Category Archives: The Business Side of Massage

Practical Plotting

My business has been doing a lot of interviewing lately, so I’ve been doing a lot of practical massages. Or having them done to me, as the case may be. Which is not, perhaps, as delightful as it sounds. In a practical massage, I can’t just zone out: I have to listen, feel, weigh, measure, and think about how this person and her massage might add to our team.

In addition, since I’m most interested in adding another “true” deep tissue person to the team, I’ve been asking specifically for deep tissue massage, and not always getting it. Now, telling someone she’s not what you’re looking for in a delicate and sensitive way is sometimes a challenge, particularly since I have a lot of empathy for often anxious, interviewing therapists. And even if I asked for deep tissue and still got a massage that felt like I was being skated on by dragonflies, I’m still sensitive to the therapist’s feelings. Up to a point . . .

The point in one massage came for me when in “letting her down easy,” a therapist got very upset, stating that she thought she already had the job. This honestly concerned me, and I asked her what we had said to lead her to believe this, so that we would have no such misunderstandings in the future. She said it was because we had said in the first part of the interview that we needed someone immediately. I replied that we did indeed need “someone” immediately, but we had to do practicals before we could determine which “someone” was right for us. She then made a veiled suggestion that some massage businesses (perhaps even us?) used practicals as a way of “getting free massages.” As you might guess, that was when my empathy well ran dry. I remained polite, but stated that we were much too busy trying to run and staff a business to plot ways to get free massage.

In my opinion, all but accusing a potential employer of trying to get a “free massage” is not a good way to endear yourself to said employer. But I can’t stop wondering: Does that really happen? Are there some businesses out there using practicals as a means of getting free massage. Surely not . . . right? If anyone has an opinion on this, feel free to weigh in.

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Mix and Match: Light to Deep

At my place of business, we use a level system of 1-4 to describe the depth and intensity of a given therapist’s typical massage style. Recently, I interviewed a job candidate who had never heard of this system and wanted me to explain it. “Well,” I said, musing, “Think of Level 1 like someone sweeping you with a feather duster and Level 4 more like a run-in with Helga the Prison Mistress. And Levels 2 and 3 as steps in between.” Overly simplistic, yes; especially since once you’ve been working as a massage therapist for a long while, you realize that there are levels within levels. For example, no Level 2 therapist is ever the same so no Level 2 massage is ever really just 2: it can be 2.3 or 2.5 or 2.8.

However, even though the level system may not always be spot-on accurate, it does serve as some sort of guideline. We keep a coffee-table book for clients that contains each therapist’s profile, and each profile clearly indicates what level each therapist works at. In addition, our front staff makes an honest effort to match incoming clients to particular therapists whenever there are special depth requests (and that means light or deep). I believe that this is a good thing: for example, no one who requests a really deep tissue massage wants to end up with a Level 1 therapist.

Not all businesses use the level system, though, or even go to the trouble to match clients with appropriate therapists. I’ve worked at places where clients requesting serious deep tissue were paired with Level 1 and 2 therapists, simply because those therapists were the only ones available at that time and the business wanted to book the slot at any cost. In my opinion, the cost could be losing a client: if you specifically ask for something, and you pay for it, you rather expect to get it.

Some people would try to justify the above by arguing that defintions of deep tissue differ greatly. Boy, do they (read a bit of sarcasm here). Just about every therapist I’ve ever known listed “deep tissue massage” on his or her resume, whether or not he or she actually practiced it. And who gets to decide what is deep? The person with the most common sense, maybe? There are levels of deep, but we all know the difference between deep and light. We just do. Light is not deep no matter how much you wish it was. And I have met many an unhappy client out there who has ended up on a table either wishing for deeper or praying for lighter.

Maybe some sort of universal level system in massage wouldn’t be so bad. It seems to me that using such systems to match clients with therapists would make for happier clients and more ethical business practice across the board.

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The War of the Table

Nobody would start a war over a table, right? Well, wars have started over less. In this case, the possible storm brewing involves an electric lift table, the only one in the six-room massage business where I work.

