Podcast

We revisit the age-old question: how do I raise my prices? From the math to the psychology to the communication, we walk you through the details on how to continue to charge what you’re worth and how to keep your practice growing and thriving.

Sponsored by: Acuity & The Jojoba Company.

Resources

• Deciding Prices for Your Massage Practice
• How to Write About your Massage Prices
• E214: Should I Offer Package Pricing?
• Talking About Your Massage Pricing in Networking Situations
• Deciding to Change Services and Pricing in Your Massage Business

Transcript:

Sponsor message This episode is sponsored by The Jojoba Company. I believe that massage therapists should only be using the highest quality products because our clients deserve it and our own bodies deserve it. I’ve been using jojoba for years and here’s why. Jojoba is nonallergenic; I can use it on any client and every client safely without a fear of allergic reaction. It won’t clog pores so I can use it on all my clients who are prone to acne breakouts. Jojoba does not go rancid; it makes jojoba a great carrier for essential oils. And it won’t stain your 100% cotton sheets. The Jojoba Company is the only company in the world that carries 100% pure, first-pressed quality jojoba. And you, our listeners, can get 10% off orders of $35 or more when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba, that’s J-O-J-O-B-A. massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba.

Michael Reynolds Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we discuss the business side of massage therapy. I am Michael Reynolds.

Allissa Haines And I’m Allissa Haines.

MR And we are your hosts. Happy you’ve joined us today. I’m looking out my window. You know what I’m going to say.

AH Is it nice out?

MR The sun is shining; spring is here.

AH Aw.

MR I love this time of year so much. I love May. Because your birthday and my birthday are in May too.

AH It is. That is the truth. It is not — I mean, it’s a little bit sunny here, but it’s freezing. I’m out in my little office and it’s like 52 degrees. So technically not freezing but very cold.

MR (Laughter)

AH And I’m like, yeah, yeah. So I’m in it.

MR Good.

AH Yeah, but there are — the lily of the valleys are blooming right outside my office shed door, so I’m looking out at them. They’re hesitantly blooming and I’m going to be a good sport about it. So what have you been up to?

MR Those are not the ones you identified for me at the conference, right? Those were — what did you —

AH No, that’s a rhododendron.

MR Rhododendron, that’s right. Okay.

AH Rhododendrons are big, hearty, bushy shrubs with bright, usually, purple or magenta — some of them have white flowers, but the deep purple is the most common.

MR Love it. Okay. Got it.

AH Yeah. And lily of the valleys are these little tiny, tiny groundcover kinds of flowers. I think they’re actually an invasive species, but they come up with these beautiful, very sturdy green leaves, and then they have these delicate little white dangly bell flowers. They’re really, really pretty and they have a very short, short season. They’re like out for a week and a half and then it’s just green leaves. So we have them all outside, and it’s funny because they keep popping up on rando little piles of dirt from when we moved all the dirt out of the way and created a level platform thing for the shed. So they’re kind of popping up in weird spots and in between the little bricks of my walkway and — but they’re my favorite-ish flower, so I’m delighted they’re outside my shed.

MR Cool.

AH But they are slowly and hesitantly blooming. Normally, they’re like full out by now, but it’s been so cold that they’re a little hesitant. So soon. Whatevs.

MR Whatevs.

AH Spring. Yay. Maybe.

MR As far as what I’m up to, I’m just working from my lovely new home office. I love it. Just kind of meetings back to back today, so working it. Doing the things. Doing the business things.

AH Oh, bid-ness, man, bid-ness. So what are we talking about today, Michael?

MR Well, I think you let me know that we’re going to go retro. We’re going to go all the way back to, I think, our very first episode, right? And kind of revisit and get back to some basics that people are really curious about and asking about, which is how do I raise my massage prices?

AH Yeah.

MR This has come up a lot. And —

AH It has.

MR Sorry, I know I’m totally, like, jumping in. But you need — I want to just say that I’m really excited about this topic because we’ve heard reports from people that they’re really starting to understand how to charge what they’re worth. And it’s so exciting to me and I think that is so relevant to our topic today. I just wanted to say that, so. That’s kind of where my head is.

