Welcome to The Health & Wellness Practitioners Podcast! Dr. Danielle and other guest experts talk about everything from getting your practice started, developing your clinical skills, growing your practice YOUR way, and dealing with the real stuff life burnout and work/life balance. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you’ll find something here for you!
DR. DANIELLE: So welcome everyone. I am bringing you a special guest to the podcast today. This is Regina Close. She is a massage therapist and the owner of the Washington Green Spa, which is in Washington, Missouri, which is where I live and I frequent the Washington Green Spa. So I asked Regina to come chat with me today and just share some things about her business and entrepreneurship in general because I moved to this town the same year that you opened the Washington Green Spa so it's been here for me ever since then. And I've just gotten to watch it grow and see how it's evolved and changed over the last five years as well. And I feel like it's a very inspiring business. Regina, I'll let you share a bit about yourself and then we'll just take it from there.
REGINA: Okay. Sure. So first of all, thank you so much for having me. I really greatly appreciate it. I myself have been a massage therapist for 15 years, I was licensed down in Florida, moved back to Missouri, I'm originally from here. So I worked as an independent contractor for about 10 years. I grew my business tremendously to the point where I was doing, all the things you say not to do; I was booked for months out, I was taking on clients who would call in they were in pain that day, so I'd add 'em to the end of my day or come in early the next day, doing all those things. And I just knew that wasn't going to be sustainable for me. And so that's kind of where I've always wanted to own my own business outside of just me renting a room somewhere.
So I knew that that was kind of the end game or next step. But once we got to that point and I just saw like, I'm working six days a week for the next four months without a day off, this is ridiculous. And I can't do this anymore, or I won't be able to do this at all much more if I continue to work that way. And I didn't want to turn down clients either. If they're in pain, I wanted to be able to help as many people as I could, but I just knew that I needed a team of people in order to do that sufficiently.
DR. DANIELLE: Interesting. I'm so glad that you brought this up because I didn't know this aspect of your past, or work experience, if you will. Which now I'm like, oh! This is a great conversation. Because yeah, of course I say like all those things, but the truth is that most of us go through all of those struggles before we get to a place where we're like, oh my gosh, this is not okay anymore, I can't keep doing it this way. If I'm going to keep doing it this way, I'm going to die. And then we get to that place where we're finally able to see or consider a different way forward, you know? So yeah. I'm glad that you shared that. Thank you.
REGINA: Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of where this came about and I knew we needed a team. And for those 10 years where I was working by myself, I was renting a room out of salon/spa combos. I learned a lot for sure. I met a lot of really great people. I learned things that I absolutely loved. I learned things that I absolutely didn't want to bring with me like just the smell of product and the loud bow dryers going. When you walk out of a session, like those kind things. I wanted to create a place where people could come in immediately kind of start to relax a little bit, walking in the door and still feel their Zen when they walk out the door and not walk into this mass cloud of hairspray and blow dryers and all the people. So that was one of my main goals too, because relax on the table for however long, your session is great, but you want to keep that as long as you possibly can.
BUILDING YOUR DREAMS, LITERALLY
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. I'm actually always surprised how at the Washington Green Spa, like if I'm in a treatment room, I never hear anything outside of that room. And I've been in the room looking and I’m like, how did you do this? There doesn't seem to be anything special on the surface, at least to my eyes that blocks the sound that much. And I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I never hear anyone talking in the hallway, but I talk in the hallway and I know that when I'm in the hallway, people that work there are talking to me.
REGINA: So we were super, super lucky to find a space that was like the floor was rock. Nobody had ever been in our space before, I got to create our space 100% from the ground up, obviously outside walls were there - as far as plumbing and absolutely everything was done how we wanted it to be done. So with that, we did a ton of insulation on every single wall, the ceiling, as much as we possibly could. There's soundboard in between certain aspects where the reception areas like our first wall starts. There's definitely a lot of thought that went into it. I'm glad you can't hear anything. There are definitely times where I'm in the treatment room, but because I'm kind of listening for those things, I’m like, Oh my gosh, I can hear somebody walking, you know, it's just something that's probably really light. And if you're on the table, you probably don't notice it and you tune it out. But yeah, I'm a hyper alert. Like where is that noise coming from?
That was also a tip from the first place I worked was next door to my treatment room was next door to the dish pit of a restaurant or it was a meat market is what it was. And so listening to dishes playing around all day long and then listening to the rock music, I knew that was not an option.
