Why did you decide to start your own practice?
I wanted to chase that ethereal work/life balance. Haven’t yet achieved it, but thought i would have a better chance than if I worked for someone else. Also I love making people happy, I get a real kick out of it, and what better way than by having a massage and beauty business! There is lots more information on what we do on our website.

What was the most difficult part about starting your business?
Probably juggling all the many things needed to make the business successful in the early years, doing all the book work, marketing, sales etc as well as doing all the massage treatments myself.

What’s the best part about starting your business?
Doing something that I love, creating something unique, and bringing in unique massage and beauty treatments from other countries and introducing them here to Australia. One of these was the chocolate massage which has become really popular and which I brought back from Spain.

What’s the best way you’ve found to market your business?
Word of mouth beats any other form of marketing. We aim to really provide exceptional customer service and exquisite treatments and making our guests happy. Our referral rate is really high from our clients as a result.

What sets you apart from other RMTs?
Probably our unique product and massage treatments and our customer service.

What are two pieces of advice you’d give to someone who’s considering starting their own practice?
Be prepared to work really hard and put in a lot of hours, and do something unique, don’t just be a pale imitation of another company.

What is the one thing you do with or for your clients to connect and create a deeper meaning in the work you do?
All the added treatments we put into our packages and our follow up with our clients.

You’re talking to ‘you’ five years from now. What would you tell yourself?
Relax! Keep doing what you are doing and you will be successful.

Alison is the owner of Ripple Massage, Day Spa and Beauty, a mobile day spa business in Australia that brings massage and beauty to your doorstep.

—
What have your experiences been starting a practice? Are there any people you’d like to hear interviewed? Other questions you’d like to know the answers to? Leave them in the comments!

If there are people you’d like to hear interviewed, or other questions you’d like us to ask, leave them in the comments and we’ll get on it!

Now, on to the amazing interview…

Why did you decide to start your own practice?
For a number of reasons. I felt I was ready to take on this type of challenge and had the right skills in place. Also, my partner and I were considering a move to about an hour north of where I was working at a chiropractic office so I wanted a location that was at least halfway between my current employer and my future home area. And when I thought about starting my own practice, I realized only fear was holding me back. That wasn’t a good reason!

What was the most difficult part about starting your business?
I have ADD so I would say organizing everything—every detail was my responsibility, which can be daunting for someone like me. It forced me not to procrastinate, to stay focused and on target, which ended up being a great learning experience. I had to find what worked for me, even, for example, in terms of keeping track of appointments. I had an electronic organizer/appointment keeper and even bought one specifically for massage therapists. But what works for me—because I use it—is a regular daily appointment book I bought at a bookstore.

I have ADD so I would say organizing everything—every detail was my responsibility, which can be daunting for someone like me. It forced me not to procrastinate, to stay focused and on target, which ended up being a great learning experience. I had to find what worked for me, even, for example, in terms of keeping track of appointments. I had an electronic organizer/appointment keeper and even bought one specifically for massage therapists. But what works for me—because I use it—is a regular daily appointment book I bought at a bookstore.

What’s the best part about starting your business?
Knowing it’s mine. I’ve worked for places where I felt things were missing in the client experience or things were not as professional as they could be. When I open the door to start the day and close it at the end, I know I set the pace, choose the quality of everything from lighting, music and linens to the quality of the client’s massage and healing experience. I know I am responsible for how every client feels when he/she leaves my office.(Most of whom schedule their next appointment on the spot.) It’s a big responsibility but I love it!

What’s the best way you’ve found to market your business?
My location. I pay a little more than I’d like but I’ve got built-in advertising in that I’m in a mixed use, renovated mill building (in a residential neighborhood that is quite diverse) with very cool businesses—coffee roaster/café, ballet school, Buddhist center. Neighboring businesses include a health food shop and a physical therapy/fitness office. The owners of the café and PT center let me put out all my brochures, and this has generated a lot of repeat, regular clients. There’s also a community billboard downstairs where I can post brochures and flyers, which has generated new business. Also, walking custom-made postcards door-to-door has helped. People like that they can walk to my office and that I’m supporting their neighborhood. So I was surprised to see that these free methods have been the most effective thus far.

