Are you really a business owner?

Back in February I wrote about my two favorite business-advice reality shows. I still follow Tabitha Takes Over, in which a very successful hair salon owner helps other small businesses get themselves out of trouble.

Usually about 90% of the problem is weak or misguided management (the rest usually come down to staff and marketing). She often asks owners a few quick question to determine how good a handle they actually have on their business. Can you answer these questions about your business?

• How many people do you have in your client base?
• How many of you clients are "regulars"?
• How many hours of hands-on time do you average in a week and month?
• How do most of your clients find you?
• How much money do you gross in an average week and month?
• What is your net income in the average month?
• How much is your business growing financially?

These questions are an example of the kind of information you need to know about your practice. These questions give you a truer picture of your business than "how full is my schedule?" They are critical questions to tell you how healthy your practice is.

If you do your bookkeeping in Quiken or Quikbooks or a similar program you can answer the last 3 questions pretty quickly. The first 4 questions may require you to do some digging in your appointment book. The 4th question requires you to actually ask your clients, either when they book an appointment or during their first appointment.

If you aren't (currently) able to answer these questions, you need to start tracking the data that will help you answer these questions. You can't really move your practice forward till you know where it really is right now.

Most Interesting Thing I've Read Lately

I read about business pretty regularly, especially for healing arts professionals or microbusinesses. Here's a selection that I found particularly interesting recently. It helped me understand where I am in my business and that it's part of a natural evolution. It also helped me appreciate that the things I'm angst'ing about are also completely normal (and, no, I'm not crazy!).
From:  Twelve Months To Your Ideal Private Practice, a workbook
By:  Lynn Godzki

Certain themes consistently emerge at different stages of small-business development -- concerns about survival and competition, a move toward stability, a drive to expand, a push to affililate, and so on. These themes tend to occur across the board in all businesses and follow a similar progression. As such, they are the evolutionary markers of a business. Although the markers are not strictly linear and don't arise in identical ways, if you are familiar with them and know where to look, it's possible to see the developmental path of any business. You can spot which stage is currently occurring, and if you understand the ramifications of the particular stage, you will know what tasks the business owner [you] needs to attend to in order to master the challenges of that stage. You can predict what will happen next as the business continues to evolve. You have a perspective from which to lubricate instead of obstruct inevitable business changes. You can begin to enjoy the bumpy ride of business a lot more by highlighting the most positive aspects inherent in each stage. Business success becomes easier...


Nature works on change; the world around us is in a state of constant flux. Change in one's business often occurs as a response to a changing environment and small businesses as are expecially reactive to external forces. But even though business evolution is constant and can be reactive, it is not necessarily random. It can be charted...


We naively think that our business success or failure is based primarily on factor that involved our psychology, or skill level, or other personal issues; while this may be true, rarely do we factor the developmental arc of business into the success or failure equation...


The following chart is a very brief representation of [Don] Beck and [Chris] Cowan's color coded spiral dynamics model...

Color	Thinking	Value Systems – Bottom Lines
Beige	Automatic	Basic Survival
Purple	Animistic	Myths, traditions, and rituals
Red	Egocentric	Power, glory, and exploitation
Blue	Absolutist	Authority and stability
Orange	Materialistic	Success and material gain
Green	Humanistic	Equality and humanism
Yellow	Systemic	Choice and change
Turquoise	Holistic	Harmony and holism

 

Being the Wrong Answer

I ran into a recent new client last night. When he came to see me two months ago, he was limping and had been in significant pain for months. The massage helped....for about 5 minutes. As he walked from my front door to his car, I saw his limp return.

Which, in this case, means the massage was a complete success.

Why? Because it showed both of us that massage was not the answer to his problem. It motivated him to do something he'd been hoping to avoid -- going to see his doctor -- where he discovered a more serious problem in his hip that really does require medical intervention. Massage will be able to support him while he goes through those treatments but it was never going to fix the problem.

This is not the first time this has happened for me. People who are in pain but don't want to go to a doctor for some reason will sometimes go see a massage therapist instead. If I can, with professional confidence, say "this is not strictly a muscular problem and I don't think massage can solve it" they are much more likely to then go see a doc.

Our greatest value is not "fixing problems". Our greatest value is listening to a client and their body in a way the often can't (or won't). And then providing a response that might alleviate the problem. Sometimes massage is the answer. Sometimes it isn't. We won't know till we listen.

Making Your Website Work

I don't often simply link you to another blog (have I ever done this?) but this blog post summarizes 5 superb points about making your website work. Four of them are super-easy to understand (the 5th one requires some technical knowledge).

Go. Read. Learn. Make your website better. Attract more clients.

Why Wouldn't It Be (a) hard or (b) easy?

It's been just about a year since I've moved back to DC from Brisbane Australia. It hasn't been an easy move. I still miss Brisbane and still struggle to accept DC again.

The two cities are different in so many ways but the quickest way to sum up their differences?

DC: "well, why shouldn't [it] be hard?"
Brisbane: well, why shouldn't [it] be easy?"

I've been thinking about this divide the last few days in relation to my massage practice. Since re-opening my practice last August I've been working hard to re-build my client base. So very very hard. Sadly, all that hardness is not showing up in my schedule.

So I read the other blogs, I read the websites, I respond to the emails, I read the books, I take the classes and webinars that all purport to show me how to do the hard work necessary to re-build my practice. My to-do list gets longer and longer and longer and I get tireder and tireder and tireder.

And I think that -- having done it the hard way for the last 11 months -- I'm going to try the Brissy way for the next 6 months. I'm going to walk into each day with the "why shouldn't it be easy" attitude. I'm going to do the baseline things I need to do -- keep the website current, write my quarterly newsletter, keep up this blog -- but otherwise I'm going to face each day as though it is and can be easy.

I'm going to do the work with love and joy. I'm going to dial down the "fret" and turn up the trust. I'm a good therapist who enjoys working with people. I will spread the word about my practice and my work in all the easy ways that are available to me.

Easy is not a bad word. And it might even be true.