Get It In Writing

My favorite business coach -- my cleaning lady Kelli of Kelli's Cleaning Angels -- is here today and today's nugget of wisdom is about contracts.

Her business is both home cleaning and corporate cleaning. She was telling the tale of a corporate client who didn't actually bother to read her contract (which is one page long) and tried to back out of a $10,000 bill (and ongoing agreement). Kelli had laid out the cost clearly in the contract but they were still shocked by the cost and wanted to terminate the contract.

Sadly, the contract they'd signed was for four years. Ooops!

Now she could have gone all wimpy at this point -- fearful of the power of a "corporation" over a small business like hers -- but she didn't. She stood her ground and pointed to the contract and they paid up.

Why? Because she knows she IS a business owner! (Shout out to all my former students..)

Her contracts are simple. They spell out what she will deliver, how often, and for how much money. They also stipulate what she will do to correct a sub-standard cleaning job. Finally, it spells out how either party can terminate the contract. Kelli says her contract is less than a page long and I'm willing to bet it's written in plain English.

She says she has insisted on contracts with all her corporate clients for a long time now. In a conflict, handshake agreements usually come down to "I said..." and "no you didn't, you said...", which can never be resolved. Though she did say that one corporate client she had a verbal agreement with tried to reneg on payment but backed down when she mentioned she'd talked to her lawyer (she hadn't but they didn't know that!).

As MTs, we are often very uncomfortable with contracts. We don't fully understand them and a lot of MTs I know are overwhelmed and baffled by legal language. We're pretty sure someone is going to use it against us sooner or later.

Contracts are simply the details of an agreement between two parties, usually for the purpose of business dealings. They exist to (1) make sure you both understand what you're agreeing to and (2) give you a point of reference if you're ever in disagreement.

You can also write contracts in plain language (think of them as letters of agreement if that makes you more comfortable). If both parties are comfortable with that, it can work. Even in court. If your agreement shows a clear intent to establish a normal business relationship, a court will take that into consideration.

Are you better off with a lawyer drafting your contracts? I think I would if I was (1) dealing with very large amounts of money or (2) not entirely confident about my working relationship with the other side of the contract but that's simply my opinion. You should never take my word as the final authority on legal matters!

If you are doing business with another business on an on-going basis, I strongly recommend getting the details down in writing. Make sure you both understand what you're agreeing to, in detail, and make sure you both have a neutral point of reference if you're ever in disagreement (and the odds are, if you work together long enough, you will be in disagreement at some point. We're all only human.).

Call it a contract. Call it a letter of understanding. Call it a document of agreement. Call it anything you want but just make sure you get it in writing.

I Am Approved

Effective April 11, I am an NCBTMB approved continuing education provider (through The Healing Core, with my buddy / Board of Directors / massage therapist / road trip companion / professional conscience / partner in crime / advanced tapotement provider Kitty Southworth).

I feel like I graduated to the Big Girl Panties!

For those of you who have no idea what the *bleep* I'm talking about....

....most MTs are licensed and have to renew those licenses every 2 years or so. As part of the renewal process, they have to prove they took xx hours of continuing education since the last time they renewed their license.

Therefore, when we are considering our continuing ed options, we always check to see if they offer CEUs. There are a lot of MTs who simply won't spend the time or money on a course that doesn't also offer CEUs (since we all are usually short on both time and money).

To grant CEUs, the workshop provider has to be approved by an agency recognized by your state's massage regulatory. NCBTMB is the leading agency for massage therapist. Hence, our application process.

In practical terms, being an "approved provider" means our workshops will attract more attention and, to be honest, we can charge more for our workshops. We are also free to offer them wherever we can find the space (and the students). We aren't restricted by the need to find a co-host who can grant CEUs. This expands our horizons dramatically.

I've been pondering whether my next 10 years should include more workshops -- both those developed by me and those I sponsor/organize for someone else. This makes that so much more reasonable and likely. I think I've found the new direction/aspect of my practice to take me to 2020.

In some ways, it only took me about 2 weeks to complete the application. In other ways, it took 5 years....

2006 - 2008

I kept meeting students and new MTs getting sidelined by the energetic effects of our work. I was becoming more and more frustrated that MTs weren't being taught the energetic body in a simple straightforward way like they were taught the physical body. More importantly, I was frustrated that most MTs weren't taught simple energetic self-care techniques (that's the equivalent of teaching someone how to do massage without teaching them how to avoid injuring themselves).

