One Size Does Not Fit All

Have you ever bought a piece of clothing labeled "one size fits all"? How did it fit? The odds are (if your experience is like mine) that sometimes it fits and often it doesn't. I think "one size fits all" should really say "we're too lazy to make multiple sizes, good luck".

With the growth of the healing arts industry, there are a lot of people offering us business advice. Blogs, columns, and articles in the trade pubs. Continuing education. Books. There's a lot of advice being tossed about. There's a divide, though, between the types of advice we're being given.

On one side is "conventional" business advice. It's the sort of thing you'd hear in business school or from the Small Business Administration. It's meant to be useful for all types of businesses. It may or may not have been customized or shrunk to fit a one-person service-oriented type of businesses, which so many of us are.

On the other side is experience-based business advice. It's more business experience than business knowledge. It may be supported by academic learning but it's primarily based on things the writer/speaker has learned from doing business. They are sharing what they have gone through and learned will work for them. The question is whether it will also work for you.

The first type -- the conventional business advice -- often feels like "one size fits all" to me with about the same degree of success. Conventional business advice assumes some things that just aren't true for me (or most of the MTs I know) -- a staff, for example, or a lot of spare time and interest for "business".

Conventional business advice is usually based on product-oriented businesses rather than service-oriented businesses like massage therapy. I have very few issues around inventory management or my "supply chain" (whatever that is) for example.

Here's my biggest disconnect with conventional business advice: it's based on the assumption that my primary motivation is profit, lots and lots of profit. I love the idea of making heaps of money (pause while I fantasize about what it would be like to make heaps of money....) but it's not what gets me up in the morning and keeps me doing the never-ending laundry. What keeps me going is the complete buzz of making a difference in someone's life, of having a body really talk to me, of feeling tissue open and breathe beneath my hands. It's the work that keeps me going.

Now, since I'm trying to support myself with massage, making a profit comes in a pretty close second in my passions! But it is second and most conventional business advice places it first. That's a disconnect for me.

Does that mean that there's nothing to learn from conventional business education? Not quite. There is a core of basic (albeit generic) information to be gleaned from conventional business education. There's often an under-appreciated "translation" problem -- translating the generic advice into something that's specifically useful to us.

When you read these business columns, articles, and blogs, when you are tempted to take the continuing ed or sign up for the workshops do you hear the voice of someone who loves the work first? Do you sense the compassionate heart that drives most of us? Do you get a sense of someone who fundamentally understands your priorities and appreciates that same passion? If the writer / speaker / teacher isn't coming from that place (or at least somewhere in the neighborhood) take a look for that "one size fits all" label.

It won't be easy. While the "biz advice" industry is growing, it's still much smaller than they "here's another way to rub the naked person" training / blogs / columns. When it comes to business advice and training, you will have to do a little work (but less and less with every passing year). If you've only got a limited amount of time, money, and energy for business education, make sure you're spending those limited resources in the way that will help you, specifically, the most.