Before making a big purchase or financial change, try living like you’ve already made the change—for at least three months. This simple practice helps you adjust to new expenses, identify what’s truly essential, and build savings in the process. It's a powerful way to test decisions with real-world impact—before you're locked in.
Resources:
Annette Montgomery, practicing LMT in Indiana and founder of Bolstered, a virtual support community for Massage Therapists
Find more about Annette at www.annettemontgomery.org and on Instagram at @the_annettemontgomery
Author links:
Website: www.deepbreathdigital.com
0:00:00.2 Allissa Haines: Welcome to Business or Pressure Taking the Pain out of Massage Business with me, Allissa Haines. This is your no nonsense guide to managing your business money. It is our mission to make sure that every massage therapist and body worker has the tools to make a living wage in a thriving business. So let's jump in. We are talking about preparing for a new expense and specifically a particular technique to prepare for a new expense or a change in your personal or professional financial life. And here it is. When you want to buy a big thing or make a big change, make your financial life live like you are paying for that thing or making that change for at least three months. And I'm going to step back a little bit now. This idea comes from some financial advice I heard years and years ago. And they said if you know you want to have a kid when you get pregnant or even before you get pregnant, live on just the income that you'll have during maternity leave. And this technique accomplished two things. One, you could get used to the new lower income, which really forces you to consider what is a real required expense versus what is a discretionary expense and get used to living within those boundaries.
0:01:33.0 AH: And you bank, you save that current income that you won't have during maternity leave to build up your savings or really in this example, to pay for baby stuff. Now I never had any babies. I never needed to take maternity leave. This wasn't relevant to me at the time or ever in the future. But this advice applies to so many financial situations. It applies to changes in income and changes in expenses. It applies in business and personal lives. Here are some examples. Let's say you want a new car and maybe you don't have a car payment right now because you paid yours off and you've been living with this older car for a couple of years for at least three months. Pretend like you are paying a new car payment. So look at the kind of car you might want to buy new or used. Figure out what your car payment would be and live like that for a few months. Make that car payment. And I'm air quoting that, make it directly into your savings account.
0:02:34.4 AH: Can you live on what's left or what adjustments need to be made in your budget for you to be able to afford a car payment. And also don't forget to add in an increase in insurance if you're getting a nicer newer car and if your state or locality charges an excise tax. Keep in mind when you might have to pay that. And over that three months you're going to get used to living with that new expense and you're going to save up a little more for the down payment or just to cover the insurance increase. Or you might find that you cannot afford that new car payment and that might help you feel better about throwing some money into the older car to make it last longer or rethinking the kind of car or value of car you're going to get. And this applies in big and little situations in business. Let's say you want to start using a laundry service. You're tired of hauling your laundry around, you're done. You want to use a laundry service, price it out, find out what that's going to cost and add that expense into your budget for a few months. So for a few months you're still doing your laundry, but you're also taking whatever that monthly or weekly fee would be for laundry services.
0:03:46.1 AH: You're pulling it out of your budget as if you are paying a laundry service and you're putting it into your savings. How do you feel about that? Does that work for you? Great. If it doesn't work for you, you need to rethink what you're willing to pay for. Or maybe you'll just feel better about doing your laundry on your own. That's a pretty small expense. But what if you want a new office space? Maybe you've been subletting in a tiny little room and you're tired of hearing someone slam the bathroom door and you want to be able to bring in your own wall decorations. You want your own office. Add that higher rent expense to your bookkeeping to your budget and put that money into savings and see how it works out for a few months. Now, this isn't always a perfect exercise. Maybe going off onto your own and getting a bigger office also means working a few extra days. So your income will come up and you'll be able to afford that higher rent. Or maybe you'll take on a subletter of yourself and that will mean more income. But to some extent, you can practice this exercise with almost every business decision that impacts your finances.
0:04:51.7 AH: It allows you to actually live with the financial decision before you make that decision. And that's a really helpful exercise, especially if you are prone to making quick few feelings based decisions. In the past, you may have experienced some financial regret. I certainly have. Using this technique can help you prevent that, and it can help you take the feelings out of a decision and then ultimately feel really confident about that decision. Either way you go. There are endless situations where this technique could apply in business and in personal. I'd love to hear about how you use it. So let me know and I hope you find it helpful. Let's jump into today's chat with a colleague.