AH Yeah, it really is. And this was our — this was the very first question we ever covered in a podcast episode because it’s the most frequently asked question that we’ve heard from massage therapists. And there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of ways to spiral out of control with this particular question and spiral into various related questions. So there will be a handful of links in the show notes. If you go to our website massagebusinessblueprint.com, if you go to the podcast tab, you’ll see that we list — everything’s kind of backwards chronological — so you see one of the more recent episodes is episode 224, which is this one, and if you click on that you’re going to have a bunch of links in the podcast notes. So that’s what we’re talking about when we mention podcast notes. I’ll have a whole bunch of links to supporting resources. There’s a lot of factors to this including a lot more detail about how to decide your prices in general. And we’ll touch on some of it but not all of it, so know that this is a really big topic. We’ve got some supporting resources.

But I felt like — it was four years ago almost that we covered this the first time. And our podcast sound quality was not as good and we have learned a lot from you and with your feedback in the last four years that we felt it was worth it to cover it again. So that’s what we’re going to do.

So yeah, raising your prices, man. This is scary. And it’s scary for a lot of reasons. Making any kind of change is scary. People in general, like us as practitioners in general, get kind of wigged out by topics of money. Some of us do, some of us don’t. And at different points in our career, some of us do and some of us don’t. So there’s that. And it’s a — money stuff can be a charged topic. And then add in the money stuff plus having to communicate changes to your clients, that makes it triply difficult. So know that this is charged for a lot of people. It’s something many of us deal with. I still get a little creeped out when I know I’m going to have to start talking to clients about changing prices, and many of us do. So know that you’re normal if this freaks you out a little bit. It’s a big thing.

So let’s tackle the first question. The first obstacle is the “what if I lose clients” obstacle. Yeah. So you could start charging more. You could change your prices, and if you have clients who are freaked out by that or have not been trained to really recognized your value or have not seen the change that frequent, regular massage can make in their life, or if they’re people who have seen that but they’re just — they’ve got their own money issues, you could lose a few clients. You might. It’s pretty rare for me to see — I haven’t heard much from people who’ve lost a lot of clients, but that could happen too. I — much less frequently. It’s probably — you’re not going to lose have your client based. You might just lose a couple of clients.

But I like to run the math on this. And you don’t have to do the math because I’ve done it for you. Let’s say you see 15 clients a week and you’re charging, like, 80 bucks a pop. So you’re grossing 1,200 a week. 15 clients at 80 bucks a pop, it’s about 1,200 a week. If you lose four clients — if you lose one client a week for a total of four monthly clients, that means you’re going to see 14 clients a week at $90 — let’s say you go up 10 bucks — and you’re still going to make more. You’re still going to make $1,260 a month — a week, pardon me. So you could lose four clients and still be making more. You could lose eight clients and only be making a little bit less, but you would be working less and making around the same or just a hint less money, but you’re making room in your schedule for a new client who will happily pay 90 bucks. So yeah, might you have to do a tiny bit of work to get a couple new clients in the door, sure, but we got to do that all the time anyway because clients die and move away and whatever, just fall out of treatment for one reason or another.

So if this super freaks you out because you think you’re going to lose clients, do some math. Say, okay, I see this many clients and make this much money. If I saw five fewer clients a month, but my prices were up, how much money would I make? So see how many clients you can afford to lose and still make the same amount of money but working less. That might be good for you. Sometimes people raise their prices because they want to work less, because they want to weed out the suckers and shorten their schedule a little bit. So do some math. That might help you feel better. If you’re like, oh, I can raise my prices by 10 bucks and I can safely lose five clients without taking a hit to my income. All right, I’m not going to stress out about this; I’m going to give it a shot. So there’s that.

How often can you raise prices? This is kind of a personal decision and there are varying schools of thought. There are people who feel that you can and should raise your prices annually and that smaller incremental changes are better. So maybe you want to raise your prices by $5 every year. Some people feel like they don’t want to raise their prices every year, they do better if they raise them every two or three years, and $10 makes more sense. And there’s a whole other school of thought that says you can and should raise your prices when your schedule is very full. And you get to decide what very full means. But if you are over 90% booked over 90% of the time, two or three months out, you can safely raise your prices and feel good about your schedule staying full. And they say — some of these hard-core, schedule-based people say that if that — if your schedule is super, super booked all the time and you raise your prices but you find three or six months later that it’s still super booked, you can raise your prices again. If you’re that much in demand that people are willing to pay continuously higher prices, then just keep jacking them up. I feel like that’s really aggressive. That would not work for me, but it works for some people.

