Author Archives: Larisa Goldin

Boundaries and the Fine Print

Independent massage therapists (like myself) have a few extra duties to perform during the course of their careers. One of the least fun is leasing space.
My first office was a pretty simple deal. I rented two days in another therapist’s office and we had a handshake deal. I paid once a month and kept the place tidy while I was there. The biggest challenge was making sure we did not “borrow” each other’s supplies without at least a note and a replacement and or payment. Boundaries. Pretty easy stuff.

My next venture involved renting space in two local hotels. I had to come up with a contract that protected them, protected me and kept the business model viable. The first hotel signed the contract I wrote with the help of an attorney. No sweat. The second hotel wanted me to indemnify them from any negligence on their part with any of my clients and to pay court fees, etc. We went round and round for months. The hotel manager and I wanted the deal, the attorneys “got in the way.” We ended up changing the wording just enough to make it look like it was in compliance with corporate but did not really put me on the hook for anything beyond my massage room door. Whew.

A third facility was a negotiation nightmare. The corporate folks had in-house attorneys make up a “standard contract” for everyone that fit far better for a salon (and their toxic chemicals) than a massage center. The proposed contract ended up with about 20 paragraphs that were checked “does not apply.” Corporate would put the stuff back in. I ended up walking away from the deal rather than get hooked up with the “robo-lease.”

I learned to negotiate, a difficult skill for any businessperson, and I also waxed nostalgic for my handshake room-share lease. Keeping good boundaries, as in massage practice, is never easy.

By Sue Peterson

Full Slate – The convenience of online scheduling within your reach!

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Korol, co-founder of Full Slate, which is a company that provides a popular online appointment scheduling solution for many massage clinics and other small businesses in the health and beauty space. I was really impressed with what I learned about Full Slate and wanted to share with our community. And for what it’s worth, if you are running a practice and do not yet offer online scheduling for your clients, Full Slate is real find and definitely worth checking out.

Before founding Full Slate, Chris was working full time, leading a busy lifestyle with a busy schedule. Making appointments for personal services like a haircut or massage was always a challenge. With a day full of meetings, it wasn‘t convenient to get on the phone during the workday so she usually tried to make appointments for personal services after hours. She recalls leaving a lot of voicemails, not always hearing back, and missing out on preferred appointment times once she did. The phone tag was a real obstacle to getting an appointment scheduled.

This is when it occurred to Chris that small businesses, especially those that didn’t have the luxury of dedicated phone staff, were probably losing out on a significant amount of business. With a background in online marketing she felt that service providers who have a website aren’t getting full value if their clients still have to pick up the phone. Consumers are beginning to expect that they can do everything on the web and they really want to be able to schedule appointments online too. So Chris decided to make it her mission to help small businesses serve their clients better by enabling easy and affordable online appointment scheduling.

After looking at some of the scheduling software that was already on the market, Chris and her team noticed that many of the existing solutions were un-intuitive and hard to use. Small businesses need to focus their time and energy on providing great service and taking care of clients, not figuring out how to use some software. So the Full Slate team set out to make the friendliest possible scheduling solution – for both businesses and their clients. For example, one drawback with some of the existing solutions is that clients of a business need to register and create and account before they can schedule an appointment. Recognizing that many clients would be turned off by this extra step, Full Slate chose to make registration optional for the clients. One more challenge the Full Slate team observed with the other solutions was that they were simply unattractive. To quote Chris directly “If I am a business and I offer online scheduling for my clients, I want this to be something that looks good, that I am proud to show my clients.”

Full Slate released the first version of its web-based scheduling software to the public in early 2009. The company chose to focus specifically on the Health and Alternative Medicine providers – like Massage clinics, Hair Salons, Acupuncture and Chiropractic clinics – wanting to do a great job for these businesses before considering others. Their strategy seems to be paying off handsomely. Chris shared with me that there has been more than a handful of users that have offered to start paying for the service even before the end of the trial period. Now that’s a testament that users are getting a lot of value from the software!

Chris says most businesses that sign up for Full Slate find that after a few months, up to 70% of their appointments shift to being booked online, which translates into huge time savings. There was one client, an acupuncturist, that had actually begun to resent her clients because she was so stressed with the administrative aspects of the practice. Full Slate completely alleviated her stress. In an email to Full Slate, the acupuncturist raved about how she went on vacation and upon returning, had lots of new appointments that her clients had booked online through Full Slate.

Another thing that users often say about Full Slate is that it feels “Mac like”. That’s a serious compliment because Apple does a great job of making software easy to use and it means something to be compared to Apple. The team at Full Slate prides itself on providing personalized customer support and tries to talk to every new business that signs up. This really makes a difference and re-assures the small business owners that there are real people at Full Slate, available and willing to help if and when there are any questions.

