The Massage School

We are two founders, Valerie Hood and Alexei Levine.

While homeschooling her two children, Valerie had started, grown and sold a successful business, The Bread Lady, in Newport RI.  After selling the bakery, she explored a new career in massage therapy.  The costs, in time and money, of all options were exorbitant. She rejected that path and instead started a school with Alexei, of the sort she wished had been available.

Alexei Levine was a Physical Therapist and former Massage Therapist when he met Valerie. The work was satisfying, but of limited scope.

In 2001, Valerie and Alexei created a massage school that offered hope for single mothers and other working people.  With evening and weekend classes, and an innovative business model, it was a program that would allow students to continue to work while attending classes, and did not require that they become trapped in bloated student loans. 

We are committed to fighting the problem of growing inequality.

We have created a trade school called "The Massage School". Through a practical clinical approach we produce highly skilled Massage Therapists at less than half the typical cost. These graduates can use these skills to create equity in their lives. They can make good wages working for employers, or open their own studios and expand their operations.

Our project can elevate significant numbers of people out of economic and emotional poverty, through enabling people to gain a relatively lucrative and professional trade without taking on student loans. Our students also attend class on evenings and weekends, unlike the traditional post secondary trade schools. This means people don't have to quit their job to attend our school. 

We are working to solve the problems faced by large numbers of economically disadvantaged people who are trying to gain a trade to work their way up economically, but who can get trapped by onerous student loans, or cannot attend classes during the normal weekday class schedules due to work or parenting obligations. The typical trade schools sometimes seem designed to extract as much money as possible from their students. 

Some economists think the rising numbers of student loan defaults represents a threat to the economy as great as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. 

We started The Massage School almost 20 years ago, in 2001. Since then we've expanded to 3 schools in 2 states.  We'd love to expand further as the need is great and widespread. We've seen rising enrollment of people of color and we know we can help elevate disadvantaged people.

The Massage School helps people who can't, or choose not to go into debt to attend trade school.  Also those who cannot attend classes during "normal" working hours. 

We provide an excellent education in Massage Therapy on nights and weekends at less than half the cost of the typical for-profit corporate post-secondary trade school.

Instructors at The Massage School are paid at the top of the pay scale, students pay their tuition as they go, and the public gets to have great massages in our student clinic, at a reduced cost.  Win, win, win.

The Massage School is organized as an alternative to the common system of for-profit trade schools. We avoid the student loan trap, and utilize a scholarship system where we give back most of our profits to the students while still remaining profitable, and paying our employees well. Our student clinic serves the community and finances our scholarship program. Classes are held on nights and weekends to make it easier to attend for most people. The tuition is paid on a monthly pay-as-you-go basis.

Valerie asked Alexei to teach her to be a massage therapist, Alexei asked Valerie to teach him how to be a business person, and they decided to partner up on The Massage School. It was a success from the start.

The Massage School grew out of a need for easier access to vocational education, in a landscape of schools that are prohibitively expensive, and are engineered to exploit the federal financial aid system and maximize profits at the expense of students and taxpayers.

In some ways we hearken back to an earlier time, when for-profit education was not a predatory system that exploited vulnerable people to collect government subsidies. Our highly developed student clinic also recalls the apprenticeship programs of the past.

We've seen great results over the years, and believe that there are huge opportunities for our organization to grow and diversify. The potential for elevating people's lives is only growing, especially among women and minority populations.

Unlike traditional approaches to post-secondary education, we are accessible.  We have a vigorous, hands-on approach to learning, in an environment that works for non-traditional learners.

For Valerie, it started with disbelief that it takes two years and over $25,000 to learn to give a massage.  There had to be a better way.

Turns out, the reason the programs are so long and expensive is because the regulations are written by those who profit from conferring credentials.  More classes, more hours, more regulations all add up to higher tuitions and greater profits from the federal financial aid trough.  For too many years, these predatory schools have inflated recruits' expectations of return in order to persuade them to sign up for unnecessarily large student loans.  Graduates are saddled with years of paying back loans.  Many default, leaving taxpayers holding the bag, while investors on Wall Street keep the profits.  A big part of our work became offering students an alternative to being victimized by that greed.