And now word-of-mouth is starting to build. I’ve gained new clients from referrals from other clients—and even got a few from friends of people who received my postcard. The person who received the card hasn’t been in but she’s referred two friends!

I tried four weeks of ads in a local paper and a few months in a regional health journal. Neither generated more than a couple of new clients. I’ve also taken out an ad in a regional Catholic church’s bulletin—big mistake in terms of money outlaid and return on investment thus far.

What sets you apart from other RMTs?
A couple of things: I’m a long-term [kidney] cancer survivor and I am certified in oncology and post-mastectomy massage/supportive touch. Not many therapists in my area are certified in either area, nor do they have that sense of understanding first-hand some of the feelings such clients are dealing with. It’s like an instant connection many times. And being a survivor also seemed to resonate with clients who aren’t survivors themselves—they’re either going through a health crisis of their own or know cancer patients/survivors and kind of cheer me on.
Also, I’ve chosen to study modalities, in addition to the cancer-related modalities, that have broad application and/or broaden my capability to help clients. I am trained in CranioSacral Therapy, lymph drainage therapy and am a Reiki master, in addition to being a nationally and state certified massage therapist. Clients appreciate learning more about these options and how they can be helped by them.

What are two pieces of advice you’d give to someone who’s considering starting their own practice?
How about 3?

1. Have plenty of money set aside. I actually liquidated a going-nowhere 401K and took a small hit on it taxwise to start my business. But it gave me a sense of security when things were slow at first. (I am very grateful that even my first month, I was able to mostly cover my rent and some other expenses, and things have just gotten better from then on.)

1a. Get an accountant who understands sole proprietorships and what deductions one can take. I’ve had the same wonderful accountant for years—she does energy work too—and she was very helpful both in tax-specific details and small-business start-up ideas.

2. Be open-minded and flexible. Initially, I had planned to not have hours on Wednesday. But when someone called and urgently needed help, I worked on one Wednesday. Soon, Wednesday became one of my busiest days whereas I thought Saturday would be. So while I still have Saturday hours, I work less than I thought on that day of the week. I’ve found a way to meet my clients’ needs and keep some “me” time.

Also, I noticed that a client was a yoga instructor. Now we do twice-monthly trades of an hour massage for an hour of private one-on-one yoga instruction. Another client makes signs and we bartered sessions in exchange for great, professional-looking car magnets. And it’s been wonderful to get to know local business owners and be supportive of each other.

3. Be patient. Several people stressed this, and it is true! It could be hard not to chomp at the bit but things take time. But once clients discover you and like your work, they’re pretty loyal. I’ve had a couple of clients who’ve “followed” me from my first massage office to the second and now to my own practice.

What is the one thing you do with or for your clients to connect and create a deeper meaning in the work you do?
I listen—to their concerns, their needs on any given day, to what’s going on in their lives. And, as a result of that listening, I customize each session for them. I hear from a lot of clients that they had previously gone to such-and-such a place for a massage and been disappointed because the therapist either didn’t listen to them when they asked for a specific level of pressure or didn’t listen to what they specifically wanted worked on. I tell them it’s their massage and I am happy to make the experience the best, most relaxing and most therapeutically helpful as possible. It may sound corny, but people really appreciate being heard.

You’re talking to ‘you’ five years from now. What would you tell yourself?
Look how far you’ve come! I’m proud of you taking this challenge and with what you’ve done with it. Keep on growing as a massage therapist/bodyworker, keep finding new ways to help people. (And I’m glad you didn’t get talked into any other church bulletin ads! LOL)

If you could spend time with one other RMT to get hands on experience etc who would it be and why?
More bodywork done on myself! I never seem to get enough. I’d like to learn more myofascial release techniques.

Bryna Elder-Munro, NCTMB, is the owner of In Balance Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork, a massage therapy practice in Lambertville, New Jersey.

—
What have your experiences been starting a practice? Are there any people you’d like to hear interviewed? Other questions you’d like to know the answers to? Leave them in the comments!

If you’ve been delaying checking out Twitter, here’s why today is a good time for you to investigate how Twitter can help your business.

Useful technology services often go through a cycle:
1. Obscurity. Nobody but geeks – like us at EasyCal :) – use it.

2. Early hype. Your geek friends may tell you it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Some forward-thinking blogs might talk about how it’s useful for your business. You usually ignore this, which has proven to be a good move most of the time.

