Bethany Ward
Bethany Ward, MBA, BCSICM, CARTM, is a Rolf Movement® practitioner and instructor at the Rolf Institute® of Structural Integration. This October she presented “Creating a Thriving Practice: One that’s easier, more fun, and self-sustaining” in Melbourne, Australia at the Annual Conference of the Association of Massage Therapists, Ltd. She splits her time between her private practice in Durham, NC, teaching internationally, and writing about bodywork. She is past- president and current advisor to the Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation.
Surviving is important, thriving is elegant.
— Maya Angelou
successful practice, like a successful structural integration session, is more than a combination of techniques. I submit that our beliefs about business and money often color the way we build and maintain our practices. Perhaps the reason we came to this work—to help, educate, and facilitate transformation—makes it feel wrong to look at it through a financial lens. Is it wrong to make money from transformation?
This article looks at how beliefs about money and work can either help our practices flourish or keep them wispy. I also discuss my personal experience with a variety of common marketing techniques, hopefully evoking some fresh ideas along the way. Lastly, I’ll discuss one of my favorite practice- building techniques and specific ways to make it work for you.
Beliefs
When it comes to the body, we understand that function needs to be integrated. If the talus is unable to glide, the rest of the system must compensate and grace and ease is diminished. It’s no different with your business. Your business is a system. For it to perform well, your beliefs, policies, service, and relationships—every aspect of your business—needs to work seamlessly. They need to be integrated. If there is a part of you that feels that talking about money and structural integration in the same sentence diminishes our calling, then that belief isn’t integrated with providing excellent service.
Why? Because you won’t be able to provide decades of top-level bodywork when your business isn’t profitable. It just isn’t sustainable.
Unproductive beliefs about money may show up in obvious ways like not charging what your time is worth or be less apparent like a pattern of unconscious decisions that hamper creating a sustainable practice. Either way, it’s worth considering how you perceive money and what it means to own a thriving business.
Ask Yourself Why
Why would you want a busy practice? Your first response might be, “To make a living,” or for many new structural integrators, “To pay back loans.” These are excellent reasons to pursue a full appointment book. But keep asking the question, and the list gets juicier.
Seeing lots of clients allows us to help more people. But what about you? What do you get? Well, a full calendar:
Develop Your Skills
Of course, developing your skills is a life-long pursuit that can’t be crammed into a few weeks or months.
Each of us has our own timetable for integrating experience. But, we also need a fair amount of input to optimize our learning curve. We need enough samples to allow us to compare, contrast, and develop our awareness. For example, when we learn to feel layers in the body, we start out with a vague conceptual understanding of the concept. But as we hold this understanding when we work, comparing different types of tissue within and among hundreds of clients, distinctions emerge. Especially in the early years of a structural integration career, having access to many clients provides the extensive sampling needed to develop your spectrum of touch, body- reading, and relational skills. Furthermore, refining these areas informs your intuition—perhaps the greatest bodywork skill of all.
Freedom to Choose How You Spend Non-Working Time
Conflicted beliefs about money hamper practice development. If you get queasy when you talk about profiting from your work, it may be your definition of money. Consider that money is simply a convenient, transferable representation of energy. A dollar bill [Euro, shekel, real, pound, or yen] is something we accept in exchange for our energy and talents. It represents energy we expended. And we give it to someone else in exchange for the same. Money is energy.
Often, a full practice means a little extra money. Again, this representation of our energy and efforts gives us options. We can trade it for products or services that we don’t want to create or perform ourselves, or activities that might take a lot longer to perform than the time it would take to earn the same amount of money in our studios. A full practice allows us to have more control of how we use our time.
Especially in the early years of a structural integration career, having access to many clients provides the extensive sampling needed to develop your spectrum of touch, body-reading, and relational skills.
But the best part of having a full practice is that you can do as much continuing education as you like. Continuing education keeps you fired up about your work, and your clients feel it. If you regularly go to trainings, your clients benefit doubly: They receive work that is continuously improving, from a practitioner who is enthusiastic about the craft. There is no better practice building technique than to nurture your love for this work. When you do, people feel it, they send referrals, your practice keeps growing, you have more options . . . You get the point.
Grow Our Profession
When you have a practice like that, you’re helping all of us. Some of you have worked with clients who have had amazing structural integration experiences. Those clients talked to their brother, mother, or friend in my area and told them to find a local practitioner. Then, they called me. Thank you! I get to repay the kindness when I help clients find some of you. Thriving practices are a way to make our work more available to more clients.
Profitable practices equate to much more than dollar signs. Full practices provide the lab where we hone our skills, add flexibility and options to our daily lives, allow us to feed our passion, and grow our profession as a whole.
