The Membership Domino
Interestingly the most valuable tool of the mega chains is their greatest weakness. Memberships are the life blood of a massage business. They create a consistent flow of revenue, but they do come with risk. If a customer cannot enjoy the services they are paying for they will cancel their membership, this causes more damage than the loss of one client. It can cause a catastrophic domino effect.
When a client intends to cancel their membership, they attempt to use as many of their accrued services as quickly as possible. This limits the number of hours available for other members, resulting in limited or no access to their prepaid services. Once these members become frustrated, they too will attempt to use all of their accrued services so they may cancel their membership. A common reaction to this trend is for the company to limit how each customer may use their services. They may also prevent sharing, charge more for sharing them, or limit the number of services a customer can use each month. When this phenomenon occurs it triggers a snowball effect that is increasingly difficult to stop. Often this leads to a mega chain lowering their standards of employment to meet their demand.
For many years this is how the industry has operated, especially for the mega chains. Every new massage therapist must be recruited at all costs. The mega chains do not care if the student has not been taught effective body mechanics, can pass the MBLEX or can perform a quality massage.
This is a great circumstance for the schools, they can invest the minimum to generate the same revenue. They know every student will get a job if they want one, so why bother doing more work? We would assume there is some kind of regulatory body holding the massage school accountable, but there isn’t. Due to the provisional license a new therapist may practice up to one year without having to pass the MBLEX. New therapists are able to practice even if they are unqualified to do so. At the end of this time the workforce must anticipate a hemorrhage of at least thirty-three percent of its new employee workforce. This calculation does not account for burnout, or injury, which are common occurrences, and are expected due to the physical demands and poor training of our workforce. All in all an employer should expect to lose about fifty percent of their new employees within twelve months.
Once hired the new graduate is thrown directly into the fire. The clinics must survive the membership domino, the demand for massage, and the limited supply of therapists. This results in new practitioners overworking themselves, leading to fatigue, burnout, and injury. A good estimate for career length for a massage therapist is fifty percent for one year, thirty percent for three years, and ten percent for seven years.
How do we address this problem? We need to remove the rot from our culture and replace it with the golden glowy goodness of creativity, empathy, and humility. Removing the disease requires a transformation of our education system, guidance for our new massage therapists (helping them avoid the dark road of the mega massage chains), and a rebirth of our culture.