I began to picture a class that would teach the basics of the energetic body in an organized way, much like the anatomy classes I had in massage school.

As that picture solidified I realized such a class would be best taught by two people, one for the academic portion and one for the practical portion. The most obvious person to teach such a class with me? Kitty Southworth, since she was the one who had dragged me (kicking and screaming) to my first energetic self-care class. I pitched the idea to her in 2008 and she agreed.

While at the 2008 American Massage Therapy Association convention in Phoenix, I picked up the NCBTMB approved provider application package.

2009

April: Kitty and I went away for a weekend to fully develop the course outline.

It helped that I had been a technical writer for 20 years. Documentation and training are cousin disciplines -- we approach a subject the same way but tech writers deliver their information in writing and trainers do it in a workshop setting.

I'd used that same experience in developing my course material for the business practices classes at Potomac Massage Training Institute (PMTI). I taught those classes for several years.

As part of preparing the PMTI business practices material, I had a friend with a background in adult education teach me how to develop learning objectives and give me the basics on developing good courses.

Important aside: just knowing a lot about a subject does not necessarily make you a good instructor. There's a whole different set of skills (and, frankly, personality traits) that make a good instructor. The skills can be learned (the personality traits may have to be genetic, I'm not sure). If you want to develop a workshop, take the time to learn how to develop course content and how to teach adults.

May: Our initial plan was to convince our alma mater, PMTI, to include our material in their professional training program. We pitched the course proposal to PMTI.

They turned us down.

July: We decided we could re-work it as a weekend continuing ed workshop. It took us a few months to make that work.

2010

February: We had a course we could teach: Energy 101. We worked out the where and and when and how much.

April: We started promoting Energy 101.

August: We taught Energy 101 for the first time (a necessary prerequisite to the NCBTMB application process) in August to 11 students. We offered it at about half the cost we will in the future to (1) attract students and (2) in recognition of the lack of CEUs.

We also kept detailed track of how long each segment of the workshop took. We knew that would be required later for the NCBTMB application.

Four days later I moved to Australia.

November: I began reading the NCBTMB application that I'd had for 2 years. The application itself was about 35 pages; 20 of those pages were data entry pages.

I presumed the actual application could be done online. Well, yes and no.

NCBTMB offers the application in PDF form online. But you can't save the form and you can't save anything you enter online and you can't submit the PDF as the application (that has to be done on paper).

Remember that we had 20 pages of data entry? The odds were that I was not going to enter all that data all in one go.

I was so baffled by this, so convined that I was missing something that I called the NCBTMB (from Australia) for clarification. They confirmed that I was right -- I had to enter it all at once or (they suggested) I should print out each page as I completed it since I had to actually make the submission as hardcopy.

Need to make a correction? Re-enter all the data on that page and print it out, again.

I worked on the application pretty steadily for a week in November. I was using the Energy 101 course Kitty and I teach plus 3 other courses taught by Ben Risby-Jones, an Australian naturopath that Kitty works with (and is now my co-author for "Travel Guide for the Spiritual Journey") in the application. I needed some detailed info from both Ben and Kitty but we ran into the holidays....

2011

January: We moved into a new townhouse and Brisbane experienced massive flooding. Didn't get much done.

February: I got back to the application. It took about another week to get all the pages completed to my satisfaction.

I had to do most of this at the library because we don't have a printer at home. That meant making a reservation to get into the Learning Lab at the library for a 2-hour slot (all that's available) and pay to print each page. I'm delighted that the library had the services I needed but it was tedious to make the reservation and troop over to the library every time I needed to complete some more pages. $10 in printing costs.

Once complete, I had to make two copies, get them 3-hole punched, inserted into binders with dividers. I marked where Kitty had to sign (since we were submitting under her company The Healing Core). Another $15.

Interesting side note: 3-hole is not necessarily the default here in Australia. I found 3-ring binders, 2-ring binders, 4-ring binders, and 5-ring binders. The 3-ring binders were the hardest to find!

THEN I had to go to the post office and find something I could fit the binder in. Like Goldilocks, it was either way too big or way too small for most of the packing options available. I got it squeezed in sideways into a box and got it in the mail to Kitty, with delivery confirmation. $60 to mail it to Kitty.

