MTs and the ACA

Read this. That's all I'm going to say (because she says it so damned well!).

http://www.lighthold.org/fish-or-cut-bait/

Are You Smart Enough?

Next week I'm teaching a 4-hour class on business plans for massage therapists. It's at 8 am and I've got 35 people signed up. Let me say that again: at 8 am. They must want this bad. I often see clients until 9 pm or later so there's lots of days I'm just waking up at 8 am! I'm going to have to get a good night's sleep the night before this class!

I'm pretty confident I can deliver material that will be useful to everyone in that room. I'm passionate about making business knowledge accessible to MTs, explaining things in language we can understand. Translating "standard" biz concepts into something people like us can work with.

I would like to say that it's the result of my degree in business or my extensive experience managing obscenely profitable businesses. I possess neither of those. I have no formal training in business. I have (1) real-world experience in building (and re-building) a modestly successful practice and (2) a gift for learning new stuff and translating it to the general public.

10 years ago I knew virtually nothing about business. Then my alma mater, the Potomac Massage Training Institute, got desperate for someone to teach business practices and asked me if I'd take it on. That request gave me a moment's pause (see: "uneducated in business", above) but then I thought "what the heck, I bet I can figure this out" and I proceeded to do just that.

In the process I discovered I'm really fascinated by the subject and (more importantly) by making the subject accessible to other MTs and microbusinesses. I was born to teach, baby!

What about you? What are you not doing right now because you don't have formal education in it or didn't go to college or "only" have a GED? What have you convinced yourself you're not smart enough to do?

(Note: I do not mean passing yourself off as competent in something you've never studied, like lymph drainage or visceral manipulation! Don't go there, don't do that.)

In our culture right now we are absurdly obsessed with the idea that a college degree is the way to health, wealth, and happiness. You must get a college degree if you don't want to end up hungry and homeless.

I have a college degree (BA, Journalism) and I have this to say about that: bullcrap. I know way too many people who are brilliant at what they do who do not possess a college degree.

There's so many things we have to learn on our own in this industry. Our training programs are struggling to keep up with the changes in the profession and the rising expectations put on us. We simply need (and want) to know more than we did 20-30 years ago. It's a natural problem to have as a profession matures but it means we often have to educate ourselves about things like research, business, new insights into how the body works, etc.

Telling yourself you're not smart enough or educated enough to do that is like tying your shoelaces together and then trying to go for a walk! Not going to get far.

If you are a practicing massage therapist, if you finished a professional training program, you are smart enough. Find places to learn the things you need to learn. Find people with the information you need and learn from them. Find the books, websites, journals, blogs, and conferences that can feed you the info you need.

Go out there and get yourself smarter. I know you can do it!

You've Asked, I've Listened.....

You've asked, we've listened, and The Healing Core is bringing her back in time to get yourself ready for your taxes: Margo Bowman! Our favorite massage therapist + accountant.

You have three (3!) chances to let her help you be a smarter (and more profitable) business owner (and the Early Bird Discount for all three of these ends in two weeks):

If you already know your stuff pretty well but just need to know what's changed in 2013

If you're just starting out and need someone to help you get started well and correctly (and save you money!)

If you are ready to really own your responsibilities for your bookkeeping, deductions, and financial decision (and, no, having an accountant is NOT enough).

If you've been thinking about it, now is the time to sign up and reap those early-bird discounts.

Define "Employment"

In the last 24 hours I've run across two places where massage therapy organizations (one of which was the AMTA, sigh) were using the term "employment" incorrectly. Drives me batty so let me lay out a simple truth here.

Are You Employed? 

Employed means you work for someone else as an employee. It has a specific legal definition. It's not just a general term for "I work for pay" or "I work within an organization as a massage therapist".

Do You Work For Yourself?

When you are an employee you have an employer who files W2s and W4s for you, withholds taxes (and submits them to the government for you), etc. An employer has greater control over your day-to-day work world (schedule, dress code, work protocols, etc.) than you do so they take greater responsibility for you (providing tools, space, clients, etc. you need to do your job).

Are You Self-Employed?

When you are an employee you don't get to claim any of your work-related expenses as business expenses. This is important!

Are You An Employee?

If you are not an employee, you are self-employed. You may work out of your home or a rented space; you may work in someone else's organization as an independent contractor.

If you are working in your home or office space, no one provides you any paperwork to show how much you made this year. That's your job. If you are an independent contractor (and you receive more than $600 from an organization in a year), that organization will send you a 1099 to use when filing your taxes. In either case, you have to withhold your own taxes and mail them to the government quarterly.

