We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Hankammer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

It’s been my mission since I began as a Licensed Massage Therapist to eradicate as much pain from people’s lives as possible with the least amount of discomfort. It was my own terrible car accidents, yes, plural, that made me realize that pain is a thief that steals a piece of you at a time until you’re unrecognizable. I spent my energies learning from anyone & everyone I could, including my massage therapist mother & grandparents, attending seminars to learn advanced techniques, & building a clientele that would allow me to experiment with these various techniques while providing me valuable feedback on how they felt afterwards.

After many years of practicing on my clients, I realized the body is a lot like an onion & treating it layer by layer had the best effect that lasted longer & then I had another terrible car accident. This one broke my spine in 3 places & 4 ribs & left me with insane pain for more than 4 years. I thought my massage career was over until I had a spinal surgery that alleviated the majority of my pain & I got back to what I am most passionate about-helping others with their pain. I ended up at a franchise massage business that opened my eyes to a lot of problems in the industry. The rate massage therapists are paid, the tools & techniques they are allowed to use, the way clients are treated by both the business model & the employees, the quality of products being used on clients, the cleaning routines, I just found so many issues that I wanted to improve.

I realized after working there for 3 years that I could not change someone else’s business & that I would have to do it myself & do it better. I started asking myself & my retired massage therapist mother “What could we do or offer that would make what I do go further, last longer, or be any easier for me to get those results?” This was a fun rabbit hole to go down!! I learned that we need at least 3 things to feel our best, Oxygen, Salt, & Water. I decided that anything that would be brought into the business needed to maximize the effects of everything else, great by itself, better together. Above & Beyond Wellness Spa was born!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I studied techniques that were more rehabilitative & being used by physical therapists in the beginning of my career, traditional science. After I broke my spine & ribs in another terrible car accident, I began to open my mind to techniques that are less traditional, but still very rehabilitative. Having a second chance to do what I’m most passionate about made me realize that I had been closed-minded about many techniques & tools that could help heal my clients. That is a disservice to them & I had to change that. Today, after practicing for nearly 24 years, I custom blend so many different techniques with different tools to get each of my clients feeling looser, freer movement, & less pain.

I’ve always gone Above & Beyond for my clients, truly giving them my best effort every time. I wanted to create a business that had that at the heart of it all & I would need to find other practitioners out there that shared my vision. Taking all I had seen & experienced over the years, good & bad, & using it to shape the best place to work & the best place to visit became my mission. Treat clients like people, not money. Treat employees like people, not money. Provide the highest quality products for services & cleaning. Make a space feel like a getaway from everyday stress in the way it looks, feels, & smells.

Back to the Oxygen, Salt, & Water being essential to our overall wellness. Our Hydrotherapy whirlpool tub has 16 jets & pure oxygen infused into the water, not air. The science behind this is so cool! The tiny bubbles exfoliate your skin, pulp fine lines & wrinkles, & get pulled into your bloodstream. This gets your blood & lymphatic system (waste removal) moving like a NASCAR race & activates your metabolism (detox). You become super buoyant after about 30 minutes from all the oxygen you’ve absorbed! This is really important because our blood becomes very thick from our shallow breathing & poor air quality, which leads to stiffer muscles because the blood cannot flush like its supposed to. Soaking in our tub can make your massage & facial so much more beneficial.

Our Halotherapy Salt Chamber is amazing because it’s a natural anti-inflammatory that kills 99.99% of all viruses, bacteria, & fungi while balancing the skin’s Ph naturally. The partials per million become medically beneficial after only 10 minutes vs the required 45 minutes per ANY Salt Room. This is great for anyone who wants to breathe, sleep, & feel better while improving various skin issues. We recently added our whole body Red Light Therapy with Whole Body Vibration, called the Red Light Duo. These two services work at the same time to help your body recover faster, shed unwanted weight, improve the lymphatic system, heal skin issues, & more.

We offer a variety of massage techniques, facial, advanced skincare solutions, lash & brow services, vegan waxing, energy balancing, ZYTO Scan, wellness classes, wellness gifts, & gift cards. We offer competitive prices & offer memberships for even deeper savings with perks. We even accept HSA & FSA & will be happy to submit a statement for you to turn in if requested.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

We opened July 2020, during the pandemic, not something that was in the business plan. It was a real struggle in the beginning to get people to come by to check us out, even with how clean everything was. We had to educate the public to the benefits of the Salt Chamber, something that can kill 99.99% of ALL Viruses & they were still skeptical. And of course, we had to go through a few practitioners that were not the right fit for our business. So many obstacles & so many expenses to open & stay open.

Thankfully, clients of mine followed me & were happy Guinea pigs with our Soak & Salt services before their massages & posted their reviews online. They also shared what they liked & disliked about the franchise locations in great detail, which gave me an idea. I had already created our No Commitment Membership that is a one-time fee for member pricing, but now I thought I should offer some kind of Monthly Membership. It had to be better than the rest!

I developed a Monthly Membership program that would be based on Time so that everything we offer could be used & I made it a crazy great value with the more time you bought. This time would roll over, lock in rates, be sharable, & best of all easy to cancel should you need to.

Clients love the value! Clients love how easy it is to share their time with others! And they definitely love being locked into great rates should our prices change! This really helped our business during a really hard time while helping our clients get more wellness for their money,

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

We started using Referrizer to build our referrals & loyalty with our clients back in January 2021 & we started seeing more clients leaving reviews about their experience. Plus, we now offer a loyalty reward program that our clients don’t have to do anything to be part of, but they get free 30 minute upgrades after 3 60-minute services. We’re also able to create offers & send text & emails to our clients easily letting them know about our offers. This has been a great program to help us build our reputation within our market because our market has to do with an experience, which can vary per person.

We hired a company called Studio C5 to rebuild our website & manage our Google My Business page back in March 2021. They did the best job with our website, making it clean & user friendly with all the technical stuff linked with Google. They added our reviews to our website so people could easily read what our clients had to say about us. The technical stuff is still over my head after many monthly meetings to review the data, but it’s been a steady increase to our business that’s resulted in us needing more practitioners & front desk staff.

It’s true that you cannot run a business by yourself. You cannot do everything yourself. I was trying to do it all in the beginning, which was not working & was taking away from what I’m best at- Massage!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://abovebeyondwellness.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/above_and_beyond_wellness_spa/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
• Yelp: https://bit.ly/3U4ualz
• Other: sarah@abovebeyondwellness.com