3. Media hype. It seems like you can’t turn on the TV, pick up a magazine, or read a website without hearing about the news media’s latest darling. You may feel like you’re missing out, but you’re still not convinced. And besides, your time is limited, and you’re busy enough as it is without having to investigate the media’s latest flavor of the week.

4. Acceptance. Verbs like “tweet” or (back in the day) “google” no longer elicit an eye-roll. The media’s moved on, but real people are seeing the power of embracing the tool to benefit their everyday lives. Maybe your elderly parents start asking you what this service is all about. You finally figure that it’s worth investigating, and you turn out to be right.

Twitter is now entering the fourth stage. Aside: if you want to know what Twitter is these guys explain Twitter in plain English amazingly well. If you don’t know how Twitter works, you should check out the 2 minute video – the rest of this post probably won’t make much sense.

Here are four reasons why Twitter can help your small business attract and retain new business.

1. You can directly reach customers when their intent to buy is high

When someone asks about getting a massage in San Francisco or an eyebrow wax in Calgary, you have an opportunity to pitch yourself. You probably want to be careful with this one. A direct pitch for your service can come off pretty aggressively. A much better approach is to teach your customers.

Here’s an example. In November, I tweeted out asking for things to do in New Zealand. Kirsten at Skydive Wanaka replied:

It just so happened that I was looking to skydive by the end of the year. Kirsten seemed cool and helpful, and replied to a few more of my tweets about planning my route in New Zealand. I ended up stopping by Wanaka and paying Kirsten and crew $525 to jump out of a plane (along with enjoying the delicious local microbrews and very cool Paradiso movie theater).

All because Kirsten took the few minutes to help me out.

Here’s a great post on using Twitter’s search feature to find leads when people have high intent to buy.

2. You can build relationships quickly

Here’s rule number one of Twitter: be helpful. If there’s someone you want to be noticed by, read a few of their tweets and learn about what they’re interested in. Figure out how you can help – is it an interesting article (not one that promotes you :) ), a recommendation you can provide, an intro you can make, feedback you can give, knowledge you can share, etc?

Just reply to them, get on their radar, start a conversation, and start building trust. It’s best to do this before you need anything. Remember, you’re not doing this in a tit-for-tat way; you’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do. But the awesome part is that when you’re helpful, people want to help you. Trust that it’ll come around and put yourself out there first!

3. Word of mouth is a tremendous marketing tool

I know you’re heard how awesome word of mouth is as a marketing tool. It helps you get customers at a near-zero cost. Here’s the awesome thing about Twitter – when you create a good experience for someone, *and* you’re on Twitter, people will be more likely to either:

a) talk *about* you by referencing your Twitter user account.
b) talk *to* you by sending a reply to your Twitter user account.

In most cases, when someone references your Twitter user account, every one of their followers learns about you.

Time for another example. My girlfriend Daniela, who gives facials in Vancouver, gave a facial to Natalie at Womanzworld. Natalie loved the facial and tweeted about it:

The awesome part for Daniela is that Natalie has 721 followers who just learned about her.

4. Social proof is killer for your business

When people have a conversation about how awesome you are, you benefit hugely – it reinforces the choices they’ve made to buy from you.

When they have that conversation on Twitter, all *their* followers not only hear about you, but hear *multiple* people raving about you.

In the above example, Natalie’s Twitter account is followed by another of Daniela’s clients, Angel.

Angel saw Natalie’s tweet and replied:

The social proof of how great Daniela’s services are was flying all over the place thanks to Natalie and Angel. And Twitter made it possible for the two of them to let their 1000+ followers know how they felt about Daniela’s business. Pretty powerful stuff that’s already led to two new clients.

How To Get Started

The nice thing is that you can dip your toe in the pool without having to commit a lot. Two great resources to get started:

1. Twitter’s official guide for businesses is a great starting point.

2. Matt McGee has 100+ Twitter business tips over on his blog. Check them out!

What about you? Do you have any Twitter success stories about your business? Would love to hear them in the comments!

If you liked this post, you should follow us on Twitter here – we’d love to hear from you!

Do you ask your customers about how you can improve the experience you provide?

How often do people tell you that you’re doing a good job?

