A New Years Letter from Lisa

A New Years Letter from Lisa

Lisa Keplinger, Owner of That's the Rub
And Now, a Few Words from Lisa…
I want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts here at That’s the Rub Massage Therapy Center and Body Boutique. It’s been a wonderful year of growth and opportunity, for you the client, our staff, our community, and our business. Affectionately known as The Rub to all of us who work here, we do our best every day make you the client proud to say you go to The Rub to take care of your body, to give back to our community and to support our staff.We’re very proud to say that 2016 has been our best year ever and we’re so happy that we got to share it with each and every one of you. You, the client, entrust us at The Rub to teach you how to understand your body better, to help you unwind and destress, to trigger a healing response from within for old and new aches and pains. We take that job seriously, while providing a safe, relaxed and happy atmosphere that we at The Rub have come to cherish. We at The Rub enjoy being here because It’s a cozy place to work. While our jobs may be busy, we are encouraged by your support and your loyalty, that gives us a sense of fulfillment and joy that can only be met with much gratitude. We truly love what we do and it shows.

All of our staff have a voice in how The Rub operations needs are met and each member of our staff is supported and honored for the work that they accomplish with us. The Rub wouldn’t be what it is today without our team of the finest front desk staff and bodyworkers in town and I love them all.

Here at The Rub, we take our community to heart. As busy multi-business owners / operators, we don’t always have the time to spend at functions and parties that support our fellow entrepreneurs, but we always give back to the community at large because we understand that it’s our backbone. When our community thrives, The Rub thrives, and all of the individuals who belong to our elite staff thrive. We’ve done seated chair events, most recently at Lucky’s for their health and wellness day, all proceeds from the event were donated to Stepping Stones; a local nonprofit supporting our community children in safe housing, education, and lifestyle coaching. We’ve donated to WFIU to support public radio: the family and I enjoy all forms of public radio while we’re on much-anticipated road trips. We also donate to the Mauer Women’s Law Caucus events because it’s important to support women as they continue to learn, and for anyone that knows me, I’m all about girl power. The Rub also donated to many silent auctions around the community throughout the year of which I’m sure some of you benefited. This list is just a brief description of the many donations we’ve done in 2016, with your continued patronage these donations and more will continue to support our community because while we may not always be in attendance, we do care about giving our support.

The Rub’s business this year grew in all directions as we’ve added to our staff, and expanded our menu of services. Carla is our new esthetician who provides waxing services, amazing facials, and body treatments. While she’s only been with us a few months, she and her husband recently expanded their family with Ava joining the team, we’ve missed Carla while she spends time with the new baby, and we look forward to seeing her around again in February. Lynnsie, our oldest daughter, joined our team in January 2015 and in July gave us our first grandbaby, Oliver, who I’m sure many of you have met as Oliver comes to the office with Lynnsie when she works. The staff and clients alike enjoy having Oliver with us, and he certainly enjoys all of the attention. Elizabeth will also be giving birth to our 2017 edition of babies born into The Rub. Due in January, she will be missed while on maternity leave, but we look forward to welcoming daughter Lexi into the team.

But it hasn’t all been about babies. We also welcomed new massage therapist Chris, he does great hot stone massage and Reiki, massage therapist Bri who is awesome at Deep Tissue and Therapeutic massage but is sadly leaving us for Austin, Texas in a few short days, and Kara who is a real dynamo working at the front desk and later becoming a massage intern to earn her hours towards state certification which happening this month. We’re so excited for Kara as she begins her new career as a massage therapist! As anyone who’s been on her table can attest she is an awesome massage therapist and we look forward to working with her in treatment. Beth has expanded her offerings to include acupuncture, a clinic for acupuncture and a massage that also includes acupuncture. Theresa has expanded her offerings to include cupping. Tonya Faye continues her education with IU for occupational therapy, let’s celebrate her smartness. If I’ve missed out on anyone’s accomplishments this year, I apologize, there are just so many that it’s hard to keep up and that’s just the personal side of the business.