Building Your Practice
I have a favorite practice building approach that I don’t hear discussed very much. It helped me create a steady twenty-client-per-week practice in six months. A couple months later, I was seeing 25 clients weekly with a six-week waiting list. This article initially reviews several approaches and techniques for building a clientele, ending with a deeper exploration into one approach that is extremely effective but often overlooked.
If we believe it is okay to want a thriving practice, how do we attain it? Here are some things to consider:
In my opinion, developing your craft is your very best form of practice building. The more skilled you are, the more clients refer others. Word-of-mouth is the most valuable form of marketing. But, until you have a self-sustaining practice (and in many environments, this may never be possible), what other ways are there to build your practice?
Paid advertising
Paid advertising often has a low return on investment, so it’s rarely my first recommendation for practice building, but it can work well if the right elements are in place.
I have created two busy practices from scratch. My first practice was in medium-sized university town that wasn’t particularly close to a city. Except for the university, there weren’t a lot of employers in the town. Since my pool of potential clients was limited, I knew I would have to find my market. As it turned out, the practice grew fairly quickly thanks to a weekly ad in the Flagpole Magazine, a local music and events publication.
I have a favorite practice building approach that I don’t hear discussed very much. It helped me create a steady twenty-client-per-week practice in six months.
If you are going place a paid ad, find a publication that reaches the population in your immediate vicinity. I was in a university town so the publication I chose focused on that particular market. Secondly, make sure your ad speaks to a segment that wants and, dare I say it, can afford your services. (Note: Most of us are concerned about providing our services to those who need it, rather than only those who can afford it. Instead of being a low cost provider, my advice is to charge a little more for your services so you then have the flexibility to help special cases on an individual basis. Not to mention, if you make your fees too low, you may run the risk of burnout, which could result in you helping fewer people over the length of your career.)
If you do choose to place an ad, commit to a regular submission. Well over a decade ago, I bought a small ad every week in a local publication at what was the equivalent of one bodywork session per week. Although my monthly output was fairly significant, my ad generated two or three clients per week. That added up after a few weeks!
In addition to finding the proper publication, one of the reasons I think my ad worked was that I developed a recognizable look and layout but changed the content each time. You want people to start recognizing you by encountering your business on a recurring basis. For example, in my ad, the fonts and the main large copy, “What’s Rolfing®?” stayed the same. But, in each issue, I answered the question differently with a different quote about Rolfing. I suspect that people tended to return to see what changed each week. Of course, the ad directed them to my website where they could learn more.
Website
I designed my website to be informational—this has been a key part of my marketing strategy over the years. Initially, I wanted to provide a resource for clients to learn about structural integration, but the approach had additional benefits. First, my comprehensive website lent credibility. Second, it saved me a bunch of time on the phone because I no longer had to answer a lot of questions for new clients.
Invest your time upfront creating a website that is easy to navigate, is uncluttered, and responds to client needs. It will develop the way you talk about the work, and it will require you to clarify policies, procedures, and boundaries. This exercise in itself will strengthen your business model, creating a better experience for your clients and ultimately improving your bottom line.
Printed marketing materials
It always helps to keep printed marketing materials low-cost and flexible. Being able to design and layout your own materials means they can be living documents that allow for experimentation and ongoing development. With today’s inexpensive high-quality printers, you can create professional looking materials for very little money. But make sure you spend time editing and attending to design detail—the brochure represents you.
In addition to trifold brochures, I created small page-sized posters that had a pocket for my business cards and hung them in organic grocers, coffee shops, and other establishments that attracted my target market. I designed all of my materials with meaningful images, clear copy, and as much whitespace as possible. The fewer the words, the clearer your message, and the more likely it will be read.
Workshops
I also taught informational workshops at health food stores, health fairs, and running clubs. Although these were fun and excellent practice for learning to speak about structural integration, they were time- consuming and never really produced a lot of work for me. It seemed that the people who attended these gatherings were seeking low-cost entertainment and didn’t turn into clients. Of course, different things work well in different situations, so these kinds of workshops might be just the ticket for you. Or, you may simply do them for your own professional development—learning to speak confidently and intelligently about our work is another powerful element in practice building. And, from that perspective, community speaking engagements will always be an excellent use of your time.
Social Media
Obviously, the wave of the future in marketing is social media. This is a vast area and beyond the scope of this article. But the concepts—identifying and connecting with your target market and providing meaningful information that’s easy to use—stay the same.
Let’s talk a little more about your target market. People tend to think this is determined by the product or service being offered. Although somewhat true, for many small business people, your market depends on you. When I started my first practice, I used pretty traditional forms of marketing and advertising, and I worked with whoever came to my door. I was new and this approach worked well. It gave me the experience I needed to start developing my skills.