So I — me, Allissa — for my massage practice, which is different from your massage practice, I like to raise my prices every two or three years and go up by 10 bucks. That works for me. I like the consistency of not thinking about it for a couple of years at a time. And I like being able to say, if a client questions it — and we’re going to talk about these conversations with clients after the halftime. But if a client questions it, it makes me feel good to be like, yeah, you know, I haven’t raised my prices in three years so we’re due. And $10 might seem like a lot, but it’s only once every three years, so we’re good. And then I can safely say, and I’m not going to raise them again for three years, so we’re good. So that’s how it works for me. That doesn’t mean it would work that way for you. You have to do — I almost defaulted to saying you have to do what’s in your comfort zone, but nothing is in our comfort zone for most of us with pricing, so do what makes you a little uncomfortable because I think that’s the only way you’ll make change, but try not to freak out too much about it. Which of course is easier said than done.

So I kind of want to jump to how do you figure your new prices? And this — there’s a lot of factors here. We have a whole blog post about this, so I’m going to refer to that in the show notes. I’m going to skim a little bit about this, but pricing is a dilemma. It’s hard to, when you start your business, create a pricing structure, and then if you’re making changes in your practice, it can be hard to reconsider prices. So there’s a couple of factors.

Consider looking around in your area. Now, I don’t think that you have to price match for your area, but I do think you need to have a general idea of what people around you are charging and what they are offering for those prices so that you can come up with a pricing that you feel good about so that you don’t feel like you’re undercharging and you don’t feel like you’re so grossly overcharging in a way that you can’t articulate and justify why. So a 60-minute massage in rural Kansas is going to be much different than my pricing right outside of Boston. Cost of living is different, wages are different, everything is different. So I think it’s worthwhile to look in your area. And this is not the only factor you’re going to consider, but it’s good to have an idea of what’s going on in your marketplace. And when you look at those prices, look at other services provided. So my pricing for an office that you walk into — you know, you park 15 feet away from the door, you walk in, it’s all — I’ve got an entry room but then it’s just a massage room, everything happens in that massage room, you come on out, you leave. My pricing is going to be different from a larger facility that has a steam room and a sauna and a relaxation room and a locker room attendant and all of those things. So there’s a different level of service and amenities that you need to keep in mind.

You also need to consider your own expertise. You — I, as a 14 years of experience practitioner with a lot of different continuing education including that in oncology and complex medical conditions, I can and maybe should be charging more than someone who is fresh out of school. But there’s other factors here as well, like should I be charging way more than someone who is maybe out of massage school a year but is also a PT or an OT and brings — or an athletic trainer and brings a whole other breadth of knowledge to their practice? I don’t know, but it’s something to consider. Your own expertise and professionalism is something to consider. How you run your business is something to consider. If you are super stable, if you haven’t moved frequently, if your schedule is consistent every week, if you rarely cancel clients because of some kind of emergency or situation, or if you don’t take lots and lots of rando vacations but only take certain times off per year and you’re really consistent and regimented, you can get — because you’re so disciplined and so reliable, you can get away with charging a heck of a lot more than someone who does massage a little more part-time and hobbyish and goes away for two or three months every year. So know your experience, know your professionalism and your reliability in the way that you run your business. That is a factor. People will pay more for consistency and reliability and responsibility.

What about tipping? If you take tips, then your pricing might be a little bit lower than someone who doesn’t take tips. If you don’t take tips, look at your pricing in relationship to other businesses that do because I’ve found this to be an issue where because I didn’t take tips and because I hadn’t raised my prices in a few years, I was all of a sudden becoming the discount provider and my massage — my 60-minute massage with me and no one but me and me being the only person clients interact with — was coming out to be the same or even a little bit less than someone going to a franchise and paying 80 bucks for a massage and tipping their therapist 20 or 25. I was like, well, that’s ridiculous, I don’t want to be a discount therapist, and I certainly don’t want to cost less than a place that does not have as reliable or personable service. That’s silly. So kind of think about what’s going on around you, if you’re going to take tips or not, and where that puts you in the spectrum of pricing overall.

I am not — when you’re considering your pricing, I’m not a big fan of pricing services differently for techniques. That makes me uncomfortable. If there’s something that involves extra product or extra prep time — so like product like body scrubs and stuff or K tape or whatever, or extra equipment and prep time like hot stone massage or cupping, even — then it kind of makes sense to charge a little more. But to charge more for deep tissue versus Swedish or relaxation or whatever you call it, or regular relaxation massage versus medical massage — and if you could see me, I’m making all kinds of air quotes whenever I name these modalities — that becomes weird. When is — if someone comes in to chill out but they also have a headache, are you going to turn it into a specialty massage and charge more or less? I’m not a big fan of that. You get to decide what works for you. But things to consider when you’re figuring out your pricing.