You get more control over your work environment (or should insist that you do) because the organization you are working with is taking less responsibility for you.

When you are self-employed, your work-related expenses are tax-deductible.

Where Do You Work?

Am I just being a fussy word-geek? I certainly can be but I'm not in this case. The words we use have the power to define our reality. They also represent how we understand the world. If we use the word "employee" or "employed", the odds are good that the subconscious picture in our head is of, well, traditional legal employment with all the rights, privileges, and restrictions thereof. Odds are if that's the picture in your head, you will act accordingly. 

Who Do You Work For?

 

 

If you don't embrace the reality of being self-employed -- in all its permutations -- you risk not recognizing when and how to stand up for yourself, to say no, to draw healthy business boundaries. Even worse, you risk sounding like an ill-informed fool when you bitch and moan about not getting the kinds of benefits and support due an employee when you are not an employee.

 

We hate it when people use the wrong word -- masseuse -- to refer to our profession. If you care enough about language to care about that, then you also need to care enough about language to use "employed" and "self-employed" correctly.

 

The Oddly (or Un) Structured Day (especially for the new MT)

If you are new to being a self-employed / independent contractor massage therapist, you will discover something odd (especially if you came from the world of traditional employment): when you don't have a client, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to.

In traditional employment, if you don't immediately have something you have to do, you still have to sit / stand / walk / talk as though you did. You can't just......leave. You can't take a nap, go home and bake cookies, or take yourself out to a movie. You can if you're self-employed.

What freedom!

Except....

Except you're the boss. Which means you're the one that has to ensure that phones get answered, email gets answered, business cards get ordered, bookkeeping gets entered, linens gets laundered, supplies get bought, trade pubs get read. That last sentence was chock-full of the passive voice ("gets answered / ordered / entered", etc.). The beauty of the passive voice is that is avoids saying who is going to do all these things.

You are.

So you've got conflicting realities: the reality that when you have no clients booked you're free to do whatever you want and the reality that because you're self-employed there's always something more that needs to get done. How do you structure a day? All free time or all work time? What are your working hours? When does your day end? When does your day start?

Some of you will remember that I started this blog when, thanks to my husband's job, I lived in Australia for a year (2010-2011). I wasn't practicing massage, I was working on my writing. Talk about a day with NO inherent structure to it!

I created a chart for each week. Each day had 3 categories: morning, afternoon, evening. At the beginning of the week, I wrote down what I wanted to do / accomplish / work on in each segment of the day. I went a step further (because, yes, I am that kind of nerd) and color coded the boxes / tasks. Purple for "work" and blue for "personal". That allowed me to see at a glance whether my week was overloaded one way or the other. Here's an example of what it would look like now.

I can look at this chart and realize Tuesday and Wednesday are very long days. But I also notice that I have a chance in the middle of Tuesday to watch the America's Cup races in the afternoon. I also notice that I plan to get a swim in on Wednesday afternoon while I'm at the gym. So maybe those days are just fine the way they are.

 

This is one way to bring structure to an un-structured work life. Any other way that works for you is good. You run your own business. Do what makes sense for you (including take a nap in the middle of the day if you want to!).

The Self-Employed / Independent Contractor Economy

On Labor Day I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR and heard a speaker mention that 1/3 of the US labor force are freelance / self-employed / independent contractors. The speaker expects that number to rise over the coming two decades.

33%. Between 10 and 42 million.

In my experience, it's closer to 95% in the massage therapy profession, at least here in DC.

We aren't unique. We aren't unusual. Heck, we're cutting edge!  :)

But our economy has not yet caught up to that reality. Too many benefits, too many tax laws, too many expectations are still wrapped around the idea that the vast majority of the workforce is a standard employee / standard employer (and that we're 9-5 but that's a conversation for a different day).

You can listen to the 50-minute show here. There's a lot of good info in there about how to do well for yourself as a freelancer / independent contractor / self-employed person.

You may also want to check out The Freelancers Union. It's a gathering place for the self-employed with information on things like buying your own insurance and writing a good contract.

Just One More?

When I travel, I like to get massages. I'm out of my own area so I'm experiencing people who didn't go to the same school I did, may not be operating under similar state legislation (which does affect how a practice operates), and are in a different community of MTs who often have a different perspective on massage. It's good to broaden my experience as both a client and as a fellow MT. I always learn something.

I was in Calistoga California recently. Calistoga is known for its mineral springs so there are quite a few places offering mud baths, soaks, and massages in a spa setting. A good time to try something new!

