Embracing challenges brings post-pandemic profitability to The Massage Company

The franchise used its unexpected spare time to accelerate its business plans, enhance its training programmes and encourage clients to have longer and more frequent regular treatment sessions

Franchisees of The Massage Company aren’t just surviving but are positively thriving, emerging from the pandemic fitter, stronger and even more profitable.

With so many businesses brought to their knees or going to the wall as a result of shutdowns, lockdowns and staffing shortages, The Massage Company used its unexpected spare time to accelerate its business plans, enhance its training programmes and encourage clients to have longer and more frequent regular treatment sessions.

“Clients who signed up for a 50-minute massage once a month weren’t able to have them when the restrictions forced us to close our doors,” says Charlie Thompson, The Massage Company’s founder and managing director. “So when we were allowed to open again, we invited them to play catch-up by having 80–minute sessions every fortnight instead.

“And now they’ve realised how good those extra sessions make them feel and how beneficial the treatments are for their wellbeing, they’ve formed a new habit and are sticking with the longer, more frequent sessions.

“That’s an unexpected side-effect of the pandemic restrictions and has put us ahead of where we imagined we’d be, both financially and in our business development.”

The company has also raised its prices for new clients from £49 to £59 - a significant increase that will mean substantially more profit for franchisees - without any noticeable fall-off in business as a result.

“We also used the compulsory downtime to our advantage by testing out our new operating system, MyTime, at one of our centres,” says Charlie. “That meant we could sort any issues and deal with any glitches without impacting our franchisees or their businesses. We took the time to crash-test it there, so any pain would be ours. We’ve moved our operating system from quite heavy server-based to web-based and that will save our franchisees money and give us better integration and functionality in the future.

“We must be doing something right because we’ve taken our franchisees and their staff through this unique situation and they’re trading strongly out the other side. We went at it all guns blazing and tried to attack the lockdown situation in a really positive way - and ended up being more successful rather than merely limiting any damage. Franchisees are coming in now to a business that’s so much further ahead than it would have been.”