So that is the bulk of my schtick on the basics, the freaky part of raising your prices, and perhaps how to consider what your pricing should be. We’re going to jump into our halftime, and then when we come back, I’ll talk about the logistics of raising your prices. Michael, who is our halftime sponsor?

MR Halftime sponsor today is our favorite online scheduling software, Acuity.

AH Yay for Acuity. We super love them.

Sponsor message Acuity scheduling is your online assistant working 24/7 to fill your schedule. No more phone tag. Clients can quickly view your real-time availability and self-book their own appointments. They can even pay online; they can reschedule with a click. It’s super super easy. You can look and act professional by offering convenient scheduling to your clients, and you can customize it all so it matches your branding and your voice. Customer support is a delight. Acuity’s style will help you relax and have fun running your business. And we love Acuity and they love us so much that you get a special 45-day free offer if you go to massagebusinessblueprint.com/acuity.

AH Yay. And I’m just going to note that as we were talking in the last few minutes, I have had two new appointments from new clients come in via my Acuity online scheduling. Thank you very much.

MR Thanks, Acuity.

AH (Laughter) Thank you, Acuity, for filling my schedule.

So let’s flip back to my notes here. Michael, I kind of want to — I should have done this before the halftime but what — if you’re talking to somebody about their pricing and they know that it’s time to raise their rates and they’ve done the legwork but they’re still freaking about the idea of raising your rates, what kind of advice would you give them if they’re just freaking out about the mental component of it?

MR Yeah, well, you’ve covered pretty much the same advice I would give. It’s do the math — I like the math you did of hey, if you lose — what’s the realistic possibility of you losing x number of clients? Are you going to lose all your clients? No, absolutely not. Are you going to use a few? Yeah, and the math really kind of helps illustrate that. So the math you’ve really outlined very well.

To me, a lot of it also comes from — and this is a whole huge topic which we don’t have time to get into today, but the self-worth or the what are you worth when it comes to the service you provide. I mean, massage therapists provide a really, really valuable service, and people will pay for this. And $10 to you may seem like a lot. But when someone is already paying a certain amount for massage, $5 or $10 more is not going to seem like a lot to them. I think there’s a larger gap between people who will pay for massage and who won’t pay for massage just in principle, and people who will pay $70 for a massage or $80 for a massage. That gap is much, much smaller. If they’re already willing to pay $70 or 75 or 80 or whatever you charge, they’re more likely to pay 85 or 90 or whatever you’re going to raise your rates to. So kind of put your self in the perspective of the people who are coming to you anyway and your target market, and I think a lot of that could relieve some of the fear of oh, they’re never going to pay. I mean, they’re already paying probably a pretty premium rate, so you’re worth it. So they’re already voting with their money and telling you that you’re worth it.

AH They’re already voting with their money. That’s brilliant. Thank you for that.

MR That’s what I got.

AH I knew you’d have a little something for me.

MR (Laughter)

AH All right, so how do you actually do it? What are the logistics of raising your prices? I — and again, this is all really varied. I like to give two months’ notice. Please note that one month is totally fine. I like to do two months. And what I do is I verbally do this with all of my regular clients. So if I know that I’m going to raise my prices on, let’s say, January 1st, I start telling people in November. So when my regulars start coming in in November and we do the massage and then they check out and schedule their next massage and pay for their appointment, I do a verbal head’s up. Come January 1st, I’m going to be raising my rates, so an hour massage is going to become $110 instead of $100. And I do that verbally. And I say, you will see the official notice on this in a couple of weeks. And they’re always like, okay, thanks for the head’s up. For my people who buy packages, I let them buy packages at the old price and I keep — and I don’t upcharge after the price is raised; I honor that package for the length of it without increasing their price. So they can actually defray or delay the price increase for up to five months if they buy a package just before the prices go up. You don’t have to do that. It’s just a thing I do. It is a service I offer my regulars as a courtesy. So I like to cover it verbally with my regulars.

I put a note on the services and pricing page of my website. So it’ll list my full menu of services, but there’ll be a note at the top for two months. For November and December, it will say, please note that prices are increasing by $10 per service as of January 1st, 2020. That’s it. So anybody who looks at my website in November and December isn’t going to be piffy if they come see me in January and the price is more than they expected. And if they are piffy, it’s their own fault for not reading, and I’m not going to feel bad about that. Period. That’s it.

