Today we’d like to introduce you to Amber Briggle.
Hi Amber, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
This has been one happy accident since the beginning: I never planned on going to school for massage therapy (I had already graduated from a prestigious 4 year liberal arts college, after all!), and I never in a million years thought I’d be franchising such a successful business and looking at becoming a nationwide brand.
But at every point in my journey, I’ve always tried to find sustainable ways to scale up my offerings, availability, and business — without burning myself out. Early in my career, that meant building a schedule that fit my clients’ needs with the needs of my young, growing family. When my schedule didn’t have any room to take on new clients anymore, I realized that I needed to partner with a similarly skilled massage therapist so that on my busiest days, it would be a smooth transition for those clients to see someone else. That idea very quickly blossomed into a business, and before I knew it, I was moving my studio out of my house and into a brick-and-mortar where I continued to hire skilled massage therapists to help me serve as many people as possible.
Things were going really well and we were looking at expanding into either a larger studio or adding another location when covid hit. We were forced to shut down for 2 months, and by the time we reopened, my team of 13 therapists had dwindled to 4 — and one by one, they continued to quit due to the stresses and uncertainty of the pandemic. Meanwhile, I had literally hundreds of clients who were desperate to come in and see us. Soma Massage Therapy is very well positioned in the medical massage field, and our clients see the work that they receive here as being more wellness-oriented than the fluff-and-buff spa experience. (Don’t get me wrong: a massage at Soma is going to be a luxurious, relaxing experience. But our therapists are well trained at looking at the structural imbalances in your body, so we’ll be massaging not only where it hurts but where it’s coming from, in order to provide longer lasting relief and recovery from injuries.) So our clients, many of whom were dealing with issues like lymphedema, frozen shoulder syndrome, thoracic outlet syndrome, sciatica, fibromyalgia, and more, were pretty desperate to be seen. And I had virtually no staff to see them!
Through sheer tenacity — and a whole lot of spit and scotch tape — I somehow kept Soma Massage Therapy afloat. One by one, I hired massage therapists who were looking for a safe place to work, or whose previous employers closed indefinitely and were on the hunt for a job. We closed in March 2020. We reopened in May 2020. And by May 2021, we reopened again in a gorgeous studio with twice the capacity. By 2022, we were grossing over $1,000,000 in sales, and in June 2024 we opened a 2nd, satellite location (one spare room inside of a chiropractic clinic, to complement our 7 room facility in downtown Denton). We did this through… Read the entire story here
