91: Employer Blues (with Drew Freedman & Diane Matkowski)
Episode Transcript
Summary: Employers are having a hard time finding therapists to hire. Like workers everywhere, massage and manual therapists’ relationship to employment is different than it was a few years ago. Til and Whitney talk with independent clinic and spa owners Drew Freedman and Diane Matkowski about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs involved in this changing landscape, in a conversation that solo practitioners, employed therapists, and employers will all find stimulating and informative.
- Til Luchau’s Advanced-Trainings.com
- Whitney Lowe’s Academy of Clinical Massage
Resources:
- Drew Freedman’s http://bostonbodyworker.com
- Diane Matkowski’s http://www.freedommassage.com
- Til’s Facebook post mentioned in the episode
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner where Books of Discovery has been a part of massage therapy education for over 20 years. Thousands of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, e-textbooks, and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say learning adventures start here, and they see that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast, and are proud to sponsor our work knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and body work community enlivening content that advances our profession. Be sure to check out their collection of e-textbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy, and physiology at booksofdiscovery.com, where you, The Thinking Practitioner listeners, can save 15% by entering THINKING at checkout. Thanks again.
Til Luchau:
This is Til, and I am our in-house sponsor for this episode. I’m going to try to read this in the first person. It’s written in the third person. You’ll see what I mean. I am the sponsor, and my group offers all kinds of learning opportunities from one-hour certificate courses to ongoing study groups. I want to highlight a live online course that we have coming up soon, our next training in the Principles of Advanced Myofascial Technique Series. We’ve been evolving as a group. Me and the faculty have been evolving this series for the three years that we’ve been pushed online and we’ve actually been online teaching courses like Whitney for a couple of decades now. This latest version of how we’re working it, I think, is really hitting the mark, hitting the perfect balance between learning at your own pace, getting personalized real-time interaction and support.
When you sign up, you get lifetime access to all the recordings. They’ve been fully updated. It was a really fun project to go through and take some of the things we’ve been teaching for years and bring into the modern era, plus you get a variety of choices for scheduling some live meetings with us as faculty as well. Super affordable with discounts for ABMP members, AT subscribers, in-person course repeaters, and lots of other discounts. Check it out in the show notes or on my site, advanced-trainings.com. All right, that wasn’t so bad. I got to say I’m still getting used to this idea of reading my own sponsor spot, but that was hard.
Whitney Lowe:
Maybe I should read your sponsor spot for you.
Til Luchau:
I want that. Maybe next time.
Whitney Lowe:
Hey, Til is such a great guy. Here’s what he’s doing here now.
Til Luchau:
There you go. Thank you. How are you doing, Whitney?
Whitney Lowe:
Doing very well, and yourself today? It’s a little crazy on the schedule of things that are going on, but that’s par for the course as usual, but today actually, I’m quite excited. We have two guests with us today. Not just one, but two.
Til Luchau:
Two guests. We have Drew Freedman from the Boston Bodyworker. Welcome, Drew.
Drew Freedman:
Hey, everyone. How you guys doing?
Til Luchau:
And we have Diane Matkowski from the Massage Mentor Institute. How you doing, Diane?
Diane Matkowski:
Hello, hello, hello.
Til Luchau:
Hello. Good to have you here. So good to have you here. Good to be here with all of you.
Whitney Lowe:
They are return guests, so they decided that we were at least decent enough to have them come back again so we didn’t get blacklist from them, so thank you all for being here.
Til Luchau:
Do you think there’s an ethically required disclaimer that we’re recycling guests when we do that?
Whitney Lowe:
I imagine. Yeah.
Til Luchau:
These guys have such a depth of experience and knowledge and perspective though that I think we could just make a whole show about them, so I’m really glad to have both of you back.
Drew Freedman:
I don’t know about that but…
Til Luchau:
This came out of a conversation you and I were having, Drew, where you put a message up, “Hey, I’m looking to hire some folks,” in your clinic there. We just started talking and what you were saying about the challenges you’re having, finding therapists, really struck a chord and realized it’s very topical, and probably a lot of people dealing with the scenario you’re facing from both sides of that equation for both from as employers like you are, and as therapist. I know all of us are as well. I really wanted today to focus on the employer side of that question. I know there’s a lot of different sides to it and a lot of interesting wrinkles in this question, but I really wanted a chance to hear from you two as leaders in our field, and as entrepreneurs, and as employers what this is like right now to be running in a massage business and trying to hire people. What do you think? You said yes to my invitation. You still in?
Drew Freedman:
I think so. I hope so.
Diane Matkowski:
I’m in, absolutely.
Drew Freedman:
I’m not going to bail now. We don’t run now we got to do this, right?
Diane Matkowski:
Yeah, there’s really nowhere to go.
Drew Freedman:
Quite frankly, it’s too important not to talk about. It’s obviously, as you saw just from your simple post that you put out yesterday asking the question, it struck nerve on quite a few people. It’s interesting that the people who actually didn’t comment on there because they’re already so upset, so I think we have a good topic of discussion for today.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, you’re referring to a couple Facebook questions. I just put the question out there, “Hey, what would it take, therapists, for you to answer an ad an employer put out and work for an employer?”, and I just wanted to get a sense of what you guys are up against really. It gave us a good sense because we got a lot of replies all across the spectrum, some heated, some appreciative. Later on when we get to more details, I want to share some of the summaries of that, what we heard. Maybe in the show notes, we’ll put a link directly to some of those posts so people can go read them themselves if they want to.
Drew Freedman:
I did my best to filter through and read as many of them as I could. You see some people who are just offended by the fact that they would never think about working for somebody, or as other people, they’re crushed that they can’t work for somebody and they have to do all the other legwork in terms of running their business. You can see from both sides of it. It’s tough.
Til Luchau:
It is tough. Drew, before we get to Diane, anything you want the audience to know about you and what you do in the world, that kind of thing?
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, just as a background, I’ve been doing this since, well, ’95, ’96, I was an athletic trainer, and then I rolled into massage therapy doing that and opened Boston Bodyworker in ’99, and we’ve been running ever since then. It’s been a challenge. It’s always been for most employers in the massage world, but having a practice in the heart of Copley Square in Boston, obviously, over here’s a little bit different than it might be in the middle America somewhere, there’s other issues that you have to come up against, but we’ve been doing it for 23 years now. I have therapists that have been with me for 12 years. I have 10 years, seven years, eight years, and three months. It’s not a question on our end sometimes of, “What kind of an employer am I? Do people want to work for me?” Some yes, some no, of course, but it always comes down to the individual practitioner, I think, and what they’re willing to put into their work and what they’re willing to work for and those sorts of things.
I think from my background, I’ve probably hired and seen people go, I don’t want to say fired, but over 300, 400 employees over the last 23 years or so. It’s grueling. It is grueling to have some of these conversations with them because you feel for them as a therapist. Diane and I are also therapist too, obviously, so we understand the work that’s put into doing a massage or doing seven to 10 in a day. We have an appreciation for that side of it where I think a lot of employers may not understand why they say, “We need more time in between appointments,” or “We need to make X.” We get it, but a lot of them don’t have the other side of the equation, whereas we have to manage seven to 20 different employees with their own personal schedules and stuff, and there’s a lot of juggling that goes back and forth, and you got to toggle that, as Diane knows, toggle that between, “Am I massage therapist or am I their boss?”, or am I their friend or am I their boss?” It goes back and forth, so it’s a delicate dance.
