Refinement

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When we work for ourselves, one of the things that we are constantly engaged with is refinement. We're refining our skills just like anyone else would. If you're a plumber, the more plumbing you do, the better you get at it. If you're a financial advisor, the more people you advise, the better you get at it. 

But we are also, as self employed people, refining the container of our business. How do we get the word out? How do we best deliver our services? How do we best earn a living? And how is that going?  And based on what we're seeing and hearing from our clients, how do we refine our offering and our business as a whole in the direction of truly best meeting the needs of our clients? While also, of course, making sure that our businesses take good care of us.  

I find that self-employed people  are more creative on the whole than those who are employed. Not as a rule, of course, depends on the industry, depends on the person.  Just in general, that in order to  walk the path of being self employed, there is creative thinking that goes on.

And oftentimes, People like that part of it. They like being a creative thinker. I think it's a part of why any of us choose self employment over employment in the first place, which is that we really want the opportunity to be engaged in a creative refinement process, as opposed to a stereotypical employed situation where somebody will tell us what to do, and then we just do it.

It's not so black and white in the employed world: plenty of jobs require loads of creative thinking. But when you own the results of your refinement or lack thereof,  you're darn well sure more engaged. Or to put it another way, if things go south,  for example if suddenly people stop hiring you, then the questions about why and how to fix it are going to feel pretty pressing.

Okay, story time. I'm going to tell the story of the refinement process of one particular income stream that I've had, which is teaching practice building and small business know-how to healing arts providers. I've been doing that since 2009, so this is a story of refinement. 

You might relate to it through something you've been refining and honing over years in your own practice or in your own business.  

It's also going to function a little bit, full disclosure, as a kind of infomercial for the Healing Arts Practice Incubator, which closes to new students at the end of today. I'm recording this Thursday, January 18th. So if you've been interested in that, if you've been interested in support in marketing, in the money piece, you can find that at the Healing Arts Practice Incubator. The Incubator also includes the Business Model Buffet if you have questions around the refinement of your actual business model. 

Okay.  In 2000, I graduated from the Rolf Institute. I am a Rolfer and have been since that time. So it was shortly after that, that I started my business in something that most people hadn't heard of: Rolfing. And which people almost always pay out of pocket for. 

I did this very wisely by moving to a place where I knew literally nobody. I moved from Boston where I had grown up and knew a lot of people and had been completing my practice hours with people who would have loved to continue paying me once I was certified.  

So I had been growing a practice in Boston through my years of training at the Rolf Institute because I would go back and forth between Boulder, Colorado for school, and then back home to Boston. 

But once I completed all of that back and forth for two years, I decided that there was just nothing quite like a 3,000 mile move to a place that you've never been to make practice building super easy on myself! Ugh.

I was 26, and I was really, really  naive in that I hadn't at all thought through the fact that not only was I starting my career in Rolfing,  but I was also about to tackle this whole other brand new thing called self-employment, which at that time I hadn't done before. 

In my view (again, naively) I loved Rolfing so much- and it had literally saved me from a lifetime of chronic pain and mobility dysfunction- that I really was just like, “This stuff's amazing. It really helps people. It really helped me. And so people will want it.” 

It did not occur to me at the time that I would have to do things to grow my practice and then to manage my practice and do other things like juggling numbers and whatever.  

So I had this,”If you build it, they will come.” mentality. Or more like, “If I show up, everyone will want Rolfed”. 

Ah, youth. Just to give you an idea of how  insanely optimistic I was, I brought my massage table with me as checked oversized baggage on my one way ticket flight from Boston to California, because I was that sure that I was going to be getting straight to work, seeing people for Rolfing! I did not know anybody in Napa or California. Yet I was sure that I would not be able to wait the two weeks for my belongings to arrive (because I did have movers bringing over a tiny pod of things to California).

For those of you who are post-internet babies, here's what I had to do in the pre-internet days of landing. There was the internet, but there weren't things like Craigslist, or Zillow, or job hunting online. It was basically email via a dial up modem, ok? 

So after landing I had to find a temporary place to stay. Then I had to do apartment rental hunting, which happened by getting a physical copy of the local newspaper every morning and looking for listings.  I had to find a part time or full time job to float me while I built my practice. (which, again, in my head,was for a week or two, but whatever…)  

So I had to get a job and I was applying for licensed massage therapist jobs at the tourist spas there in Napa. I had to buy a car because I was out in the country and there wasn't public transportation.

