For many massage therapists who are just finishing massage school, they graduate and are faced with two options: find a massage therapy job working for someone else, or create their own massage job (also known as their own massage practice).

The problem for many massage therapists is that they have not developed two critical skills:

1) The ability to effectively run their own massage business. This may be basic skills like basic accounting, taxes, staff management, and so on.

2) The ability to effectively market their own massage business.

Massage schools correctly teach one of the most important skills for a massage therapist to know: how to safely and effectively deliver a professional massage. It’s critical that each potential massage school graduate knows how to do a professional massage without putting a client at risk of further injury.

This consumes most, if not all of the time available to teach massage students. So unless the massage student has a business background already, or takes the time to study basic business skills, they may have a more difficult time creating their own massage job.

Taking a massage job where you work for someone else may be ideal for some massage therapists. They may not have the time or inclination to deal with the daily rigors that come with owning your own business.

Instead, they are happy with having a steady massage therapy job, which allows them to work in the field of their choice. They simply come to work, perform a certain number of massages, which someone else has scheduled for them, and then leave for the day.

For the entrepreneurial or risk-taking massage therapist, they may love the challenge of creating their own massage business and employing other massage therapists. While this may be a wonderful dream to aspire to, it can be a big challenge as well.

You see, not only do you need to have enough advertising and marketing in place to create a steady stream of clients for yourself, but that stream needs to be big enough to feed every other massage therapist you decide to employ. If you can’t create a big enough stream to feed other therapists, then they may need to look for a massage job elsewhere. And if the stream is more like a trickle, you may be forced to look for work somewhere else too.

Many massage therapists come from a wide variety of prior work experience. Some may have worked in the corporate arena, and decided to become a massage therapist after becoming tired of the dog-eat-dog environment. Or perhaps they worked in some other type of service or hospitality industry.

No matter what, your prior work experiences can help shape your success or failure as a massage therapist.

Each prior work experience you have had, has taught you certain skills, which may help improve your ability to succeed as a massage therapist. The key is to think of what skills you learned or developed from those prior jobs.

For example, one massage therapist I knew had worked for over 10 years as a hostess and waitress. She had dealt with a wide variety of different customers. Some customers were very pleasant to deal with and others…well, let’s just say that they weren’t so nice.

So when she finished massage school and started doing massage professionally, she had a head start on giving exceptional customer service.

Here’s another example. For most of my undergraduate college life, I had a part-time job where I acted as a phone receptionist at my dormitory. This was a great learning experience as I became very good at answering a phone professionally, and asking the most appropriate questions to help the caller quickly.

In my own massage therapy business, this skill has helped me quickly and professionally screen callers, and answer their questions confidently. This skill also helped me train other people to answer the phones for me when I owned my massage therapy center.

I’d like to leave you with 3 Keys To Creating Your Own Massage Job.

1. Learn from Successful Massage Therapists. Study what they do and apply it to your own massage practice. Every product we offer at Help Your Practice has field tested marketing tips, tactics, and techniques that work.

2. Always Be Marketing (A.B.M.). Marketing needs to be an ongoing effort. If you wait until your schedule is slow, then it may be too late to make a difference. Schedule times where you will do your marketing and treat it like a paying client…In other words, don’t do anything else during that time except marketing!

3. Stay Positive As Much As Possible. Like it or not, there’s a lot of negative information and people out there. Look at on the evening news shows. You listen to an hour’s worth of the news and it’s 57 minutes of ‘gloom and doom’ and about 2 minutes of feel-good stories.

Some people get a kick out of trying to tell you all of the reasons why you can’t or won’t succeed. With all of this negativity, you may wonder why you sometimes feel depressed. Treat your mind like you would treat your body. Put healthy thoughts and information into your mind, so you get healthy thoughts and mindset in return.

About the author: Michael Humphreys is a nationally certified massage therapist and co-founder of HelpYourPractice.com