When I first began working there, I was afraid I had become too spoiled with electric lift tables to ever be able to live well without them. But as it turned out, I didn’t like the energy in that particular room, and energy matters more to me than electricity when it comes to massage. I also had the sneaking feeling that as the business grew, so might competition for that particular room and table. So I chose another room to work in, removing myself from any future territorial struggles, and brought the table way up high, the way I like it for my height and my back.

Unfortunately, I appear to have been right. The one electric table — originally installed in the largest room to be available to clients with mobility and other issues — is now being vied for by two or three therapists. As long as these people don’t work the same shifts, all is well. But if, for example, they overlap, there is a problem. Yesterday, one therapist was running over slightly, and the therapist waiting to inherit the electric table for the remainder of the day almost started her own massage late because she was unwillingly to work on a “regular” table.

Being a team-player, I’d like to think of a solution to this issue so that everyone can be as happy as possible. Some of the therapists who prefer the electric table, cite back issues as a problem, and that’s understandable. But buying five more tables is a terrible expense, and not likely to happen. Perhaps one more, or one more at used price is an option. I’m really not sure. I have my own physical issues, but as long as the table is at the height I need, whether the table is electric or not doesn’t really matter to me that much. If any therapists out there have had to address the electric vs. non-electric table issue in the workplace, please comment on how you would handle it.

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What Is More Professional?

Lots of therapists like to say they are not salespeople, that they didn’t get into massage to sell anything and they don’t like to “sell” anything to a client. I never understood that. A therapist is always selling their skills and benefits of massage to clients.

When I was doing training for a large day spa, some therapists would bristle at the idea that they could or should sell anything. Selling was sleazy and unethical – not something a professional would do. A high position, easily defended with high ethics.

Conveniently, as it turns out, they had a built-in excuse for not taking their training seriously or making an effort to educate clients. They scoffed at learning about add-on spa treatments or products as some sort of foo-foo fluff. I wanted to know why, if we had treatments for jet lag or gels for neck pain why it was more “professional” to keep them a secret from the clients.

Is it sleazy or unprofessional to sell products to clients? What about selling your services to clients? What about tips? Is it okay to accept more than the quoted price for a service? What would a professional do?

When trying to figure out what a professional should do, should I ask a plumber, a surgeon or a doctor of philosophy? What about the owner of a day spa or a server at a good restaurant?

I don’t presume to have the answers to these questions, but I do know a little something from experience that I think has helped me negotiate through the minefields of being a therapist.

When I worked for a gynecologist, I occasionally had the option of accepting a tip. My pay was based on the time spent with clients, many of whom had severe chronic pain syndromes. Some were very happy to be out of pain and offered tips. I asked the doctor what he thought about tips.

The doctor’s wife was from Hong Kong, and he had visited often with the family. In that part of the world, he said, it is expected that families would tip their surgeons. Tips came in the form of gold, usually. It was considered the polite, respectful thing to do for a job well done. Hmmmm. Some customs are pretty interesting.

On vacation in Oregon I stopped in to a small, very well-presented day spa and looked at the brochure. On the back, the owner had printed that their workers were not allowed to solicit or accept tips because the owner has always considered tipping “unprofessional.” It didn’t say the estheticians and massage therapists had gotten together and decided that, it said the owner didn’t allow it.

I spoke to a client in the parking lot who told me she always tipped, secretly, to avoid getting her therapist fired. “Imagine expecting people who work for a living to refuse tips!” she said.

Perhaps deciding for others what is professional and what isn’t just isn’t professional?

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Another Kind of Business, Not Massage

Well, California can once again be accused of being different and difficult. It’s a land of fruits and nuts, yurts and yogurt, movie stars and serial killers. And one of the oddest hybrid massage licensing laws ever.

First, after a long-fought battle mostly amongst ourselves, the California licensing law isn’t a license, it’s a voluntary certification designation. And required education hours are set quite low, at 250 and 500, in deference to our economy and our quaint three-states-in-one political climate.

