We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Holden Zalma a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Holden, thanks for joining us today. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance?
When I began my career, I was still in college and had just been told that the last 3 years I had spent working for free as an Assistant Athletic Trainer for the USC football team, didn’t count as volunteer hours toward my application to the Physical Therapy program. I was then told that I would have to spend another year working for free in a hospital setting to even apply. The irony here is that the program I was in, gave me more experience in the field of rehabilitation and internal medicine than the 3 yr doctoral program even offered. At this point, I decided that entrepreneurship sounded like a much better path for me to embark upon! Massage Therapy had the lowest barrier to entry to legally allow me to do what I was already doing. So I got the license and then had to figure out how to make money. The massage therapy profession is filled with people that work at multiple different places, for low pay and long hours. This did not sound like an attractive path for me to take. So one day I was reading one of the trade magazines and it was talking about how “Corporate massage” was the new trend and how the equipment had improved making it much easier to transport. This was my new direction! Never having done sales, I bought a massage chair with the last few dollars I had, put on a pair of kakis and a polo shirt and took my skinny 21 yr old Jew fro’d self to Century City Towers, parked realized I needed $3o to get out of the parking lot, that I didn’t have, and started my journey to find clients. I knocked on 50 floors worth of offices of that building, refining my pitch with each door that got slammed in my face. By the end of that day I had Deloitte, USA networks and a law firm as clients and got parking validation! Over the next year and a 1/2 I built the company to 35 employees seeing a 1000 people a week!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Holden Zalma and I am a Holistic Bodyworker/Massage Therapist that has owned MetaTouch Body Balance for the last 30 yrs. I started my carer and education at the University of Southern California as an assistant athletic trainer for the football, basketball, volleyball and swimming teams. There I received a degree in Psychology with a minor in Pre physical therapy. Originally wanting to go into the Physical Therapy field, I took all the required classes and spent almost 4 years working with the teams. After I got out of school I was disheartened by the direction PT was taking and how it dealt with treating pain and people as a whole. I had a decision to make, spend another 3 years going to school for something I didn’t agree with or take a different path. I decided to take the path of entrepreneurship! Massage therapy was the lowest barrier to entry to do what I was already doing while allowing me to affect and help the most amount of people. This is when MetaTouch was born!
Since its inception MetaTouch’s mission has been to leave everyone who walks through our door different and better. We do this by taking a whole person approach to therapy. Traditional medicine focuses on treating symptoms, putting multiple band-aids on things hoping to lesson pain and discomfort, but often ignoring the route cause of the problem. At MetaTouch we look at the whole person. When designing a treatment plan we take into account the emotional, physical, life history, behaviors and patterns the person has and how they relate to their problem. If we can discover the root cause of their problem then we can stop the symptoms from returning, giving them tools to keep those symptoms from returning.
This mindset and methodology has allowed us to treat over 300,000 clients and achieve lasting results in usually half the time as traditional therapy. We accomplish this with a combination of Massage therapy, Holistic Bodywork, Nutrition, stretching and targeted personal training. Using all these modalities in conjunction with creating a safe space where the client’s emotions and feelings are validated and understood has made MetaTouch one of the premier Bodywork centers in California.
At MetaTouch we have treated countless celebrities and business moguls, but our core clientele is the person that has tried everything else, been in chronic pain and has lost hope. When they find our clinic our first mission is to restore hope. This is achieved buy giving our clients a better understanding of where their pain is coming from, a path to get out of that pain and the tools to keep it away on their own.
One of the things I am most proud of is my team. Everyday I am privileged to work with a group of people that are passionate about helping the people they treat. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to see a client come out of one of our treatment rooms and say “You guys have saved my life, every time I have a problem, I come here and you make it go away!”
I think very few people in this world get to say that on a daily basis they have the opportunity to change someone’s life. We get to take people that are in debilitating pain and show them their is an alternative pain free option, thus changing the course of their life. This is what has fueled me to grow MetaTouch to the company it is today.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
During the dot com boom we had pivoted into the corporate massage space. We would go into businesses, create entire wellness programs and deliver by providing on-site massage services to their employees. At the peek, MetaTouch had 35 employees seeing over 1000 people per week, all on-location. As the financial environment was changing, I could see the writing on the walls. Too many companies were only focused on growth not profit. All their share holders wanted was to grow the company as fast as possible then sell it off for a big payout. That means there was a lot of fat in these companies and they were burning through cash fast! This model was not sustainable and my point was proven in 2001. In a 2 week period we lost 98% of our accounts and 100k in receivables for work we had already done that would never be seen again. I had warned my staff to build individual relationships because these companies wouldn’t last and their guaranteed income would soon be gone. Unfortunately, they didn’t listen. I laid off my entire staff, lost 70k a month in revenue and rocked back and forth in the corner for a few days wondering what the hell I was going to do. I had a new baby at home, no income and a lot of bills. This was one of my rock bottoms. After I picked my self up, I started working, built my own clientele up again to at least pay our bills, took out a loan on our house to help give us a little runway and started rebuilding the company. The corporate space was dead. So I had to find a new way of making money. Groupon had just come out and we decided to try their platform. The rep had pitched me that their demographic was age 28-35 average income 85k. I hired a new staff, trained them the best i could and pulled the trigger.
Within the first three hours we sold 950 sessions at $50/ session! The way groupon works is they make you discount your price 50% then take 50% as their fee only leaving a 25% margin. In our case it was even less than that! After we paid all of our expenses we were left with $1 of profit per session. My thought process was that this would bring new clients in the door and then we would sell them packages to come back and make our money on the back end. Remember the demographics I mentioned before? Yeah, they lied! We got 19-21 yr old unemployed students. We retained 2% with packages.
After fulfilling all these sessions and working for the business and supporting it with my own clients. I decided to fire all my crew, re-hire more talented and sales oriented staff and do groupon again. Most people in my circle thought I was crazy, considering I had now been on the verge of bankruptcy twice in the last 3 years, why would I do this again? But I had a plan. This time we raised the price of the deal to attract more of an older clientele. We changed the copy to reflect that our focus was more on reduction of pain instead of fluff massage and lastly I made an obtainable upscale. Instead of offering a package we offered the exact same price they paid on groupon for their next session but they had to purchase it with us before they left. This guaranteed income and we got to keep all the profits.
This time we got 750 new people in two days on the platform. Out of those 750 85% purchased the second session and fed us for over 4 years! So if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
The thing that helped us build our reputation is the rapport we create with our clients. This is a very personal business, not only are we dealing with people in pain, but we’re seeing them at a very vulnerable state in their life. Then we’re asking them to trust a stranger to lay hands on them. This is where being experts at achieving instant trust and rapport come in handy. We do this by making sure their concerns are heard and addressed all while explaining a path and solution to their problems. I learned a long time ago that people don’t pay for services, they pay for outcomes. At MetaTouch we provide outcomes time and time again, that’s why we are as successful as we are.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.metaotouch.com
- Instagram: @metatouch
- Facebook: @metatouch
- Linkedin: @metatouch
- Twitter: @meatouch
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/metatouch-body-balance-culver-city?osq=metatouch