And I had to move into whatever rental I found, but surely in the midst of all this, I was going to need my massage table for just all of the instantaneous clients who would appear!! 

Spoiler alert, it didn't work out that way. I did build a practice in Napa, California in my three years there. I barely did that. It was really coming together when I left.  

So there's that number that people tell you, right? It'll take three years, which I don't believe is true. But when you're as unskilled as I was, yeah, for sure. 

So, I spent those three years working five part time massage jobs up and down the valley because I had also chosen to move to the Bay Area right after the dot com bubble burst and everybody was clutching their pennies.

There was not a lot of work in spas and in body work.  So, I was working five part time jobs, plus I had my Rolfing private practice. I spent the whole time just feeling like I was walking into a brick wall.  

And then with my partner at the time, we decided to move back east.

We had moved together to Napa, and we were going to go to Brooklyn, New York. We had three friends in Brooklyn, so it was a step up from the zero people that we knew when we moved to Napa. But it was still pretty slim. And we had to do all the same things. Temporary place to stay, apartment hunting, no car this time, thank god to New York City for public transportation. 

I had to find a Rolfing office for myself, and yet another part time job while I got my practice off the ground. I was smart enough not to bring my massage table as carry-on luggage, as I knew I would not be needing it in the two weeks it took to make its way to Brooklyn via the movers.  So at the time I was looking for any kind of work I could do while I grew my practice, and life seems to have chosen the best possible part time job to motivate me to get my act together. 

I was not licensed to practice massage in New York so if I wanted to go that route it was going to take me like 14 months just to be able to apply for massage jobs. And what had I done before massage jobs? Retail. That's what I had experience in. So I got a job making $8 an hour at the Anthropologie store in Soho. 

And we can all agree that paying Brooklyn rents on $8 an hour is not a thing and I'm not a trust fund kid and as lovely and generous as my parents are, they were never rent subsidizers for me. My partner was also not in a high paying industry (he was a waiter). So the money was just us. Hustling and stitching together low paying jobs. 

Back to Anthropologie: it's so beautiful in those stores, isn't it just a dream to work there? Okay, no. I love shopping at Anthropologie, but if you have never worked  retail at the height of spring fever in an insanely busy shopping area in a city of 8 million people, you don't know. It was chaos.

Literally, people were stripping down to try on clothes because the line for the fitting room was all the way out to the front door. It was insane. I would go home after a long subway ride, and I would soak my feet in a giant bowl of ice water while taking a shot of vodka. Now, I've been sober for 13 years, but back then, if there was vodka in the freezer after a retail day like that, You're going to reach for it. 

So not only was the job miserable, but it was nowhere near meeting my needs. And my very, very meager savings were disappearing to be able to take care of myself and pay for my Brooklyn apartment.  

I knew it had taken me a couple of years to get things to a sustainable place for my rolfing practice in Napa, so I started thinking about getting a better paying part time job, assuming it would take another two years. 

So I applied to a temp agency, and it turns out that this temp agency supplied receptionists to the financial industry- aka stock market bros. So I showed up wearing my favorite wide leg sailor pants and bold print top, like an Anthropologie salesgirl, and I got a very stern look up and down from the woman giving me the temp test, and she emphasized that I would need more professional clothing if I were to get the job, so strike one on me there. 

Then I took the temp test, and it turns out I have few to no skills that a financial firm would want from me. So, I didn't have to go buy new Wall Street clothes after all! But I also did not get a better paying temp job. 

So what I decided at this time was that  I had to get  my practice together. I was absolutely at, the rock-and-hard-place place. And I knew things had to come together much faster than two years because I literally didn't have the money to pay my rent while working at Anthropologie. 

So what I discovered I had to do immediately was to become more visible in my new community, which was the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn.  At the time, when I first landed, I found a wellness center that was maybe a 20 minute walk from my apartment. 

Unfortunately, this was an exploitive fee per session. They sent me zero clients. They didn't even put a business card out front or mention that I existed.  But they happily took 50 percent of anything I earned. So it was just a bad setup.  

