Podcast

Weekly Roundup

• Allissa Featured on the Massage Hodgepodcast
• The Night Circus
  

Discussion Topic

• We gather tips and scripts for MTs who work while pregnant and still want a bit of privacy. 

Quick Tips

• Schedule time to worry, time to decide, time to plan
• Summary of gotchas on PPP Loan Forgiveness application

Sponsors

• Acuity Scheduling
• The Jojoba Company
• Yomassage

Transcript:

Sponsor message This episode is sponsored by Acuity, our software of choice. Acuity is the scheduling assistant that makes it easy for both traditional businesses and virtual businesses to keep their calendar full. Acuity is the business suite that takes hours of work off your plate so you can focus on the fun of your massage business. From the moment a client books with you, Acuity is there to send booking confirmations with your own brand and messaging, deliver text reminders, let clients reschedule, let them pay online so your days run smoother and faster as you get busier. You never have to say, what time works for you? again. Clients can quickly review your real time availability and book their own appointments. You can get a special 45-day free offer when you sign up today at massagebusinessblueprint.com/acuity.

Michael Reynolds Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we help you manage the firehose of information and emotions that is our current environment. I'm Michael Reynolds.

Allissa Haines Allissa Haines.

MR And we're your hosts. Welcome to this episode today.

Allissa, what's the haps? What's the latest?

AH Quadrilaterals, like learning about them in a fifth-grade levels -- a little bit of a challenge for me, and trying to teach it to a kid is even more of a challenge. So that's my headspace. I'm coming to you from an hour of quadrilaterals.

MR Those are shapes with four sides, right?

AH They are indeed. And there's squares and rectangles and rhombus and having to identify a particular quadrilateral on a worksheet that has adjacent sides that are the same length and determining which shape has right angles and which one has parallel opposite lines. It's a bit much for me, and I just want to say to the kid, it's fine if you don't get it because you're never going to use this in your real life.

MR Exactly.

AH But that's not really staying on board with the curriculum. So there's that.

How are you?

MR Wow. Doing fine. Doing well. Hanging in there. Ready for today's episode. Got some fun stuff packed in, I think.

So should we jump to it?

AH Do it. What're you reading? What're you watching? What's going on?

MR Well, I, interestingly enough, have been listening to you, my friend Allissa, featured in the Massage Hodgepodgecast.

AH Oh, [indiscernible].

MR How do you say it? Massage Hodgepodge -- let me start over.

AH I think it's the Hodgepodcast.

MR [Laughing] The Massage Hodgepodgecast. Yes. That one. Yes, where the host is trying to interview a massage therapist from all 50 states, and he asked you to represent Massachusetts. So I have like ten minutes left, but I've listened to most of it. And you did a great job. I was impressed. Yeah.

AH Thank you. It was really sweet. It's a really neat little podcast. I love it. I just said it like that was demeaning, like, little podcast. It's not. He's got a ton of episodes up. I really admire the effort of getting information and updates from therapists in each state, especially now. The climate across the United States is so different state by state, and even just region by region. I don't know. It's really neat. I listened to a few episodes before I did the one that I was on, and I really enjoyed it. He's a really sweet, sweet dude, and the podcast is really good.

MR Yeah. You did a great job. You had some really insightful stuff to say about the industry in general, and what's happening. So I encourage everyone to check it out.

AH Thanks. Thanks for listening to that, Michael. Like you don't spend enough of your time listening to me.

MR Yeah. I just can't get enough of your voice.

AH [Laughing] Just don't even know where to go with that.

MR [Laughing]

AH So I am -- I was -- I finished it last night, I think -- reading a book called The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I had never heard of the author or the book until somebody mentioned another book that she had written and said how much they loved it. And somebody was like, was it even better than The Night Circus? And my friend was like, yeah. And it was two people I really respect. So I did the "little free library into my Kindle" thing and read it. And it's kind of like -- it's a bit of a fantasy that takes place within a circus. And it's like -- two magicians have this life-long competition situation. It's really, really cool. It's a little bit mystical. It's kind of exciting. There's some romance. There's really sweet friendships. It was just a really good book. So I recommend if you need to get out of your head a little bit, and you'd love a really slightly dark but beautiful and descriptive fantasy fiction novel, try The Night Circus.