It’s important for your business to be able to answer these questions. The last one in particular can be hugely rewarding and remind you of why you got into your business in the first place.

We’ve found a free, simple, and awesome tool to get feedback from customers.

It’s called Survey.io. All you do is enter your business details and contact info, and it creates a simple web survey that you can send out to your current customers (perhaps with a little incentive – a free service for one lucky survey respondent, or 15% off for responding).

Before we dig into it, you can see an example created survey here.

When you’ve got an existing clientele, I think these are the most interesting questions:

What would you likely use as an alternative if our product were no longer available?
This helps you understand your competitors. The cool part is that the way your customers think about (replacing) your service can be very different from how you think about it. Understanding how your customers think will help you understand the true value and benefits of the service you provide.

What is the primary benefit that you have received from our product?
This helps you understand the benefits your customers get from your service in their words, not yours. You might be surprised at how your customers describe the benefits they get from your business! And if you notice a lot of your customers describing your business using specific wording, it’s probably a good idea to incorporate this language into your marketing materials.

Have you recommended our product to anyone? If so, please explain how you described it.
Two important things to learn here. First, word-of-mouth referrals are highly correlated with customer loyalty (for more insight here, read about Net Promoter Scores). Word of mouth marketing is the cheapest marketing you can do and it’s dependent on having a great product or service worth talking about.

Second, as with the previous question, it helps you understand how your customers talk about your business and the benefits they get from it. You can use this to underscore the difference between your service and your competitors’.

What type of person do you think would benefit most from our product?
This helps you understand whether there’s a whole new class of potential customers out there that you haven’t even thought about. It’s the beauty of having a whole bunch of people with varied experiences and backgrounds use your product!

How can we improve our product to better meet your needs?
This is a no-brainer :) A friend of mine used this tool recently and 95% of customers gave him the same piece of feedback – his price was too high. It’s important to take this with a grain of salt, but that’s a pretty overwhelming pattern and worth seriously considering. The crazy part is that if he hadn’t asked, he never would have found out!

I highly recommend checking out Survey.io. It’s super simple, gives you valuable insight into your customers, and the price is right!

We’re in the process of applying for a merchant account so we can take online payments for EasyCal. While doing so, we’ve learned a few interesting things about the kinds of charges you might face and we thought we’d share (of course, you can also take payments in person without a merchant account :) ).

A quick lesson – a payment gateway lets you take payments over the web, while a merchant account is where funds “settle” when a customer pays you. You then transfer those funds from your merchant account to your business banking account at your bank.

Also – I’ve included a free spreadsheet that can help you compare merchant account providers when you’re making a decision.

Background

We spoke to four different companies in the US and Canada that provide both payment gateways and merchant accounts. Only one – the company we went with – was completely up-front about their fees. The others quoted one fee on the phone, but their contract contained a bunch of other add-on fees.

Since we’re in Vancouver, Canada, we were looking for a company that would provide both US and Canadian merchant accounts.

Hopefully this is useful, but as usual, your mileage may vary – be sure to read the fine print of any contract you sign. :)

What Credit Cards?

All providers we spoke with would let us take Visa and Mastercard off the bat. American Express had a separate application process and separate fees, but all the companies we spoke with would help us apply to accept AmEx.

Setup Fees

Standard Setup Fee

Every company we spoke with charged a setup fee. These ranged from $50 to about $150.

Credit Card Registration Fee

Some companies charged another few bucks (generally about $50) as application fees for Visa and Mastercard.

Recurring Fees

Standard Monthly Fee

Every company we spoke with charged a monthly fee, ranging from $19.99 to $29.99. Seems reasonable – you let me take credit card payments, I pay you for the service.

Statement and Funding Fee

A few companies we spoke with charged about $10 per month to provide a monthly statement and to move funds from our merchant account to our regular business bank account.

Hardware Fees

Some companies required us to pay another dollar or two per month to send us a physical device so we could take credit cards in case the internet decided to take a nap. Since we’ll probably charge for EasyCal on a recurring monthly basis, it doesn’t make much sense for us to have hardware lying around but I suppose it could make a good paperweight.

Transaction Fees

Every provider had a per-transaction fee they charged us. Generally these ranged from 15c to 25c per transaction.