One day I was walking around my neighborhood and Carroll Gardens, looking for a better office situation and that same day, a wellness center literally around the corner from my apartment had put up an office for rent sign. So I went inside, I met the owner and I had a love at first sight, friendship connection. (That's how I met my bestie, Vanessa Scotto, who I did the Bliss and Grit podcast with, if you've been following my work for a while.)

Vanessa came up with a much more humane rent on-ramp for me. As I got going, she and the other practitioners in the space- there were four amazing women in there- they all enthusiastically got work for me and spread the word about Rolfing and the Wellness Center.

So the office situation was great. Lesson one: having an office situation that bolsters you and has more people around, with more word of mouth to share, and people who are great and enthusiastic- this is very helpful. 

But the clients were still trickling in, and I was still working my $8 an hour retail job and I wanted it gone. 

So I got the website, I got business cards, I even printed old school flyers like at a Kinko's print shop (#datingmyself), and I hung up flyers around the neighborhood. 

I forced myself to walk into all of the businesses on my street, handing out my card and introducing myself, which was sometimes very warmly received.

Other times people were like, “You do what?”. This was Brooklyn. It was humbling to say the least. 

But  because I made myself get out there and connect with people I had a few lucky breaks and also gained some wisdom. 

Yoga people loved me in Napa, so what was one of the businesses I went into? Brooklyn Yoga Center!

Yoga people love taking care of their bodies and they're interested in movement and all of the things that Rolfing has to offer. And the owner of that studio was so excited that a Rolfer had come into town and he wound up sending me a ton of people. And those people wound up sending me a ton of people.

And long story short, I could quit my $8 an hour retail job. And just be a self-employed Rolfer for the first time ever. 

And I was very busy. I was young, I had no kids, I had no mortgage, and so I just worked all the time.  One of the lucky Things for me is that once I got the word out (at that time, there weren't other Rolfers in Brooklyn, which is insane). It’s New York City, it’s a very vibrant, dynamic place. So that was good fortune, right? And that made it easy, once people knew I existed, to keep fanning the flames of my busy practice there. 

And then I had my son. Brooklyn is a very expensive and a very stressful place to raise a kid on your own as a self-employed person. So I decided at that time, other personal life extenuating circumstances, that I was going to move to New Haven, Connecticut.

New Haven is about two hours away from Brooklyn. It's where my parents were, so it was about having an extra generation around to help with childcare. 

So there I was, starting my practice over again in New Haven. I didn't know anyone except my parents in New Haven, so I was starting from scratch again. To say I was highly motivated by being a single mom and having to support my son is the understatement of the year. And fortunately, I had been through this a couple of times. I knew where I blundered in Napa, which was basically by hiding out in part time jobs that kept me busy instead of putting my energy in letting my business be visible. 

And I knew what had worked for me in Brooklyn, which was not just connecting to the community in general, but connecting to the right people in the community- the people who were going to be generous and happy to spread the word about my work and refer me to their friends and clients.  

I had to get income coming in, like, yesterday when I arrived in New Haven. I went looking for an office space and found another very, very fortunate office for rent within a Pilates studio.  And another best friend love-at first-sight with Sarah Aldrich who ran the Pilates studio! We wound up sharing space and growing our businesses together for a decade after that.

So I had good luck with office space, but I knew I was still going to have to come up with something to really get things off the ground much more quickly than in the past. 

At the time I came up with two  campaigns that I could use to connect into the community more. 

The first one I call Help for the Helpers, and it was a way for me to introduce myself to all the other helpers and healers in the community by offering them a free trial session. And if you hear that and you're like, “I'm going to do that too”. First of all, God bless, go do and try whatever. But please don't do it in a way where you're just kind of offering that to people whenever and however. I found that offering it as a very precise campaign: precise time window with precise communication, is what got my practice off the ground very quickly. 

And then I created what I now call the win-win-win offering. With this, you are going to a place that would be likely to have other clients already gathered there who would be grateful to discover what you do. When you go to these spaces, you offer them something that's valuable to them. 

So in my case, I connected with gyms and yoga studios and I taught mobility classes and self myofascial release, which I had learned and trained in through Yoga Tune Up. 

