rolfing, Trager, Feldenkrais, and Rosen work (to name a few brand-name styles of bodywork I love) have, typically, far smaller potential audiences than more generic approaches to massage like Swedish or acupressure.
  • There are more potential customers of massage then there are clients. There are more potential clients of massage then there are patients. Choose your language and intention carefully.
  • And, yes, when people pay for a massage, they don’t expect long periods when they are not being touched or the hands touching them are not moving.

To be absolutely clear, I am not ranking one approach to massage as “better” than another. I, personally, love them all. I am simply noting how markets for massages services narrow or broaden depending upon certain characteristics. Schools do not do their students any favors by pretending that all approaches are equal in this regard nor by pretending that the more approaches they teach the more successful their graduates will be.

Any other additions to this list?

Seeing Your Way Clearly to Success

by | Nov 28, 2011 | Business

Note: This is the second in a series of four articles called “C”-ing Your Way to Success about  the value of Conviction, Clarity, Consistency and Change-ability in business.

While having conviction about your work is fundamental to a successful value-based business, a second tool, clarity, is required to effectively communicate your conviction to the rest of the world so they can beat an enthusiastic path to your doorstep. Clarity has a number of important characteristics as it applies to business.

Full disclosure
To be “clear” presumes a commitment to be honest to your customers, to tell the whole truth about your business. This is the business standard that I call full disclosure. When entrepreneurs are not honest about their business it is generally because they either don’t know the whole truth about what they are doing, or they are afraid that if people found out the whole truth they wouldn’t buy the service.

If you don’t know the whole truth about your business—often the case when a person is just starting out—a healthy response is to own up to the fact that you are beginner. All too often new bodyworkers are embarrassed by the fact that they have little experience. The question feared most by bodyworkers beginning their careers is, “So, how long have you been doing massage?”

Rather than fudging an answer, I recommend that new practitioners proudly announce their beginner status. Don’t be ashamed of being a beginner. Celebrate it! Your beginner’s energy, when filled with a fresh conviction about the importance of your work, is unique. Your enthusiasm is infectious and is a marketing strength because it is pure and spontaneous. You only get to be a beginner once so try to hang onto the excitement of that moment for as long as possible.

Understanding your business
If you don’t know what you are doing, neither will your customers. A commitment to clarity is a commitment to an ongoing exploration of your business idea. The greater the clarity you bring to your business idea the easier it is to have conviction about your work and for other people to relate to you.

To say “I do massage” is only the most superficial layer of your business identity.

  • What is your personal intention for your work, i.e. what do you want to get out of your business?
  • What is your professional intention, i.e. what do you want your customers to get out of your services?
  • Are you aware of the deeper assumptions that underlie how you define your business, i.e. your personal philosophy, value system and/or world view?
  • How do you define the market you are trying to reach?
  • How do you define your short-term and long-term goals? The quality of your answers to these questions will reflect the level of maturity that you and your business, have reached.

The search for clarity in business is a process and it never ends. The questions, and the answers, are constantly changing. Your job is to be as clear as you can be, right now, about what you know and don’t know about your business so you can be clear with your customers, employees, suppliers, and supporters.

Translating your business idea
Clarity also means being able to translate your business idea in a language that people can understand. Skilled touch can be talked about in an infinite variety of ways. The words you use must be appropriate to the market you select and the way in which you define your service.

Are you communicating to truck drivers, corporate executives, teenagers, suburban shoppers, seniors, people from a Hispanic culture, or travelers? Each group requires words that are personally meaningful and rationales that make sense.

Telling a construction worker that your massage will improve his muscle tone and make him more beautiful may not have much of an impact. Using the same approach in a beauty salon, however, would be perfectly appropriate.

Openness
One of the most difficult characteristics of clarity to integrate into your business is the concept of openness. When something is clear, like a pane of glass, it is transparent, you can see through it, and nothing is hidden. Secrecy in our business culture—not to mention our governmental institutions—is almost an automatic reflex.

We think that it is normal to hide budgets, salaries, business plans, marketing strategies, and financial statements. But why? Doing business is, in its most basic sense, about having relationships, be it with customers, employees, suppliers, or observers of our business. Few would argue that openness and trust are hallmarks of healthy relationships and yet business relationships are often cloaked in secrecy and adversarial in nature.

Unfortunately, many businesses do, in fact, have something to hide. They do make inferior products. They do treat their customers and employees with disrespect. They do operate with policies that place short-term profits ahead of long-term concern for the environment, community welfare, and even customer’s lives.

