New Students Must be Shown How to Succeed
The sum of a student’s success is determined by the passion, professionalism, and skill infused into them throughout their education. New massage therapists are being taught just enough to jump into the pool, splash around a bit, and drown. This is unacceptable. A school should prepare each student for their career. Every facility needs to be teaching their students to excel, so they may swim like an Olympian and emerge a champion of their dreams.
Instead massage therapists often drift into a lonely sea after graduation. The comradery experienced during school fades as they enter the workforce and feel alone. I remember looking forward to working in an industry saturated with purposeful men and women with the same zeal and passion as I. Unfortunately, I found a collection of passionless, disenfranchised people.
The Meat Grinder of Massage
The massage industry is a meat grinder, it is fed hopeful souls and it spits out shredded husks. The outside appears magical and majestic, it shimmers with a radiant glow and exudes hope. So how could it be so brutal? With few exceptions the schools are uninvested in their student’s success, and ability to thrive.
I theorize many institutions are aware of the inadequacy of their programs but choose to leave them as they are. Why would they do this? Perhaps it is because they believe it is not to their benefit.
Massage businesses need schools, they cannot operate without them. They must have employees to generate revenue. Right now every clinic needs providers, their customers want massage, but the businesses cannot meet the demand. Watching revenue slip between your fingers is maddening and over time the desperation has reached titanic proportions. The frenzied hunger of the mega chains has ravaged our occupational landscape and built a bubble that is about to pop.
The mega chains have a valuable place in the history of massage by helping it gain acceptance across America. I am thankful for their contributions to our beautiful profession, but they have also destroyed our culture. As the demand for massage increased, the necessity for more massage therapists followed. This gave birth to the modern massage education system. These factors plus the licensing requirements and state regulations at the turn of the century transformed the landscape of massage, especially in Missouri, forever.
These three forces have created the bubble, so then what is it? As the demand for massage increases, the need for licensed professionals increases as well, if our industry could maintain our workforce this would be great. Effectively everyone would win.
Unfortunately our industry is a meat grinder. As the demand for massage increases, so does the need for therapists, right now the clinics do not have the ability to meet the demand, so they stop focusing on quality and instead focus on quantity. This reduces the benefit the public receives from our services. As more therapists drop from the industry the clinics require more providers, guaranteeing job placement for all therapists. This lowers the quality of massage and the public’s perception of the benefit it provides.
When the demand outweighs the supply service rates increase. This results in a price increase even though the quality of said services are decreasing. Once the price is higher than the perceived benefit of massage the bubble pops.
What happens when the bubble pops? History repeats itself; our industry collapses and massage will return to its darkest era of all time.
We are heading in this direction, take a look at the current status of our industry:
According to the ABMP the number of massage therapists currently working dramatically fell in Missouri from 2019 to 2020. In 2019 Missouri had an estimated 6,126 massage therapists actively working in the field, while in 2020 this fell to 4,451. This was a loss of 1,675 jobs or 27.3% of the employment pool. In addition to this the FSMTB reports a 67% pass rate for the MBLEX which is the minimum state licensing exam required for all therapists to legally practice in the state of Missouri.
As our industry continues down this path the mega chains will accept more unqualified service providers into their ranks. Right now anyone legally able to practice massage is employable, effectively making quality completely irrelevant to them. This is because they must do whatever it takes to survive. They need to eat, and when resources are scarce they will eat whatever they can, the hungrier they get the more desperate they become and the more damage they will do.