It arrived in Kitty's hands about one week later. She made a copy for her files, signed in all the right places, filled in the payment info ($400 as an organization; $175 if I'd been submitting as an individual), and forwarded it on to NCBTMB at the end of February.

April: I expected to hear back from NCBTMB in about mid-April with a request for correction or clarification. I didn't expect it to go through the first time. When I got up this morning, there was an e-mail from Kitty asking me to call her as soon as I got up and she gave me the good news (she'd wanted to call when she opened the letter on Friday at noon in DC but that was 2 am here in Australia, so she held off -- barely -- until I woke up).

The best part? We couldn't offer CEUs to the students who took our classes last year. But as part of our approval, we can grant retroactive CEUs back 2 years! We'll be sending those out in the next month.

When I get back to the US in August Kitty and I will have to sit down and do some Big Picture and long-range planning for The Healing Core. What classes would we like to offer, develop, and sponsor? It feels today like the future is wide open.

And I'm walking around the house with a silly little smile saying, every so often, "I'm an approved provider!" (much to my husband's amusement).

NCBTMB-approved?

Kitty Southworth and I have (finally) submitted the application to be NCBTMB-approved providers! (translation: we can offer CEs for our workshops) We figure they'll have to kick the application back to us at least once for clarification / correction / improvement but I see no reason we won't be (eventually) approved. It took us about 3 weeks of work to get it done. It's not quite as horrific as I feared but it's no walk in the park either. You've got to really want it....and we do. :) Trust us, we'll let everyone know when we get it!

Getting Smarter, Together

In a recent post I mentioned the idea of being a promoter of massage workshops. That idea has so engaged my imagination that I've actually started contacting people to see if I can really make this happen. And it looks like the answer is.....yes. Here's my question to you: what business topics would you like to attend a 1-2 day workshop on? Here's my ideas so far:

• Using social media to grow your practice


• Taxes & bookkeeping (in MT-friendly language!)


• Creating a massage therapist-friendly business plan


• Using financial reports to evaluate the health of your practice


• Marketing your massage practice to success


• Business ethics


• Sensible insurance choices for a massage practice


• Understanding independent contracting


• How to develop your own workshops


• Becoming an approved provider with NCBTMB

What else would you like to see?

Your Mission (should you choose to accept it)...

More biz talk with my cleaning lady, Kelli of Kelli's Cleaning Angels....

We got to talking about business plans today. She's been having a very hard time with her corporate clients after the January floods. They've all been pushing their cleaning services to drop their prices. She's ended up letting go of all her corporate clients because she can only meet their price demands by seriously dropping the quality of the work she's doing.

When she was struggling with that decision, she went back to her mission. Her mission includes doing extraordinary cleaning work. She couldn't drop her quality. She let the clients go.

We talked about how important the mission statement is in a business plan. A good mission statement captures the essence of what keeps us going as businesses. Money is virutally never enough of a motivation to keep you going for the long haul. A good mission statement captures what excites you about the work you do.

She brought up something else I hadn't thought of -- a good mission statement also contains an element of challenge. It should capture a standard that is something of a reach for you, something that's not a cakewalk. Your mission statement needs to inspire you and stretch you. Not impossibly so but reasonably so. I'm not sure I ever told my students that but if I teach business plans again, I will.

Massage Dreaming....

Today, I fantasize about being a promoter. That is, organzing and sponsoring workshops, particularly on the business of massage.

Margo Bowman on taxes and bookkeeping.

Laura Allen on marketing.

Randall Craig on social media.

Somebody (maybe me?) on business plans.

Ferreting out the people who are offering good business courses that can talk in the language of massage therapists. Creating some workshops of my own. I've already done this once or twice with Margo Bowman, so I know what it takes.

I have a fantasy today of organizing 2 years worth of business workshops, maybe one every quarter. Really promoting the heck out of them in the mid-Atlantic region. Hosting them with PMTI (or on my own since Kitty Southworth and I have submitted the application to be a NCBTMB-approved provider!).

And if I can pull together 8 workshops/offerings over 2 years, then turning that into a bonafide The Business of Massage conference! I already actually have a business plan for just such a thing, which helped me realize I can't do it on my own, so I've laid it aside for the moment.

That's my massage therapy fantasy today.