Til Luchau:
The challenges of running a massage enterprise, massage business, and how you have worked with that over the years from your identity as a therapist and a business owner, and how the connection with the massage therapist is so important, and yet you’re not finding enough people to hire. That’s interesting.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah. Diane, I’ll let you jump in there, but I think we’ll go into deeper in terms of what COVID did to all that and how that impacted any momentum that we might have even had pre COVID because we did have some good momentum. I think we’ll get into that, but I won’t over speak, and let Diane jump in.
Til Luchau:
Diane, tell us what you’d like people to know about you and how you see all this.
Diane Matkowski:
Oh, hello. My name’s Diane. I’m the owner of Freedom Massage in Malvern. I’ve been in business for myself since 1996. I have 11 therapists.
Whitney Lowe:
Diane, can you tell us where Malvern is?
Diane Matkowski:
Malvern is outside the Philadelphia area.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, thank you.
Diane Matkowski:
I’m pretty close to Philly.
Whitney Lowe:
For those not familiar. Yeah.
Diane Matkowski:
We are hiring, anyone listening, we are hiring and-
Til Luchau:
Put your contact information in the show notes.
Diane Matkowski:
By the way, we are hiring.
Drew Freedman:
We’re hiring too.
Diane Matkowski:
I have a staff of 11 therapists. I have an amazing manager who now runs the business for me. Her name’s Eugenia. I do offer PTO. I do offer a 401(k) plan. I do offer continuing-
Til Luchau:
Okay, time off. 401(k) is like retirement? Yeah.
Diane Matkowski:
Yep. Continuing education, flexibility and schedule, and we do have the value of family first and the therapist’s body first. For me, after being a therapist for so long, it was important to me. One of my passions is the massage business used to be owned by massage therapist, and it was a different time, it was a peaceful time. For me, I feel like just being, like Drew was saying, we were massage therapists, we are a massage therapists, so I really tried to cater to the needs of the employee and the client. For me, reading some of the stuff, I understand everything that everyone’s saying on both sides.
Til Luchau:
You’re talking about reading the comments in the Facebook post?
Diane Matkowski:
Yeah, on Facebook, but I hope that people will realize that there are small businesses out there, some run by massage therapists who really love massage therapists and want them to do better. I want my staff to do better than I ever did.
Drew Freedman:
Absolutely. 100%.
Diane Matkowski:
That’s my goal. I want them to be better in every way. I want them to be better body workers. I want them to make more money than I did. I just think there is that out there too, but maybe we’re just harder to find.
Til Luchau:
The issue issue is, I’m clarifying it, is you two have both tried really hard to offer the ideal place to work, and as I understand it, you don’t have enough people working for you. Is it that simple?
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, kind of that simple in a sense. The demand is there. The supply is not. We literally turned down 20 to 30 clients a week because we don’t have enough staffing. It’s not a matter of my therapist won’t work. They won’t do enough massages. We just can’t hire enough therapists to fill in the holes. We have enough room. We have a smaller space than we used to have. It’s just we can’t find therapists. This is going to be a touchy subject, so I’ll get right into it from the very beginning of it, is a majority of the phone calls that we get for requests for appointments are for female therapists. As an employer looking to hire, when I put job postings out there, 90% of the people that respond are male therapists. I’m a male therapist. I understand how it’s hard for us to do work, but I always… It is what it is. It’s the one profession where I always say the men are discriminated against, so get over it, guys. Just work harder.
When you’re looking to satisfy the demand, how do you specifically go out there and look for what’s being demanded? You can’t say, or some people will say that you can’t say, “Looking for female therapists. Looking for male therapists only.” That’s a tough one. I completely understand the back on that, but how do you go around that and how do you not respond to male therapists who are genuinely out there looking for work? How do you screen other therapists that just because they’re of the gender that you’re looking to hire, they are more qualified immediately than the other gender? That’s not how it works. That’s far less I checked. It’s a sensitive slippery slope, and then it’s experienced.
They’re like, “Oh, I’ve been working as a massage therapist for six years now.” Okay, that’s decent experience for six years, right? Well, but the last three, you were in COVID, so you didn’t touch anybody. You’ve been working for three years, and the three years prior to COVID, you just got out of school and you barely did more than three massages a week, so six years experience is really not legit. You see what I mean? Where somebody else might have just got out of school pre-COVID and was working right away and started doing all their massages, next thing they know, they have nobody to work on for three years and they lost their momentum. You’re just trying to find that right fit, and it’s daunting. It’s daunting.
Whitney Lowe:
I’m a little curious about the timing here of this. Did you see these kinds of problems happening in the last few years, or is this predominantly a post-COVID phenomenon that you’re seeing?
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, go ahead, Diane.
Diane Matkowski:
No, after you, Drew. Go ahead.
Drew Freedman:
Well, what I was going to say is that I think I’ve always had issues with hiring, and I think part of it has to do with the way my business is put out there. Whitney, you and I’ve talked over the years, we call it clinical massage versus orthopedic massage, or we’ve always said clinical massage encompasses all the different techniques, but I think the way we’ve classified our site, our business, and the therapists at work for us, that a lot of therapists coming out of school feel intimidated to work for us. They’re not capable of working at that level just yet, so they want more experience. That’s entirely not true. They’re completely capable.
They just need some coaching or whatever in terms of how we develop our treatment strategies in terms of at Boston Bodyworker, but I think sometimes they feel like they can’t aspire to work there yet because they need more experience, and if they’re never getting that experience, they’re never really aspiring to get to work at our level here. I’ve had therapists… Whitney, you know Solan. She’s been with me since 2012. I hired her out of Bancroft because she just would not stop emailing me. She would not leave me alone that she wanted a job, and at the time, I had a minimum two years experience out of school, and she just would not let it go. Here she is, 12 years later, still on my team. The therapists are out there. The persistency, I don’t think, is necessarily always there. I don’t know what’s driving them or what’s not driving them, but I think that’s what we’ve always seen.
Til Luchau:
It’s an endemic issue across the board, across not just in the US, it’s across professions, it’s across countries where it’s hard to find enough people to fill the jobs that are available. I just saw this yesterday in the New York Times, so I thought I should mention it. Desperate for workers, Britain expands childcare as an incentive. The British government ramped up its efforts to get more people into work and make Britain an enticing investment destination as it announced Wednesday an expansion of free childcare, extended housing, energy subsidies, and bolstered business investment incentives. Next to it was more Britains decide to leave the workforce. It’s right next to that. It’s like the British government is wrapping up its efforts to draw people into the workforce, and at the same time, even more people saying, “Yeah, I’m not going to do this.”
Drew Freedman:
They’re ramping down the work week around here too, right? There’s a whole petition for the four-day work week versus five-day work week. Everybody wants to work less and make more. It’s the American dream, right? Come on.
Til Luchau:
Where does that leave you, guys? Please go, Diane.