Take, for example, salaries. Many corporations restrict information on individual employee compensation and, in the worst cases, make it a firing offence for an employee even to voluntarily reveal how much they get paid. The only reasons for such a policy that I can think of is that the company is embarrassed either by how little or by how much they are paying certain employees? While this secrecy may serve the highest paid executives, it does little to redress historical pay inequalities for women, minorities, and those further down the socioeconomic ladder.

Secrecy in business, like secrecy in a family, is almost always bad. It leads to mistrust, miscommunication, dishonesty, and an eventual breakdown of relationships. There are circumstances when a business is legally or morally bound to confidentiality, such as the shielding of personnel or customer files, but these circumstances are far fewer than corporations would like us to believe.

Openness when your business is dealing with external relationships should follow the same approach. In a business committed to honesty and integrity there is rarely a need to hide what you are doing from the outside world. Realize that every time you adopt a defensive business position you limit the potential for growth and creativity in a relationship.

Concordant competition
Our culture and institutions tend to promote an overly competitive mentality in business. We develop paranoid thoughts that everyone is out to steal our current customers, potential customers, business ideas, business names, whatever. This is not surprising, because the model that traditional business is based on is the military paradigm. When corporations arose in the late 19th and early 20th century the “captains” of industry were, literally, the captains and other officers from the military. The language of business–killing the competition, cutthroat competitors, beating, winning–is the language of war or its civilian surrogate, competitive team sports.

In the military, secrecy has been developed into a fine art and openness is frowned upon. Combined with the requirement for unquestioned obedience and you have the standard operating procedure for keeping the troops in line. In the corporate environment these two elements are too often seen as the best way to keep factory workers and keyboard jockeys at their most productive.

I am a fan of healthy competition which includes a business ethic I call concordance. Concordance means always operating with civility and respect for everyone, including perceived competitors. It rejects the zero-sum mentality that says you have to “lose” so that I can “win.” Focusing on areas of mutual interest is a strategy that builds cooperation and opportunities for synergy in an industry where one plus one equals three.

Mastery
Clarity has another implied characteristic. If you continually seek clarity in what you do, you naturally step on the path of mastery, which is the path toward expertise both in your business and your work. That expertise, in turn, is unique because it comes from walking a path that originates from the inside out.

A master craftsperson never fears competition from other artisans because she recognizes unique character of her contribution. The path of mastery is, by definition, a personal path that can never be duplicated. Nobody can do the job exactly the way that you would do it and clarity means you can explain exactly how your work is different. Not necessarily better than another person’s work, but definitely unique.

The educated customer
Finally, redefines the marketing approach in business from that of selling the customer to educating the customer. In traditional business “selling,” of course, is a euphemism for “manipulation” (masterfully dramatized by the hit TV show Mad Men).

For businesses dedicated to honest, open interactions with customers the only appropriate approach is to educate a customer about the value of your product. Of course, this only works if you, first, have something worthwhile or meaningful to offer and, second, if you understand your product or service well enough to be clear about its essential value. When you educate potential customers you increase their ability to discriminate between the meaningful and worthless and they make better choices about what to buy, and what not to buy.

Education is empowerment while ignorance breeds passivity and dependence, which is great for manipulators but bad for those who want to have healthy, mature relationships. Clarity, full-disclosure as a business standard, creates the best kind of customer—one who chooses your services because they believe that you offer a valuable resource in an honest business.

Summary

A business that operates with a commitment to clarity has a certain simple, ingenuous quality. Because it is transparent to all observers, what you see is what you get. There is no mystery; there are no hidden agendas. Customers intuitively are drawn to the business because of its obvious trustworthiness. They know that there will be no head-trips or rip-offs to worry about. Clarity in business is like a well-cast bell that resonates with a sincerity and authority that draws all within listening distance to its naked, honest ring.

Successful Businesses Start With Conviction

by | Nov 11, 2011 | Business

Conviction is your head following your heartFor an entrepreneur, conviction is where it all starts. An exciting idea enters your brain and gets your juices flowing. You can’t stop thinking about it so you start testing the idea out in conversations with friends. After that reality check you begin making lists of considerations and steps to take to test out until you finally become convinced that you have to make the idea real.

However, not all good ideas come with conviction. To dissect the anatomy of conviction, let’s look at where it comes from, why it is important in business, how you find it and how you hang onto it.

Note: This is the first in a series of four articles called “C”-ing Your Way to Success about  the value of Conviction, Clarity, Consistency and Change-ability in business.

What is conviction and why is it important?

On the most basic level conviction means that you have found your path and are walking it.

