Ep 497 – Building a Thriving Hands-On Practice with Elicia Crook

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0:01:09.1 Darin Burford: I'm Darin Buford.

0:01:10.3 Kristin Coverly: And I'm Kristin Coverly and welcome to.

0:01:12.2 DB: The ABMP podcast, a podcast where we speak with the massage and bodywork profession. Our guest today is Elicia Crook. Elicia is a business coach and mentor to hundreds of massage therapists sharing the tactics she used to create her business success for over 24 years. She remembers what it was like at the beginning to get up every day and treat only a handful of clients with gaps in between and the sinking feeling when you look into next week's bookings and see it's going to be lean. Through this experience and by making many mistakes along the way, Elicia discovered what works and who she needed to be in order to run a successful massage business. Now she takes this blueprint to her clients to build more success and passion and to drive the massage profession forward. For more information about the good work she's doing, visit healthleaderco.com. And listeners if that wasn't enough, Elicia has a course in ABMP's Continuing Education center called Nature Instagram Success: A Complete Guide to Setup and Strategies and her feature article Build a Thriving Hands On Practice is the cover of the new Spring 2025 issue of Massage and Bodywork magazine out now. And we're here to talk about that and her passion for helping MT succeed. Hello Elicia and hello Kristin.

0:02:35.0 Elicia Crook: Hey guys.

0:02:36.2 KC: Elicia, thanks so much for being with us. We are so excited to talk to you more about this and deep dive in, but I want to start sort of with an overall question for you. Your journey began as a successful massage therapist. You then opened your own clinic with multiple employees. You were successful in that space too, exciting. What was then the impetus to start coaching, writing books, and focusing on helping other massage therapists succeed.

0:03:02.3 EC: I really enjoyed having business coaching myself. So I had a business coach come into my practice and helped me create a great environment with my team, and I really enjoyed it. However, there were gaps in her coaching because she'd only run a coaching business, so she didn't know anything about my industry. She didn't really have massage much herself. And so for me, I was like, someone needs to teach this to massage therapist. And there wasn't anyone else at the time. And so I thought, well, okay, well, I'll do it. And so I went and did some training and coaching and stepped into the business coaching space to really be able to help other people, because I just enjoyed it. And I got so much out of it, especially around the mindset side of things, of how to become a business leader.

0:03:52.5 DB: What even gave you the idea to go do that? 

0:03:55.7 EC: I really wanted... I could see the difference that it was making in my life and in my world. So not just in my practice. It was helping me. I had young kids at the time. It was actually helping me as a parent, helping me understand my little toddlers who were reflections of me in tiny form. It was helping me understand how to navigate the school system and kinder. And I was actually having success in other areas of my life because of what I was learning in the business coaching space. And my business started to thrive. And I thought if I could do that for more people, that would be amazing.

0:04:34.4 DB: Excellent. Okay, let's dive in. I know the listeners want to know, in your opinion, what's holding people back from making that leap to solo practice? 

0:04:43.5 EC: I think it is the fear of the unknown. You know, when you work for somebody, if you're an employee, you're pretty much guaranteed of a paycheck at the end of the week or the end of the month. And you're like, you know you can bank on that. You know what your bills are coming in, you know what money you've made. When you work for yourself, there's that, I call it a UTM or an Undetightening moment where you're like, I'm not sure if I can do this. Like, if what if I make heaps of money one week and I don't make any money the second week, then that can be quite daunting. And I think often that's one of the factors into going full time into your own practice.

0:05:22.4 KC: Okay, Lisa, you've worked with a lot of different practitioners, and of course, everyone has their own story and their Unique challenges and things that they're working on specifically. But there must also be some common threads that run through almost every client that you work with. What are some of the common pieces of advice or action steps that you find most individuals need to hear from you? 

0:05:44.8 EC: I think the first thing is about getting really clear on where you want to go, getting clear on that outcome, and that is setting goals. It is about goal setting. However, when we're clear on our outcome, it helps us to know what actions we need to take along the way. So that that's probably the first thing, we need the vision we need to be able to go, okay, this is where I'm going and get really clear on that. So if I want to become a full time in my own business, if that's the goal, what are some of the smaller checkpoints along the way? Because I think that's where sometimes people can trip up because they're looking at the big picture and not necessarily knowing. How do I break that down to bite sized chunks? 

0:06:23.2 EC: I think sometimes we can get stuck in our marketing and our marketing might look like, I treat hyper irritable spots within taut band of skeletal muscle that gives rise to characteristic referred pain and dysfunction. And we all go, yes, trigger points are amazing. And the rest of the world goes, I have no idea what just came out of your mouth. So we can get stuck in the jargon of what we as practitioners know to be amazing and wonderful and forget about, again, the outcome. Like, and this is one of the great things about on our team, my husband's a business partner, he's not a practitioner, so he'll be like, what, what is that? 

