Goals in Practice

One of the things I do every few months is look at my practice goals. Am I working enough? Too much? Am I happy with the clientele? How do I feel about my own massage health and abilities? Enough clients? Doing the work I want to do? Does my practice meet the clients’ needs? Am I making enough money?

Those questions, I suspect, come up to any massage therapist wherever or however they practice. I make a special effort to not only phrase the questions but craft the answers. Am I working toward goals? Treading water? Am I feeling behind or ahead of the curve? These are not easy questions, and it takes objectivity, which about oneself is often in short supply.

Of course, the economy has taken a hellacious slide, and there have been challenges to meet in the face of shrinking income. For all therapists it has been a rough couple of years in terms of business conditions.
I started my private practice in a recession, although that one was shorter-lived and less severe, some days it was a challenge to simply put one foot in front of the other. I remember having itsy-bitsy goals and trying to expand them as my confidence grew. I practiced my practice a lot. I learned to not take rejection to heart, and to stay positive and go with the flow.

If that sounds easy, of course, it isn’t. This year when setting goals I had to list quite a few. One was spending more days at the office to lengthen opportunities to fill the book. More effort to arrive on time whether booked or not, and that’s a tough one, especially after a late night of work. Some of it simply came down to having faith – faith in myself and faith in God above, that I can do what I set my mind to do.

Mind-set is only part of the deal. One of the concrete goals I set was to add about $300 to the weekly gross, in order to make some other goals possible. I looked at what I could do, what my counterparts were doing, and decided to stick to my core business – massage – instead of looking for multiple streams of income that required selling other products.

That was a tough one, because I am good at selling products. I often trained other therapists at my spas on how to sell services and products to customers. But I looked at the sign next to my door – it said massage, not vitamins, essential oils, health water or other products.

I also decided to reward clients for their regularity and faithfulness, rather than giving percent-offs and specials for new clients.

Now as the calendar year draws to a close, I can say I did well on a few things, not so good on others. Getting the gross increased took practice, but it has been steady improvement and now seems second nature. I’m still leaving my house like Dagwood running for the bus on some mornings, and I’m not consistent with client rewards.

These last two months of the year, I’m going to hit the goals again and try to make them work. When I need to alter my practice, I look to myself. Can I do anything about the big things like recessions or more competition or market pricing?

Absolutely. I can work on my own goals and do better. Who was it that said: There’s never any competition going that extra mile in the fast lane….Good gravy, I think it was Mary Kay.