When I decided to move to a large city, I set a goal to intentionally create the practice of my dreams.
Before I relocated, I sat with pen and paper and asked myself:
For more ideas along this line, I highly recommend the book, Building Your Ideal Private Practice: A Guide for Therapists and Other Healing Professionals by Lynn Grodzki.
Let’s face it. Not all clients are created equal, and none of us are interested in, or suited to, working with all individuals. When you identify the types of clients that you find it thrilling to work with—and those that you find less so—you can make marketing and advertising decisions that bring you more of the “fun” clients.
Although some of you may sigh a little when another “Type A” client walks in the door, I have to admit, I tend to really enjoy working them!
Why wouldn’t I? I get them! Although some practitioners find these individuals a bit annoying or unenlightened, in my eyes, they’re often highly motivated, proactive, disciplined, and eager to learn. They tend to like homework and give me good feedback. I even like that they come in skeptical and asking a lot of questions. It pushes me to keep improving my knowledge and ability to communicate what I do.
Granted, some clients on the far end of the Type A spectrum may not have any interest in exploring movement or verbalizing somatic observations. But, for the most part, they come over to my side. Maybe it’s because I understand their perspective and can reframe goals in their language. When I teach someone like this how important it is to breathe, or feel weight, or experience her Line, I feel like I’ve revealed an entirely new world to them. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me jazzed about the work!
Of course, this is just a segment of my practice. But it’s helpful to know this about myself as a practitioner. My soul searching also uncovered a deep interest in working with scoliosis, as well as a preference for working with adults.
My Favorite Marketing Technique Understanding my target market may have influenced me to pick up a copy of a local start-up publication, Endurance Magazine. The monthly journal was created for endurance athletes—runners, cyclists, swimmers, and triathletes (a goal-oriented and highly disciplined segment, for sure). Knowing how valuable structural integration can be for these individuals, I contacted the editor about writing an article explaining what Rolfing is and how athletes can use it to improve performance.
The editor took me up on my offer and I submitted an article that outlined the Rolfing Ten Series, summarizing how the goals of each session could benefit athletes (Figure 1). It was a stand- alone article, but it was well received so the editor asked me about writing more. I suggested I devote an article to each of the ten structural integration sessions, exploring a related concept more fully.
The idea was a success and before long, my articles became known as the magazine’s bodywork column.
I learned that writing articles was an extremely cost-effective way to generate clients. It costs nothing but your time, and it works better than ad placement. Writing is often better than placing advertising for several reasons.
People Pay More Attention to Articles
Although I wrote my articles for free, I also bought a regular ad in Endurance Magazine. I wanted to support the publication, though I suspected that my articles generated more clients than the ads. New clients often mentioned my articles, and I usually received three to five new clients every time an issue hit the stands. My suspicions were supported one month when I included a coupon in my ad. To my amazement, my new clients mentioned and even brought in my article—but not a single one clipped the coupon or asked for the discount!
Readers Trust You as a Source Additionally, an article takes up more visual space and holds a reader’s attention longer than an ad.
Figure 1. A stand-alone article, summarizing how the goals of structural integration sessions are relevant to athletes, turned into a regular gig: the Body Work column in Endurance magazine.
Although it isn’t always the case, the public tends to view authors as credible sources and published articles as relatively unbiased—especially if the topic is educational.
Where I live, there are health publications and radio shows providing seemingly unbiased information from chiropractors, dentists, and more. I discovered this while being courted to do a regular radio show on structural integration. Near the end of the discussion, I asked about payment and was told, “Compensation would be $600 per show.” I was willing to do it for free, so I was delighted—until I realized that the radio station was expecting me to pay them!
For years, I had been listening to health- oriented radio shows that were actually half-hour advertisements. These outfits are able to convince professionals to provide all of their content and pay for the privilege. How is this possible? Because mass communication brings credibility.
I turned down the radio show opportunity and have never paid anyone to place an article. In my experience, journal and website editors are hungry for good copy. If you are willing to look a little harder, and if you provide information that educates, elucidates, and entertains, there are many excellent venues.
Writing That Builds Your Practice: Things You Should Consider
The Readership
If you want your articles to bring in clients, make sure you’re writing for a publication that gets into the hands of local readers. A local print publication may reach more potential clients than a larger publication with a wider readership. With online articles, this is different, but still make sure your intended market is included among its readers.
A great way to make articles keep working for you is to post them on your website. This creates instant credibility. Also, consider sending articles to clients and colleagues. Sending copies of articles to local acupuncturists, yoga teachers, chiropractors, and more can help them learn more about our field and how it might support what they do. Even sending articles you didn’t write can be a particularly effective way to develop relationships with professionals who might refer to you. This kind of networking is low effort, but increases communication and fosters community among practitioners in your area.