0:07:04.6 EC: I don't even know what that is. We had to teach him about fascia and psoas and all these different injuries that he was like, you know, you talk about Facebook ads like your shoulder, like, or your ankle, and we're like, yeah, you could go better. You could do better than that. Let's go deeper. Let's teach you what some of these actual muscles are. So staying away from jargon, I think in our marketing is important and then really understanding the mechanics behind your business. So what are the numbers? Especially even if you're not a numbers person. Most practitioners I speak to are not driven by money. They're driven by impact and wanting to make a difference with their clients in the treatment room. I have this crazy belief that you can have both. You can make money and have an impact. And I think that we have to get better at embracing the fact that we do this for money, because that's how we pay our bills, it's how we feed our families, etcetera.

0:07:53.1 EC: So being able to be okay with looking at the money side of things and actually set some goals around that, what would it take for me to make the leap? What are some of those smaller factors involved that I need to be able to put in place in order to be able to get where I want to go? 

0:08:09.4 DB: Okay, excellent. In your article in Massage and Body Work magazine, you talk about three pillars to solo success. Mindset, marketing, and mechanics. Can you dive into each of those a little bit and expand upon that? 

0:08:22.1 EC: So mindset for me is around thinking like a business leader and setting up the right environment, both in your business and in yourself. And that comes from knowing what it is you stand for, what are your values, what's important to you, and how can you create a business that creates more of that? Because people don't get what you do. They buy why you do it. And when we know what we stand for, people who want to stand for that will often come and see us. And, you know, your vibe attracts your tribe. You can actually attract the people in that you want to see yeah. In our marketing, our marketing is about speaking the right message to the right people at the right time and when we communicate effectively based on the outcome. So what do trigger points do? They can give us referred pain. So did you know massage can help back pain is actually maybe a better way of phrasing the fact that we can treat trigger points because it's talking about the problem, but then it's also talking about the solution. By the way, massage body work can help.

0:09:29.6 EC: And then mechanics is about understanding the back end of your business. So having booking software, for example, making sure that you're tracking your numbers, making sure that you understand what's your rebooking rate, what are your actual tangible key metrics in your business that you need in order to be able to run a sustainable practice for the next 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 years. So it's not just for this week. It's about actually starting to see your business in the long term. That helps us be able to make a greater legacy business so that we're here for the long term rather than just it's all too hard. I'm going to pull the pin.

0:10:11.4 DB: Do you find that the people that you're working with struggle with more on one of those pillars more than another, or it just depends when they're coming to work with you? 

0:10:23.4 EC: I think that people often come and work with us because they think they need marketing. Yeah, they need to understand this marketing thing. So how do I understand social media or do I need a website? What do we do to Google reviews? How does this work? What should I do? What we tend to find is they need mindset because it's the mindset that changes everything. It's like the thing that gets the momentum happening. For example, one of the quickest, easiest, most free ways that we can put ourselves out there is through Facebook lives. And yet what stops us from doing that is the idea that my phone becomes 500 kilos. And it's super scary because what will people think? What if someone gets on there and asks me what the extensors of my wrist are? Or what if someone gets on there and says something, you know, like I've done like 400 or 500 lives and no one yet has done any hating on me ever. And I've done all sorts of topics that they could have and your anatomy teacher is never going to be on the end of it. But that's what we get scared of.

0:11:29.5 EC: Yeah, like that's what holds us back. It's the mindset that holds us back. It's the same with looking at money. When people look at their mechanics, it's like if I could do this for free, I would. Beautiful, beautiful goals. Lovely heart in there. However, we're running a business, not a hobby. And if we're not making money, we're running a hobby. And that's one of those hard truths. It's like, well, we can either accept it or reject it. And again it comes to the mindset where if I have that hobby mindset, having a great mindset says great, well what could I do to change it? Rather than that's where I'm going to be for the rest of my life. And I think that most people come in because marketing's the thing that they struggle with. And what we find is that we actually need all three because they're really important and the way that they work together. That's why we talk about the three amazing M's.

0:12:20.9 KC: I love that so much, that full 360 approach. I'm curious, you know, a lot of times people's roadblocks are actually fears and that could be a variety, wide variety of fears. But what are your go to suggestions for people who are holding themselves back essentially from making progress because of a fear? How do you encourage them to work through that? 