Diane Matkowski:
I just want to chime in a little and just say that in the beginning of my career as a business owner, I had a wait list to get in for a job. I had no shortage of therapists. I want to say that I started to notice this trend pre-pandemic, dare I say. I really did. I started to notice that it was a little harder to get in. I used to always be invited to schools to talk as a small business owner. I was a wanted commodity as a small business owner, locally-owned massage person. More and more as time went by, the invitations from the schools got a little lessened, or the buzz around my business diffused a little, I think, because of the wide spread of all these massage places going up everywhere. The business really blew up. It more than doubled in size.
Also, the mindset of massage therapists has shifted a little. I think that has something to do with it too. It’s not bad or good or anything. It’s just different. As an employer, I feel like I’ve really had to adapt to some of those changes, that mindset of the people coming out. I’ve had to change the way that I go about finding people, and also maybe what I thought was a great find in a massage therapist before is a little different now too. For me, it’s kind of been a slow shift. It’s been a slow shift.
Til Luchau:
What is that change in the mindset that you’re describing? How would you describe it?
Diane Matkowski:
As far as what I look for?
Til Luchau:
The change you’ve seen in massage therapists over the time that you adapt?
Diane Matkowski:
I feel like maybe I’m just a kumbaya old 1996 massage therapist kind, I don’t know, but it used to be a really community-based kind of thing where we all worked together more, I felt like. I worked with a group when I first got out of massage school and I loved it, and then I worked by myself for about three years and I just looked out my window looking for the next massage client. I found that I didn’t have anyone to run questions by, I didn’t have anyone to challenge me and push me, and I was terribly lonely. That is why, in all honesty, I didn’t want to become a millionaire. I started my massage business because working by myself was unchallenging, lonely, and I really just didn’t like it, so I really liked when I was introduced to massage, how it was a community affair.
Back in the Esalen days, it was like the wood stock of massage. It might not be the professional that we look at now. Some of that for me is the shift where there’s a lot more solo practitioners. AMTA just came out with the report that 70% of massage people call themselves sole proprietors which, again, is great, it’s cool, but there’s also a lot of benefits behind being an employee, and not every person is built to have their own practice. I think people try to do that and then give up.
Til Luchau:
My impression is that three to four years ago, that number was fewer. I think it was 60-40 at some point. I might be remembering that wrong, but my impression is that it shifted toward more solo fewer employees.
Drew Freedman:
Do you think based upon what I’ve… I’ve drifted away from social media quite a bit over the last three or four years, but a lot of-
Til Luchau:
Congratulations.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah. Well, a lot of the threads that I was following, especially in the Facebook groups, the massage therapist groups, a lot of infighting was going on there. Lots and lots. I don’t know if that still happens as much because, again, I don’t follow some of these different groups, but it was getting very disheartening seeing the way therapists talked to other therapists and they treated each other. I think that maybe that’s a push towards being that sole proprietor being like, “You know what? I am my own island. I will work alone,” but like Diane said, if you do it long enough and hard enough, that isolationism you feel, it’s a social trap for yourself too because you’re not being challenged. You don’t have anybody to bounce different thoughts off of in terms of treatment strategies.
I consider myself fortunate to have people like yourselves at the other end of a computer that I could just text and ask questions to whenever I want to. Quite frankly, anybody who’s out there listening, you can always text me or any of them, I’ll speak for them, because we love to help other therapists. I think more therapists out there need to start recognizing that what you see on these social threads in these groups, the infighting that happens, there’s a lot of angry therapists and upset therapists out there and that’s where they tend to voice themselves. A lot of people said some pretty mean shit to me in the last two weeks when I put out some job postings, and I just pulled out my best Laura Allen hat and just said, “Bless your heart,” and just moved on. I don’t want to get triggered by any of them because they’re upset for their own reasons, but I think a lot of the infighting we see might be reflective of the sole proprietor numbers we see from the AMTA.
Til Luchau:
Maybe a connection there. Yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
I wonder too is that with a lot of the things that we’re seeing being written about broad trends across the social landscape here in this country and maybe even somewhat worldwide as well right now just because of the extreme polarization in our society that we have, maybe this isn’t something that’s really unique to the massage profession. That’s just culture wide that a lot of just… It’s hard to get along with people now, it seems like, in many space.
Drew Freedman:
Well, I think you’re 100% right. Listen, we all live in our little bubbles. Everybody lives in their bubbles and everybody thinks everybody else’s bubbles are all messed up, but you don’t have to look far to see the biases that are around us and to immediately be impacted by them when you go on socially. Just having some awareness of that and some respect for other people’s perspectives and just say, “Hey, I never considered that.” I was frustrated 10 years ago and it’s different than now. Yeah.
Diane Matkowski:
Can I just say too? This is just a consideration. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I don’t really know what is right or wrong, but like I said, my whole thing for years has been the massage business used to be run by massage therapists. Now, the person who owns the most massage chains in the country, they own 75 establishments. They are an equity-based company that just buys companies, so they’re running 75 massage studios. To me, that’s interesting. When you get the government involved and you get big business involved, it’s going to shift the energy of things. I hate to say that I think there’s a good place for it. I think some of it’s awesome. So many more people are getting massage. I could jump out of my skin with happy.
People that never got massaged, never heard of massage, thank God they’re getting some kind of massage, and hopefully they’ll find the right fit, so thank God it’s blown up like it has, but again, I just wonder if it’s something so delicate, something so intimate, something so secret to touch another person that I just don’t know if it should be taken lightly. It’s that secretness, I wish it would come back, and get contained and scooped up. For me, that’s the sad part after being in the business all these years is watching that become secondary or sometimes even non-existent in our conversations or our work, the whole vibe of the whole thing, I guess, you could say.
Drew Freedman:
When I was in Copley for 22 years, I guess I was there, and a Massage Envy opened up, maybe it was probably 2014, 2013, it opened up right around the corner from us and everyone’s like, “Oh, my God, what are you going to do? Massage Envy’s going to crush you.” I was ecstatic that they opened up around the corner from us because they started putting up billboards and signs, and there was people in the state government lobbying for massage therapy. They created a low barrier entry point for massage to become more mainstream, which was a good thing I felt for my business, and a lot of people flock to my business once they learned we had a membership program before Massage Envy was doing membership programs, and they just eased into it.
They kind of created and trained our consumer for our practice, which was good, but they also created this model that says if you’re going to work for somebody that has a membership-based business, you’re going to get $15 to $22 an hour, and that’s what you’re getting. No time in between appointments, only going to do 50 minutes, not 60 minutes. No, it’s not that way. Some, obviously, chains are like that, but we still run 60-minute massages. I put 15 to 30-minute buffers in between all of my appointments. I make sure that my therapists have snacks on site, and if not, somebody’s running out to get food for them if they need something. These guys are working their… We did it, Diane. We know what it feels like to have four minutes because the next client’s waiting out there for you and you have no time to eat a power bar, but if somebody could change your sheets for you while you eat that power bar, that makes the difference in the world.
Diane Matkowski:
That’s right, Drew. Change it. It’s true.
