Getting the ball rolling...

...or, rather, "Researching what kind of ball I want to roll."

The business plan. Every entrepreneur should have one. I don't. So, today I decided it's high time to remedy this problem. I went rooting around in my old massage school books, looking for the one for that came with the business class. Do I have it? Nope. (But, I did find the one with the SOAP notes templates...SOAP notes are the charts used to keep track of clients' progress.) I remember from class that a business plan starts with an outline, though. So, instead of typing one out, I decided to put mine on index cards.

Index card one: The Goal.
Here's where I define what I want, and how long I want it to take to achieve it. Right now, I'm taking appointments two days a week, and working another part time job three days. I would like to reverse that. Also, I banged out some numbers on how many clients I need to achieve my monetary goal. Because I share expenses at my apartment and because I'm enrolled in college, I gave myself a modest goal. In four months, I want two to three clients a day, three days a week. That's assuming that these clients are all hour table sessions.

Index card two: How to Achieve the Goal (or: Getting My Name Out There)
Here I came up with some advertising ideas. Some I'm already doing: website, blogging. But, there's so much more I can do. There's internal advertising. I'll be setting out brochures and displaying a poster about massage in the chiropractor's office where I work. I'm also going to ask her about including a "Massage Fact" (or something along those lines) in her monthly mail out. For external advertising, I'm going to do some research on the different holistic medicine journals in the Dallas area. I'll also look into doing chair massage at the various spring festivals and health fairs in the Allen and Plano area. And last, but not least, when I've got my website perfected I'll look into sponsored Google and Yahoo listings.

So, it's not much, but at least it'll serve as a guide post for the next few months.