0:12:43.4 EC: Feel the fear, do it anyway? It's really that, that's kind of the simple answer to just be like. We have a challenge that we set our clients that we work with, which is a 30 day Facebook Live challenge. And what that is is every day showing up in your business on social media for 30 days. And when we give that task in our planning, we actually put it in the mindset section. And the first few brave souls that actually did this that way, we modeled it first and found it worked. And it was great because it builds consistency. Yeah. Like you have to... It actually helps you get over the fear of what am I going to say? I'm going to turn the live on and be like, like a baby bird. Just my mouth is open going, ah. Like, I don't know what I'm going to say. What if I say something stupid? It's like, great thing about a live is you can just delete it. If you drop your phone or drop an F bomb or drop something you shouldn't like, you can easily fix that. And I remember talking to one of our first people to go through the process and everyone said, how did you get the confidence to do it? And she's like, I didn't have the confidence to do it.

0:13:51.3 EC: In fact, I struggle with anxiety. It was actually taking the action that taught me to be confident. And it wasn't until about day 12 that I just had a moment of going, yeah, I've got this. And she literally, like, she said, I've got this. And she threw her notes away. And the rest of the 30 days she just showed up every single day talking. And I think that's where having a plan is really great. So you wouldn't just go to Facebook and go to social media and start filming stuff. You have a 30 day plan. You write out your topics of what you're going to do. So then there's part of that logical part of your brain is like, yes, I am planned. I am organized. This is wonderful. And then you just take action. And I think action creates progress. And that is often where the fears start to get allayed because you're almost distracting yourself from the fear. But there is still a structure to it that just gives us that little bit of safety. And I think that that is often the key. It's just like you've just got to take action. You just got to take the action in the direction because it's free. Yay. That's good. And it can make a big difference when we're just willing to progress over perfection and have a crack at it.

0:15:04.0 DB: Let's take a short pause. ABMP podcast listeners, are you an ABMP member? If so, be sure to take advantage of more than 50 discounts through your membership. Services include discounts on continuing education, home utilities and cell phone service, legal fees, office equipment, and more. And if you're not an ABMP member, what are you waiting for? Go to abmp.com and abmp.com/discounts to learn more.

0:15:32.4 KC: Elicia let's talk a little bit about the group out there listening who are currently employees, but they have that dream of starting their own practice. Many of them believe that they might have to replace their existing income fully before they make the leap. But you say that's not true, right? 

0:15:50.5 EC: That's right. One of the things that I modeled in my own practice when I was working full time and sort of gradually moved across to working in my own business. And I call it the Making the Leap framework, which is where you actually, you have your goal of how many clients a week you want to see in your practice, and then you have smaller goals along the way. So let's say, example, it's like if I see five clients a week and I'm like, yep, this is my new normal. I'm seeing five. It's consistent. They're all coming in. This is good. And I know how and why I've got them in. Wonderful. Then you look at how you could drop back maybe one shift or one day of work and then set your next goal. So your next goal might be 10 clients a week. When I'm seeing 10 clients a week, consistently four. You pick the timeframe, might be four or six. For some people, it might be six months. You know, I need to be had that lot of consistency before I'm willing to take that step back. And so you're kind of one step forward, one step back, you're actually stepping towards rather than making that big leap...

0:16:52.5 EC: They're actually smaller leaps along the way until you're seeing 15 clients a week, you drop another day. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, it's not that hard. But there is this, there's this part that you get to where you're working part time in your employed role and you're working almost full time in your business. And I think that this is a really important place to call out because you are often going to work the hardest you will ever work again in your life at that point. And I think you have to be aware of it. Otherwise it's like, this is stupid. It's not working and it's like you're just about to quit your full time job and you work in all these details and clients and you just wash and stuff and you go on home and you're collapsing on the couch and you're like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. But know that that that pivotal moment is probably the hardest you may ever have to work again. Because once you get over that and you have left your employed role, you're able to say, okay, now I get to choose my hours, now I get to choose the amount of clients I see and you get to do it on your terms. And I think if there's that transition point that it's important to say it's going to be tough, but hang in there because you're almost there.

0:18:11.2 DB: How do you overcome your skill uncertainty and the anxiety of financial instability? What kind of recommendations do you have for them? 

0:18:20.4 EC: Just get as many hands on backs as possible. Yeah, like when I first started, I didn't get into the industry to work in the spa industry specifically. And here in Australia it's not so much linked with like, I know you have medical massage and spa massage, whereas we just have remedial massage is what it's called. I know, we're really hanging on that, those vowel sounds. Massage. I know, I'm sorry, it's an Australian way we say this word. And I didn't really want to go into the kind of spa body work industry. However, I used to drive two hours to get to the place where I worked in Daylesford, which is a renowned place locally here in Australia, and I would work 10:00 till 8:00, 10:00 AM till 8:00 PM and we would just see 45 minute treatments, one after the other after the other after the other in a dual room. So there were two body workers, two people. Now that for me was brilliant because every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, my whole days were filled with just hands on backs, hands on backs, hands on backs. It was not heart centered where I wanted to be, the kind of impact I wanted.

