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How to Continue to Manage & Grow Your Business

Many clinicians have been asking for more information on how to cultivate now growth in your business. It's never a bad time of year to be planning to cultivate new growth. It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting out in practice, or if you have been in business for a while to get the best results, you will need to have a clearly developed plan. I realize it’s not sexy, or very complicated, it isn’t a magic pill or button to push. It just requires a little bit of time and thought. So, how do you do this? I talk about this all time; start with an end in mind. Many of our clients when we first start working with them, we have to spend some time in the beginning figuring out what it is they want to achieve both short term and long term and what is the final result you want. Even if you have been in practice for 15 years and you feel like you need a change. Really think about what you want to achieve.

Many clinicians have been asking for more information on how to cultivate now growth in your business. It's never a bad time of year to be planning to cultivate new growth. It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting out in practice, or if you have been in business for a while to get the best results, you will need to have a clearly developed plan. I realize it’s not sexy, or very complicated, it isn’t a magic pill or button to push. It just requires a little bit of time and thought. So, how do you do this? I talk about this all time; start with an end in mind. Many of our clients when we first start working with them, we have to spend some time in the beginning figuring out what it is they want to achieve both short term and long term and what is the final result you want. Even if you have been in practice for 15 years and you feel like you need a change. Really think about what you want to achieve.


Time and time again, we have seen business owners who jump in and start “doing” projects without thinking it through. Ultimately what starts happening is you get so busy “doing” things you might see some initial growth at first, but inevitably it stagnates and pretty soon you find yourself working harder and harder and going nowhere. You are stretched so thin and it isn’t that each project isn’t a great idea, it’s just that you are only one person or you might have others around you working but you are all just so busy working “in” your business instead of “on” your business that you aren’t getting the results you really want. So, before you get to a breaking point or worse yet, burnt out- ready to quit, force yourself to just stop. Take a breath and really start to focus on what is it you enjoy doing in life. This is so stinking simple that most of us try to make it too difficult when the answer is really simple. What do I enjoy doing more than anything else in the world? And that answer, no matter what it is, is what you should be doing. Now, I would assume for the majority reading this letter, the answer might be something similar to helping clients feel better. To which I ask, and how do you do that? For you, one way might be giving a massage, a hot stone massage or paraffin dip for their hands or cranial sacral work; for me that could mean setting up a Facebook campaign or writing a series of auto-responders, or redesigning a website or sharing my thoughts in a new book. Whether it is a massage & bodywork or marketing we all have something in life that brings us the most pleasure when we perform it and ultimately helps our clients feel better. And that is what each of us should be doing daily – nothing else.

Why do I need a plan? How is that going to help me? Well, consider this, you start a massage, you have an end result in mind, right? You want to make the client feel better and you have a series of steps or procedures you go through to get there. Depending on your training you may start at the head or feet, but the point is you have a series of steps you do every time. You have measurements in place to ensure you are going to achieve your result. You ask the client “how’s the pressure?” You can feel the restrictions and when necessary you ask the client to breath or you employ a stretch or adjust your angle to be able to achieve the result. And hopefully, you start to feel the restriction give way you can tell that you are getting the results you want. So, take on that same mindset when you are approaching your business. What do you want your end result to be? Do you want to expand to a 20 room massage clinic? Do you want 5 clinics in the city? Do you want to build the business up to a sustainable income and be able to sell it? Do you want to just maintain your current status and income and be able to continue working the same amount of hours for the next 15 years? What is your desired result? In order for you to start cultivating new growth, you have to first understand what kind of growth are you talking about and what you want to do and where you want the business to go? To help you organize this into a format here are some steps.

Step 1: Start by compiling a list of where your massage practice is today: Be specific, how many clients you have, where you work, how many hours a week, what is your cost per treatment, what does it cost to get a new client? What is the initial value of a client and what is the life time value of a client?

Step 2: List where you want to be and be specific about it. How many clients do you want to have? How many hours to you want to work? Where do you want to work? In a perfect day, what would happen? Include all variables of your business: personal, professional and financial.

Step 3: Imagine it is one year from today: List out what must have happened personally, professionally and financially to have made this the BEST year ever and describe what happened.

Step 4: Ask yourself what is the main challenge keeping you from achieving that goal (the best year ever)? If there is more than one challenge, keep making a list until you have all the challenges listed.

Step 5: Review the list of challenges and identify the possible solutions for each of the challenges. If you don’t know a specific solution to the challenge then list a solution that might help you achieve that solution. For example, you may need a website but you don’t know how to build a website or even who to go to find a person to build one , so who are you going to ask or what are you going to do to potentially find the solution (Ask friends? Look online for reviews? Ask your instructor? The point is, to list the best solution or a way in which you can get a solution to the challenge).

Step 6: Separate the solutions into categories identifying them as things you can do, things you should be doing and things for someone else to do. (Keeping in mind those things you should be doing are the things you enjoy doing the most!) There may be things you “can” do yourself, however, you need to evaluate if that is the BEST use of your time management or money and how quickly you want to achieve your goal. The best result for the “can” do list might be to move them to the list for someone else to do.

Step 7: Prioritize your solutions by way of how each will help you make next year the BEST year ever! Which items do you need to do first in order to achieve your goal?

When you complete this exercise, you should have a complete action plan in front of you. Now that you have the action plan we can start working on the individual components. So, here is the challenge. Submit your list of challenges that are for “someone else to do” and we will start outlining how to help you with each one on a monthly basis. Depending on the response, we may be able to help several in the same month or several of you might have the same challenge. I will be happy to offer my assistance, insight and support. I look forward to working with you to help make 2014 the BEST year ever for all of us! - See more at: http://www.customcraftworks.com/learn/blog/how-to-build-manage-your-business-in-2014.aspx#sthash.Jg1xdoqb.dpuf