Michel Lotito was an extraordinary man. This elegant Frenchman had a love for food and a fondness for eating unusual objects like bicycles, shopping carts and televisions. His odd appetite earned him the nickname Monsieur Mangetout (Mr Eat Everything).

I first heard of Lotito when he consumed a Cessna 150 airplane. The fact that somebody would eat a plane is bizarre to say the least and I can’t really tell you why he did it.

However, can tell you how he did it. Oddly enough, his approach to eating a plane can go a long way to helping you build your massage practice.

Doing the impossible…

Before we look at how Michel was able to eat a plane, let’s talk about building your massage practice. The two are very much related. Yes, I know it takes a mental leap to go from an airplane to your massage table, but stick with me.

The reason I even bring this up is that a lot of therapists scoff at some of the claims I make. I say things like,

• You can get 60 new clients in 60 days
• There’s no reason why you can’t make $60,000 a year
• You can easily double your business

For therapists who are barely scraping by and who have tried building their massage business in vain, those claims sound ludicrous. They sound as impossible as eating a plane. But if you take some lessons from the plane-eating Frenchman, you’ll see that having a successful massage business is in fact extremely doable.

So how do you eat a plane?

I’ll be the first to admit that Lotito was a little strange. He suffered from pica, a psychological disorder in which people compulsively eat non-food items such as dirt and plastic. Lotito’s condition was first diagnosed around the age of nine, when he started munching on parts of the family TV set.

To make a long story short, he came to realize that he could turn his compulsion into a career and became an entertainer of sorts. He ate beds, chandeliers, television sets through the years until turning his attention to this little baby…

… a Cessna 150 airplane.

Which brings us to the question: How do you eat an airplane? Seems impossible, doesn’t it?

Not if you eat it one bite at a time, apparently. And that’s just what Lotito did. He chopped the plane up into tiny bits. Parts small enough that he could swallow them easily. Each day he ate about two pounds of tiny plane pieces. And after two years…

…it was gone!

What this means for your practice…

Oftentimes when we look at growing our practice the task seems insurmountable. How do you increase your sales an additional $30,000 a year, for example?

To increase your sales that much means an extra 500 hours of massage for the average therapist. That is 12 ½ forty-hour workweeks! How do you do over 12 weeks of massage non-stop?

And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that hangs you up and stops you from moving forward.

Instead of looking at your “massage plane” and saying it’s impossible to consume. Start breaking it down into manageable chunks.

$30,000 means about 500 hours of massage per year. That means about 40 hours of massage per month. Ten massages per week. And only two massages per day.

Lotito ate two pounds of metal a day to reach his goal. Could you do an additional two massages a day to reach your goal?

Sure! Now that seems entirely possible. You could even relax on the weekends and take two weeks holiday per year.

Now it’s a matter of determining how you get the equivalent of two extra massages in per day.

• You could raise your prices 10%. It’s a small amount, but it’s a bite. And it makes a difference. If you saw just ten clients a week, raising your prices by just 10% would be the equivalent of doing 50 more massages per year without any additional hands on work.
• You could ask existing clients to upgrade from a 60 minute to a ninety minute massage. For every two people who upgrade, you add the equivalent of another hour of massage revenue.
• Get new clients. Whether you choose to believe it or not, they are out there. There are not enough therapists to meet consumer demand. I’m involved in a large think tank this fall with major stakeholders in the massage profession to try to find some solutions for getting more people to take up massage as a career to fill the need. There is a clear shortage of massage therapists.

If you are having difficulty getting clients, it’s not because they don’t exist. You just need a little marketing knowledge to reach them. Unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn about massage business and marketing in school and from the “massage gurus” is just plain outdated and ineffective. Welcome to the 21st century… 11 years later!

There are innovative, unconventional, but super simple systems that will allow you to easily get at least one new client per day, like my 60 Clients in 60 Days strategy (shameless plug). Every one of those clients has the potential to be an ongoing weekly client, to refer others to your practice, or to purchase gift certificates from you.

Clients seem to dribble or float into your practice. The workload is entirely bearable. The process completely painless. There’s no big drama. You work through the process just a bite at a time.

And then it happens…

…the impossible becomes reality! Your “massage plane” has been eaten!

So learn from the crazy Frenchman. Refuse to get overwhelmed. Break your goals down into manageable bite-sized pieces and take little actions every day to get where you want to be in your career. The impossible will become possible.

Take care,

Eric Brown, Grand Massage Poobah

www.bodyworkbiz.com

PS If you need help getting clients, seriously give the 60 Clients in 60 Days a try and follow it to the letter. It is super simple and it works. Anyone can do it:

http://www.bodyworkbiz.com/60days.php

Most massage professionals I speak to share a common frustration of feeling misunderstood.