In Southern California where I practice many cities require close to 1,000 hours for licensing, and some require the higher hours plus national examinations. Further still, some require all that and add on their own exam and a long, expensive application process. Once obtained, the licenses have all kinds of interesting practice restrictions from “no glutes” (try skipping those on people with low back pain) to specifying the wattage of room lighting (Sixty watts can feel like a night baseball game to someone with a migraine.)

As you may suspect, the Southern California cities are trying to regulate another kind of business, not massage, that involves touching clients.

Up north in the other California, education minimums are less arduous, and in some cases not required. Our northern folks, much more civilized that they are, feel quite happy with 100 hours or two for good if basic rub. The great in-between, the valley where the fruits and nuts are grown alongside with the politicians, is a hop-scotch of regulations.

When I went to the Long Beach police station get a license in 1996, I had to hold up a chalkboard sign in front of me with my name and application number while a policeman took my pictures, front and side. I love the idea that we are finally getting away from city-by-city funhouse of regulations.Yip Yip Hooray.

But at the same time I must say that the California certification agency, which began taking applications in August, is a little too easy on education. Figure a good massage therapist needs to know more than Swedish and basic contraindications. And long haul in mind, shouldn’t it take a few months of teachers yelling in your ear to learn proper body mechanics? (OK. It did me. My mechanics are not perfect, but I’ve been massaging for almost 15 years, thanks to a deafening stream of Portuguese exclamations.)

Increasing hours, of course, would put a crimp in the big spas and resorts, who try to juggle big overheads by keeping labor costs low. Keeping required hours down helps ensure a good labor pool of recent graduates for the big players. Unfortunately, requiring less education also makes it easier for those in another kind of business, not massage, to operate.

I would like to think of massage as more of a therapeutic profession-in-the-making, heading say, for the education level of a vocational nurse as opposed to a certified nursing assistant. I say that, of course, knowing I have the hours already and such a requirement would force a lot of experienced therapists who haven’t taken certified hours back to the classroom.

As the California Massage Therapy Council bravely tries to herd all of us cats, I can say that as diverse as Californians are, at least we are on the brink of a high hill. Soon I can work wearing a V-neck scrub shirt without being in violation of my city’s cleavage regulation.

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Cacography and Other Points in Stinky Communication

A friend of mine who subscribes to Wordsmith.org recently sent me a word-of-the-day that I knew I wanted to blog about: cacography. Cacography (kuh-KOG-ruh-fee) is both simply defined as “bad handwriting” and “incorrect spelling.” The site summary adds an explanation of this word’s history/derivation: “From caco– (bad), from Greek kakos (bad) + –graphy (writing). Caco is ultimately from the Indo-European root kakka-/kaka– (to defecate) which also gave us poppycock, cacophony, and cucking stool.”

It might seem surprising that I’m blogging about bad spelling in a massage context given that we’re not exactly in the rooms working crossword puzzles. But good spelling, and to expand the topic, good grammar are both helpful and necessary in ALL professional fields for various reasons (credibility and clarity to name just two.) And I’m not referring to charting, which is done many times on-the-fly with a bad pen; with charting, you try to do the best you can in the most legible way possible. But most professional communication in massage (e.g. email, newsletters, etc.) involves a computer and a spell-check and perhaps even Internet access to further spelling/grammatical resources. So even if you are one of those people who blame teachers for some people’s inability to learn how to use a comma after ten or so years of repeating and practicing the concept in public school, you can still see that software helps to work around this deficiency.

When I was teaching College English, a student once complained to me that he didn’t see why he was graded for grammar and spelling when he was taking a class on literature. WELL, DUH. That’s one of those moments as an English teacher when you slip outside to take deep breaths and think about trees or something or go raving insane in front of 24 freshmen. However, that student’s attitude is shared by many, and I have even met them in the massage business. I have seen people who routinely produced writing for public consumption that was laughably bad. And I do mean that: when they weren’t wincing, various members of the intended audience were laughing, which is not a good thing. Because truthfully, credibility in authority has to involve literacy . . . at least in this culture. And good communication implies that we are not laughing (or crying) and saying “what the heck does that MEAN?”

