Working as a Rolfer (Part 4)
In June 2020 the practice turned five. A few months before that, the pandemic reached Japan.
This is what I did in that period, in two parts: how I kept the money coming in, and how I rebuilt the business afterwards. The rebuilding is where, five years in, I asked for outside help with finding clients for the first time.
The spring I closed
On 7 April 2020 a state of emergency was declared for Tokyo. Japan never imposed a legal lockdown; businesses were asked to close, and most did. I suspended sessions until it lifted. Revenue fell, and I had to think about how to keep the practice funded.
What helped most was information from people I knew. Sorted out, the options came to three:
- money to bridge the gap until revenue returned: cash payments that do not have to be repaid, and loans that do
- money to build something new, such as moving services online: a subsidy
- emergency lending for living costs
How the funding came together
On 1 May I applied online for the government’s sustainment payment for small businesses. It was the fastest of them: the money was in the account on 8 May. I had filed a tax return every year since opening, and the moment it arrived I was glad I had.
With my accountant, I then prepared two applications: a loan from the Japan Finance Corporation, a government-affiliated lender, and a subsidy for small businesses administered through the chambers of commerce. The loan was to cover living costs and working capital. A telephone screening came in mid-June and the money arrived at the end of that month.
The subsidy was for building something new. Through an introduction I met Miho Fukushima, a certified small-business consultant, who went through the application with me. I submitted ahead of the deadline and was accepted on 22 July. In August I also applied for the rent support payment.
By July, sessions had started to come back. As I wrote that autumn: the support meant that, in the middle of a pandemic, I had room to think about what kind of business to build next.
For a practitioner outside Japan, the detail that may transfer is this: none of it arrived automatically. Each piece required an application, a deadline, and in two cases someone who knew the process.
Is Rolfing alone enough?
What I thought about at the five-year mark was the risk of resting everything on Rolfing. If something like this happened again, what then?
For those five years I had run the practice without hiring anyone to advise me on clients or on courses. I listened to people, but I tried things myself. The business had lasted five years that way. I had also, by then, done about as much as I could see on my own.
So I deliberately slowed the pace of sessions and made time to think. People I saw often were too close to the practice to see it plainly. I went looking for advice from people I had just met.
Asking for help with clients, for the first time
The loan and the subsidy made it possible to pay for that help. Kumi Nobe worked with me on the content of courses and online offerings. Hiromichi Ohno worked on the path through the website and on my profile — how someone arrives, and what they read when they do. Norihito Ishikawa, a calligrapher, worked on the design and the logo. Tomonori Kirigishi, who had built and maintained my sites for years, handled the build.
With Kumi Nobe I wrote out an ideal client in detail — name, gender, what they were struggling with. We also worked out what such a person would type into a search box to end up at one of my courses. The phrases that came back were ones I would never have thought of: “talking to my boss,” “relationships at work,” “writing a CV,” “building a career.”
When I wrote my profile for the first website in 2015, I did it alone, without advice. This time I worked on three questions and rewrote it repeatedly: who am I writing to, what do I want to say, and what do I leave out in order to say it.
The subsidy went mainly into websites and content. The plan had been one new site; after checking with the administering office, we did two — the new one and a revision of the Rolfing site. The new site went live in January 2021.
A course I had started in January 2020 moved online in April, and from that year I ran it properly as a series on food and nutrition.
Widening the range did not bring revenue back
Two years later, looking back, I wrote it plainly. For the first three years the practice ran on momentum, without my thinking about marketing at all. Around the start of the pandemic that momentum went, and worry came in its place.
Then I started reasoning my way through it. Courses on nutrition and on tarot, yoga classes, contract work and interpreting, and whatever could be done online: the range widened. I also tried lucky charms and shrine visits. And yet, as I wrote at the seven-year mark, what looked like a successful move online did nothing for revenue. What kept the practice alive in those years was the public support.
That is the part I would want another practitioner to take seriously. Adding services is the obvious response to a drop in income, and in my case it was not the thing that worked.
What came back
From August 2021 I meditated fifteen minutes a day. Overthinking thinned out, and I stopped rising and falling with each week’s bookings.
What I held onto in that stretch was comparing myself today with myself yesterday, rather than with anyone else — and asking, each day, how much use I had been to the person in front of me.
From around January 2022 the business turned up sharply. By May, in-person Rolfing sessions had recovered, and contract work for the second half of the year was settled. At the end of 2022 I wrote that this was the year the effects of the pandemic finally lifted.
By then, seven years in, about 150 people had completed the ten-series and close to 300 had come in total. Looking at who moved from an introductory session to the full series, my hunches about who would continue turned out to be wrong more often than right. What mattered was meeting each person honestly and with care.
What the pandemic years taught
Public money bridged the gap, and in the space it created I rebuilt the business. For the first time I paid for help, and worked out who I was writing for and what words would reach them. Widening the range of what I offered did not bring revenue back; that returned when I stopped overthinking and went back to the person in front of me.
At ten years I wrote that the loan had done more than steady the finances: it was the occasion for rethinking and redesigning the business itself.
In 2026 I borrowed from the same lender again, to build a new website. It was approved in June, and the site went live on 25 September.
In this series
The twelve-year record is collected in Working as a Rolfer — A Record of Finding Clients and Running a Practice.
- Part 1 They Came Without Any Advertising
- Part 2 The Six Months When Clients Stopped Coming
- Part 3 Four Moves, and a Room I Always Meant to Share
- Part 4 Funding and Rebuilding Through the Pandemic (this article)
- Part 5 I Moved the Articles, and Search Lost Me
Each year of this record was written as it happened, in Japanese, on my other site.