Building A Massage Therapy Practice - Part I

Before I became a Special Education teacher, I worked as a licensed Massage Therapist for fifteen years. I was a single mother needing to enter the workforce, with no desire to leave my kids forty hours a week and work a boring nine-to-five going nowhere job.

Back in 1984, massage therapy was not a career that was being promoted on bus stop benchs or vocational schools. Therefore, the job market was wide open and opportunities abounded to build a massage therapy practice after finishing the required hours of training and obtaining a state or county license to practice.

The first place I worked was an athletic club. I was fortunate to live close enough to the club so I could accommodate clientele on short notice. YES, image conducting a business in this manner before the cell phone! I started out with a dual-tone pager - one tone meant the athletic club was trying to reach me and the other tone meant the chiropractic office needed me. One of the easiest ways for me to build interest and book appointments was to offer promotional opportunities for people to experience massage first hand (no pun intended)

Here is a list of some of the promotional techniques I used to build my early practice:

1. Offer complimentary 10 minute sample massages to people right there on the spot. Quite often, people will ask to pay to extend the time and then book another appointment.

2. Give the management and other staff complimentary massages so that they can promote you. Word-of-mouth works! Within a very short period of time, I was booking 30 minute appointments back-to-back! (Oops, no pun intended again!)

3. Donate gift certificates for club events.