Drew Freedman:
I guess my point is that I want a massage therapist out there to know if you want to work someplace, pick up the phone, call them, ask to talk to the owner, ask to talk to the hiring manager, say, “Tell me about this position.” Don’t feel like they need you there. Be empathetic both ways and communicate with them. I’m telling you, you’re going to talk to somebody like me and Diane that would love to have you if you’re willing to work as hard as we work because I promise you, you probably never will, but I’d love to see you try.
Diane Matkowski:
I have to jump in on one of those little things that you don’t think of. I see you, Til. Hi, Til. It’s too just having someone help you change your sheets. When you’re back to back one hour massage, after one hour massage, you’re getting to the point where you’re not sure what foots what. No matter how brilliant or strong or crafty you are, when you’re seeing a lot of clients, it’s a high pace. When you have another staff member help you change the sheets, my God, that’s like a dream come true. That’s all I can say about that.
Drew Freedman:
We had seven treatment rooms in Copley and we would be going all the time with them, and my therapists were working, working, working. I would make it a habit about every 15 minutes to get up from my desk and walk down the hallways when I saw clients coming out because I knew the next one’s waiting, and I just grabbed their sheets, “How’s everything going? You’re doing okay? Good, great,” and I throw their stuff in the laundry. That saves them an extra 30 seconds from having to bring the laundry to the laundry room and come back to change the seats. Now, they’re just there changing and they’re right onto the next one. I don’t remember whether they said thank you or not, they probably did, but it’s just appreciated because you’re part of a team and that’s how the team works together. It’s not a one-to-one thing, like Diane was saying before. You get to work with a group of people and everybody’s in it for the same reasons to make sure that the customer feels better, and you want to be respected in your work environment. I don’t know. It’s not rocket science, right?
Til Luchau:
You guys have been doing this game for a while and you’ve learned what helps, what your therapists want, and what the customers want. I got to say what you’re saying is validated by what I saw coming back in the Facebook strings too, because what I was after was what makes a difference to therapists so we could bring it into this conversation? One of the things that was mentioned… Well, let me put it this way. It wasn’t just, “Should I work for an employer or should I work for ourselves?” That was a pretty clear divide, but it wasn’t just that divide. Of the people that were into working for an employer, the divide was, “Should I work for a low-paying employer or should I work for a high-paying employer? Should I work often for a chain or should I work for an independent shop?”, was the divide there too. There were lots of people coming in defending working for an independent shop. What’s interesting is I got a lot more private messages about that than I did about anything else. Those people weren’t posting. I don’t know what that’s about. I can only speculate.
Drew Freedman:
I don’t know what that’s about. I saw that too. Yeah.
Til Luchau:
People are more private about the fact they’re happy with where they’re working than they were about their complaints, but when I dialed it down to get specific like, “What are you happy with?”, changing the sheet sounds like a little thing, but a theme that came out was competent support from the staff. A lot of people mentioned scheduling. A lot of people mentioned dealing with client issues, support around that. A lot of people have mentioned just the competence of the staff and the place that they were working as being a major factor of why they liked working for an employer. You’re naming some of the high points.
Diane Matkowski:
One of my favorite things after all these years is dealing with clients that are “difficult”. That is because I’ve been doing it for 25 years, and so I’ve learned how to dance with it, almost enjoy it because I believe that inside everyone, there’s something good and I can find it, and we can work out something so the client’s happy, but a massage therapist who’s fairly new and has seen three clients and still has one more, pick up the phone and have to deal with something like that, sometimes it’s overwhelming and hard. That’s what I mean. Not everyone’s cut out for every aspect there is in being a good massage therapist, and a business owner, and a scheduler. When you’re on your own, there’s a lot of stuff that has to be done, so I could see where sometimes that would be a factor.
Drew Freedman:
The other thing I noticed a lot on those comments and through interviews over the years, everyone’s looking for the wage. “How much are you going to pay me?” Now, if I told you I was going to pay you $75 an hour, you’d be like, “All right, cool. That sounds great. I want to work for $75 an hour,” but then you came to work for the next week and I got you three massages, but down the street, they offered you a job for $50 an hour and you’re doing 20 massages a week. Who’s making more money? Don’t just take a job based upon who’s going to give you the highest wage. I think a lot of people go after, or don’t go after certain things.
Til Luchau:
The highest per session amount. Right.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, and it’s not the way… There’s other perks involved with that wage that make value to it. One of them, and the most important one is, “Can you put people on my table?”, because you can give me free CEs, you can offer me 401(k)s, you can offer me benefits package and paid time off, but I don’t need paid time off if I’m not working when I’m on. You want to make sure that you can provide them with people on the table. Now, when I say to them, “My job is to get people in the door, your job is to get them out the door,” they’re like, “Well, don’t you want us to keep them here?” I was like, “Of course, I want them to come back.”
I said, “I don’t want them to come back because they have to. I want them to come back because they need to.” You want to help them feel better. You want to help them get past whatever their problem is. If you can help them more faster along by referring them to a PT or an acupuncturist or a chiropractor, and we can get some other people involved to help them get better, that’s good for me too because those people are going to come back because they know that they were cared for and looked after the right way when they first came in. I just think that’s all part of the process in explaining that to them.
Til Luchau:
Service marketing, service as our mission in this profession, and we want the benefit to land for the client.
Drew Freedman:
Not everybody is a clinical therapist. Not everybody wants to work on specific injuries. Not everybody wants to work on particular problems. Some people just want to give a kickass relaxation massage and make somebody feel better, and I think that’s awesome, but if that’s not what the practice typically promotes out there, that’s probably not the place for you to be working, so don’t expect to do relaxation massage when you’re working at a chiropractor’s office or you’re working for a place that’s more orthopedic based. That’s not what they’re looking for. Go to a place where you can excel in what your sweet spot is. The other thing is a lot of people will just, “I’ll take the first job that’s offered to me,” but if it’s not going to make you happy, what’s the point of taking the job?
Til Luchau:
Good advice. I want to go back to the money thing because that was the most frequently mentioned factor and there seemed to be… I know it’s really variable locally too, and probably you could do a formula based on cost to housing or something where I know in some places in the country, the Bay Area, for example, or Seattle where my son lives, working people pay half their salary for their housing, and it’s not the same everywhere. The wage there also obviously needs to be different, but the happy ones, people who are happy working for an employer all mentioned the pay. The ones that were complaining about it all mentioned the pay. Everyone’s talking about the pay. You’re right, it’s not as simple as just how much you’re getting per session.
There was a lot of stories of people feeling a bait and switch thing going on with employers. They said, “Oh, I’m going to make 80K a year. I’m going to make $80 a session,” answering the ad and realizing it wasn’t what the reality was. Again, it’s hard for me to drop principles out of that, but here’s the principle I’m stabbing at. 60, 70 bucks per session seemed to be the breakwater between the people who were saying they were happy with what they were doing and the people who were not happy with it. Again, I know there’s so many local factors there. What do you think of that?
Whitney Lowe:
Just to clarify, Til, you’re saying that’s $60 per session of take home for the therapist, is that right?
Til Luchau:
That’s the number that was quoted and I do not take the time to rectify it.