The mud bath is a completely new experience for me. It's a trough of thick black mud in which I reclined for about 15 minutes. Hot and smelling ever-so-faintly of sulphur, it was more relaxing than I expected, though rinsing the mud out of all the nooks and crannies it had found on me took a little while! It was followed by a soak in a jacuzzi (I do love a good jacuzzi!) and 10 minutes wrapped in a warm burrito-like ensemble in a darkened room.

 

Which is all to say that by the time I got to the massage room, I was a shambling pile of warm readiness. My MT asked a few questions; I mentioned the lingering soreness in my biceps and elbows and asked for a little extra attention there. 
 

He did a good one-hour massage. When he got to my upper arms, I could tell he was trying to  address my soreness but it wasn't very effective. He didn't seem to be able to focus on specific tissue. I got the sense that he couldn't “talk” / “listen” to the tissue. He felt....fatigued. But he did give it a little extra time and I give him full points for that.

He mentioned afterwards that he 'd wanted to go over the hour a little bit so he could do more work on my arms but he was booked back-to-back and he couldn't. I certainly understand. I had that same challenge just last night with a new client. But I know I wasn't his first appointment of the day and I know I wasn't the last. I wonder if the number of clients he had that day affected his ability to connect with my sore arms. 

There  comes a point in the day when I just can't give my full focus to one more body. I can keep moving, keep rubbing, but I can't give them my creative focus. There's none left. For me, I've learned that my limit is between 4 and 5 hours. Your limit may be different.

We sometimes convince ourselves we can keep going, seeing as many clients as we can physically accommodate to be financially successful. What we shouldn't do is try to convince ourselves that our clients won't notice when we've gone past our attention-limit. They may not know why but they may well notice that the session wasn't as good as they've received from us before or that they've received somewhere else.

That's one of my biggest complaints about the national chains, like Massage Envy. They are frequently owned and run by people who don't get these subtleties of good service. For them, one massage is as good as another and if you are physically able, you should keep going. Their pay scale also tempts MTs to try to make up the difference in volume. It's not true of every large spa or national massage chain but it is far more likely to happen there than with an individual therapist.

You want to be able to deliver a high-quality service as often as you reasonably can. Going past your natural limit will not allow you to do that.

The Scapula Obsession

What is it about a stuck shoulder blade that we just cannot resist? Sore elbows, achy arches, we can ignore these if the client has asked us to work elsewhere but if we find a stuck shoulder blade, it almost takes divine intervention to get us to pass it by.

I'm just back from a 2-week  vacation in northern California. I arrived in San Francisco with two goals: check out a practice I'd heard great things of and get some relief for my aching upper body. I must have been doing something terribly wrong with my body mechanics lately because I hurt in my fingers, my wrists, my elbows, my biceps, and my mid-back. I knew my neck and traps were tight but they didn't hurt so they didn't make the A-list. I scheduled a 90-minute massage.

I was upfront about being an MT and explained where I hurt and why. I was particularly concerned about my right elbow. I couldn't seem to get any improvement working on it myself. My MT asked a few questions and then had me get on the table, prone.

He started, as many of us do, with the back. Couple of warming strokes and he discovered that my scapulae were glued tight to my ribcage. Not surprised but, remember, they didn't hurt so they weren't on my A list. He couldn't resist. He spent easily half of the session (successfully) getting them un-stuck. Yeah!

But that meant he only had half a session left for everything else, including the stuff I'd said was  important to me. So he couldn't give everything else the full attention it needed.

Did I stop him? Did I speak up? No, because he really was doing good work and I didn't want to micro-manage the session. I also didn't realize how much of the session he'd spent on the scapulae. I have been in his shoes, encountering a body part so stuck / dense / whatever that I dove in without really paying attention to the time or my session plan.

In my practice, at the end of an intake I outline how I'm going to approach the session with the client, especially if we need to prioritize some aches/pains/issues over others. The client has a chance to re-direct me and to know what to expect. It allows me to be clear on what outcome they're hoping for and reassure myself that my plan will address that outcome. If I encounter something during the session that makes me reconsider my plan, I talk to the client about it and get their OK.

The work I received was good, let be very clear about that. But we owe it to our clients to stick to the plan, unless we get their permission to do otherwise. I had a specific goal for the session – relief of some specific aches and pains. The work on the scapulae did little to alleviate those other areas of discomfort. I don't regret spending the money because I did get solid value for my money but I didn't get  what I came in for and that's a shame.

And my elbow still hurts.