You’ve spent hundreds or even thousands of hours of training and you get calls from people asking for a “back rub” or from those dubious prospects who wonder if you offer a “complete” massage (and they mean more than just thorough).

Heck, even your own clients, sometimes long-time clients, don’t understand the extensiveness of your training, the scope of your practice and the incredible range of problems you can help them with.

So what’s a massage professional to do? What can we do as a collective industry?

	“Education!”
	“We have to educate our clients!”
	“We have to educate the public!”

That’s the solution that’s inevitably proposed.

But here’s the thing…

Massage therapists, bodyworkers and holistic practitioners do a lousy job of educating the public about what they do.

Don’t tell people what you do…

Most professionals take the “what I do” approach. Let me give you an example outside of massage so you can better understand what I’m saying.

I’m at a party and I’m working the room and meeting new people. I stop at the snack table and begin chatting with this guy. I ask him what he does for a living and he says,

“I work at creating an intuitive interface between project teams and the technology they use by using cross platform compatible server side applications.”

Okay. I have no clue what this guy does. I think he works in an office. I’m not sure.

Now imagine yourself at a party and someone asks you what you do. Here’s your chance to make an impression. So you say,

“Oh, I do soft tissue work. I use Swedish techniques to help decrease neuromuscular tension, although I’m getting more into craniosacral work. It’s much more effective at getting at the deep fascia.”

Okay. The person you’re talking to doesn’t have a clue what you just said. He thinks you might work in a lab!

What’s wrong with educating people about your work in this kind of way is that you are describing what you do. You are describing a process.

Borrrrrring!

That’s not interesting to others. They may like you, but what you’re saying has no relevance to them. They don’t really understand and they don’t really care.

Tell them how they benefit…

So in educating people you need to take a different approach: You have to help them appreciate how your work BENEFITS them or people they know. If you want people to listen to you and understand you, you have to speak about how you can help them. And you must tell them in a language they can understand, making the benefits of your work crystal clear.

For example, you’re at the same party and someone asks you what you do for a living. This time you say,

“Do you know how a lot of people suffer from incredible tension in their shoulders and get terrible headaches from sitting all day at a desk? Well I help those people remember what it’s like to have a relaxed, pain-free neck and I get rid of their headaches.”

Now that description of your work identifies how people can benefit from your work and does it in a way that’s easy to understand. In the mind of the person you’re talking to a link is made: you = headache relief.

Now when someone that person meets complains about a headache, that little association is triggered and they say, “You have a headache? I know someone who can help you.”

So here’s what I suggest you do today. Create what you might normally think of as a “menu of services”. But instead of writing things that are meaningless to customers like “60 minute Swedish massage $60″ you are going to write what I’ll call a Client Situation Menu.

Your client situation menu

Instead of listing your services on this menu, you’ll list the situations (i.e. conditions or problems) that you can help people with – just like I did in the example above.

The key is to be very, very specific. You will not be limiting your potential pool of clients by being specific. Even though your example of what you can do may not fit for a client, they at least will get a sense of what you can do. And, when you share with them several things you can do for clients, they may well be able to weave your comments together and see the fabric, if not the thread.

Come up with situations that real people find themselves in and need help with. And state them in a customer’s language not your professional lingo (i.e. back pain vs. minor strain of the thoracolumbar fascia)

1. Stand in the shoes (or better yet, in the body) of your ideal client. Ask yourself:
   

   	What problems are they having?
   	What is causing their stress?
   	What opportunities are they missing out on because they are?

2. Stand in your own shoes. Ask yourself:
   

   	What problems has massage helped me with in the past?
   	What’s the contribution I want to make to others?

Take the time to write down 20 specific things you KNOW you can do for people. Don’t think about it too much; just write. After you’ve finished that, go through your notes, taking each item and working at making it as specific as possible. If there are any words that your average person wouldn’t understand, drop or replace them with something in plain English. When you think it’s ready, type it up on a single sheet to create your unique Client Situation Menu.

Use this in your waiting room, in your marketing materials, at networking events and on your website. You won’t waste your time on gobbly-gook education that doesn’t really say anything. Instead you will truly be educating people as to how your massage can help them.

If you need more examples for a Client Situation menu, get the Non-Stop Referrals e-course from BodyworkBiz. In that course, you’ll also learn another valuable educational tool that I call the One Minute Message. And no, it’s not an elevator speech. The One Minute Message utilizes the power of storytelling to communicate powerful benefits to potential and current customers. And it’s far more effective than the Client Situation Menu in creating an indelible impression in people’s minds.

You can get the Non-Stop Referrals e-course here:

www.bodyworkbiz.com/team100.php