0:19:27.4 EC: It was none of that. It was literally just experience. And then in contrast, I would work at the footy club on the weekend with AFL football. And that's like mud sweat, you know, hairy dudes, like it's the complete opposite of the lovely spa. And you never know what you're going to experience in those rooms. And so again, it was just for experience. And I only did that for one year. That was really all it was. It was just one year to get, I was getting sports experience, I was getting experience as just Hands on backs, one after the other after, to get my timings down. I think at the start my first massage was like two and a half hours because I couldn't possibly fit everything into the 60 minutes. And after like six months of, just like the factory backs of every 45 minutes, there's a new person coming in with a 15 minute break and all that kind of stuff, it was easy to sort of get those timings down. And I think it also just gives you that consistency while you're learning your craft. And I often say, like the first couple of years, if you're not wildly driven to have to work for yourself, go and get experience because you learn a bunch of stuff that is incredible and what you will never do again.

0:20:41.0 EC: That contrast learning can be just as powerful as your actual hands on experience. What do you love about your managers? What don't you love about your managers? What practices does this clinic have that you think are wonderful and what practices might you do differently next time? Like, you just, you learn loads and loads of things along the way. And I actually think being employed is a great way to get that hands-on experience and work for a couple of people if you need to, to just really get that hands-on experience.

0:21:10.6 KC: Elicia, you've worked with so many practitioners and so you have a thousand stories that you could share with us today, but please pick one if you can, and share a story, a case study with our audience of someone who you've worked with that really was able to make a big change, a big shift towards what they really wanted to do with their practice.

0:21:31.5 EC: I think a case study that comes to mind is a beautiful client. Actually, it's the Facebook Live client. She was doing Fifo, so fly in, fly out. And she was working on a mind site where she was heading up the wellbeing program. So not so much using her massage skills, but using her PT skills to look after people in the mines in their wellbeing program. And she lived in a whole different state. And so she would work 10 days on, 7 days off, 10 days on, 7 days off, and so it was really hard for her to build up the consistency because she was gone for 10 days and then she'd be back and need a bit of a break in between some of that time, some of the days of travel and different time zones and that kind of stuff. So she did the same thing. She did... She set a goal of, I want to be seeing this many clients by then. I need this much in my savings so that I can make the leap. And to her credit, she did that. She worked towards... It probably took her six months to get the momentum up to be able to leave that job and go full time.

0:22:31.6 EC: What I love about her story now is that several years on, she now has the license and contracts to provide massage on the mines in four different mine sites here in Australia. So she's actually just taken everything she's learned and she has implemented in the most unbelievable way to where now she lives and works and breathes in her space, where she's from, where she's based. And then she also has staff working for her on different mine sites, a way where she, because she's won the contract to be able to provide that service because we have a whole community of people that come into the mines, work there 12 days on, 11 days on, etcetera before they fly home and need treatment and need care and being looked after. And so she's part of the wellbeing program now in terms of being able to take that. And I just love, again, it was about the action she took. She set her goal very, very, very clear on the goal that she wanted. And it's quite an unusual skill set. Yeah, like it's not something we hear a lot of and it's quite unique here even in Australia, but it's a really exciting way that she is actually expressing her massage journey and her career and helping others on the journey as well. And I just love, yeah, I just love the way that she takes action and very much in alignment with her values and her goals.

0:24:02.0 DB: Elicia, as we close the podcast, do you have any kind of final thoughts for MTs out there who are ready to make that leap or thinking and considering about making that leap? 

0:24:12.3 EC: Do it. Like it's so much fun working for yourself. I think of it like a monopoly game. You get to write the rules, you get to actually choose what hours you work, you get to choose what clients you see, what you charge, and you actually get to make that. You really can make that choice and decision based on what it is that you want and the goals that you have and the values that you want to live and work out and make a difference in a way that really resonates with you. And all it takes is having the vision, having the courage and taking a truckload of action in order to be able to make that happen.

0:24:53.7 DB: That's awesome. I want to thank our guest today, Elicia Crook. For more information about Elicia, visit healthleaderco.com and please visit abmp.com/ce to take Elicia's course on Instagram and visit abmp.com/massage-and-bodywork to read her feature article. All links will be available in the notes to this podcast. Thanks Elicia and thanks Kristin.

0:25:19.0 EC: Thank you.

0:25:24.3 KC: Elicia. Thanks so much for being with us today and sharing all of that great information. I know a lot of people will be inspired to make the leap themselves.