MR Thanks for the recommendation. I'm looking at it now.

AH But who's our sponsor?

MR All right. Our first sponsor is Yomassage. We love our friends at Yomassage.

AH We do.

Sponsor message And you, too, can become an expert in all things restorative stretch, mindfulness, meditation, and therapeutic touch in a comprehensive, three-week virtual Yomassage therapist certification. In this training, you'll learn practices you can offer your clients virtually and an innovative modality that enables you to serve clients in a group or a one-on-one setting. You'll build community with the other therapists going through the training. You have assignments due each week and weekly discussion posts and live Q&As and weekly quizzes and lots of one-to-one feedback from your instructor. Payment plans are available for the May and June virtual trainings. This training offers 10.5 NCBTMB CE hours. And our listeners can get $50 off courses May through July using code BLUEPRINT -- all caps, one word, BLUEPRINT. So you can learn more at massagebusinessblueprint.com/yomassage.

MR Thanks, Yomassage.

AH Yeah. Thanks so much.

MR All right. So we have a question or a topic from a listener to discuss today, I believe.

AH We sure do. A listener wrote in to us and said, "I am 18 weeks pregnant, and I am finding myself in desperate search of how to prepare for maternity leave as well as how to tell my clients that I'm pregnant while maintaining strong boundaries. I have found that people are extremely comfortable asking personal questions when they find out you are pregnant, and I want to avoid that as much as possible with my clients when I return to work. I just love to hear some thoughts on being a pregnant entrepreneur and massage therapist."

So this is such a neat question and one that I am entirely unprepared to answer on my own because I have not been pregnant and not had my own babies. So I went to our community. So I asked our premium community for their feedback and their experiences and their advice. And I got some little bits of information from a couple of different people in our community that I'm going to share. And then, our friend Rianne, who is just a wonderful massage therapist and educator and uni parent in Wichita. I asked her this question, and she put together just this beautiful bullet-pointed list. So I'm going to give a little bit of haphazard, random bits of information from the community. And then I'm going to launch in Rianne's really structured information. And Rianne, thank you for this. It was -- I asked like one question and said, hey, can you give me a couple bullet points, and she gave me like a page and a half. So bless her.

When I asked the premium community, I got some great responses. Abby said she waited quite a while with her most recent pregnancy to tell clients. "I was obviously pregnant and still not saying a word about it. I think my not saying anything kept my clients from saying anything themselves, which was brilliant."

And a couple other people suggested that too. Just don't say anything. It's super rude to ask a woman if she's expecting, so most people know to not do that. And if you don't say anything, but you become physically obviously pregnant, your clients are going to know you don't want to talk about it because you haven't brought it up to them. So that's an option. You can do that as long as you feel comfortable.

Jaimie suggested if you do an email to your clients or any communication once you're ready to go back to work amidst all this COVID-19 stuff, slip it into your COVID protocol email. You can just make a very factual, sensical announcement that says, here's my change in protocols due to COVID. Here's how I'm returning to work. Also, I'd like to respect that you be extra mindful of these protocols as I am pregnant and expecting in whatever, just like, October. You don't even need to say when you're expecting. You could just say, as I am pregnant and would like to ensure that all protocols are followed strictly for your safety and mine. So you could kind of just slip it in there if it's appropriate.

One of our members, Renée, who I have known for like eight or nine years -- she emailed me years ago about something, and I just adore her. Renée is a really great resource because she has nine living children, and she had many of those pregnancies in her massage career, maybe even all of them. I'm not sure. So she says, "As with any area in which you want really strong boundaries, decide beforehand how much you want to say." So again, do you even want to say that your pregnant, or do you just want to not say anything for as long as you can? Or do you want to say, I'm expecting a baby due around October. You can be vague about that. Or do you just want to say, I expect to be out of the office beginning in October and likely through January. And don't give any additional information. The people who come in and see you are going to see, oh, she's pregnant. Obviously, she doesn't want to talk about it because she didn't say that's why she's going out of work. But there you go. And Renée reiterated that you don't have to tell your clients that you're pregnant, and that's fine.