For me and Jim, it’s been a real whirlwind of opportunity. We’ve expanded the product lines of The Body Boutique, offering more options for all natural, organic skin care that feels good, smells good, and supports local as well as USA made products. In May we were faced with our own mortality in the business because we were running short on space to launder the sheets, no small task I assure you. We’d been putting it off for a few months, but the need became so great that we could no longer ignore it, when we fell into a wonderful opportunity to buy a laundromat and to have business partners (other than each other) Purchasing a laundromat would prove to be a handful of challenges that we didn’t see coming, giving the word perseverance a whole new meaning. To keep a long story short, we welcomed Flip Laundry into the fold (see what I did there?) opening in August of this year. Flip Laundry is a commercial and residential pick-up, drop off, and delivery service for all your laundry needs, in this case it helped us greatly in providing a safe, clean environment to keep The Rub’s sheets going strong, while you guessed it supporting the community with what it needed…an easier way to do laundry, drop off or delivery style. The Launderette is the coin-op do-it-yourself laundry and provides a bright, clean, safe space for everyone to get their laundry on.

We’ve partnered with Ivy Tech Bloomington to create a massage therapy school for the southern region of the state because we all agreed that driving to Indy was quite the haul for anyone in the Bloomington and south to travel. Classes start January 17th (TODAY!). Please check the Ivy Tech website and register for class. If you’ve ever considered massage as a career for you, now is the time. We need more massage therapists in this town! We were already considering opening our own school (a dream of mine) when the opportunity presented itself to partner with Ivy Tech and we jumped at it. After all what better way to support our community than being part of community education for the profession that I love and have been a part of for 17 years….yikes!

Jim has graduated this fall with his Masters of Information Science, completing his third degree, the man is a real brainiac. We in the family joke that he is The Master, which you will only understand if you are a Whovian. If you have to ask what a Whovian is, you are not one of them.
Last but not least on the lines of the business, The Rub will be expanding and remodeling in 2017 to be all on the first floor (we had some upstairs rooms), this will give us handicap access (much needed) and more space. It will also allow our neighbors on the second floor to expand as well, bringing us full circle in our community support. I’m so proud to have created something that brings so much joy, wellness and opportunity to so many lives. Thank you so much for taking the time to be a part of The Rub and the lives of our team. Your loyalty really means a lot to me personally, but also Jim, our family, and all of Team Rub.

Cheers to you as we ring out 2016 and ring in 2017!

That’s the Rub,
Lisa

Interview with Massage Therapist and Owner Lisa Keplinger

Interview with Massage Therapist and Owner Lisa Keplinger

Lisa Keplinger, Owner of That's the Rub

As you may or may not know, That’s the Rub is the dream and brainchild of massage therapist extraordinaire, corporate spa consultant, and all-around fantastic individual Lisa Keplinger. Every now and again, someone out in the big, wide world recognizes what an amazing entrepreneur she is and calls for an interview about her story, and her ideas about the future of massage therapy (for the record, she’s got a lot). Today we’re delighted to share with you the most recent one done by a leading massage industry education magazine. 

1. Tell us a bit more about you and your practice as it is today? i.e. are you a solo practitioner or a business owner? If solo, what kind of an establishment do you work for, how large is it, what is the clientele like, what is the specialty offered? If it is a business that you own, kindly include the same time of relevant information that will give the reader a good idea about your establishment/practice. Please also include where you live and work?

I’m a business owner and a solo practitioner among many. The business is That’s the Rub Massage Therapy Center. We have five treatment rooms, eight massage therapists, a Tarot reader and an acupuncturist, we also have three front desk staff and a wonderful marketing manager.

Our clientele varies. We are a college town (Bloomington, IN) so we work with a lot of professors and students alike. There are also many businesses around us because we’re downtown that a lot of people from the surrounding businesses also come to see us.

Our specialty is our Therapeutic Rub. It’s focused on exactly what their problem areas are, then we pick them apart and put them back together again with an integrative deep tissue, myofascial and massage to name just a few of the modalities that most of us do. Then we all also have our individual specialties that come into play.

We consider ourselves family and is a family owned business. My husband/business partner and I established That’s the Rub Massage Therapy Center in March of 2010, we’re about to celebrate our four year anniversary. Each therapist is an independent contractor and is responsible for their own schedule/communication with our front desk staff to keep things running smooth and in an orderly fashion.

2. Tell us why you chose to go into massage and at what point in your life did you decide to do so? What were you doing at the time? Where did you first hear about the massage career? What factors influenced your decision? What were you looking to get out of this decision? CONTINUE READING

– READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW  at: http://www.massagetherapyschoolsinformation.com/lisa-keplinger/#sthash.kza3jMmX.dpuf