DR. DANIELLE: Yes. My first chiropractic office was adjoining a Chinese restaurant and oh, the stories. I can't tell you how many times we had cockroaches come from the side of the restaurant into our office, especially in our bathroom. It was so utterly embarrassing to me to have a patient go back to the bathroom and then they're like, oh, there's a cockroach on the floor again. And people started to kind of pick up on like the restaurant is over there and the bugs are back there. And also the HVAC system, when the heat would turn on in the winter, right over my adjusting table was the vent in the ceiling. The heat would start to blow down and this strong smell of like orange chicken would come along with it right into your face as you're getting adjusted. And it was just not ideal, but it wasn't something I had thought about looking at or being aware of until there was. And I was like, this is definitely not how I would want this to be for the long term.
REGINA: Yeah. You learn all those little things.
DR. DANIELLE: Yes. Yeah, definitely lessons, lots of lessons. One of the things that just came to me and I think is interesting is the town that the Washington Green Spa is in is roughly 15,000, 14,000 in population. It's not a huge town. And we do have, I think 101 in our county. I'm sure the Washington Green Spa draws from a lot outside of Washington itself. But was there ever any doubt for you like opening this spa in what's mostly considered a small farming community?
REGINA: Absolutely. I knew me myself with the clientele that I had built, I was not worried about myself, but obviously rent increases tremendously. We now are doing construction. And like, that was a big thing to take on. And then just the responsibility of bringing on more staff members, because for me, it's not just somebody to come in and work, like if I'm bringing them on I know that I have committed to being able to bring in enough business for them to support their family. So that was one of my huge holdbacks probably - I honestly probably would've looked into doing it much, much sooner if I didn't have like that sense of, I guess, responsibility for anybody that we bring on as, as a team member with us. So it was definitely scary.
We did start small, so it was just myself and one other massage therapist. And then we had two receptionists for the first few months, and then we added another massage therapist and then an esthetician. And so as we did it slowly like that, you could see that things were going to be fine if that makes sense. Schedules were filling, it took a little bit of persuasion to get clients who had only seen me for 10 years to go to somebody else who they were phenomenal, but it just takes a little bit - our clients that have seen us for so longer stubborn, they're committed, they're loyal. That's great. But yeah, I was like, you either cannot see me for the next five months or you can get in within the next week or two with another massage therapist today. Like, they're great, I promise you, they wouldn't be here if they weren't. So that was definitely a struggle and still a continuing struggle four and a half years later with some clients. I love that they love me and my style so much. That's great. But sometimes like you're in a lot of pain or you have this issue going on and it's not going to be beneficial to start over every three months that you can get in with me. Like, let's try to come up with a plan.
CLIENTS OF A PRACTICE VS. CLIENTS OF A PRACTITIONER
DR. DANIELLE: I can totally see that. And that's a really common challenge for any hands on practitioner because our care, especially when it's hands on is like our handwriting and it becomes so unique to each individual. And I mean, even if you train someone to practice exactly what you do, it still feels different. And the results might ultimately be mostly the same, but it's almost like conditioning when someone is used to the way that you do things, but as someone that hadn't been your client before you started the Washington Green Spa, it never actually even occurred to me that I would want to see you. Like, not that I wouldn't want to see you. But I don't know. I guess it's just a different perspective for me as someone that like I started as a client of the Washington Green Spa, not as a client of Regina.
REGINA: Right, and that's awesome. And that's something we try to work really hard and we focus on in our communications and things with our clients and training with our staff is to use certain verbiage. That way clients know that the skills of the whole staff are available to them. And not just one particular person who they happen to end up on the schedule with for their very first time here. That's one of the things that I wanted to carry or wanted to kind of separate from places I had worked in the past where everybody was independent contractors. So they were your clients. And that's how you made money is that they saw you only in that whole mindset. So getting away from that and just letting them know, if there's something that another massage therapist for example is phenomenal at, and it's just not your cup of tea, like tell the client, you need to go see this person because they're going to help you with this. I don't ever want a client to be walking down the hallway and see a therapist they saw two weeks ago and be ashamed that now they're with somebody else. And they feel like they're in trouble. Like, no, I don't, that's something I want to steer or clear of.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. Because they're all clients of the Washington Green Spa, not the individual practitioners. But overall, that's the transition. That's so hard for us to make when we get to that spot in our career where like the business has solely relied on you and we've been self-employed not really growing a business. And then we get to that phase where we have to start to do things differently to protect our longevity and to be able to keep growing and help more people. It's a really hard transition to go from people calm there because they like you to people come there because of the brand or the business, or like they know that they'll get quality care from that business.
So what do you think has been the most helpful for you in growing the business over the last five years?