Renée's really heard it call because she has nine kids, and people feel that they want to comment on that. People just -- like our questioner noted, people feel that they are allowed to share. And a lot of that -- it comes from good intent that people are just curious, and they want to celebrate with you, and they have good intent versus being mean-hearted about it. But again, this is a really vulnerable time in a person's life. You got this thing living in you, this little parasite. You might feel emotionally terrified or really, really happy. You might be physically sick at the same time. Everybody passes through those stages at different times, and you might just want to keep it personal.

And also, a thing that I've noticed is that as soon as people find you're pregnant, lots of people want to share their war stories of birth. And that's, I think, one of the cruelest things we can do to a pregnant woman is to start telling her stories of difficult births or just how your newborn never slept or make jokes about never sleeping again. These are terrible things to do to a vulnerable person experiencing this physical and emotional experience for the first time.

I want to tell a non-pregnant related story before I get into some scripts about how to handle this and maybe what to say. I took a class once, and the very first thing that happened in the class -- we sat down, the instructor stood up and said, I have not been feeling well. I have been experiencing some dizziness and some vertigo, and there might be times where I'm teaching where you see me kind of lean against this pole here in the middle of the room, or where I sit down and teach from that position. I am fine. I will let you know if I am not fine. Meanwhile, I do not wish to hear any of your stories during class about vertigo or treatments for it. And I certainly don't want to hear any negative stories about vertigo or any ineffective treatments for it. If you have a positive story of a treatment for vertigo, I would love for you to email me after the conclusion of this class and tell me such things. But meanwhile, during the class, I don't want to talk about it.

And she really just prefaced it in such a kind and graceful way that was like, I don't want to talk about this. I want to concentrate on the class. That's where I want our attention to be. And I really don't want you to scare me because people say things without realizing, and they just want to share. They want to unite in this experience that they may have had, and pregnancy and birth is one of those things; it's a thing that often binds people together in that shared experience.

So with that mindfulness and with that air of being proactive and gracious about it, some things you might say if someone -- towards the -- you decide to not say anything, but at the end you're just so obviously pregnant, and someone says something, or if you announce that you're pregnant, and your client comes in and says, oh, congratulations, and starts asking specific questions like, when are you due? Do you know if it's a boy or a girl? Da-da-da-da-da. You can say, I'm choosing to keep the details private so that the conversation -- so that it doesn't take over the conversation in the massage room. So you're using your dedication to your [indiscernible] to not have to talk about private things that you don’t want to talk about. So that's one option.

If you decide to be proactive, you could also be lighthearted about it when you announce. I'm thrilled to announce that I’m expecting a baby in October. You'll get some information coming soon about my leave. I'm choosing to keep the details private, so please don't be offended if I decline to answer questions about the pregnancy. Also, for the sake of my own sanity and positive outlook and to maintain my focus on you, I would prefer not to hear any stories about birth or related issues. Just say it. I don't want to hear your stories, people. And you can do that in a nice way.

And if someone starts to tell you their story anyway, it's okay -- just like you would anything else inappropriate that would get discussed in a massage room, it's okay to stop and say, you know what? I don't -- I'm not comfortable talking about my pregnancy, especially during a treatment. I really want to keep my focus on you. But thank you so much for your thoughts. And that's it. Or you can -- people are respecting a little bit more the desire for privacy, so you can say, even if you know you're having a boy, let's say, if a client asks you what you're having, you can say, oh, you know what? My family and I have just decided to keep that information private right now. That's it. You can just say, I'm a private person. There you go, and that's okay. And if anybody is offended by this, well, then, they probably won't get back on your schedule when you come back to work. And that's okay. So those are the "dealing with intrusive questions" kind of scripts and answers.