Drew Freedman:
But those numbers are skew because you don’t know if those are employment numbers or independent contractor numbers. I think, obviously, Diane-
Til Luchau:
Let’s put it this way. As an employer, I would say if you were coming to me as a consultant, and I’ve done a bunch of this, by the way, for small clinics to help them with this very issue, I would say make sure your therapist can say to themselves they’re making $60 to $70 per session. Whatever that math of that is. That seems to be what I’m seeing is the feedback coming this way. The people that are happy are saying they’re making $60, $70 or more per session, and again, there’s a lot of variation there.
Drew Freedman:
I would say the first thing any therapist or anybody going to find a job needs to do is how much do you need to earn to make a living? Because I’ve had therapists come and say they want to work, and then they come back two weeks later and say, “I need to be making more money,” and I said, “Well, what changed in the last two weeks?” “Well, I have these bills, I have these bills, and this is what…” I’m like, “I don’t understand.” They want to work more, but they don’t want to do more massages. They just want to make more money on the massages they’re doing. To me, that’s not a conversation you have two weeks after you start a job when you’ve agreed on all the other terms of the job. That, to me, is a lack of professionalism in that regard.
Diane Matkowski:
I just want to point out too what Drew said earlier, I kind of agree with him in that the $60 or $70 is very… We might hear that and that might be the check is written for that, but after all the numbers are done, meaning time spent to answer the phones. I’m talking for an independent contractor or a sole proprietor, all the things that they have to do, what is being covered outside of that $60, sheets, lotion. I do sheets, lotion, I do everything for staff. They don’t pay for anything. After that $60 is taxed, and again, remember the sole proprietors are paying about 7.65% more. They’re paying a self-employment tax. If you’re 1099, you’re paying a lot more in taxes. That number gets beaten down pretty hard pretty quick.
Then two, if we come into another pandemic, you’re not going to get unemployment. All my staff members sat back on their couch, eating popcorn, and they had their unemployment during the pandemic. For me, there’s this safety net. Also, what I’m also doing for you is you’re getting money towards your social security. Another thing I hope when you’re doing your stuff as a 1099 or an independent, that you’re doing your books correctly because there is always a chance of an audit. There’s just so many factors that go into that $60. It’s a lot of risk. I think Drew and I are taking a lot of risk, and I think that we deserve to make a little money too. 60, 70, I would need more facts to really have a fair discussion around what that means.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, I would even… I actually want to-
Til Luchau:
I’m going to take that number off the table. I was looking for indicators to that we could talk about, but no, you’re so right that there’s so many factors in that, that those become red herrings almost, or things that we think mean something and they don’t because the most interesting answers were the ones from say the clinic owners who said, “Listen, I sat down with my therapist. Each therapist has to decide what’s right for them, but this is a story from a woman in Oregon who’s been in a lot of our classes.” She said, “When we did the compensation math together with my therapist, they actually make more money per hour working at our spa and have more free time than they would if they’re working for themselves.” I’ve actually been through two different consulting gigs where we did that with the therapists. We facilitated those conversations. In each case, that was the takeaway that people had. It’s like, “Wow, actually, you’re paying me more than I realized even though…” I’m sympathetic to that point of view. I really am.
Drew Freedman:
I remember when the pandemic hit us, and basically, massage therapists who were either employees or contractors were scrambling to figure out, “How am I going to survive?” The ones that were employed by people like myself and Diane got to sit back and just understand as long as they have an employer that’s out there working for them to take care of this, they’re going to get their unemployment stuff, they’re going to be taken care of.
I was hoping that when we came out of the pandemic, that some of those people that thought being a sole proprietor would be the ideal way for them, they were going to realize, “You know what? Maybe it’s safer to be employed by somebody because I have this protection with unemployment, and if a pandemic hits again, I want to work for an employee that’s going to take care of its employees like Boston Bodyworker did, like Freedom Massage did, these kinds of places. I want to work for one of those places so I know that I can continue to build my career without that thought in the back of my head of catastrophizing what’s going to happen next, and let the business owners focus on that stuff.” It didn’t work that way.
Diane Matkowski:
I just want to say too, I do think there are some people out there that it works perfect for it that make an amazing sole proprietor. They’re just built for it. They’re made for it. They can juggle a lot of balls. They like the freedom of being their own boss. Kudos to you, guys. Thank you so much for your service too. I’m not saying it’s only my way, but there are a lot of people with families and other things going on that don’t have the time to do all those things. There is help. You can find good employers out there that are willing to accommodate your lifestyle. That’s I think something that I just wanted to point out too, that go on with your bad selves out there with your own businesses.
Drew Freedman:
Now that you mention that, you said risk before too, and the risk of… We have liability insurance. We have our own insurance for the spaces that we’re in. There’s so much risk that an employer puts out there that I think when an employee comes in and says, “Oh, you guys charge $130 for an hour massage. I should get at least 65 because that’s 50%, and that’s where we’re starting at,” I wish math worked that easy in my world, but I know post-pandemic, I’m paying back a quarter of a million dollars from a lease that I had to buy out of. I have expenses that are on top of my already existing expenses that accumulate that. It’s not as simple as just, “Pay me what I’m worth.”
Til Luchau:
There’s a big discussion there around how do we each decide what the right number is from these different perspectives? Again, you can get a good view of them if you look through these threads. There was quite a bit of sympathy for both sides of this quandary. People say, “Listen, I need to make so much, and I understand the employers have expenses too.” There was a lot of that, but I got to say from both sides too, employers chiming in too, there’s a lot of one-sided like, “Hey, I just need to make 80% of what the employer is taking in. If they’re not paying me that, they’re exploiting me.” That’s the more extreme position, I say, but fill in the 80% with whatever you want, it’s talking about it in the sense that it’s true, that you know what you need to make. Maybe we’re not always aware of what the needs are on the other side of that picture too, and that’s some of the challenge here as well.
Drew Freedman:
I’ve had a conversation, it’s going on 12 years ago now, 13 years ago, with my staff. We all sat down and I literally opened up my accounting books to them because they thought that I was basically gouging them for what they were earning. We sat down, we broke down what it costs my business to operate one massage. It basically came down to I was generating in net revenue $5 a service from all the work that was being done, and they thought that was unbelievable. I’m like, “That’s where it is right now because of the overhead that I have.” I said, “I chose to lease this space at this price and pay this much per square foot. That’s my deal, but this is what I can afford to pay based upon that.”
It’s not like I was undercutting them or underpaying them. They just didn’t think that the 60% that might’ve been going to the business at that time was actually going to the business instead. I wasn’t rolling around the cash on my bed at home. “No, I’m telling you I’m not even paying myself. This is what we’re netting right now is $5 per massage,” but again, unless they can see your book, sometimes it’s just a conversation that’s impossible to have, I think.
Til Luchau:
Well, I got to say every conversation I’ve been a part of that where we’re doing that, just opening our concerns or our books to each other, there has been more understanding, I’d say, of the cost involved in being an employer. Now, there’s a societal conversation now. What are the needs of workers? What do they need to feel valued and what do they want? I think you’re both to the place, I’m going to predict this, where you’re offering everything you know how to do and still not getting the response you need.
Drew Freedman:
Pretty much.
Til Luchau:
Yeah?