THE MINDSET YOU NEED TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS
REGINA: Well, definitely past experiences for sure. Not only in this field, but before I went to school for massage, I was a restaurant manager and event coordinator, and I learned a lot in those two fields. So I think I had thought about going to massage school right when I got out of high school, didn't do it, ended up doing a few other things, ended up in Florida. And I know now, like that all happened for a reason because of those experiences that I learned. I couldn't imagine starting this business right now, fresh out of like going to massage school out of high school and trying to start this now, I would've been so lost, things would've been a disaster. I couldn't even imagine what that would look like. So it's definitely past experiences. And when things happened, even along the past four and a half years, five years that we've been open.
Anytime something doesn't go my way or the way that I thought it should go, I know there's a lesson in that. And so kind of taking a step back and trying to figure out like, what's the lesson, how can we change things in the future? Or maybe it was, it ended up being better the way that things happened, didn't feel like it at the time as you were going through this, but in the long run, it may have turned out for the best, you know? So just trying to look at the overall picture, and not nitpick every little thing to where like, oh my gosh, this one little thing happened and we’re doomed for the rest of our lives. So trying to change that, or make sure I have that mentality.
DR. DANIELLE: One of my business coaches calls those pockets, those phases pinch points. And she just told me yesterday, she was like, you're in a pinch point and you just didn't realize it yet. And I was like, oh, that's what's going on. And actually I was spending a lot of time over the weekend thinking about this, I've come to see these phases where it's like, things don't feel really smooth. Things are not feeling really easy as signs that things are about to get even more amazing because if you just keep, I don't want to say pushing through them, but if you just keep showing up and keep doing the work and chipping away at it a little bit at a time, then you look back and you're like, oh, okay. That's what I needed to learn. And as I learned that, then the next level came, but they're certainly hard to go through. And sometimes I feel like I don't even realize I'm in one until it ends. And I look back and I'm like, huh, okay, I survived. That's all right. Good. But it's the learning lessons that come along with owning a business. And I think that's one of the easiest but also the hardest things about entrepreneurship is that if you just keep going, then you'll be successful. But it's when we get frustrated about how quickly or how slowly things are growing that we think it's not working. I should just quit. But if we quit, we never get there wherever going
REGINA: We have to be resilient. My necklace here says resilient. We did the word of the year with our tribe at the beginning and we all picked our words, and this is mine.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. That's an amazing idea. I've been picking a word of the year, like a theme word since I think 2016, but I never had the idea to wear it. That would be pretty cool.
REGINA: I recommend it.
SETTING GOALS AND ADJUSTING GOALS
DR. DANIELLE: So tell me, what do you see for the future of your business? How do you think that things will shift and continue to grow moving forward?
REGINA: I would absolutely love - so at the beginning four years ago, four and a half years ago, I had the vision that I wanted to have multiple locations. And I mean, not a ton of locations, but I had like three is kind of what I'm aiming for at this point to where service providers would be the main like management staff within them, because they have the background as far as like what the service providers are going through, or at least people who've been in this industry in some way, shape or form for an extended period of time, like within those other places. So that was the long term goal or not the long term, but that was my five year goal to open my second location. And then obviously the last few years things have happened because you know, the pandemic and everything else. So I know it's not completely, we just had to push it back a little bit, like we want to make sure things here at this location are, I don't want to say perfect, because it's never going to be perfect, but we have a lot of the major kinks work out to where we're not starting fresh at every, any, any time we want to get to the point of opening a new location, if that makes sense.
So just making sure we have all of our systems in place, we've critiqued our systems. We've looked at our systems and to see how they could potentially be better. And having the input of our staff in those has been tremendous. We have a really phenomenal staff right now and our teamwork aspect, we can sit down, we can say, okay, we've been doing it this, you know, X, Y, Z, this way for so long. Something's not quite right, I don't know, I can't put my finger on it. And just having those outside perspectives has been great, so we work really good together, the team that we have right now. And so it's definitely working towards getting to that point.
DR. DANIELLE: Team communication and just managing people in general is such a huge pain point for practice owners. So I'm curious if there's a thing that you do that helps to make the communication amongst your team work that well,
REGINA: So we implemented about a year ago huddles. So we do team huddles at the beginning of every shift. So currently we have free shifts each day. So at the beginning, anybody coming on that ship will have a quick, it's just the 10 minute little meeting. We have huddle sheets where, you know, any pertinent information for the day, things like that. We always have like a little ice breaker or dad joke or something like that, just to kind of, you know, get things started. But then, we have that daily and then we started doing once a month, we call them tribe chats to where it's changes monthly. So we hit everybody at some point in time because we have a lot of part-time staff members. So we'll just do as a 30 minute tribe chat. It's not super structured. It's not a meeting where I'm going to stand here and talk to you the whole time. And you're just going to sit there and listen, it's just more of a team building type thing.
