In this month’s magazine we interview one of the UK’s most successful massage therapists. John Holman shares insights with us about his background as a baker and what it takes to succeed in the world of massage.
Q. John, Please tell us a little about yourself and your career, how did you first get into the world of massage and when?
A. I came into the world of massage quite late in my career as a 34 year old. I was a baker running a very busy bakery business that I bought when I was 20 years old. I was a regular recipient of massage to help me manage stress. In the 14 years that I owned the bakery I had taken it from a £9,000 a year business to one that was turning over £1.76m or around £8m in today’s money. We employed just shy of 100 people and the bakery was in production for 164 hours a week. It became apparent to me that I did not have the skills to grow it any further, and decided to sell it, change my career, and become a massage therapist.
Q. What route did you take with your training?
A. I took a conventional route via a collection of FE and private colleges. As a mature student I had a slightly different approach to learning and getting things done. I was used to working incredibly hard and long hours, so the thought of doing a full time course that only required me to be there for 15 hours a week was completely alien to me. I solved this problem easily by signing up to five different massage courses in four different colleges to fill my time. I quickly realised that technique was just technique, essentially how hard you press someone and what part of your body to use to do it. Where everyone seemed to struggle was with the anatomy, but all I had to do was concentrate on the college that taught the highest level of anatomy and I could easily pass all of the others. It took me about 15 months to acquire all of the qualifications that I thought I needed to go into business as a therapist.
Q. So, it was all fairly simple and straight forward then?
A. No, far from it! Firstly, I made the mistake of believing everything that I was told about massage was true or founded upon scientific evidence. That was a big mistake, especially when I repeated one of these famous myths to a doctor. I am of course referring to “tension knots”. In my case, the knot I was referring to was in the shoulder of my prized doctor client. When he quietly and carefully corrected my language and my anatomy, my confidence and beliefs almost collapsed. However, I will be forever grateful to Dr Karmali for setting me straight, and I am delighted to report that nearly 30 years later he is still a client of mine, albeit he has long since retired from medicine, and my use of language and understanding of anatomy is considerably improved. This simple action has been the foundation of my success in massage. I vowed from that day to this that would never accept anything that anyone told me about massage or anatomy without doing my own research and checking that it was correct.
Q. Any other problems
A. Yes, the biggest of all was that I was starting to feel the effects of doing massage the way that I had been taught. I was developing pain in my wrists and back because of the way that I was working. I could see that the pain in my wrists was being caused by the compressive nature of massage, after all I spent all day leaning across couches and every technique I used involved me pressing down on people. It was a simple RSI problem with no obvious solution at the time.
Q. What did you do?
A. My problem went from mild discomfort to excruciating pain in a very short time and I needed a solution quickly or that was going to be the end of a very short career in massage. I am perhaps fortunate in that I am blessed with a pretty good lateral thinking brain. I understood the causes and the effects and realised that I urgently needed a way of working that provided a balance of both compression and expansion to my wrist joints (pushing and pulling massage techniques). At the time I concentrated all of my efforts in trying to solve that conundrum and did not worry about my lower back. To cut a very long story short, I came up with a concept of laying the client on a cushion of warm water and I started to experiment with techniques that did not exacerbate my wrist pain. Clearly it worked as my career is currently 30 years long and I still do around 1,200 hours of massage a year. What was perhaps more interesting was that because I learned to work a different way my back pain disappeared as well. I designed what is today known as the Hydrotherm massage system, and it was this that effectively saved my career.
Q. Can you tell us a little about your day-to-day work?
A. The first thing to point out is that I spend all of my time doing what I love, and my whole working life revolves around my knowledge and skills in massage. It is probably easier if I list what I do and include a few facts about each.
I am clinic lead at Massage Matters in Thame, Oxfordshire where I have been based for the past 30 years. I have more than 50,000 hours of hands-on treatment experience. I only have enough time to do around 24 hours a week of massage personally. The clinic is open seven days a week, and there are currently five therapists in the business. Prior to Covid19 rearing its ugly head, we were doing around seventy five to eighty hours a week of massage. We consistently generate between forty five and sixty new clients a month and have more than 250 five star reviews or recommendations with google and Facebook.
I am also managing director of Hydrotherm. We have around 2,500 therapists here in the UK. We are essentially a training business with a unique product
Another area of involvement is as director of massage training at The Massage Company, a franchise operation with four sites currently. This incredible business model shows us all that the demand for high quality massage is there in every community. We were fast approaching 4,000 massages each month under the skilful management and guidance of the owners Charlie Thompson and Eliott Walker.
Recently I am privileged to have become a founder board member of the SATCC, the Standards Authority for Touch in Cancer Care, where I am the Subject Matter Expert for massage.
And lastly, I am greatly honoured to be a member and Subject Matter Expert for ThinkTree.
Q. Do you still have further ambitions or is that enough?
A. Yes, I want to write a book about how to make money with massage, I genuinely believe that anyone with the right attitude and beliefs can do it with just a little help and guidance.
You can learn more about Hydrotherm here. www.hydrotherm.co.uk John’s massage clinic here: www.massagemattersclinic and to find out more about the massage company, go here: www.massagecompany.co.uk