A New Years Letter from Lisa
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