Now I want to bounce to what Rianne said, and some -- she set up just this beautiful outline for us. The first bit was about self-care. She noted that she had a massage once a week and didn't regret it at all because in addition to the typical aches and pains, actually performing a massage could instigate a little bit of carpal tunnel syndrome, so the massage was really helpful for her for that. And it was just really good for her physical and mental health. She said you should bring lots of snacks to work. Learn to do more seated work and other modifications just to take the weight off a little bit and help you feel better as you work. And she noted that she needed to drop the amount of clients that she was seeing every day in order to keep working and do so comfortably. It was gradual, but by the last two months, she was only seeing about three clients a day for four days a week, which was much less for her.

You can change your menu. So she had to stop offering essential oil treatments. She had -- and she didn't do hot stone massage because she really struggled with morning sickness through her whole pregnancy, and heat was a trigger for her. She planned for at least six weeks at home with the baby. She's had therapists return after four weeks because they had to financially, but she really wanted to take more time. And she did note to give yourself a lot of grace. You're not going to be able to do all of the things, and that's okay. And everyone's really different in that. She knows therapists who have worked right up to the end without any modifications and others that dropped a couple of days a week right at the six-month mark. Note how you feel and be good to yourself about that.

And she has a section about boundaries. She was living in the South in a relatively small town, and she kind of loosened up some of her boundaries from previous when she had been working in the Pacific Northwest. She said to keep it simple. Clients don't need much of an explanation. They don't need to know if you were trying or not, or how your partner feels about this or whatever, or if there a partner. Who knows? So those scripts about privacy that we covered kind of covered that. She said stick to your scheduling boundaries, especially when you start dropping your workload because you are the most important thing to take care of.

Gifts -- she had clients bring her gifts. Consider how you are going to receive said gifts, and in a gracious way, that allows the people who like you and love you and care about you and want you to be happy to celebrate with you but also in a way that doesn't make you too uncomfortable. So just have a plan. Think about that.

She chose to send announcements to some clients but not -- but she understands that might not be for everyone, so you get to decide how you announce or if you don't. And she noted that people have opinions, and especially in situations of babies and families. And she had to deal with judgements about being a uni parent and just let clients make their own assumptions and not care about what they thought about that. Let go of that.

And she said be prepared for some boundaries to just fly out the window -- that she had morning sickness her entire pregnancy, and she had to tell a new client that she was pregnant before telling anyone else because she had to leave the session to puke and didn't even make it to the bathroom -- puked in a sink in the hallway. She was concerned that the client had heard it and didn't want her to think she had the flu or something, and so when she came back into the massage room, she told the client she was sick. So there were some things like that where she just had to tell a client.

And then, the business aspect Rianne covered. She said she saved as much money as possible with the goal being to have $1,000 a week in the bank for when she was out of work and on leave. So she was taking six weeks off. She wanted 6 grand in the bank. But she's a single parent, so figuring out that budget that works for you is going to be helpful and will be your guide. She worked in a multi-therapist office, so referrals were really easy. But if you don't have access to other therapists who you refer to, that might be a little trickier. And acknowledge that -- I'm sorry, I lost my place in my notes, and I wanted to -- oh, that you might lose some clients, especially if you return, and you're not working as much as you did previous, you might lose clients. It's not about you. It's fine.

She wanted to work until the end of her pregnancy, but clients kind of stopped booking with her at the end. They get a little weird and think the baby's going to fall out while you're massaging them. So she was able to work until five days before her due date on a reduced schedule. She's had other therapists who worked the day, or right up to the day before they had their kid, and -- I lost my notes again. I'm sorry. And I had -- she had other therapists who stopped working at six or seven months. Do what you got to do, and be mindful that if you do end up having a C-section, you're going to need a lot more time off to heal. Be gracious to yourself there.

She also put a little sidebar in at the end about nursing, which she said, totally unsolicited but related. Plan for extra time between clients so that you can pump if you need to if you go back to work and you're still nursing. Build in that 20 minutes you're going to pump plus whatever your normal cleaning time is because you're going to need a lot of time between clients to do that. And she had extra pump pieces that she got just for the office because you're going to be exhausted and high on hormones, and it's going to make you really forgetful. So to have the extra supplies at the office made everything much better. She only had to bring the actual pump device back and forth. She said there's nifty bags you can put the pieces in with a little water and sterilize them in the microwave when you finish for the day. And she said have plenty of access to water that you can drink during the day because you're going to be crazy thirsty.