Drew Freedman:
I’d like to think there’s more that I can do. I just don’t know what that is yet, but yeah, I think I’m trying to exhaust everything we can short of… I know there’s certain things that I could do with my staff that’s here or training them to work with them individually, but if I’m doing that, that means I’m taking myself away from my business in other areas where the business will be impacted to the point where it’s not going to just impact that one therapist, but the other six or seven therapists. I have to determine whether my time spent doing that one thing is valuable to all seven or eight of them versus just to the one of them. When you don’t do that, you look like, “Whoa, you don’t care about me.” I do care about you, but I also care about the whole family, and I’m not playing favorites here.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, there’s limitations to what Drew can do. What were you going to say, Diane?
Diane Matkowski:
Really, for me, this has been a 20-year journey, and there’s been times where I’ve been a dreadful boss. Dreadful. I wouldn’t have wanted to work for me 20 years ago maybe. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve done the best that I can do as a person. I do think that, as to what Drew was saying, there’s only so much that I can do, and I do feel like I’ve done as much as possible. I’ve lost my train of thought a little.
Drew Freedman:
That happens.
Diane Matkowski:
Because this is a very passionate thing.
Til Luchau:
Yes.
Diane Matkowski:
I get really into it, but I feel like, like I said, I don’t know… It’s ever-changing and everything in our industry has been changing. Yeah, I’ve stepped up as much as I know how.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Right. Whitney, go ahead.
Whitney Lowe:
I had a question for both of you too along these lines, and a lot of our discussion has been around the conversations that you have with new potential employees, new people who might potentially be coming in there and their needs and wants, but we’ve been hearing a lot, not only within our profession, but across the board too, about this increased level of disengagement with employees and employers across the board. I’m wondering, have you seen any of these attitudinal shifts that you’re talking about here impacting your existing staff that you have in any way of feeling less comfortable, feeling less supported, or feeling like, “I don’t want to work anymore,” of those kinds of things that we hear about across the spectrum?
Diane Matkowski:
I think that that’s where I was going, and then I totally lost my train of thought because I got excited.
Whitney Lowe:
Well, I picked that up for you. I just threw it back at you.
Diane Matkowski:
Thank you. I appreciate you. I appreciate you bringing me back. When I was running the business, initially, I was doing massage, I was doing everything, and I was managing people, and I very quickly got burn out. I do think that in order for the staff to get the most out of an employer and a manager and support, the business has to be constructed almost like every other business. Now, I have a manager who takes care of the day-to-day. I have another therapist who takes care of my recruiting and my hiring. I have someone who takes care of all my finances. I’ve had to learn how to delegate. By delegating then, I am a little more available for my staff.
My staff feels more loved than they’ve ever felt because I was a little burned out, so I do think that it is important for staff to know that they’re appreciated, they’re doing a good job, that they’re great with clients. We never stop loving up on our staff. I think there’s nothing, I think, that feels better than hearing from your role model, your employer, your manager, that you’re doing a great job. I find in this business, you really can’t take your employees for granted because if they’re not there massaging, what are you going to do? You’re out of it too, so I do think that there is a little bit of a disconnect, and I see that, but I hope that it stops and there are ways.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, I’m with you. After money, learning was the most mentioned motivator for the people that would work for an employer or that would make a difference for them or worth happy what they’re doing. It was opportunities for learning. Sometimes, it was mentoring with a specific therapist who worked there. Sometimes, it was the CE benefit that people were getting, or the culture of learning they were finding in the clinic.
Drew Freedman:
I had different situations in place for a therapist to either earn CEs or mentoring or do certain things, but what I found from them is that they would either say, “That’s not what I want to be learning, so can you teach me how to do X?” In other words, “This is what I want from you versus what I can offer to you,” or they would come back and say, “I want to do a CE course that I want you to pay for that has nothing to do with what service I would offer for you here.” I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t fit into what we’re trying to provide here, so that wouldn’t be included.”
They would come back and say like, “Well, then I’m not getting what I want out of this.” They’re trying to basically use my space as a platform to build their solo practice, and I’m like, “That’s not what this is for.” Any therapist that works for me that wants to go on and do their own thing, go right ahead. I have no problem with that whatsoever, but I don’t expect to hire somebody who wants to come in for me to train them so they can go off and do whatever they want. You know what I mean?
Til Luchau:
Okay, dude. Can I push back a little bit?
Drew Freedman:
Please. Yeah.
Til Luchau:
If you’re a businessman, let’s say, let’s take it from that point of view, isn’t there an argument to say, “This is just a negotiation, and if this is what you need and I can give it to you, then I get what I need”? From that point of view, with that therapist, isn’t there an argument to say, “Yeah, you don’t want to learn something that necessarily I see you practicing here, but if that keeps you here and keeps you happy, why not offer that for you?”
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, I think that would maybe be a one-off maybe just in terms of… What I’m referring to right now, my thought is this individual person or persons who had done several other things that warranted that response.
Til Luchau:
Okay, all right, so you didn’t feel very giving to this particular person, but what about that perspective? What about saying, “Okay, if they’re willing to negotiate what they thought they needed”? What about that perspective that just says, “Whatever it takes, I’m going to make you want to work here?” Let’s go to money. Let’s say they say, “I can afford to pay you 60, 70 bucks an hour.” They say, “I need 80.” Why not just add $10 onto your cost if you can pay the therapist that much?
Drew Freedman:
Because if Diane hasn’t done that already, I’ve done that and I’ve already catered all into that, and it doesn’t work that way, but Diane’s going to die if she doesn’t get the slot, so let her have it.
Diane Matkowski:
Here’s the thing. That is part of, I believe, my responsibility is to provide learning to the practitioners because if they’re not better than I was then… I know this is a big statement, but my manager is better than me. She’s a better massage therapist and she’s a better manager. How did that happen? I gave her everything I had, and she went with it, and she added to it what she adds to it. She is better than me. Eugenia, I’m saying it out loud to the entire listener crowd. You are better than I am as a therapist and as a manager in many ways, and that is the way I want it. In CEs, she teaches hands-on to staff. She’ll pull aside a Sunday. She’s taking classes with all kinds of people, James Olszewski, and Til, soon to be you. Whitney, she’s taking classes with you.
She’s everywhere and she sets aside the time on Sundays, and whoever wants to show up can show up. Do they all show up? No, but that’s not my problem. That’s their problem, right? I’m giving it to them. Also, too, CEs, we have guest teachers come in. I have guest teachers come in and teach classes. Does everyone love the teachers? No. Does everyone come to the classes? No. Shame on them. All I can do is my best. I do think it’s my responsibility as a business owner and as a boss to make sure that my therapists are better than me. I get massages from them, and I’m a little intimidated to go back on the floor now. They’re good. They’re really good. Look, I’m turning red because I think they can massage and some of them can massage better than me, and that’s the way I want it to be.