We yesterday, we actually had one. We talked a little bit about some work things going on. Some things were coming up in June and then it was just kind of some random chat about how we started, you know, offering sugaring and how that worked out for the staff members who had received it, what their thoughts were and their follow up. And so it was just kind of a quick little fun, you know, conversation. It's really hard in this industry to have a lot of FaceTime with everybody, because we're all in individual treatment rooms and you can come in for an eight hour day and never see two of your coworkers because of scheduling, you know, and you just never see them. So making sure that we're doing those things regularly and then we have our quarterly full staff meetings as well. And then we also use Band, is our app that we use for our team. And we do a lot of communication on there regularly. So between all of those things and obviously having like an open door policy, if I'm here, I locked my door for this podcast though. So nobody could come in. Normally they can pop in and they know that any of feedback or suggestions are always appreciated. So them just knowing that that's option.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah, it sounds like to me overall you just have a lot of structure around the touchpoints that you have with everyone so that there is even though opportunity to have that open communication, which I think a lot of people miss because our schedules can be challenging. And like you said you can be working in the same space with someone all day and not really have an opportunity to see them or talk with them because we're busy with our clients. So it's about being intentional with making the time to have those conversations.
REGINA: And planning. A lot of planning.
HOW TO TURN YOUR VISION INTO REALITY
DR. DANIELLE: Okay. So I have one last question for you and that's hopefully a simple question, but if there's someone who is just getting started in their career and they have a big vision for where they want it to go and they don't see how they're going to get there, what would you want them to know?
REGINA: Somebody who is like just starting out with massage on their own or looking to do something independently? What are you thinking?
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. Someone that's looking to do something independently, like they have a bigger vision for what they want for themselves and their career than just working at Massage Envy.
REGINA: So definitely like fresh out of school. Just kind of take the education side of things slow. I know, I see so many people who are graduating or have just graduated, are getting ready to graduate and they have a huge list of all these continuing education classes that they're signing up for in the next year. And just know like practice your basics. Like perfect those, get really good, creative, comfortable before you start adding on a ton of different modalities, because you're probably going to find out that all of your focus on these continuing education classes aren't going to be what brings your clients in. It's going to be your communication with your clients, how consistent you are with your communication, your scheduling, do you show up when you say you're going to show up - those kind of things are what matters to the clients more so than if you took this - I don't know, six hour class on reflexology. So just focusing on the customer service aspect, more so than all the fun things like those will come short. If you decide down the road that that's something you still want to do, then sign up for it. I'm not saying don't, but we don't need to do all of them all within six months of graduating while trying to build a business while trying to get clients to come in the door, you're going to burn yourself out. You're going to hate it. And it's just going to end up being frustrating and not something that you love when you probably loved it going into school.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. Thank you for saying that because I harp on that often that continuing education doesn't grow your business for you. And I think a lot of our mentors who were successful in the seventies, eighties, nineties, maybe even the early two thousands that was perhaps then enough for them to be really good at what they did was enough to grow their business. But things are so different now and people just make buying decisions differently than they used to. So the things that we were told would be good enough, like just do a good job and people will help you grow your business. It's not quite that simple.
REGINA: No, no. And I think too, and I don't know how it is when you are in school if you're required to do a business portion or business class or something like that. In massage school you are, and it's very, very basic. And I just wish that they would tell them if you are going to go to school for something, because you want to go out on your own like business, you need to focus a little bit on business. You need to know your numbers. You need to know that sure, you get paid $75 for an hour massage. So you're getting paid $75 an hour. You're not, you have to break that down through all the things that you've done to get that client in the door for that one hour. So just like that side of things I think, because that's not a strong point for a lot of people and they're just told like, oh yeah, just do your own business. It's easy.
DR. DANIELLE: Totally. Okay. Well thank you so much for everything that you've shared. I love the Washington Green Spa. I'm glad that you decided to take that leap and open it. There isn't something that's like it in our area and on one hand that could be that could scare most people out of doing something like that. And on the other hand in my opinion, you've shown that actually people really wanted something like that here because you've been growing subtly over the last five years. If someone would like to learn more about the Washington Green Spa, where is the best place for them to go?
REGINA: They can go to our website WashingtonGreenSpa.com.
DR. DANIELLE: Cool. Thank you again so much.
REGINA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.