Burned Out, Broke, and Rebuilding: The Mindset Shifts That Changed Everything

By Rachael Summers

I’ve had so many mindset-shifts over the last few years. After having my daughter just before the pandemic and the world went into chaos, I had been a business owner – a small massage practice in SW Portland, and I routinely offered discounts to get people in the door. I closed my business just after having my daughter and before the pandemic hit, moved back to Minnesota for a bit, and then to Mexico for six months. When I came back to start my second business, Earth Breath Yoga, I was undercharging – by a lot. Everything had increased in price. When I first opened in December 2021, I tried doing everything – massage, teaching yoga, and running the actual business side of the business. Collectively, we were still very in the pandemic, and there was a lot of fear around COVID, so growth was slow. I quickly learned that I was burning out. Between being a single mom to a small child who wasn’t sleeping through the night and being a solopreneur, I was dousing that wick in gasoline with lit candles nearby.

Several months later, I decided to partner with a local yoga teacher. She already had a small following, so it seemed like a good decision at the time. I outsourced some of the repetitive tasks, but still personally went from working 40 hours per week to 60-80+. As a single mom, that meant spending weekends hunched over my laptop with my kiddo watching her tablet right next to me. My body was screaming from the very beginning of this, and it only got worse. I started having horrible health issues. The partnership was not a partnership. I was doing 90% of the work, while my business associate just showed up and went home. It was beyond exhausting. To rub some salt into the wound, I found out after she decided to leave that she had been planning it for months, and then after she left, she also went into the company email account and started directing people to her new business. I'm still healing from it, but I learned so many lessons from this. I finally realized that not only do I not need to be doing all the work for my business to be successful, be careful who you go into business with, and I don’t even need to expand to make my business hit six figures.

Since then, I’ve switched to offering only massage therapy in Beaverton only, but with a twist. I'm really working on my branding and including unique services not seen anywhere else. This year alone, I'll hit over 6 figures, and I'm also raising my massage prices in August (something I should have done a long time ago, given that I have 17 years' experience).  Massage therapists in general have a hard time with charging their worth (even though we have the average career lifespan of a professional football player). Something I learned here is that I am the product. When a product-based business starts noticing a slump in their sales, what do they do? They reinvent. They invest in marketing, maybe they vary their formula slightly (depending on the product), but really, they just find a way to make their product stand out in the crowd. And then they raise their prices to cover the costs – and make more profit. As a professional, I need to be able to take time off, save for retirement, and have a good quality of life. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The market is infiltrated with other Licensed Massage Therapists doing the exact same thing. But I’m not competing with everyone else anymore. I’ve found a way to truly differentiate my services from others’ and to make my brand stand out. It’s a work in progress – as always – but it’ll be completely worth it. Earth Breath Yoga now offers unique massages in Beaverton, like our soon-to-be elemental massages, astrologically inspired and designed to bring you back into alignment with the very essence of your soul.

Connect With Rachael

www.earthbreathyoga.com

www.instagram.com/earthbreathyoga