I also utilize email to communicate with my clients. I have a decent email list. The bulk of my clients are subscribed, so I will send a bulk email, once the middle/end of November and then once again in December, probably a week or two before the price goes up, just to remind people, hey, my pricing are going up as of January 1st. If you’d like to delay that price increase, you can buy a package. Here’s the link to do so. And that’s it.

Moving forward, if I was going to do that, I’d probably put a note — I’d probably update my appointment confirmation email, maybe in December, so that every appointment confirmation also includes a little bit at the top that says, reminder: prices go up on January 1st. And then as of January 1st when I increase all my priced, I’d probably put a note in the confirmation email for the first month or so that says, please note new pricing structure and link out to my service menu or whatever. I would probably do those things as well.

In that month prior — so I’ve talked about giving two months’ notice — which, if that doesn’t work for you, then all of these protocols work for just giving one month notice as well. If you want to offer those packages at the current rate and reward loyalty, great. If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. So that’s how I do it. I — two months verbal, one month written everywhere. I may make a few adjustments to my service menu and promote that as well, like, now offering a 75-minute massage. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll stop offering something that I hate like when I stopped doing hot stone massage because I’m terrible at it and I did not enjoy it. So I would note, will not be offering blah, blah, blah after blah, blah, blah. If you want that service, here’s who I refer to for that. And that’s totally cool.

Changing your prices is a great time to change your service menu and updating your service menu is a great time to change your prices. So if you do those things concurrently, you might feel really good about having kind of a clean slate with all the stuff you do. So if you’ve been experiencing some resentfulness about maybe not charging enough, then it can be a nice clean slate way to start up so that you don’t feel resentful about your pricing anymore. Yay.

What do you do when people — when and if people react negatively to that? Because it might happen. Some people might just say nothing but then not rebook with you as often. Okay. Or they might feel awkward when they’re there and you mention the price increase and they rebook but then they cancel it when they know they can call and get your voicemail or they’ll just do it online. Okay. People gonna do what people gonna do. But what do you say if someone says, oh, well, why are you doing that? First of all, it’s probably not going to happen. Most clients are going to say, good for you, it’s about time. I’m glad you gave yourself a raise. But for me when people have asked — a few people have asked, not a in “I don’t want to pay more money way”, but in a “what’s making you do this?” I say, you know, I’ve been a massage therapist for 14 years — or however long I’ve been at that point — and I think this pricing, my new pricing, better reflects my skill level. Or the last time I raised my prices, it was because I realized I had become the discount provider in my area. And I said right out, you know, I looked at my pricing, I factored in my no gratuity policy, and I realized I had become the discount provider in this area, and I don’t think that that makes sense with my skill level and the service I provide, so I decided to increase my prices to be more reflective of what I do. And it — nobody — everybody was like, wow, that’s great, good job thinking that through, Allissa. It wasn’t — most people get it.

I have had, in a few times that I’ve raised my prices, occasionally someone who was like, oh, that might put me a little bit — that might put massage a little bit out of my budget. Okay, what can we do for that? I had one client, who last time I raised from 90 to 100, it really made her flinch. I have seen this client since I was a student. I did not want to lose her. She is delightful, she has been — she is so receptive to the services I provide. She has sent people to me, she is a cheerleader, and I did not want to lose her, nor did I want to make her space her appointments out a little further. And so I said to her, you know, you’re getting close to retirement, so how about I just put you into the senior pricing now? She’s not 65. I think she just turned 58 or something. So she’s not by any means old or old enough to qualify for my senior citizen discount, but I said right out to her, you know what? You’ve been with me forever, I want this to stay affordable for you, I’m moving you into your senior pricing early. So when you see “senior citizen” come across on your appointment type, don’t be offended, don’t feel like I think you’re old, but I’m giving you better pricing. And her pricing actually went down. You know what? That works for me. And I had one other person who comes for a half an hour every six weeks and she was a little bit startled by the $10 increase, but she was also two years away from her 65th birthday, and I said, okay, we’re just going to move you into senior pricing, and she was delighted by that and she has sent me other people since then. And I said right out, maybe don’t tell everybody I’m giving you the senior discount early. You’re getting it because you’ve been with me forever. And it worked. So my pricing actually went a little down on two clients, but it went up on everybody else and it more than paid off. I was able to keep my loyal clients with me in a way that worked really well for them and I felt good about.