0:05:38.3 AH: You may or may not know, but I used to run an online community for massage therapists. Well, on March 1st, Annette Montgomery took over that community and reimagined, revamped, shot some much needed enthusiasm there and it is now Bolstered. If you haven't checked it out, you should. We're going to have all of Annette's links in the show notes. Welcome, Annette Montgomery.
0:06:01.0 S3: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.
0:06:03.2 AH: Annette is a practicing massage therapist in Indiana. She's a full time sole proprietor and also the founder of Bolstered, this new virtual support community for massage therapists. You can find her @annettemontgomery.org and if you are on Instagram, I cannot strongly recommend enough that you find her there. Her handle the_AnnetteMontgomery. And I love that because it's like you're the Annette Montgomery, not any of the other ones. You're the Annette Montgomery. Very official. Before we jump into the question you're going to answer for us today, tell us just a little bit about your massage practice.
0:06:39.2 S3: Yeah, so I've always been on my own. I jumped into running my own business right after graduation. Just dove right into the deep end of the pool. So that was about 12 years ago. And I currently have a really beautiful book of long standing clients. Most of them have been with me over seven years. And it's just feeling really nurturing and nice. I'm in a good spot now after 12 years.
0:07:09.6 AH: So nice. So how many clients are you seeing a week?
0:07:12.0 S3: So my absolute minimum to kind of make my goal is 12 and then my capacity is 18. So I kind of shift around in there from week to week.
0:07:26.5 AH: Okay, you're gonna tell us what is the thing that you would do differently, if you could go back in time, and start your business again?
0:07:34.3 S3: Yeah. So I think this is probably a pretty common response, but I would have charged more starting out and I think getting a little deeper into that, I wish I would have understood or known what it takes to set your rates and how to establish that pricing. I think I did what a lot of massage therapists did or do is they just charge what Janet down the street is charging. And you kind of you do this market research and then you find the average and then you, depending on your level of imposter syndrome for the day, you either go a little bit above or below. And I did that for a long time.
0:08:19.3 AH: We mentioned this the other day because one of the features in the bolstered community is hot chocolate chats, which are just little virtual gatherings where people can bring their question about what's going on in their massage practice. And the group, the small group, can kind of peer mentor each other. And you said something that's actually stuck with me for a few days. You said, I'm still catching up on my prices because I priced too low when I started. And it made me think about how long it really does take to catch up. If you price your services too low at the start, and then you realize that and you want to up it, sometimes that can mean like a 20 or $25 price increase all at once. And that's a lot. And for some of us, that is not the best option. One of the things you do is teach massage therapists really great communication skills and scripts around boundaries and pricing and all kinds of businessy things. What is the pep talk you're giving yourself to get your pricing where you want it to be?
0:09:19.2 S3: You know, when it comes to raising rates, the thing that I usually share with other massage therapists is that it's never going to feel easy. You just get better at doing it. So I'm almost 12 years in. I just raised my rates again this past January 1st. And it's like the hesitation to press the send button to send the email, it still gets me. I still get that feeling in the pit of my stomach. And it's like, is everybody going to abandon me? Have I finally priced myself out of my existing client base? Is this the end of the line? I think you learn better how to navigate things like pushback and lower client retention.
0:10:05.7 AH: So how did it go when you did it?
0:10:07.3 S3: It went really well. I didn't lose anybody. But what I chose to do this year is I split it up because I was concerned about the economy with the upcoming administration change in the United States. So I actually did a $5 increase for January and then prompted them that there would be another $5 in July.
0:10:31.6 AH: Oh, that's good. I love, like, giving people a heads up, even though most of the time they forget because they don't really care that much about the $5. Then it's more of a big deal to me.
0:10:41.4 S3: Yeah. You know, and I think about, like, one of the things that I think I would do when it comes to raising rates if I could go back 12 years is I would have just implemented a annual maybe $3 increase every year. And just upfront say that you can expect $3 more every January. And that's more or less going to cover things like cost of living, cost of overhead going up and just getting them used to always seeing an increase from me.
0:11:15.4 AH: And I love that. Except $3 isn't enough. I would really push you to do like 5 to 10. But you know what, we always have that first output of like, oh, I'm just gonna go low on this. And then we rethink it and we're like, oh, that's probably too low. I like that you said that you get better at it over time. Because I just hit my 20 year anniversary and I raised my rates last fall and it was the first time that I raised prices and just did it without any feelings. I did not have any concerns. And I had actually planned to wait until this like January or February, until it was like a year or something. I changed my mind like somewhere at the beginning of August. I had just come back from. I took like a month off last year and I had just come back and I was really busy and I was like, you know what, I don't want, want to wait until next spring to raise my prices. I'm just going to do it. And literally that day I went onto my website, changed all the pricing. I upped it $10. I went into my scheduling software and I changed it everything. I raised it $10. My software didn't change existing appointments that had already been made. So that's beautiful. So I still had plenty of time to warn my regular clients.