With a few providers, Mastercard charged another 12.5c if a non-Canadian credit card was used to buy a product from a Canadian merchant.

Percentage Fees

You pay a percentage of every transaction to your merchant account provider. The bulk of this fee is called the “discount rate” (see below). In this section I’ll detail other percentage-based fees that merchant account providers may ding you with.

I found these to be the most opaque set of fees. A few times, I got the sales reps to go through the whole fee schedule line by line and tell me exactly what these fees were for because it wasn’t clear.

A note: if you’re taking taking foreign credit cards these fees can add up.

Here are some of the fees we ran across:

Discount Rate

This is the fee you pay your merchant account provider. It’s the percentage of a sale and, especially when you’re doing a high volume of transactions, will comprise your largest payment processing cost. For example, if you sell a product for $100, and you have a 3% discount rate, you pay $3 to your merchant account provider.

Assessment Fee

I’m not sure what this is, but I was assured by multiple sales reps that this was a fee from Visa and Mastercard they were generously passing on to us. Generally this was 0.1% of the transaction.

Cross-border assessment fee

Good times being a Canadian business and taking foreign credit cards. Visa didn’t feel the need to slap its merchants with this, but Mastercard charges anywhere from 0.4% to 0.8% on any transactions made with a foreign credit card.

Non-qualification transaction fee

A “qualified” credit card is a basic Visa or Mastercard with no frills.

A non-qualified card is one that offers incentives for customers to use it; perhaps it offers air miles, or cash back, or reward points. When one of your customers pays you using a non-qualified card, Visa and Mastercard recoup the cost of having to provide that customer with air miles or cash back by charging you an additional fee. Typically this was about 1% of the transaction cost and occurs (according to sales reps) on about 25% of transactions.

Other Fees

Minimum Monthly Discount Fee

This isn’t an additional fee, but is something to be aware of when you’re starting out and transaction volumes might not be that high. This fee assures MC and Visa that they will make at least this amount from your business in discount fees. In other words, if the discount rate fees you pay MC or Visa amount to less than the minimum monthly discount fee, you pay the minimum monthly discount fee.

For example, let’s say your minimum monthly discount fee is $10. If your discount rate is 2.5% (you pay Visa and MC $2.5 for every $100 billed), you wouldn’t pay Visa $10 in discount fees until you sell $400 worth of goods and services. But Visa and MC will charge you the minimum monthly discount fee even if you don’t sell $400 worth of stuff, to make sure they’re getting their $10.

Cancellation / Deconversion Fee

Are you signing a long-term contract? Do you want to? Some providers would charge us a “deconversion” fee if we cancelled before our contract was up.

Who Did We Use?

We ended up going with Beanstream, a provider based in Victoria, BC. They had reasonable rates, transparent pricing with no hidden costs, good service, no contract, and good technical documentation (which might not be important for you).

Free Spreadsheet

I’ve published a spreadsheet that will help you compare and calculate merchant account provider feeds on Google Docs.

What Do You Think?

How about you? Do you have any more lessons about hidden merchant account fees to share?

In this article, I’ll show you how.

The world has changed, and that makes traditional ways of promoting your business less effective. Nobody wants to listen to you tooting your own horn. But they *do* want to have their questions answered. And if you answer their questions, they’ll trust you.

Trust is thus the goal of marketing. Long-term relationships are much more beneficial for *both* parties than a transaction is.

So what’s the best way to build trust with potential customers?

Instead of promoting yourself, teach your readers. The best way to reach your readers is to post articles to your blog (which you can set up on Blogger or WordPress). When you consistently post articles that teach, people will become curious about who you are and what you do, and will seek to learn what you do. This is much more valuable to you and your customers than “targeting” your customers with “campaigns” that have your “message” (is this business, or war?!)

When you teach, your articles are more likely to be passed on to potential customers, more likely to be found and ranked highly by Google (which means more potential customers to your site for months or even years), and people who read them are more likely to trust you as an expert in your field.

Here’s an example. If you were looking for a massage therapist and found one who wrote about the difference between deep tissue and shiatsu, what the advantages of thai massage are, and how to lessen shoulder and neck pain when working at a computer all day, wouldn’t you be more inclined to trust them over one who just had a static website?