Also, pregnancies are personal and unpredictable, so give yourself the space to be flexible and the ability to let go of plans. And she quotes around that "that need to be adjusted." And she suggests a book for surviving once the baby arrives called Wonder Weeks, and there's an app. And she said, "It seemed like every time I thought I had mothering figured out, things changed. Wonder Weeks helped me realize that I wasn't crazy and that the kid wasn't the devil's spawn."

So thank you so much for that comprehensive look at being pregnant while you're a massage therapist. Thanks, Rianne. You really helped me out on that one. And that's what we've got.

That's all I got, Michael.

MR Nice. Thanks, Rianne. She's been a big help to us in a lot of ways, especially with this, so.

AH She's just wonderful.

MR So thank you for that. Awesome. Really great stuff. Great questions from our listener, and really good material to share, so thank you for that. All right. Well, let's hit our other sponsor, and go on to quick tips. Our sponsor is Jojoba!

AH Hey!

Sponsor message As you know, I recommend HobaCare jojoba for use in your massage practice since it never goes rancid. It's safe for all your clients, and it won't stain your natural fiber sheets. But with all the handwashing we're doing right now and all the "hand sanitizering", it might be a time to grab a bottle and put some on for a little self-care. It's the closest thing to the natural sebum your skin produces. And a few drops on the back on your hands will keep your skin soft and healthy. And also, the hand and cuticle salve is awesome, so you should check that out. 10% off discount off the price of the product on orders $35 or more when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba.

MR All righty. Quick tip time.

AH What's your quick tip?

MR So I think a lot of it's -- it's kind of the season for PPP loan forgiveness applications now because they've been released, and a lot of us have received PPP funds, and it's time to apply for forgiveness, so some people are having questions about that. And specifically, I wanted to point out a couple things that might trip up most of our listeners, which are going to be sole proprietors, single-member LLCs, Schedule C filers. So I wanted to kind of just run through a couple things to look out for. The application is a little bit long and scary -- it's 11 pages -- but I want to point out, kind of pin down, the things you want to focus on so it's not quite as scary.

So first off, it's going to ask you to fill out a PPP Schedule A worksheet. You can ignore that. That is only for people that have payroll employees. So most of our listeners, I would expect, that does not apply to you because you're a single practitioner, LLC, or Schedule C filer. It's not going to apply to you, so you're going to skip that PPP Schedule A worksheet area. Then, the other part of it -- there's kind of three sections to worry about. That's one section. You can ignore that. The other section -- by the way, they go in reverse order, so the worksheet's at the end, and then, the Schedule A section is in the middle, and the actual application's at the beginning. So it's kind of weird. So at the end, again, ignore that worksheet.

And then, the middle is the PPP Schedule A section, and you can ignore most of those lines as well. You want to fill out lines 9 and 10 because that is specifically the part related to compensation to owners. And when you fill that out, that is where you're going to apply the fractional multiplier based on your 2019 Schedule C income. So that's where you want to basically take your Schedule C income for 2019, divide it by 52, and multiply that number by 8. And that gives you the 8 over 52 fraction multiplier you need to use to get the portion that is forgivable. So then, you put that in line 9 and line 10. And that is what you, then, pull up to the actual application for line 1. It's kind of hard to talk through it without visualizing it, so you may want to rewind this and pull out your application and look at it.

But basically, don't be alarmed if you don't know what to do with the worksheet because you want to skip that. And don't be alarmed if the middle section looks kind of confusing. All you need to worry about is lines 9 and 10. And then, the worksheet -- or the actual application itself is in the beginning, and that should be fairly straightforward at that point. There are some gotchas in there, and of course, all of this is subject to my best knowledge at this current time. Things change, as we know, and we get new information, but based on my current understanding of it, this is going to be your approach to the application. So if you have questions -- yeah, go ahead.