Drew Freedman:
When I hire my staff, the conversation I have with them is that my job as the business owner is to not be their boss. They are my boss in a sense. I work for my employees because they work for the Boston Bodyworker. I have systems in place that they basically follow the systems of the Boston Bodyworker. That’s who they work for. I work for them to make sure that they have the most success within that system. They see it as like, “Oh, you’re my boss.” I am not. As long as you follow the system and you understand the practice that we have in place there, that’s who you work for. My job is to help you navigate that and be successful within that system. It’s not a matter of if you don’t follow that system, I’m going to be on the outside here saying, “This is what you’re doing wrong. This is what you’re doing wrong. You’re fired,” or “You’re going to get a raise.”
No, I’m working within that system to help them to see where they have their strengths and weaknesses, but some of them, they’ll come through and they’re like, “Well, I don’t really want…” I had Boston Bodyworker University where there’d be classrooms that we would talk about different techniques and different things, and some would be like, “Yeah, I’m really not into shoulder stuff.” What does that even mean? When somebody comes up and they have shoulder pain, we say, “Yeah, Diane’s not available today because she’s not into shoulder stuff.” Of course not. The attitude is like, “I really want to learn on how to work on plantar fasciitis. I don’t want to work on shoulder stuff.” It’s baffling sometimes.
Til Luchau:
Well, back to my question for you, Drew.
Drew Freedman:
I love it.
Til Luchau:
What if you commented as a businessman, say, “You want plantar fascia, and if that’s what it takes to keep you here, why not?”
Drew Freedman:
Why not? Because then you’re stuck every day catering to that one employee who you want to make feel special and happy because they’re not getting what they wanted, and next thing you know, have seven other employees be like, “We just did shoulder work three weeks ago. Why are we doing this again?”, or “We just did this.” It’s because this person needs some extra handholding, so everybody else needs to fall into line with that. Again, the system is what the system is. If they want to learn more, I’m happy to do private stuff with them but-
Til Luchau:
If you’re getting the results that you want with the system as it is, fantastic. If you’re getting what you need with the system as it is, you got the system that you need. If you’re not getting the results you need as an employer with the system you got, then maybe the system is the question.
Drew Freedman:
Well, the system’s always changing. The system’s never 100%.
Til Luchau:
Right. What do you think, Diane?
Diane Matkowski:
I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve been at this for a long time and I haven’t always done it elegantly and beautifully, but I will say this, that one thing for me about the art of massage is every practitioner is so different, even practitioners that practice the same modality, even practitioners doing the same technique. I don’t know if two people do the same technique. Til, you can teach the technique, but each person’s going to do it a little bit different. No one’s going to do it exactly like you. For me, I just have found that I want people to find their strengths and run with them. There’s been some times where staff has wanted to try something. We have added the branch on for oncology massage. Was that a part of my idea to my vision? No, but has it worked out? Magnificently fantastic at it. Has Molly now been with me for almost 10 years? Yes.
To me, yeah, I did say Molly, if you want to check that out, and all it did was attract a different kind of clientele, but we’re booked out. You can’t get in with Molly doing oncology. I did take some risk with accommodating staff. I couldn’t do everything. There’s certain things that I have a hard no to. I don’t need to get into that, but all in all, I think that the beauty of community is everyone has something to offer. I’m like a boss in the background. I’ve decided I’m not your friend, I’m your ally, so for me, I make those decisions pretty crisp and clear. For me, to a degree, Til, I would say, and Drew, everyone has their own different feelings on things. A little flexibility with what people bring to my office, I think, has been helpful. I can’t always give everybody exactly what they want, but I have benefited greatly by taking some of those risks.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, I will say this though as well. It does help as a business owner if you have other underlings who are doing some of the other parts of the system. If you have somebody else helping with your staffing needs, if you have somebody else helping with your education stuff and you can manage the business, sometimes those people that are having issues, they’re never getting to you. They’re getting to the underling saying, “Hey, I don’t want to work on shoulder stuff this week. I want to work on plantar fasciitis or whatever it might be.”
The underling can absolutely work that time, but if I have to take away from my time that I’m constructing for the rest of the business for that one individual person every single time, then I’m always in the trenches. They’re doing that stuff and I’m never managing my business, and then the business eventually fails, and that one person who probably isn’t even with us anymore is moving on, and the business is now underwater. You have to juggle what’s not most… I don’t want to say because they’re less important, but prioritize how things are being done. Sometimes, your priorities are going to be put above them because if there’s no business to manage, there’s nothing for them anyway here.
Til Luchau:
I have so much sympathy for you as a manager, Drew. You manage a lot. Hey, there’s one more question I got in mind. Whitney, interrupt me or take it some other way if it’s too much, but what about the money? Why don’t you just add 10 bucks and give the therapist 80 bucks if they say that 70 is too little? Tell me about that.
Whitney Lowe:
Well, let me ask a clarification before they answer that question. Are you saying do that for one person or are you saying do that across the board for everybody?
Til Luchau:
No, that would be a fairness issue. You’d have to make some way that’s fair, but that’s often the argument that comes to says, “I can’t do it for X,” 70, let’s say, “But I could do it for if it was Y,” let’s say it’s 80. Why not just add that much more onto your prices and pay your therapist Y in a fair way?
Drew Freedman:
Because you just increased your payroll by 15%. I’m sorry, the answer’s never that simple because I’m paying you $10 more, plus I’m paying payroll tax 11% more, and that number is not as simple as $10. That’s $10 multiplied by your 10 clients. That’s $100, and seven other therapists, that’s $700 a week. That’s $2,800 a month just to make that $10 happy? Math doesn’t calculate.
Til Luchau:
Could you raise it $15 then and then pay 10 of it?
Drew Freedman:
Say what?
Til Luchau:
Can you raise your rates to cover that cost too? That’s the question.
Drew Freedman:
What if I raise my rates already? The only way to do that, again, supply and demand. I have a therapist that is booked six, seven months out, and I keep wanting to raise his rates, but he insists that he wants to work for this wage and doesn’t want to charge his clients more than that wage. You know what I say? “Good for you. I’m all for it. I don’t need to pay you more in behalf of those people.”
Til Luchau:
Exactly.
Drew Freedman:
As long as he’s happy with what he’s doing, I’m happy.
Til Luchau:
The second part of that question that I’m trying to get your views on, what about just charging more?
Drew Freedman:
Sometimes, you have to. I raise my rates in September by 15%. That’s a significant pay, but I hadn’t raised my rates in five years. When I reached out to all my members about the rate change, I had two out of 200 that had an issue with it and it really wasn’t non-issue. Their alternative was this, they go find another therapist somewhere else, and they don’t want to do that. They know the therapist is not… It’s not like the company raised the rates and the therapist is all getting paid the same kind of thing. There’s things changed in the business model that it works, and you have a reputation. We’ve been around for 20 plus years. They trust that, and that works for us, but we did raise the rates and change things, and it’s still never going to be enough for that one person.
Diane Matkowski:
I would like to… This is interesting, Drew. I adore you and I’m learning more about your business. We do have some similarities and we also have some differences because for me, I would never want to lose someone for $10 an hour. I know I might be losing my mind by saying this on a podcast, but most of my staff is happy with what they’re making, and I always say, “If you’re not, at least give me the opportunity if you’re going to go somewhere else to have a conversation.”
Drew Freedman:
Absolutely, 100%.
