Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

[shags1_23]

This post goes out to those bodyworkers who practice from within their *home* offices. I have been doing that the past couple of years; however, when I moved from one town to another a little further north a year ago, I noticed my clientele dropped significantly. For some reason, when folks find out that my massage office is out of a home, they tend to say something like "let me check my schedule and get back to you" and then never call back. I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced lower volume of clients when they switched either from one location to another or from a professional office building to their home.P.S. I am in the process of now trying to find a room to rent in a chiro's office so that I can start drumming up business like I used to have since the home office thing doesn't seem to work anymore for me.Be well,Jen

 

[Cihle]

Where is your office?  Is there a separate entrance?  Do they have to walk through your home to get to the massage room?  Some people might think it's less professional if you work out of your home.  Perhaps they might wonder if you are truly offering massage or "extra" services.  Perhaps they feel they are intruding on your personal space and feel awkward.  Silly, I know, since you are inviting them to your home.  Maybe they are worried you will have pets that they might be allergic to.  Or that there will be noises from children or your personal telephone or something.  Perhaps the next time you get that reaction, you can say "excuse me, do you mind if I ask you why coming to my home office is not appealing to you?"  You can explain that you've been receiving this reaction frequently and would like to understand what the objections are.  If i had to guess, I would guess that they think it's less professional and that maybe the massage will be substandard.  How are they finding out your location is your home? If they are asking where your office is located, are you saying "it's in my home?"  If so, perhaps you can just say "It off Fiddler's Road"  Or "it's in the Bay area" or whatever.  Just so you know, my office is not in my home, so I can't speak to you about personal experiences with this.  I considered working out of my home but decided against it for several reasons, one of them being the perception of "professionalism", as well as disturbances from my family, worrying about safety issues when there is snow, etc.  Also, having to be concerned about odors....if I've cooked something with garlic for dinner and have an evening client........not so good.  I do have a friend who just recently went from a rented office space to working from her home.  Her office has a separate entrance.   She's been in business for a number of years and her clients just moved with her.  This is all new, so she hasn't had experiences with new clients not wanting to come because she works from home.

 

[cymraesgwyllt]

I work, part of the time, out of my home.  I have done so for about 6 months.  I am pretty happy with the way things are working, but I do find it difficult to get new clients.  I do not post a sign or have any public ads.  As I don't want people just dropping by.  Right now I am doing very selective marketing that I feel safe about.  Word of mouth is working the best.  Of my clients that do come to the house, everyone seems very comfortable.  Many have complemented the massage room and the house.My massage room is located in a sunroom at the end of my house (the front door is nearby).  You have to step down into the room, which I think helps them feel like the room is more private.  I don't have any office-type equipment in this room.  It is strictly massage.  I find that this helps too.  It ultimately seems to be about their personal preference and comfort.  I do see more of a volume from working at the chiropractors office.  But, he is free to advertise in anyway (compared to me being careful), most clients are covered under insurance (which helps motivate), and I have been there for almost 4 years.  If I took out at yellow page ad, did more aggressive marketing, and had an article in the local newspaper, I am confident that things would become quite busy at home.  But, as I said above, I am just not comfortable doing that.I had a therapist that worked out of her home.  I didn't feel weird about it being in her house, but I did find many things to be annoying.  She had a dog that liked to greet you at the door.  This was fine, but the dog barked and jumped which I didn't like.  Her office was set up next to the massage table and a cluttered shelf was in front of that.  Not the most professional looking space.  The dog and a pet bird would make noise throughout the session, which did get old.  But I continued to receive treatment from her because she was a good therapist.  I have done some open houses that have helped.  People like to know what to expect beforehand.  That might be an idea for you if you haven't done one already and still want a home office.Could some problems come from the general area that your are located in?  Hopefully this has been helpful.    

 

[danielle Z]

Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

i work from my apartment, and love it. im sure when you work from home you do loose a few clients but i feel i make up for it in other areas. no building to rent, 100% of the income is mine. no sitting in traffic getting to an office.

 

[Miss?spelled wrong]

Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

Personally, I would not go to someone's home for a massage. I went to a therapist once who practiced out of her home, and it was so bizarre because I didn't know which entrance to use (back door or front door), and everything felt less professional. I half expected to meet her in her bathrobe with a mug of cocoa. I did not feel relaxed and have not gone back.I just wanted to offer my view as a former "client" of home offices. Best of luck to you!

 

[kazlith]

Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

i work from my apartment, and love it. im sure when you work from home you do loose a few clients but i feel i make up for it in other areas. no building to rent, 100% of the income is mine. no sitting in traffic getting to an office.

I was thinking about doing this out of my apartment and/or going to apartments around my area on the weekends.  Right now I just have clients that are through friends and family, word of mouth kind of thing.

This if for exta money that I can save, and when I feel I have enough I'm going to look for office space to lease and open my own place.  This way I don't have to deal with working for anyone.