No, massage therapists and the non-therapists working with us aren’t professional writers, and our/their writing does not have to be perfect. But we are all professionals, and should, I believe, at the very least shoot for writing that is clean and clear and doesn’t read like a bunch of . . . poppycock.

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Psychology and Massage: Some Things in Common

My client seemed particularly stressed. Her back and neck was a never-ending patch of bad trigger points and spasms. This client was all wound up.

“How are things going?” I asked. My standard way to get folks to open up when their tissues are slammed shut.

“Work is driving me nuts. Actually, the work is easy. The people I work with are driving me nuts,” the client said.

This client is a psychologist; a psychologist who supervises new psychologists, a requirement of all graduates. My client’s job was supervising and coordinating all that goes with it for an agency that provided psychological help to people in various government aid programs.

My client had a beef. Too many of her newbies were complaining about their pay and paying too little attention to getting their jobs done.

To summarize: Her new psychologists had the attitude that when they graduate, they should immediately be making $250 an hour. Their clients should be movie stars, professional athletes and rich people who pay cash. They shouldn’t have to waste time with boring public fund clients simply to fill an hours requirement. As graduates, they felt entitled to practice unfettered right away.

In feeling that way, they were missing out on a big opportunity to learn what they are doing, she complained. They don’t understand that right out of school they are lucky to be making $25 an hour, with insurance, sick days and vacation, my client said. They often didn’t listen to the sage advice of their supervisor.

My client had been on both sides of the equation. For years she had worked hard on building a private clientele, establishing referral patterns and working the flexible hours – nights and weekends – that go with people’s schedules. If she was sick or took a vacation, she didn’t get paid. Health insurance cost a lot. Some years ago she switched to agency work, glad for regular hours and a quitting time of 4 p.m.

When all this stress came pouring out, I had a reality check myself. These were some of the same issues I had struggled with as a newbie at massage, and later as a massage employer. When I graduated, I assumed I could just go right into private practice, even though I had no experience at finding and keeping clients. When I went to work at a spa, I was surprised at the low pay per massage, with no pay for down time between massages.

Later in my career, as therapist employing other therapists, I saw many an applicant who didn’t like getting one-third the money for “doing all the work.” Besides the pay, they didn’t want to work evenings and or weekends – or massage anybody hairy.

I particularly enjoyed it when they announced their vacations. The idea of asking for vacation time, a tradition at every job I had ever had in my life, seemed like an alien concept.

We talked for a while about the similarities between massage and talk therapists and expectations. Perhaps we all have odd ideas when we start in a field. My client felt better having talked about it, and her massage went well. I felt better having learned that talk therapists and massage therapists perhaps have more in common than one would think.

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So Many Lubricants, So Little Time!

Some people think that massage therapists are a perhaps a little too obsessed with lubricants. But you know, lubricants are one of the most important tools of the trade next to linens, liniments, and tables.

In school, they teach you about the Big Four: lotions, crèmes, oils, and gels. Generally, they provide you with a basic, but generous, stock of lubricants and just leave you to find your own way. Soon, you’ve been smeared with just about everything and have heard stories from all the instructors on why they prefer x or y lubricant and how they prefer to x or y apply it. For example, you’ve seen lomi lomi people basically take a handful or oil or crème and just SPLAT! it onto a back, and you’ve seen garden-variety lotion lovers walking around looking confident yet goofy with big dabs of the stuff on their arms because God forbid they should have to reach down and pump a bottle and concentrate on massage at the same time. Eventually, you begin to lean toward a particular lubricant for your own work, and then just when that gets easy, BANG! You’re out of school and have to choose a type and brand of your own. If you want oil, you can certainly have it: but do you want olive, emu, avocado, sesame, sunflower, apricot, or fractionated coconut? Scented or unscented? Organic or non-organic? Blessed-under-a-full-moon-by-a-Peruvian-shaman or non-blessed-under-a-full-moon-by-a-Peruvian-shaman? Biotone, Sacred Earth, Bon Vital, blah, blah, blah, etc ., etc.?? The possibilities can be mind-boggling. The resulting obsessive opinions are really no different than the parallel situations you see with artists (oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, pencil, etc.) or rural Southern bass fishermen (frozen corn, chicken livers, anything-you-can mash-together-with-peanut-butter, etc.)

