Pregnancy is such a wonderful time blooming with life, excitement and wonder.

Well this is how it is for some women but I think we also know as therapists that often pregnancy isn’t alway like that and can be fraught

Do you feel uncomfortable with your marketing strategy and think that you should be doing more and doing it differently or that you are not attracting the right clients to you? This can be a real struggle, time consuming and fraught with uncertainty. It can leave you feeling that you are shooting in the dark.

Is your marketing flourishing or failing you?

There are some points that I feel are key to underpinning all aspects of how we market ourselves before we get to putting it into action.

You are your business; understanding your values and your value is at the heart of this. We are our greatest assets and to be authentically ourselves is our key selling point.

This is a more ethereal selling point to get across than say than selling a product but if we embody these things with an inter clarity it becomes a strong foundation to our work and how we are perceived.

I don’t think that many people considering training in therapies do it because they see it attached to a large salary, world domination or a Nobel peace prize but what does draw people to this profession?

Having taught students in several different Colleges and different age ranges, I have found when teaching 16-19 year olds (and sorry as this is a generalisation) they liked working with people but were often unsure what job areas to go into or saw it as a travel opportunity for working abroad.  With the increase in the number of Spa’s there is also a larger corporate industry with job opportunities for younger therapists.

By comparison older students often feel drawn to retrain in complementary therapy wanting a new career  in which they feel that they are helping people. They often have also had personal experience of receiving complementary therapy, which has helped them through a difficult time maybe emotional change, health problems or to support them through their pregnancy. This often means they come into training with a greater sense of direction and with more life experience to bring to their treatments.

Coming into spring yes we are here even though its still rather chilly!

The detox word starts to be bandied about we are often feeling sluggish at this time of year.

There are loads of detox programs and books out there. But what is detoxing?

The premise of these programs is that once completed your body is free of toxins. Our body does acquire toxins the majority of these come from our environment, which contains chemicals such as heavy metals and other substances to varying degrees.  If we have these in our body to anything near high levels we would be feeling very unwell. Just look up the symptoms of lead poisoning but obviously we would rather not have any of these toxins in our body as they could be contributing to health problems.

As another new year starts this is often a time of reflection upon our past year and an opportunity to look forwards towards another. January is also tax return time and for those self employed individuals it is necessary to make sure you have filed your self-assessment return and to pay your tax.  In this blog I will be looking at cash flow planning and discussing the ways of managing both your cash and work flow to help plan for your tax and to improve productivity and efficiency.

Initially it is worth reflecting on the previous years in order to look for any issues or trends which you might be able to learn from. Reviewing your accounts can help to identify those times of year which tend to be very busy and those which are quieter. A key problem with managing quiet times is often that of cash flow as bills and expenses need to be paid all year round and a quiet spell can place pressure on available cash to meet your costs.

Consider what problems your quiet times cause you and on looking back at your past year, could you have done anything to spread the work more evenly? What might the reasons for the being busier or quieter at different times of the year?

Selling Treatments as Presents

Offering treatments as presents to existing or potential new clients is a lovely idea but here area few things you may want think about:-

Consider the type of work that you do and whether it would be appropriate as a gift, for example if you work a lot with emotional issues then you may find people buying gift vouchers is less likely due to the personal nature of the treatment.

Those working with stress, relaxation and pamper treatments should find these gift vouchers to be ideal.

Some ideas when offering gift vouchers are:

Pregnancy Massage Training in the Maldives

Our Pregnancy Massage courses are with the Well mother organisation founded by Suzanne Yates who offers the most comprehensive international pregnancy massage training.

I trained with Suzanne in 2006 and went on to do her teacher training. This year we have been working together to develop a new certificate course designed for delivering training in Spa’s and luxury treatment centres.

So when Suzanne contacted me to teach the pregnancy massage certificate in the Four Seasons resort Maldives, I was not going to hesitate!