The benefit of teaching people about what you love doing is that you have a natural passion and ability to talk about it. You’re not promoting yourself directly, but you’re building something even more valuable than a transaction – you’re building relationships with hundreds or thousands of potential new clients.

In other words, when you teach, you’re marketing yourself in a smart way that will build returns for your business for a long, long time.

What about you? Have you found teaching to be beneficial to your business? What have you found to be effective or not so much?

Neither of us are graphic designers, so we investigated our options: we could get a known quantity in an expensive graphic designer, go cheaper but probably less awesome, or use a creative services marketplace like 99Designs or CrowdSpring.

These marketplaces let you post a contest for a custom design (like a logo, website redesign, blog design, etc) and offer the winner some prize money. You pay the prize money and a listing fee to the marketplace website when you post the contest. If you don’t pick a winner, you get the prize money back, but the marketplace keeps the listing fee.

Since we’re building on blood, sweat, and tears, we wanted the best bang for our buck. We posted a contest on 99designs with a prize of $150, plus a $54 listing fee that went to 99designs itself, and waited in excitement for the designs to pour in.

We weren’t disappointed. Though the contest lasted seven days, the logo we chose was a revision of the very first logo that was submitted. We had 20+ logos to choose from. It was exciting to wake up every day, see the latest logos, and provide feedback for the designers to tweak their logos to our liking.

When the contest ended, we picked our favorite. Several things happen after that:

1. the winning designer sends us all the necessary files
2. the designer and purchaser both sign a transfer of copyright ownership
3. the funds get released to the winning designer

It was easy as pie, and such a great experience and we’ll definitely use them again when we need some good quality design work done on the cheap. We found that It’s a great option when you’re starting up a business and don’t have a lot of money.

Oh, and the winning logo? Here it is, let us know what you think! :)

Paypal

The first and simplest is using Paypal. The challenge with Paypal is that you either need payment integration built-in your booking calendar (which is technically complex), or you need to send a payment request email to your customers. This is fine, but it doesn’t enable you to take payment at the point of sale. Lots of service providers we know will use Paypal payment requests only with customers they’ve known for a while, or in advance of providing a treatment.

Square

The second, and *way* more interesting way to accept credit cards without a merchant account is still not widely available (yet). It’s called Square, and is brought to us by the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

How Square Works

Square allows you to plug a little credit-card swiper thingy (I’m gonna call them swipeys :) ) into the audio jack of your iPhone, iPod touch, computer, or Blackberry. You download a program that lets you then process credit cards and issue receipts over email.

And the best part is that you don’t need a merchant account – you pay Square the transaction fees. Getting set up will be a lot quicker than if you wanted to accept credit cards at point of sale today.

Here’s a video of Square in action:

The New York Times has a good interview with Dorsey about Square, where he says they’ll be giving away the swipeys for free!

You can read more about Square and sign up to get a swipey on their website.

[Update Jan 13] Amit writes more about using Square, and includes some screenshots of the iPhone app:

She had just had a terribly frustrating experience with her latest booking calendar. Every booking calendar she tried had too many options, wasn’t easy to use, and often crashed, leaving her clients unable to book and Daniela not knowing her day’s schedule. She explained to Kareem, a web geek, that most booking calendars are built for spas or salons with lots of employees who have complex needs. Being a company of one, Daniela’s scheduling needs were a lot simpler, but no product existed that was built for individual small businesses like hers.

Kareem and his fellow web geek pal Daniel were looking for a fun business to build where they could help make life better for people. Helping fellow entrepreneurs was exciting for them. (Plus, Kareem’s home life would be a lot better off if Daniela had a better booking calendar). They both hated complex software that wasn’t friendly to the people that used it.

So, Kareem and Daniel decided to build a booking calendar for self-employed service providers (like massage therapists, estheticians, and hair stylists, amongst others). It would be simple, easy to use, and reliable. And it would give customers like Daniela peace of mind (she could take bookings while she wasn’t working), help her focus on providing skincare treatments instead of dealing with scheduling clients, and help her make more money by showing her insight about her business that she couldn’t otherwise get.

We’re still building EasyCal right now. If it sounds like it’ll help make your life better, you can signup to know when our online booking calendar launches. And, stay tuned to this blog for progress reports and ideas on how to grow and run your business so you can live the life you want.