AH But if someone's an S corp and they've been running real payroll, they do need those worksheets, right?

MR Yes. Yes.

AH Okay. Sorry, just wanted to clarify that.

MR That was great. Yeah. So if you have questions -- we obviously can't field everyone's questions publicly. But if you are in the premium community, just hit us up there, and we'll talk about it there. Or consider joining if you want to dig deeper. So hope that helps.

AH All right. I'm going to wake myself up now because that was intense and boring for me.

MR [Laughing] Right.

AH Yeah. So my quick tip -- and I talked about this before about scheduling time to worry about something, which is a tip from a woman, an author I love, Gretchen Rubin, and who says, literally put the time in your calendar so that when you start thinking, oh, I've got to worry about blah-blah-blah, this thing I have to do, or renewing my car registration, or whatever, put it in the calendar. And then when you start to worry about it, you can say, nope, I have time on Monday at 10 to think about that and figure that out and worry about it.

And I recently experienced all this where I was getting really stressed out about when I would go back to work. And I'm not in a hurry to go back to my hands-on practice. I've shut down my office space that had many practitioners. My plan is, when I return to massage, to return in a one-person office all by myself because that'll be a little bit better to manage protocol-wise. And I was really getting wrapped up in what my state is doing, and just really stressed out trying to make plans for like six and seven months away, which is impossible to do right now. And I kind of had the epiphany last week where I said, why am I thinking about this when I know I'm not going to do anything about it very soon? And the information that comes out tomorrow wasn't going to help me. When do I need to think about this?

And I kind of looked at my calendar, and I thought -- I looked at some of the timelines of potential second and third waves of COVID, and I thought, okay. I'm not going to think about this again till August. And it's been -- it was really good because it was nice for me set a date and say, I know I'm going back to massage, I just don't -- everything feels so uncertain because I no longer have an office space. And then I was kind of getting wrapped up in like, when can I start doing home visits? And most of the best practices and protocols for this world right now say home visits are not a good idea, which I agree with.

So I was just going around and round in my head, and once I said, I am not going to think about this again until August 1st -- and I literally put it in my calendar for August 1st, "start thinking about future practice." And since I did that, it has been a huge relief for me to get rid of that worry and that crazy cycle of thinking. And when I've started to think about it again and get a little hyped up, I've gone, nope. I am going to rebuild an amazing practice. It is going to be the practice of my dreams. I'm going to have the schedule I want. I'm going to handpick the clients I want to return. And when I seek new clients to fill in the gaps, I know exactly what kind of client I want. I'm excited to rewrite my service descriptions. I am thrilled and excited to launch my dream practice, but I'm not going to think about that until August 1st, so calm down. And it has been such a relief to do that.

So if you know that your state's not going to go back to work until like July 1st, it's okay for you to say, you know what? I'm not going to think about this until two weeks into June. And I'll start thinking about it. I'll refresh my memory with all the protocols. I will create a list of supplies that I need to order. And if I don’t have them all by July 1st, that's okay. I will open up a little later than that. Now, again, I know that not everybody has this flexibility. Some people need to go back sooner than others. Some people are not going back at all, which is really sad. But anything that's weighing on you, if you can set a time and a timeline to worry about it, especially if it's something uncertain in the future, try it. It may work well for you.

Even with the kids, we don't know if they're going to go back to school in the fall or not, and it's really stressful. And I said to the little one, who is like, are we going to have school in September? And I said, you know, I don't know, but we're not going to know that until the middle of August. And we wrote it down for the middle of August and said, this is when we're going to start thinking about that. And this is when we're going to start planning for the new school year.

So anyhow, that's my tip. Schedule a time to worry, a time to decide, and a time to plan for whatever that thing is that is stressing you out but you still need to think about it.

MR I really like that.

AH It's worked for me for like the past week.

MR Yeah. I really like it.