At the same time there were other people who flinched a little bit and said, well, maybe I won’t come back as often, and I said, okay. If every four weeks isn’t best for your and your budget, how about we do every six weeks; how do you feel about that? And it all kind of evens out. I’m like, that’s this many massages per year versus this many massages per year, and with the new pricing it’s going to come out to the same amount of money or a little bit less even. And they’re all cool with that. And I think a couple people who did that ultimately figured it out and started coming every four weeks again.

And this is — I’ve raised my prices four or five times in the past 14 years, and it’s never wrecked my business. So that’s where I’m at with that. But know that most people won’t complain. Most people are going to feel good about it, and also know that should something wacky happen and you do lose a bunch of client, you absolutely have the skills to build your practice back up. It — you probably just need to do a little bit of legwork, maybe encourage a referral program or something, and get a few more new clients on your books and you’re going to stabilize pretty quick and you’re going to feel good about your pricing. And that is my entire increase your pricing schtick. We could go on for hours about this, but I will not. Take it away, Michael.

MR I have one question.

AH Yes.

MR So how do you feel about the side effect of using this also as an opportunity to raise a bunch of short-term cash by selling a bunch of packages at the old rate before the new rate kicks in?

AH So it can be a great opportunity to do that. If you’re going to do that, be really, really smart about what you do with those packages — the money from that. Depending on how you pay yourself and how you manage your money, it can be fantastic — if you bank all of it and then parse it out to yourself over time. If you take all of that money in for packages and then you spend it on something, even if it’s a legit business expense, you need to — when you spend your gift certificate or package money, you are robbing from your future self. You are stealing income from your future self. Be really aware of that.

And I think we’ve probably all had weeks where if you average 15 clients and you have five or seven come in on packages or gift certificates, if you haven’t set that money aside — if you’re someone who pays yourself weekly based on how many clients you saw, that can really hurt you. If that happens twice in a month — if you have two weeks like that in a month, holy moly, that can be really hard because you know darn well it’s going to come the month before you have to pay your liability insurance, before your car payment is due, before your car insurance is due, before all of these wacky annual things that you tend to forget about.

So if you are good at managing your money, you’re fine. If you’re not good at managing your money, you best make sure you put that money aside and don’t blow it or you’re just totally screwing yourself. You’re stealing from your future self and it will be a debacle.

MR Thank you.

AH Did that answer your question?

MR Yeah. Absolutely.

AH And I say this as someone who has been in that debacle.

MR (Laughter)

AH You know, I made some — I got bad advice, but I made bad decisions, didn’t realize I needed to pay quarterlies, and ended up with a fat tax bill one March millions of years ago. And I ended up with a fat tax bill and I was like, holy crap, I got to raise like 7 grand, like, tomorrow. And I ran a package special, and I sold probably $4,000 worth of packages, and it was great because I was able to pay the bulk of my tax bill, but I also — for the next five months — so that’s March, so we’re talking about through the rest of that year — there were weeks where I had a handful of people on packages and gift certificates and could barely pay myself because I had spent that money. It all worked out. It was a good learning experience. But if you’re not prepared to take a lower income, if you pay yourself that way, then be really mindful of that.

Also if you’re in a state that regulates that, some states regulate that kind of stuff really hard. And if you sell a package or a gift certificate, there are certain rules about how long they can be good for and those rules can vary based on what kind of thing you’re selling. And some states even require that unredeemed — people — if someone buys a service but it’s not redeemed, you have to keep that in an interest-bearing account. So if you were to shut — if I broke my leg and had to shut down, I would actually have to give the state that money so that anybody who has an unredeemed gift certificate or package could recoup it. So you get yourself into a bad situation, you can really — it can be rough. So manage your money according to how terrible you could be at managing your money.

MR I like it.

AH (Laughter)

MR Great advice. All right.

AH Yeah, I try to compensate for my own stupidity as much as possible.

MR Your Honor what? That’s good advice for all of us.

AH (Laughter) It really is.

MR We’ve all been there. Well, thank you. This was phenomenal, a great, kind of, full circle refresh episode on this topic. It’s going to come up over and over in the future again as well. So send us more questions about this, but thank you for the overview and this discussion. It was great. Love it.

AH Thanks for tolerating it, and thanks for sticking in through it, everybody.

MR Well, that wraps it up for today, then. So reminder you can visit us online at massagebusinessblueprint.com. And consider joining our premium member community if you haven’t already. It is a lovely community full of lots of knowledge, learning, resources, and conversation. And if you have a topic or a question for us or anything you want to let us know, you can email us at podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com and we would love hear from you. So again, thanks for joining us today. Have a great day and we’ll see you next time.

AH Bye.