Dear friends,

I'd like to arrange a get together of anyone that is interested, current students or past, for the purposes of discussing the business side of medicinal qigong bodywork.  I've thought that if some of you were interested, we could meet at Jupiter's in Berkeley, I could buy the pizza, and we could mix a little business talk with some socialization.  I have questions that I'd like to ask of other bodyworkers that are less about expertise and more about what you're experiencing.  I have little doubt that some of you may have questions you'd like to bring up, too, and this might be a neat chance to share insights.

Of particular interest are those of you who are actually practicing your art, either in medicinal qigong, energy treatment or some form of bodywork.  The reason for this focus is that I'm a bit hung up on how to produce market research for doing business in this field, when there is so little market research being done on our particular specialty.  What research there is on Acupuncture doesn't apply as obviously to medicinal qigong--those who go out to find an acupuncturist are motivated by a unique set of assumptions that may not apply to medicinal qigong work.  Likewise, massage market research is garnered chiefly from spa data, where larger groups of mostly beginner massage practitioners can be found with a large cache of clients, but where the marketing situation is decidedly different from a private practice with a more medicinal theme.  One way around this is for those of us who are doing any treating of patients, including anyone who's doing labs at AIMC, to talk together about what we're finding to be true about medicinal qigong clients.  What brings them in?  What do they expect?  Who are they; are they middle-aged women, primarily (for instance)?  How do they hear about medicinal qigong, and what is it about what they hear that convinces them to give it a try?  What do they pay for it?  What are they willing to pay for it?  And so on.  I'd like to work on developing some marketing profiles and, absent existing focus group research, I'm hoping to tap your real experiences.

I don't care if you have 1000 clients per month or 1, nor whether or not the clients pay.  What I would like is for some of us at the get together to actually have had clients, so that we can share stories and maybe gain insight into what market profile best fits our industry.

Any interest in such a get together, perhaps this week or weekend (June 2 - June 8)?

Thanks,

Lihai

I Qi You
Bay Area, CA
www.IQiYou.com
iqiyou@yahoo.com