The Massage Company enjoys post-pandemic profitability

The franchise’s Founder and Managing Director, Charlie Thompson, recently shared how The Massage Company had continued to thrive despite COVID-19.

UK franchise businesses of all kinds, operating across a wide range of sectors, suffered at the hands of COVID-19 and as a result of the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. But The Massage Company, unlike many others in its industry, has managed to come out of the other side and into the latter half of 2021 stronger. According to Charlie, the spare time caused by lockdowns and service disruptions was well spent on enhancing the spa franchise’s training programmes and accelerating its business plans.

In Charlie’s words, “Clients who signed up for a 50-minute massage once a month weren’t able to have them when the restrictions forced us to close our doors. So, when we were allowed to open again, we invited them to play catch-up by having 80-minute sessions every fortnight instead. And now they’ve realised how good those extra sessions make them feel and how beneficial the treatments are for their wellbeing, they’ve formed a new habit and are sticking with the longer, more frequent sessions. That’s an unexpected side-effect of the pandemic restrictions, and has put us ahead of where we imagined we’d be - both financially and in our business development.”

The Massage Company has also introduced a new operating system - MyTime - which was tested during lockdown to iron out any integration and functionality issues. Of this, Charlie said, “We took the time to crash-test it [during lockdown] so any pain would be ours. We’ve moved our operating system from quite heavily server-based to web-based. This will save our franchisees money, and give us better integration and functionality in the future.”

Plus, prices have been reasonably raised to allow franchisees to enjoy an increase in profits. Charlie’s final thoughts expressed that, evidently, The Massage Company was doing something right, as “[franchisees are] trading strongly out the other side”. He said, “We went at it all guns blazing and tried to attack the lockdown situation in a really positive way - and we ended up being more successful, rather than merely limiting any damage. Franchisees are coming in now to a business that’s so much further ahead than it would have been.” Find out more about investing with The Massage Company via its profile page, linked above.