 

[Ritchellei]

Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

I plan to work for someone and also try to build up some business for my home office. The room is 10 x 12 immediately as you walk into the home with a double door. My husband is at work all day and my children are grown and don't live at home. Have 2 cats that hide all day.Very quiet here. No noise in the street, outside of home, etc. I have a 2 car driveway in front of house for parking. I park in the garage. People who visit say my home is very peaceful and love staying here. There is a bathroom right outside of the office room going through the other door leading to the hall. It flows nicely.I set up the room that way also very peaceful. I beleive that once I start getting clients who "want" to come to me instead of me going to them will like it here. I was hoping to have maybe two days out and two days in per week if I can make enough money. I'd also like to find a place to do chair massage working for myself one day per week. I am in a new location in the Las Vegas area and am starting from square one. When I lived in Santa Monica between my friends. . . .one of my daughter's who is an actress/waitress age 30. . . with more friends than you can count. . . .who braggs about her "massage-mom" all the time. . . . having clients was never a problem.I believe getting people to the home will be a slow-process, taking a long time, but eventually it will happen.I will definitely work by word of mouth from people I know or who I get to know. No advertising or strangers, etc. for many of the reasons stated in this post.

 

[Martin F]

Home Office for Massage Therapy Business

...She even phrases it "The office is connected to my house" rather than "I work out of my home" and gives directions by giving the address and saying "You'll enter through the office door, on the right side of the building" (rather than "the right side of the house").  I don't know if this vocabulary would help, but she has all the clients she can hold and is usually booked out for 3 weeks.  (The fact that she's been practicing there for 15 years probably doesn't hurt!)

I like this. Clear verbage is important because clarity of thought IS part of the essense of professionalism is it not? And clarity of thought is expressed or not whenever we open our mouths.

I've worked in both settings, I have therapy room inside my home and I do outcall and have also worked in clinical office settings either separately or connected with some other practitioner(s).

I think that alot of it comes down to how you hold the context of the space wherever you are physically established. I've seen office settings where the clairty was less than I have established in my home office.

Because I'm not restricted to practicing in my home office I can adapt to other people's needs who might for whatever reason not feel comfortable with my pets or my neighbors or the smells of my food or whatever. Be that as it may I can't really imagine not having a home office in addition to whatever else I may be doing in other settings. It's simply too convenient to be without. it's pragmatic advaneforum.xxxes are too obvious.

I've gone to some effort to create auditory and environmental privacy in the room I use for therapy, I've made adaptations to the room for air circulation so it breathes independently. I have a switch where I can turn off my house doorbell when I'm in sessions. The telephone is barely audible behind soft music when in the room. My home 'tends itself' in may respects because I've intentionally set up systems to make it tend itself. Not all home offices or all home office practitioners have done the things to separate and automate and remove their home responsibilities from themself when they are at home, if at all possible you need to establish separate bathroom facilities for clients if you intend them to use your home as a clinic, if not then the other members of the family that use the same bathroom have to agree to maintain it in a high standard of impersonalism or it can be uncomfortable for clients to feel like they are imposing on the family's personal space. That's hard for people to tell you but it's a real deterrant.  so simply being IN a home office does not make the home office a dedicated clinic. Making the home office a dedicated clinic is what you have to do IMHO.

If you can't establish and maintain those sorts of subtle and not so subtle limits and boundaries with the whole family using the home as a domicile then it's going to make more conflict than it's worth.

If you can, well hey, more power to ya. I love my home office! I also like keeping more of what I earn than just buying expensive overhead. I know this much about my clients. They have learned to value my work more than any particular environment I work. Some of them have come to me in my home office and in other offices usually having to do with what was most convient for both of us at the time and what was available.

While I'm a believer in feng shui in the end it all comes down to the quality of the bodywork that results from it all. Either your enviornment supports or detracts from that quality but the work you do is the final measure of all of it. The environment is secondary, significant but not primarily governing. If you focus well without distraction when at home then that's a good thing and if not it's going to present problems.

Knowing that I'm wired that way I also know that not everyone else is wired to think like I do too. Some people have a certain image in their mind of what a massage clinic has to look like and too much deviation from that mental image and they are just not comfortable.

I did some market research a few years ago and discovered that in my area over 60% of the people surveyed said that the qualifications of the practitioner are more important than the ambience of the environment and that they would not be deterred from a home office if they felt the bodywork they needed was getting well done there. It reportedly made little or no difference to them if it was a home office or a rented space downtown. They didn't have that strong a feeling about it. Interestingly the rest of the people who objected to home offices did have very strong feelings of objection so that tells you something too.  

there's no doubt that if all you do is a home office you've limited your potential contacts. you have to decide what you're willing to live with and without.

I'm a creature of convenience. I'm a busy guy and if two options are equal in all other respects I'll choose the most convenient of the two every time.  

I may consider adding handicap wheelchair access to my home clinic this year too.