The Healing Arts Center Adds Entrepreneur Studies To Its Business Curriculum

With 60% Of All Massage Therapists Practicing As Independents, HAC Ramps Up Business Development And Marketing Skills In Business Class And Looks At Business Incubation.

   The Healing Arts Center trains more licensed massage therapists in the St. Louis region than all other programs combined.  As the oldest and largest school around, we feel that we have a responsibility to train massage therapists for prosperity in the real world.   Given that nearly 60% of all massage therapists are self-employed, independent operators, HAC has decided that it must improve its business training to assist its graduates in creating their own massage practices should they chose that direction.
     Massage therapy is a wonderful profession, but it does not have be practiced full-time to be useful for personal prosperity.  A significant segment of the massage therapy community are part-time therapists who use the practice to augment income  that they earn in other professions.

     Regardless of whether or not one is a stay-at-home mom looking for income augmentation or budding wellness professional looking for a full-time career, entrepreneurial business skills can help any massage therapist improve the bottom line.   HAC just happens to have a secret resource to help massage therapists find prosperity - its president, Dave Kenyon.  Not everyone knows that Kenyon is actually a professional business developer.  An attorney by training, Kenyon has spent decades counseling and coaching businesses.   In fact, it his unique style of highly ethical and sustainable business modelling that brought him to HAC in the first place.  He has been working to create a next-generation business model for the school while simultaneously looking to help the industry as a whole mature into a new type of wellness profession.
     Kenyon personally teaches five (5) classes out of twenty (20) in HAC's business class.  Teaming up with HAC's primary business teacher, Terrie Yardley-Nohr (who literally wrote the text book on professional ethics used at HAC), the business program has taken on a nuts-and-bolts feel much more like a business incubator. These five entrepreneurial track classes are a progressive examination of small business development that anyone can do.   The topics include:

• De-mythologizing attitudes toward money that often prevent morally-inclined people from creating prosperity;
• Business as an ethical vehicle of personal and social well-being;
• Fundamentals of harmonic resonance - how marketing works from a point of psychology and being;
• Organic product development and identification - how to effectively match services to customers;
• Creating market awareness and inspiring customers to activation;
• Brand building;
• Basic business operations and organization including limited liability company filings and tax identification applications;
• Fundamental employment law;
• Basic accounting and how to use accounting data to build a business model.

While this list of topics is extensive and cannot be taught with thoroughness in the time available, the entrepreneurial track is designed to assist potential small business owners to become aware of important specific issues.  The idea is to present the some of the complexities of business in a model that anyone can understand.  This gives students a short list of skills and knowledge that they need to develop to become successful.  Without this insight, students could spend years and years not knowing that they don't know important business concepts.  In today's digital environment, one can learn almost anything quickly, but in business, especially for novices, it is not clear what is important and how various business concepts and skills can impact the outcome.  The business entrepreneurial track takes students through a rather in-depth exploration of how businesses are built and how they grow in the wellness market sector.  The result is not a lot of answers, but rather, students leave with a thoughtful list of specific questions that they can then answer for themselves.
     Since joining The Healing Arts Center in 2014, Dave Kenyon, acting as president of the company, has grown enrollment by more than 30% at a time when most massage therapy programs are going out of business.  Part of his approach has been to present to the world a clear view of how valuable massage therapy is as a healing practice thereby moving massage therapy into the broader wellness services market and away from the recreational or pamper massage market.   HAC has always been about health, healing and holistic approaches to well-being.  It is, after all, the house that Tom Tessereau built.  When Tom asked Dave to join HAC, the two began to synergize Tessereau's extensive health and wellness knowledge with Kenyon's extensive business knowledge.  In the process they have turned HAC's signature focus on compassionate healing into something akin to a religion.  "We have always been very zealous about natural healthcare", says Tessereau.     Students cannot make it past the first week of school without being indoctrinated into what Kenyon calls "a clear vision of the moral and ethical calling of a healer".    It is a question of clear market messaging.   Kenyon believes that "no one wants to give back rubs for a living, but expelling anxiety and pain from the human body, now that is something worth getting up in the morning to do."
     "There is nothing inconsistent about doing good in the world and creating prosperity", says Kenyon.   It is a question that plagues Millennials in particular:  "how can I use my life to make a difference."   "Because no one can afford to get sick anymore, long-term wellness management is an affordable solution in an increasingly sick world," says Kenyon.  "Many of us have the altruistic motivation to step up to help and we can show you how to do that," he adds.  HAC is looking to expand its offerings in the area of holistic wellness education.  This year it added a Master Track series that offers 100 hours of transformational breath training.  This allows practitioners to coach personal breath sessions and breath classes.  Transformational breath has a long history of incredible health benefits especially in the area of trauma release.   It is a tool that can be easily and logically added to a massage therapy practice to create depth in customer service offerings especially for independent therapists.
     HAC is looking at offering a Master Track course in wellness business development to anyone who is interested in developing a wellness business.   "We think that it would be useful for wellness professionals to be able to bring their own real-life business ideas into a comprehensive course where these ideas could be systematically developed in a program that is part instructional course and part business incubator," says Kenyon.  "We are going to be pushing hard to help massage therapists and other holistic wellness workers find their way to business viability, prosperity and ultimately economic autonomy."