AH And it's also given me the space to get really excited about what my business is going to look like when I relaunch it. It's given me the space to, as much as possible, embrace and enjoy the time that I have home now. And it's actually why I was able to read a book. I haven't read fiction in a while because it's -- I haven't been able to concentrate on anything, and a great deal of that was this hanging over me. I feel really good about it. I feel really excited about it, and I feel really grateful that I did the things I did, and I had the good fortune that I've had in the past several years to be in this position more. I can take a couple months and have it not be a crisis.

MR Yeah. Thank you. All right. I want to take a couple minutes, if it's okay, to just talk a little bit about a couple aspects of our new community. I know some of -- we're all very fatigued and kind of scattered right now, and we need to hear things a few times sometimes to kind of get the grasp of this. I want to go back again, and I want to talk about a couple things in our new community.

First of all, I've been really excited because a majority of our previous premium members have signed up for our new community, and they're having conversations every day and helping each other, and it's been awesome to see that vibrant community flourish there, so we really thank everybody who's joined. And by the way, the community is open to everybody to join, so not just our previous premium members. It is open to the public to join, so you're welcome to -- if you're listening to this, you are eligible to go sign up and join us. Again, it's a 30-day free period, and then $4.99 per month, and definitely until Allissa and I make the judgement call that the profession is back to work enough that we feel like we can bring it back to a slightly more normal rate. So anyway, it's a really good time to get in.

A couple things I want to point out -- first of all, I forgot to mention this last time. We have two courses, two NCBTMB-approved courses, in the community. One of them is just a little 1.5-hour audio course on networking, which I did. It's not that big a deal. But the other thing is a big deal. It is a six-hour ethics course. So in the community, as part of the community, no extra fee, there is a NCBTMB-approved, six-hour ethics course online in the community. So now is a really good time if you need some CEs and you want to take a course. Now is a great time to do it. You can join. It's basically free because the first month is free anyway. And then, if you decide to stay, then that's great, but no obligation. Hope in. Take the course. It's awesome. Our friend Andrea Lipomi is the instructor. It's phenomenal, so check that out.

The other thing I want to mention is our office hours. We have some really good office hours coming up. Office hours are when we hop on a video conference, and people join from the community, and we just talk about whatever's on your mind, challenges, help each other. So in addition to generalized office hours, we have some very specific ones coming up. We have an Alternate Income office hours that I'm hosting. I realized that by the time you listen to this, it'll probably be past for most of you because it's 10 a.m. Eastern on a Friday, which is going to be today. So we'll have another one. Don't worry. But the Alternate Income office hours are for those who want to maybe supplement their massage income, even when they go back to work, with alternate jobs or business ideas or sources of income. That's been super popular.

And then Allissa's hosting an Online Forms & Storage office hours where she's going to talk through online storage and digital -- going paperless -- stuff. We also have a phenomenal one coming up with Ruth Werner, who is an undisputed leader in the field and will be talking to us about potential clotting issues, contraindications, stuff that we need to know as we consider going back to work. And then some other stuff -- well, niching and branding. So some really good stuff. So if any of that sounds appealing to you, go ahead and check it out, massagebusinessblueprint.com. Click on Community. Click on the Join Now button, and join us in the community. We'd love to have you. That's my pitch. I'm done.

AH It's well done. I'm really excited about the -- typically, our office hours are super open. People bring the topics that they want to discuss, and they peer mentor each other, and I love that. But I'm really excited about the specific office hours that we have coming up too. I'm a geek, but I'm really excited about demonstrating some Google Forms stuff because we've had a lot of people moving their -- using this downtime to make their business go paperless, and the Google Forms stuff is really cool. It can be -- once you get over the learning curve, it's really easy, and it's a great way to manage your client files and intakes, especially now that we kind of need a new intake for every single patient visit -- asking COVID screening questions -- so making it electronic can be super helpful. So yeah.

Thanks for the pitch, Michael.

MR Right on. All righty. Anything else, or are we good?

AH I'm done, man.

MR All right. Let's do it. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We appreciate you joining us. And always, I mentioned it before, but our website is massagebusinessblueprint.com. Check us out there. Get in touch if we can help you. Have a great day. We'll see you next time.

AH Bye.