The people of acclaimed conviction—Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and even Mother Theresa—all believed that a meaningful life was a life of service. The Boy Scouts instilled me with a similar ethic at an early age when I learned to leave my campground (i.e. the world) a little bit better place than I found it. Whether you are rich or poor, young or old, sick or well, there is always a unique path of service that each of us are meant to walk.

People with true conviction are virtually unstoppable. They know in the very core of their being that what they are doing is what they were meant to be doing. Conviction is what gets us through the inevitable ups and downs of business. With conviction, problems are not barriers, but rather challenges. The idea of doing something else other than the work we believe in is unthinkable.

As a marketing tool there is nothing as powerful as true conviction. Conviction breeds enthusiasm and enthusiasm is like a magnet. One of the marketing truisms from the traditional business world that I agree with is that the person who believes in what they are selling will always be more successful than the one who does not.

On that premise corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to create training programs for their sales staff. Unfortunately, most of the money is wasted because conviction is not some piece of external knowledge like geography. It is a process that arises from within. You can teach people how to act as though they believe in what they are selling, but you can’t give them that belief.

Often those corporate sales meetings take on the feel of high school pep rallies, using crowd dynamics such as “us vs. them” and “we are winners” to rally the troops and motivate the sales staff to set goals and work hard.

But true conviction can never be imposed from the outside. Motivation that will  be sustained for the long haul emerges naturally out of true conviction. Belief in your work is what motivates you to jump out of bed early in the morning and stay up late at night. Conviction instills meaning into even the most mundane parts of your work, like laundry and bookkeeping. With conviction, the lines between work and play become blurred. People who love their work believe they are the luckiest people on earth. My personal little secret is that I feel like I am always on vacation.

Getting convicted

Walking your path of conviction is not difficult. The tough part is finding your path in the first place. In contemporary culture, recessions not withstanding, if you are educated and middle class the number of roads to be traveled is still virtually unlimited. Unfortunately, our culture does not always provide us with the skills to determine which unique path is meant for us.

We bodywork professionals are lucky on this score for three reasons.

First, we are, by definition, in a service profession and one that clearly makes a contribution to individuals and to society. This provides us with a strong sense of self-worth because of the inherent importance and meaningfulness of massage.

Second, we are fortunate because, for most of us, bodywork is our vocation. The Latin root of the word “vocation” means “a calling.” We got into massage because something deep inside us felt called to this work. Perhaps massage helped us through some difficult period of our life or we saw it help someone else. Perhaps we recognized early in our lives that creativity with our hands was important. For most of us, we did not so much consciously choose this work, as it chose us. That is good because that is the foundation of conviction.

Finally, bodyworkers have the advantage that we trust our bodies. Finding your path is not an exact science. But when we are on our path we have a “gut” instinct of the rightness of our choice that may actually defy rationality. But our body knows. Minor aches and pains disappear, depression and anxiety dissipate and the whole world just seems to work better around us. It is an ongoing challenge to learn to trust the wisdom of your body to tell you if you are on your path or not.

How to know if you’ve got it

Here are a couple of easy tests of true conviction.

Conviction, like love, is unquestioned and unconditional. If you are not sure you’re in love, then you’re not. Both true love and true conviction fit the wearer so naturally that they leave no doubt about their authenticity.

Another test is to ask yourself whether you would do this work even if no one paid you for it. If you won the hundred million dollar lottery today, would you quit your job tomorrow? No? Then you have found your unique path of service and have conviction. Walking your true path is a leap of faith you make because to do anything less would be a failure of courage.

How to keep it

Conviction must be nurtured. On a regular basis it is a good idea to remind yourself why you got into massage and what you get out of it. The answers to both questions will change over time, as you get deeper into your work. Initially I thought I went to massage school to learn how to do massage. Later, I realized that I went to learn how to touch and be touched. Still later, I understood that my path was to make skilled touch accessible through chair massage.

Besides paying the rent, chair massage feeds those parts of me that like to serve, to learn, to teach, to write and to grow. The benefits of walking my path continue to pile up in ways large and small that together add up to the satisfaction of a life worth living.

To find your path takes faith; to begin walking your path takes courage. But from then on it’s a piece of cake. When you are on your path doing the work that only you were meant to do, you are in the Tao, as the Buddhists say and you become like the Bible’s lilies of the field, clothed in glory. Life becomes easier, lighter. Decisions become obvious. Resources seem to appear out of nowhere.

Find and feed your conviction and success will follow.

Question: Does your conviction pass the lottery test?