Working as a Rolfer (Part 1)
On 29 June 2015, I started seeing clients in Shibuya, Tokyo. Nine people came in the first week, most of them for an introductory session. A year later, in July 2016, I had given 610 full sessions and 32 people had completed the ten-series.
I did no advertising in that first year. Rolfing was, and still is, little known in Japan; almost no one searches for it by name. So the question of where those people came from is worth answering carefully, and the answer starts before I opened.
The question was never what to offer
I was certified in Munich in March 2015 and came back to Japan in April. In May I went to a two-day gathering of people who had left conventional careers, and heard a talk by Yohei Yamaguchi, a consultant and writer. His point was that what you do matters less than how you do it, and that the harder work is building something that actually earns.
Going back to the pharmaceutical industry was still an option. I had spent about eleven years there in medical marketing. What stopped me was something I had seen from the inside: the pressure of numbers, and how often the information a patient needed was not the information that got through. Marketing, in Drucker’s phrase, is about creating a customer. In that industry it can quietly become about creating a patient.
So when I decided to open a practice, the question I carried was not what to offer. It was how to make it work.
What the Rolfers ahead of me said
During those weeks of rest, I visited three Rolfers already in practice in Japan — Akinori Ito, Kosuke Sato and Hiroki Sato — and asked them plainly how clients come, and what makes a practice hold together as a business.
Two answers came back. Offer an introductory session. And have a room of your own.
I found the room on 1 June 2015, a five-minute walk from Shibuya station, forty square metres, and signed within a week. I set the introductory session at 3,000 yen and each session of the ten-series at 10,000 yen — deliberately below what Rolfers in Tokyo were charging, because what I needed first was experience.
In the introductory session I explained Rolfing briefly, watched the person stand and walk, and worked only where it seemed useful. I kept the hands-on part short so that the experience stayed clear. Within the first week it was obvious that explaining less and letting people feel more was the better trade.
Writing brought the people
Just after I left my job, my brother told me that if I wrote about the process of becoming a Rolfer, people would follow it and want to support me. He also told me to write honestly.
I started a column about Rolfing in July 2014. Over the year of training and travel, it came to 288 posts. Takami Kamata, a Rolfer living in Frankfurt who had finished her training before me, picked up my posts again and again. People from my yoga practice asked when I would start.
Looking back at it a year in, I wrote that the blog had raised what people expected of me, and had turned some of them into people who wanted me to succeed. Their introductions are why clients were there from the first month.
A month after opening I wrote that although I had done nothing to promote Rolfing, people were asking for sessions from directions I had not expected, and strangers were telling me they read the blog. Some of those readers became clients.
The numbers on the blog were not impressive. I had about 1,650 contacts on Facebook, and posts drew ten or twenty reactions. The people I had hoped to reach came anyway.
The room came before the practice
From around 2008, while still an employee, I had been meeting someone new every week. Don’t decline the first invitation. Build a structure that puts you in front of people. Information gathers where information is given out. Don’t ask for anything back. At one stretch I was meeting a new person every day.
When my Facebook contacts passed a thousand, I rented a large room in Okusawa, in 2012, and held workshops and yoga classes there. Running events and filling them was something I had already practised, in a small way, three years before I opened. At the two-year mark I wrote that this — doing it small, in advance — was what had made the difference.
The first months
July 2015: 24 Rolfing sessions. By the end of September I had passed a hundred sessions in the room, and the first person had completed the ten-series.
Three months in, I already had the next worry. The people coming now would finish their ten sessions and leave. Would new ones keep arriving? I wanted it to happen by word of mouth rather than by promotion, and I did not know whether that was possible.
I put the question to Hiroki Sato and Akinori Ito in September. Their answer was that it depends on where you are: if you are steady in yourself and meet each client properly, people come. I took it as a way of saying that I should stop working on what I could not control.
By December, five months in, I wrote that essentially all of my clients had come by referral, and that taking care of each person was what produced the next one.
Renting the room built a circle
When I was not using the room, I rented it out, below the going rate for similar rooms near Shibuya.
There were two reasons. My leaflets were in the room, so the clients of whoever rented it saw what I did. And the practitioners who rented became people who wanted my work to go well. Sharpening a sales pitch is worth less than giving other people a reason to understand and support what you do, because there is a limit to what one person can carry.
Eight months in, I wrote that I had put my effort into growing a circle of colleagues rather than acquiring clients, and that as a result I had as many clients as a Rolfer two or three years further along. I barely advertised the room; yoga and Pilates teachers and other Rolfers found it through people they knew.
Craft alone does not fill a practice
At the same time I could feel the risk in depending on referrals. Seven months in, I wrote that referrals through people you know do help, but they rise and fall with circumstances you don’t control.
In January 2016 I went to a seminar by Shingo Miyagi, who runs a programme for small businesses in Japan. He divides what an independent practitioner needs into three: the business side (planning and design), the selling side (attracting, converting, earning), and the craft itself. Start a practice on craft alone, he said, and you will hit a wall at the part that isn’t craft.
Once you are certified, the pull is to go and learn more technique. I felt it too. From that month I changed course: I trusted that what I could already do was good enough, stayed in the room, and gave sessions. In the pharmaceutical industry I had learned that a good drug does not sell itself — how it is conveyed decides everything.
The end of the first year
By April 2016 I was looking at about sixty sessions a month, an average of fifteen a week. So at the one-year mark, from 1 June 2016, I raised the price of a Rolfing session by 5,000 yen. Clients who had supported me from the beginning kept the old rate to the end of that year.
Raising a price, I wrote in the announcement, felt like a test of its own. Bookings from new clients went up steadily afterwards.
Before opening, I had written a year of targets into a spreadsheet — how many people would complete the series, what the monthly revenue should be. A year later, nearly all of it had been met or passed. On 26 July 2016: 610 full sessions, an average of fifty a month, 32 people through the ten-series, and as many as 25 sessions in a heavy week.
Of the hundred or so people who had come by May 2016, the average age was 39 and about seven in ten were women — close to the reader I had been writing for, a woman of about 35 with a movement practice.
What this first year was
People came without advertising, but not by luck. A blog written through the training years gave people a reason to want me to succeed. A place where people gathered, built before I opened, turned into introductions. An introductory session gave them a way in, and renting the room turned colleagues into a circle.
It was also a year that ran on referrals and the momentum of opening. The worry I had at three months — what happens when everyone finishes their ten sessions — arrived a little over two years in.
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 (this article)
- 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
- 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.