So that was a perfect way for me to connect with people, be visible, and be doing something that was related to Rolfing and which demonstrated my expertise. I got a lot of private Rolfing clients from that because a group self myofascial release class is different than a one on one session. 

So, long story short, my practice in New Haven was full with a waiting list within 3 months, which was record time compared to the other two practices I started. And thank God, because that was when I had to start paying for preschool and all of those things. 

This process of refinement had happened in the three cities I had built a practice in: Napa,  then Brooklyn, and then New Haven. 

I knew how painful it was for me to acquire the skills to grow my practice and to be a small business owner  piecemeal.  It hadn't been taught to me. I loved my education at the Rolf Institute, and I think they did an excellent job of training us how to be great practitioners in a well rounded way.

But the small business piece was really missing. And so I put together a blog, which is also dating the time that this happened, called The Well Practice. And I created a course called Practice Abundance to help healing arts providers in all different kinds of practices. In that course I had the chance to work with people all over the world to implement some of the strategies that I was teaching. And I worked with hundreds of people. It was very gratifying. And we would all connect once a month on Free Conference Call (pre-Zoom! pre-Skype!)l and I would answer questions as people went through the material.

Because of that, I started to really get a sense of what goes on for healing arts providers: What are the common themes? What are the common stumbling blocks? What are the things that our schools are commonly not teaching us about the small business owner piece?  

I was also sorting out my own money situation at the time. I had a tiny rental house with my son andI was still very much in that overwhelmed single mom feeling of like, “Will I be able to do this?”

So I was figuring out the money piece too. How do I make sure the right amount is coming in? How do I make sure I'm not going nuts with my business expenses just because I figure oh, it's a business expense, so it doesn't really count (It does! It takes away from what you can pay yourself!) How do I automate saving for taxes, or saving to pay myself when I take a vacation week or a sick week?Oh and how do I pay attention to all this stuff in a way that suits me, because I don't love numbers, and not motivated to have huge wealth. I didn't have that Ebeneezer Scrooge excitement of counting my gold coins at the end of the day.

I did ultimately train as a financial recovery counselor with Karen McCall as well, and decided I just wanted to keep applying that knowledge to self employed people. And who are the self employed people that I know? The healing arts people!

And so I've been helping the helpers this whole time. 

After the pandemic, I decided to resurrect Practice Abundance as the Healing Arts Business Incubator. 

This container had the practice building information and the financial counseling information put together. It also offered individual coaching with the people who were trying to sort out options for new business models, because that was really what was on our minds a lot at the time (and still is to a certain degree). People were really wondering how to translate their healing arts skillset into other business models that can still deliver care. 

I ran The Healing Arts Business Incubator several times with wonderful groups of people, and I honestly changed the name to the Healing Arts Practice Incubator, because  one of my dear friends kept pronouncing H A B I as abby,  because she has a daughter named Abby. But a lot of people pronounced it Hobby.  And  the whole point of the course is that our businesses are not hobbies.

So HAPI, H A P I, Healing Arts Practice Incubator, is a better acronym. That's the boring branding information for you. 

After all that refinement, this material is absolutely at its best place. There's no filler. 

And I'll admit, especially back in the Practice Abundance days when things like social media and blogs and content creation were brand new things  (if you can even imagine that), I would say things like, “We should all have a Twitter account.” And now I stand by my stance that we do not benefit from those things.

What are the things that actually grow our practices? What are the things that actually make sure we're financially taken good care of by our work?  That brings me to the very brief infomercial piece, which is just explaining what is in the Healing Arts Practice Incubator, because it closes at the end of today.

If you're interested, go to hapi.simpleprospering.com. It consists of three classes. One is a practice building course, one is a money course, or practice finances course, and one is the business model buffet, or a business model course. 

You can buy those a la carte. You can buy them as one offs if you know you need them. You don't need one of those pieces, or you can buy all of them together as a HAPI member and also get the free private podcast feed, which is a question answer coach in your pocket private podcast feed for members of HAPI. 

As you're working through the material, you can ask a question and I will answer each question in a separate episode so that it becomes a resource over time that's very easy to find the answer to your question- you're not having to sift through 60 or 90 minute Zoom calls to see if there's something relevant to you or to find the answer to your question. 

So, that's what's included in HAPI- loads more detail if you want it at hapi.simpleprospering.com!