I have worked as a Rolfer in Tokyo since June 2015, and by August 2026 it was twelve years since I began the training. Rolfing has been the whole of my income for that time.
This page is the business side of those twelve years: the numbers, what worked, and what did not. I have written more about what failed than about what succeeded, because the failures are the part I could not find anywhere when I needed them. There is a good deal written about becoming a Rolfer, and very little about what happens after the certificate. My own training is recorded separately, in The Path to Becoming a Rolfer — A 12-Year Training Record.
Where the numbers stand
People who have completed the ten-series: 32 in the first year (July 2016), the hundredth in October 2018, about 150 by May 2022, 174 by June 2025, and 185 by May 2026. Around 374 people have come for sessions in total.
A single session began at 10,000 yen in 2015 and rose to 15,000 yen after the first year. It stayed there for ten years, until June 2026, when it became 18,000 yen. An introductory session began at 3,000 yen and is 10,000 yen now. At today’s rates, a session is roughly 120 US dollars.
Seven years in, about eight of every ten clients had come by word of mouth and two through web search. Rolfing is little known in Japan, and almost nobody searches for it by name, so referral has always carried most of the weight. The website is where the enquiries themselves arrive.
What did not work
- Working on the room. When clients stopped coming in 2017, the first thing I did was clean, tidy and add plants. Sometimes it seemed to help; mostly it did nothing
- Collecting advice. I asked many people and tried what they said. When you are struggling, other people’s advice fills the space where your own judgement should be
- Widening the range. In the pandemic I added courses, yoga classes, contract work, interpreting, anything that could go online. It looked like a successful move; revenue did not follow
- Moving the articles. In 2021 I moved every blog post to a second site of my own. Within a year the practice had dropped out of search for its own name, and it took three years to get back
- A referral discount. I ran one for a month in 2026. One person used it
What worked
- Writing before I opened. I published a column through the whole year of training. By the time I opened, people were waiting for it, and their introductions filled the first months
- An introductory session. Priced low, kept short, and used to let people feel the work rather than hear about it
- Renting out the room. Sharing the space with other practitioners for seven and a half years paid the rent through the thin months, and turned colleagues into people who sent clients
- Deciding it was mine to solve. What ended the drought in 2017 was not a technique. It was deciding to solve it myself, changing the words I used about my own work, and meeting people
- One site, one door. Keeping the Rolfing articles and the enquiry form in the same place is what search rewards, and what clients follow
- Meeting each person properly. My guesses about who would continue past the introductory session were wrong more often than right. Care, not judgement of prospects, is what produced the next client
Twelve years, in order
- 2015: opened in Shibuya on 29 June. Nine people in the first week
- 2016: first anniversary, first price rise. 610 sessions in the first year
- 2017: moved to the second room; merged two websites into one. From September, clients came full circle and stopped arriving
- 2018: turned it around by the end of February. Television in May; rewrote how I describe the work. The hundredth person completed the series in October
- 2019: moved to Ebisu. English site published
- 2020: closed during the state of emergency. Grants, a loan and a subsidy; rebuilt the business with outside help for the first time
- 2021: launched a second site and moved the blog to it
- 2022: revenue recovered from January. In the second half, search rankings collapsed
- 2023: sessions in Shibuya, events in Tsunashima
- 2024: faster pages, and “rolfing” in the domain. Rankings came back
- 2025: certified as an Advanced Rolfer in July
- 2026: first price change in ten years; renting the room again; a new website on 25 September
What twelve years give you
Staying put has its own compound interest, and it is slower than anyone wants.
The articles I wrote in the early years still bring people to the site today; that is why losing them to a site move hurt so much, and why getting them back worked. Clients who finished their series years ago send people. The practitioners who rented my room are colleagues now. Raising prices, which I dreaded, brought more new clients rather than fewer — both times, ten years apart. And the training kept going: Rolf Movement in 2019, Advanced Rolfer in 2025, in the eleventh year of practice.
None of that was visible at three years, when I was worried about where the next client would come from. If you are in that part of it now, the honest encouragement I can offer is that the work you are doing this year is not paid for this year.
The five parts
- Part 1 They Came Without Any Advertising — the year before opening, the first year, and why people came without promotion
- Part 2 The Six Months When Clients Stopped Coming — what I tried, what did nothing, and the language the television coverage forced me to find
- Part 3 Four Moves, and a Room I Always Meant to Share — what I look for in a room, and how sharing it paid the rent
- Part 4 Funding and Rebuilding Through the Pandemic — grants, a loan and a subsidy, and hiring help with finding clients for the first time
- Part 5 I Moved the Articles, and Search Lost Me — the clearest mistake in the record, and the three years it took to undo
The rest of this site
If you came here as a practitioner, the rest of the site is written for you as much as for clients. It holds several hundred articles in English, on fascia, perception, tonic function, phenomenology and energy work, along with records of every training I have taken. Start Here is the way in.
Each year of this record was written as it happened, in Japanese, on my other site.