So what should you do if you are intrigued and wanting to learn more? Just go to their website and sign up for a free trial of online scheduling. The trial is not time-based. Rather it lets you explore and test all features fully and you can use the software for free up to the point where 10 clients have booked online appointments. After that, there is a very affordable plan to keep using the software. This is a nice way to try out online scheduling because when you see your clients actually using it, then you truly grasp the value of the software. Full Slate also offers a live tour for a fictitious massage clinic at http://massage.fullslate.com. So, without sounding like a broken record, if you have ever considered online appointment scheduling for your clients, now you have no excuse NOT to do it. If you do try out Full Slate, come back and share your experience on this blog!

All the best,
Larisa Goldin,
Find Touch Co-founder

Where to get your Professional Liability Insurance

“What’s the best place to get my liability insurance?” I think I have heard this question more often than any other since I graduated from massage school in 2002. Insurance is insurance. Some therapists go with one insurer over another because of additional benefits offered, for example by an AMTA membership. But, some of us are just looking for the best deal.

So, for those that want to do their own shopping, here is a list of masage insurance carriers currently known to me. I hope you find this helpful:

ABMP
Affinity Insurance Services
American Massage Council
AMTA
Hands On Trades
IMA

New Training Center offers affordable CEUs and More

So, this bit of information just floated into my email that I thought was great stuff and must be shared with all the dedicated massage therapists in the Northwest.

There is this new organization called Therapeutic Training Center, Inc. that is dedicated to bringing high quality additional training opportunities to us manual therapy workers. Check them out at http://www.theratraining.com/

Notable are the instructors themselves. These are heavyweights from the Seattle massage scene including, Pat Archer, Brian Utting and Julie Bacon. And the pricing for the different classes is completely reasonable, ranging from $80 to $260.

I also couldn’t help but notice, this organization also makes efforts on behalf of traveling therapists that come to the area to take classes, helping them find a place to stay during their visit.

Yes, it’s nice to see an entity like this pop-up and I hope you all will take time to check out their website soon. Again it’s at http://www.theratraining.com/

Be well!

Getting Visibility on FindTouch as an LMP

First off,

thanks to all the wonderful massage therapists around Seattle that have already started using Find Touch for extra work opportunities. It’s so exciting to see this service taking off and to be learning from you.

While it’s still early on, we have also heard back from Employers on what they look for in considering who to hire for their temp jobs. So I am sharing this feedback below

  1. A photo. Hiring managers say they are ‘more comfortable’ with candidates where they can put a face together with the background info.
  2. Work History. This is a must. If you leave this information out, intended or not, it may be perceived by employers that you are hiding information. So take a minute to list your relevant work experience.
  3. Educational History. CEUs give employers confidence in where your bodywork interest or expertise really lie – spa work, energy work, working with athletes, or treatment/medical massage, etc… Make sure to highlight your CEUs. Also, list your collegiate or advanced degrees. These make you stand out.

So there you go. These are the top 3 things Employers look at when deciding who to work with. Hope this is helpful!

– Lara

Announcing Find Touch Service Beta Release!

We are pleased to announce the Beta release of Find Touch – new online job marketplace for the Massage industry.

Find Touch makes it easy for Massage Employers and Massage Professionals to connect for short-notice work opportunities. It provides Employers with a smart search mechanism to quickly locate Massage Professionals based on job requirements such as modality practiced, years in practice or minimum hourly rate of compensation. Find Touch communicates with Professionals and Employers by Email and Text Messages to shorten the communication cycles involved in a job match, recognizing that time is of the essence when trying to staff same day job openings.

Massage Professionals use Find Touch to build a profile that Employers see and to maintain their Calendar availability so that Find Touch knows which jobs match their schedule. They then receive job invitations and notifications about publicly posted jobs for which they can apply.

The Find Touch Beta release involves no transaction charges, but is otherwise is a fully functioning version of the service with core functionality enabled. Find Touch Beta is being made available in the greater Seattle area and is accepting new registrations from Seattle-based businesses and licenced massage therapists interested in trying out the service.
Those interested to learn more or to register should visit the company’s website at https://www.findtouch.com/

Welcome!

Hey there!

In our new ‘blogsphere’ age, there seem to be a zillion blogs for just about any topic you can think of. But not many I have discovered that provide a convenient and open forum for us, Massage Therapists, to talk about issues facing our profession, to share tips and best practices.

As the saying goes, ‘if you can’t find it, create it,’ and so, as a massage therapist and co-founder of Find Touch, I wanted to help create this missing place of connection to bolster our massage community.

One question that has been on my mind lately is this – What makes for a good place to work? I mean when you apply for a job at a spa or medical office your resume says something about you, but what about the flip side? If we were to request a ‘resume’ from a prospective employer, what information would be on it – good pay, clean space? What else? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Welcome and I look forward to hearing from you!