0:12:34.4 AH: So as they came in over the next four weeks and like the second half of August and into September, I would, I would tell them, your appointment today is the same price. Anything you book after October 1st is going to be the new pricing. So it gave me like six weeks of Runway to just tell my regular clients and they stayed on the old pricing. But anybody who scheduled, whether it was somebody like a returning client who just hadn't been on the books, like if they went onto my website that night and scheduled, it would be the new price and they would not have gotten an email telling them that. It just was. It just was. Literally no one said anything and I had zero feelings about it. And six weeks later I was making, you know, $100 more a week.
0:13:18.0 S3: Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, yeah, to get to that point where you just do it, you're just able to rip the band aid off and say, this is a necessary change that has to happen for the business and you just do it. And I think, you know, I think the thing that a lot of massage therapists, including myself, tends to forget is that you really can stand to lose a handful of clients and break even and make the same income. But you know, we tend to focus on our existing clientele because they're our bread and butter. We want to keep them happy, we want to make sure that they're content, they want to keep coming in. But it's kind of a natural progression of a business that you eventually start pricing yourself out of people's budgets. And you know, that happened to me really unexpectedly a couple of years ago. And I think it was because I went over the hundred dollar mark. So I think that just psychologically for people put them in a different place. When it came to spending money on massage therapy, I do not believe it had any, anything to do with my skills or their value of massage or how much they wanted massage.
0:14:29.5 S3: I think it's just one of those psychological things about money. But I ended up losing maybe 8 or 9 very long term clients and it really knocked me on my side. I mean, I was not anticipating that at all. And I was kind of in a place where I didn't really want to find new clients. You know, I was kind of coasting and comfy with what I had. But I do think it does happen, and I think it does losing clients does happen, maybe more than people are talking about. And I think it's okay. Like I said, I think we have a cushion there when it comes to income. I think what really happens is it just pulls on our heartstrings that people, it feels like people are abandoning us.
0:15:15.6 AH: Yep, we take that very personally when it's. I feel like if someone leaves you because of a 5 or $10 price increase, they were probably going to leave you soon anyway. Or they were going to find a reason to drop off one way. And a lot of times it's budget, or a lot of times they'll say it's budget. But really it's just time and effort and lifestyle changes and all of those things.
0:15:38.6 S3: I would say when it comes to pricing specifically, no one's asking you to be an accountant. But as someone who is not very great at math, I would encourage everybody to take the time to crunch the numbers to get really serious about what your expenses are, how much money you want to make, how much you need for your lifestyle, and just keeping in mind that the revenue that your business generates pays both for the business and your personal income. And so it probably needs to be much higher than maybe you're imagining. And there's no shame in that. And I think also we tend to price based on how well we think it's going to be accepted or received. And one thing that's really helped for me is I tell myself that the business generates two things, money and massages. The massages are for the clients and the money is for me. And so as much thought and care as I put into curating a client experience so that they get what they want, I also deserve to get what I want and what I need from what the business is generating.
0:17:00.7 AH: Hey, do you have... Since this turned into a conversation about pricing do you have any resources for people who are gonna increase their prices?
0:17:08.0 S3: So I do have a free download that walks you through how to write the email to notify clients that your prices are increasing. And then I guess a little bit of a secret is I'm wrapping up a course on raising rates and all things money that's gonna be launching sometime here in 2025 and it is gonna be NCBT and be certified for credit.
0:17:35.0 AH: Thank you so much, Annette Montgomery, for joining us and dropping some pricing wisdom. Again, everybody, you can find her @annettemontgomery.org I'll have all kinds of links in the show notes. Thank you for joining us.
0:17:48.2 S3: Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure.
0:17:50.8 AH: If you have a question about running your business or an idea for an episode, reach out via email, businessorpressure@abmp.com you can also find me coaching massage therapist @deepbreathdigital.com and make sure you subscribe to ABMP's podcast so you don't miss a beat. I'll meet you right here for the next episode. I can't wait.