Lately, since I’m even pickier than most, and tend to mix gel and lotion as I work (in different proportions based on skin type), I’ve been working with one that seems to be the best of all possible worlds for me: Soothing Touch Desert Bliss Massage Lotion. It has the “soak” of a lotion with the “glide” of a gel or an oil, perhaps because aloe vera gel is one of the ingredients. Anyone else want to weigh in on your own favorite?

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Where to get your Professional Liability Insurance

“What’s the best place to get my liability insurance?” I think I have heard this question more often than any other since I graduated from massage school in 2002. Insurance is insurance. Some therapists go with one insurer over another because of additional benefits offered, for example by an AMTA membership. But, some of us are just looking for the best deal.

So, for those that want to do their own shopping, here is a list of masage insurance carriers currently known to me. I hope you find this helpful:

– ABMP
– Affinity Insurance Services
– American Massage Council
– AMTA
– Hands On Trades
– IMA

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The Mana of Lomi Lomi

When I began massage school, I had never heard of Lomi Lomi. Later, having been introduced to the few odd strokes, I became very enthusiastic about learning more, given that I have a tendency to want to listen with and use my whole body in massage, and Lomi Lomi seemed as much like dancing as massaging. On the other hand, I was leery of the spiritual aspect. Though I am a very spiritual person, all things Hawaiian in my upbringing were tainted with shameless tourism, plastic hula girls, and the kind of plinky music that sounds like the background advertising for a Girls Gone Wild video.

As I quickly found out, there was a lot more to Lomi than excuses for tropical debauchery. There are actually at least two main types of Lomi-Lomi: Temple Lomi and Clinical Lomi. Temple Lomi is quite energetic, and more like a dance: long flowing strokes, close to the body, and very spiritual. While Clinical Lomi is also spiritual, is it much slower and more focused to specific areas with specific thoughts. Mana Lomi™, the style I have been studying and practicing, is a form of Clinical Lomi. The Hawaiians believed the soul resides in the bones as much as anything else, so all types of Lomi massage reach into the bones as well as touch the muscle.

A little terminology goes a long way in better understanding Lomi. Lomi means to rub. Repetitions in this language often seem to amplify meaning so Lomi Lomi is roughly big rub or massage. Mana, as in Mana Lomi™, means life force or energy. Thus mana is similar to chi, prana, etc. Pule means to bless or pray. A Lomi session will typically begin with a spoken or silent pule to ask for permission or help or to express gratitude to the guiding forces. And finally, there is piko, which literally means navel, but also has an extended meaning similar to chakra. Hawaiians envisioned a triple piko: one on the head, connecting us to ancestors and the past; one at the navel, connecting us to our current generation of family; and the third at the genitals, connecting us to our descendants and the future. Between the three pikos runs the spine, a structural timeline connecting our past, present and future. Blockages in any piko can cause blockages and movement problems along the spine, in turn affecting parts of the whole body.

But Lomi Lomi is not just about words or even touch in general. It’s about deep, soft, loving spiritual touch. My first Lomi teacher, Barbara Helynn Heard, taught me once of the most useful things I know about massage. If I feel lost or unsure about what to do, or I can’t seem to focus, or some aspect of the client is resisting the massage, I silently say “I love you,” adding the client’s name, and I am always surprised how the message seems to go to the bone, and the muscle and other tissue opens up to me. There is indeed great mana in Lomi.

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