We've been growing our organization for almost 20 years now. While corporate trade schools have floundered in the past few years, we have expanded and developed. We are a small group of educators and administrators who've been working hard on this project for enough years to have gained a thorough understanding of key aspects of our business. We can successfully grapple with issues like determining where to open a school successfully, marketing to today's potential students, and maximizing efficiencies without compromising the quality of education delivered.

In only 200 words??!!  

Our first challenge arrived right off the bat.  Our competitors initiated new legislation to try to put us out of business.  We initiated an ethics investigation, which held up the legislation.  We spoke to Governor Patrick at a televised "Meet the Governor on the Corner" event.  Rep. Scibak came out to the school and spent the morning observing how we conduct our business.  Upon leaving, he promised to fight for us, saying, "And I don't fight to lose!"  The onerous legislation did eventually go through, but the governor appointed Alexei to the new Board of Massage Therapy, where he still serves today.  We were able to adapt our program to fit the new regulations.   We devised a workaround that allowed us to continue to make the program affordable to our financially challenged students.  We incorporated a Student Clinic, whose profits go toward scholarships to all our students.

Then, when the financial crisis struck, the big corporate schools tried yet again to raise the regulations, in order to maximize what they could reap from the more generous Pell Grants.  Feeding frenzy at the trough!  We testified before the Joint Committees and got that bill killed. 

The Massage School is itself a protest against the greedy mentality that makes education inaccessible to underserved populations.  Those of us with traditional advantages have lots of options.  Those without do not.  We wanted to give them a good option that did not indenture them to years of loan payback.

As a single mom herself, Valerie knows that few are as hardworking and deserving as a parent who wants to make a better life for herself and her children.  They just need a leg up.  They need a trade that pays well and offers flexibility so they can be present for their kids.  Valerie had already started and sold a business. Her clear-eyed view of business, and her work ethic, enabled to her make that bakery a success and hand it on to the next owner. And that experience gave her the confidence to start a school.

Alexei most recently demonstrated his leadership ability when as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Massage Therapy he successfully proposed and wrote a resolution to the National Federation of State Massage Therapy Boards that would create a database of schools that would greatly assist the fight against human trafficking and sexual slavery.

We consider ourselves a social enterprise.

We utilize an intensive student clinic which is a sort of apprenticeship. This enables our students to develop their technique to a high level. The public gets to enjoy discounted massage therapy, and all of the money generated is paid forward to fund scholarships for the next cohort of students. With these scholarships, students end up paying far less than at traditional massage schools.

We collect the tuition monthly, at the end of the academic month, so that we never collect any unearned tuition. We offer our classes completely on nights and weekends, and we pay our instructors at the top of the pay scale in the industry.

We've been bootstrapping our business for the last 2 decades, and our school effects change the same way, from the bottom up. Our graduates gain exposure to STEM classes and academic challenges that may otherwise have been unavailable to them.  This helps them to begin to amass  generational assets over the years.  There is a significant broadening of horizons for most of our graduates. They accomplish things like starting multi-generational businesses, and investing in their own further education. 

We've also always been politically active, recognizing our responsibility to be part of the developments of the laws and regulations governing our profession. We try to inculcate this same political awareness into our students with discussions of active and potential issues, and organized action meetings. 

We start cohorts twice a year in each of three schools.  Typically there are around 15-25  students in a cohort.

We would like to open more schools in well chosen markets.

Our approach has been to reinvest whatever profits we retain into opening new schools.  In nearly 20 years, we now have three schools.  An infusion of cash could make that process go faster.

We will continue to save up for continued expansion, as we have done.

Our business model is one of the keys to our success and holds great potential for further expansion. Our students get a comprehensive education in massage therapy. As part of their training they complete 200 hours of clinical practice, working on the public. Our clinic collects $35 dollars for each hour of practice, benefitting the public who get high value massage therapy for less than half the cost of what they might ordinarily pay. We use the funds generated to pay the overhead of running the clinic and finance our scholarship program. Our scholarship program awards large financial scholarships to every one of our students. Our students currently pay a fraction of what comparable schools charge. 

We are already financially sustainable. As we pursue further growth into more branches we anticipate a more intense demand for capital. We hope the Elevate prize will aid our expansion, not merely through financial assistance, but also through potential partnerships and advisory help as we bring things to the next level.

We have been successfully expanding to serve more people, however the process is very slow. We hope to be able to find a way to expand much faster at this time when a school like ours is desperately needed.