Diane Matkowski:
Is it fair to everyone? No. Does everyone in my office get paid the same amount? No. I don’t know. I don’t-
Drew Freedman:
Think about this though. I’m not having a conversation.
Diane Matkowski:
At this point in time, the ball has been tossed from my hand to the employees’ hands a little bit. In this day and age, I’ve learned that I have to be a little more flexible. My pay scale has gone increased a lot over the last few years, and as has adding the PTO, as has now adding 401(k). I did benefit in some ways for a while there. Now, those other businesses are upping the game as to what a good employer is. It’s tapping in and I had to hire a manager, and my God, there’s another thing. I’ve had to spend money to keep people happy, to keep staff happy, and then also to keep myself happy where I don’t have all the responsibilities in the office so that I can manage things better, but that’s where I am so I might not go 10, I might go five. I would just-
Drew Freedman:
Here’s the thing-
Diane Matkowski:
I’m going to negotiate.
Drew Freedman:
I’ll go $20 an hour more. I’ll give them $20 month. The question that you asked, Til, was why not just give him $10 more, right?
Til Luchau:
Why not raise your rates to give them $10 more?
Drew Freedman:
Regardless. Either way doesn’t matter. I think the answer is the infamous Whitney answer, which it depends. It really has to depend because if you’re saying universally across the board, I would say, “No, I wouldn’t do that,” but if you’re saying, if a therapist has been with you for a year now and they’re saying they need to earn more an hour and they’re going to leave if you don’t pay them $10 more an hour, that’s a different conversation altogether because I can look back at their numbers, see what they earned and we can-
Diane Matkowski:
I agree with that.
Drew Freedman:
Yeah, we can then have that conversation, but if you’re saying I’m sitting down to interview for a job and I’m saying, “I’m going to pay you 75,” and you say, “No, I want 85,” no, I’m not having that conversation just yet. If you can show me something based on incentives, I’ll have that conversation, but if you’re just saying you’re worth more because you say so, I’m telling you 23 years tells me exactly what you’re worth because I don’t just arbitrarily pull numbers out and say, “This is what I’m going to pay you.” I pay people based upon what the business can afford and what their value is, and then I go from there. It’s not as simple as just give them $10 more so you don’t lose them.
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Thank you, Drew.
Diane Matkowski:
Good points, Drew. Good points.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, no, thank you both. What do you think, Whitney? How are we doing?
Whitney Lowe:
I think it’s never an easy answer, obviously. For me, I was particularly interested in this just because I see this as this is not an isolated thing. I think we’re seeing a lot of these kinds of things impacting various aspects of our industry across the board, and it’s an angle that we haven’t explored a lot, so I really appreciate both of you coming on and giving a lot of value and perspective to those parts of the puzzle as well.
Drew Freedman:
I would just like to say that if people are out there looking for work, and I like to believe there’s a lot of massage therapists out there looking for work right now, pick up the phone or find the contact on their website, and email the places you want to work. Start the conversation. Advocate for yourself. I guarantee you the place you want to work wants to hear from you. They do want to hear from you and they’ll have the conversation, and if the conversation works out that you don’t want to work there, so be it, but at least you checked it off the box and you don’t sit there and being like, “Well, I’m not going to call them because they’d never hire me,” or “I’m not good enough to work there,” or “I’m too good to work there.” Pick up the phone. Otherwise, you’re still not making anything because you’re not working. Just have the conversation.
Diane Matkowski:
I would like to say thank you to all the massage therapists on the ground working day in and day out with clients. I’ve done it and I know it’s not always easy. A lot of times, I would hope there would be a band in the lobby waiting for me, playing music, saying how great a job I did. Oftentimes, that didn’t happen. Oftentimes, I didn’t even know what the client thought. Thank you for all your hard work, and this is a tricky conversation. I would just like to say again, I am hiring and I am in the area. It’s freedommassage.com.
Til Luchau:
Thank you both. No, so much-
Drew Freedman:
My information’s right there. Just go to bostonbodyworker.com.
Til Luchau:
bostonbodyworker.com. We’re going to put both you guys in the show notes directly to your sites. Yeah, please do call these two amazing leaders in our field, these two therapists. We’re lucky to have you two and we’re lucky to have all the people on the ground, like you say, and then everyone everywhere else working hard to try to find the balance between these different competing questions.
Drew Freedman:
We love what we do. We’re passionate about what we do. If COVID didn’t kick that passion out of me, I don’t know what the hell ever could because COVID kicked my ass, and I’m still hot and heavy for massage therapy, and I got another 10, 15 years left of me, I think.
Diane Matkowski:
You know what, Drew? I would like to do, too, if you would join me in just thanking Whitney and Til for what they’re doing with this podcast. You guys are just kicking ass and taking names. You get so many views, and you have so many interesting topics and guests, and you’re not afraid to push a little bit, so thank you for being brave and speaking your minds and bringing on great guests.
Drew Freedman:
I’ll actually take that-
Diane Matkowski:
An honor to be here.
Drew Freedman:
I want to take that thank you to another level because I put this question on Facebook. I put this fake question on Facebook at the beginning of the week, and I would say minutes later, maybe it was an hour or two later, Til chimed in, picked up the phone, we had a conversation, and we started talking about just this because he gets it. He’s met me enough times, we know enough about each other to know we both love this field and we genuinely are concerned for both sides of it, employers and employees, and we want to figure out what the answers are. We don’t know what the answers are. I certainly don’t think I have all the answers. Diane doesn’t, Whitney doesn’t, and I don’t think anybody on Facebook has it either, but we have to have the conversation. We have to have sometimes conversations that are hard and difficult and make us uncomfortable, but that’s where the answers are usually found, right? So, continue. Thank you guys so much for this platform. Thank you guys so much for-
Diane Matkowski:
We love you, guys.
Drew Freedman:
… what you’ve been doing for the last 25, 30 years because we’ve known each other that long in regard. Yeah, and to those who are out there listening to this podcast, trust me, there’s a lot more people like Til and Whitney and Diane that are out there that are just as passionate as you are. Pick up the phone, shoot them an email, they’re there to help.
Diane Matkowski:
freedommassage.com.
Til Luchau:
All right. Thank you dears. Feel the Love. The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, Associated Body Work and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with Pocket Suite, and much more.
Whitney Lowe:
ABMP CE courses, podcast, and the Massage and Body Work Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession. Like my partner, Til, here and myself, Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abpm.com/thinking. We would like to say thank you to all of our listeners who’s hung out with us here on this episode. Thanks again to all of our sponsors. You can stop by our sites for video show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find links over on my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com. Til, where can they find that with you?
Til Luchau:
I am at advancedtrainings.com.
Whitney Lowe:
All right, so questions or things you’d like to ask us, you can hear us talk about, email us at [email protected], or you can look for us on social media under our names. My name is currently Whitney Lowe on social media. Til, yours?
Til Luchau:
Still Till Luchau. Please rate us on Apple Podcast. That really does help people find the show and it helps us stay visible so that people will listen. You can also hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast, or wherever else you listen. Please do share the word, tell a friend. It’s just great to have you in the audience. Take care. Thanks, Whitney. Thank you, everybody.
Whitney Lowe:
See you again next time. All righty.