Regularity
Like any form of marketing or advertising, repetition is key. One article is nice, but regular submissions are infinitely more valuable. If you provide good content, readers will look for you. Even if they don’t read your articles, they’ll have a sense of the kind of material you write about and start considering you as a specialist. They may not need you now, but will remember you in the future.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, a regular submission to an ongoing publication could build your practice. You might consider a small Tips and Techniques piece in which you only write 100 words, but you teach something in each issue about posture or body use. Or perhaps you draw well and you’d rather create a comic. Just make sure you find a regular venue that speaks to your market, teach something useful, and provide contact information.
Figures 2 and 3. Take a single concept or idea and explore it. After I wrote an article about hamstring tightness due to shortened quadriceps, I realized I should have given readers something they could do to affect this. Eureka! A topic for my follow-up article.
Information That Can be Used Immediately If you write articles that read like a long advertisement about structural integration (SI) or your services, you’ll lose your audience. If you’re going to have a regular presence in a printed or digital magazine, you must commit to educating readers. In the immortal words of motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Once you’ve made sure that you’re writing for a publication that reaches your intended audience, forget about practice building. As a structural integration practitioner, you have an enormous amount of information that can significantly improve peoples’ lives—and you’ll probably be sharing information that is completely new to them.
This is what’s so great about writing from an SI perspective: We have a wealth of information that the average reader knows nothing about. You’ll never run out of content. There is so much to share that can make people’s lives better. Write about the fascial matrix, tensegrity, why the foot should be flexible, how movement affects structure, better sitting, the iliopsoas, scar tissue, viewing the body as system— whatever you’re fascinated with at the time.
I recommend teaching one concept per article. For example, in an article discussing hip flexors, I shared an interesting tidbit—how tension in the rectus femoris can contribute to tight hamstrings—and then I discussed the consequences for readers (Figure 2). After I wrote the article, I realized that I wanted to give readers information about ways they could mitigate this. So I followed up the next month with an article (Figure 3) about how to stretch quads to affect posture.
I learned from this, and created a loose formula for future submissions. Figure 4 demonstrates how I:
I never told readers to give me a call, or that structural integration would solve all their problems. I wanted readers to take away a better understanding about their bodies. A simple byline at the end of each article stated that I was a Certified RolferTM (at the time) who worked in the area and provided my website and telephone number. If they wanted to contact me, they had the information.
Figure 4. As the months went by, the quality of the journal improved (better paper and the introduction of color) and so did my approach. By this time, I was developing a formula for my articles, which included a simple topic, relevance to readers, an experiential exercise, photos, and contact info.
We have very cool information to share. It isn’t necessary or productive to hard-sell. Write from a place of wanting to help, and people will find you to learn more. Of course, make sure you can be found easily on the internet and that all of your materials (website, brochures, cards, etc.) have contact information in an obvious location.
Include Photos
Your article will get more attention if you include images. Robert Schleip, PhD, one of our colleagues who excels at making fascia research accessible, coached me that although creating pictures may require 25% or more of your writing time, they’re also responsible for the majority of your exposure. When it comes to images, the payback is well worth the effort.
Writing an Article for the Yearbook
If your immediate goal is to fill your appointment book and create a practice that provides meaningful income and options to your life—and the clients needed to hone your manual skills—then focus on writing for local print and online publications. But when these basic needs are met, I strongly encourage writing for peer journals like the IASI Yearbook.
Writing for the Yearbook is an indirect form of practice building because it makes us better practitioners. Sharing ideas with our peers keeps the work vital. A well-researched and written article lends credibility to you as a practitioner and further enhances the way our field is perceived. It also improves the way you think and speak about structural integration. When you’re spending untold hours meeting a deadline instead of going out with friends, consider that writing is a self-imposed form of continuing education. In terms of both personal and professional development, I haven’t found a better return on investment.
Conclusion
Maya Angelou said, “Surviving is important, thriving is elegant.” Although our world often defines “thriving” as “graceful and stylish in appearance or manner,” I suspect she was talking about a less common definition. The Oxford Dictionaries define “thriving” as “pleasingly ingenious. Neat, simple, effective.” A well-run business is all of these. Our beliefs about our businesses can be just as lofty.
When we create neat, simple, and effective business structures and practices, we create sustainable environments where we can focus on personal development, public education, and growing our profession. It is through your own success that you will ultimately help the most people.
References
Angelou, M. (n.d.) www.goodreads.com/quotes/ 13334-surviving-is-important-thriving-is-elegant
Ziglar, Z. (n.d.). www.ziglar.com/quotes/ you-can-have-everything-life-you-want
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