VoyageHouston Magazine Community Highlights: Meet Bailey Mier-Nava of Interstellar Massage

Interstellar Massage and our Founder, Bailey Mier-Nava, LMT, were featured on 12/17/2024 in VoyageHouston Magazine for their Inspiring Stories series about local entrepreneurs, creatives, and community leaders. You can read the contents of the article below:

“Hi Bailey, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Well, I have been an aspiring entrepreneur my entire adult life. I say aspiring because it is a difficult scene to learn how to navigate when you are still young and trying to understand the world! And I feel like 33 years old is still pretty young. But it is an exciting way of working, and so I have been researching and learning about entrepreneurship all these years. I learned so much of it from being raised by my father, who has always been an entrepreneur and thankfully has taught me SO MUCH about the grit that it takes to be able to navigate this part of the business world. It is intense, and he taught me how to endure it. We are both what Gino Wickman and Mark Winters of the book “Rocket Fuel” describe as “Visionaries.” So along my own journey, I’ve started several businesses throughout the years and learned a great deal about the nuances of startups and business in general.

It takes many “failure to launch” moments to become proficient enough to be successful at SOME point, MAYBE, as an entrepreneur. So I still consider myself to be “aspiring,” and along the way I have developed a profound respect for the entrepreneur lifestyle. My very first company I built when I was 18 years old was an automotive detailing company, and we held several accounts to run all of the detailing services for local dealerships in that area. Since then, I also tried out an online print on demand eCommerce store, a dropshipping business, a Life Coaching business, and for some time I operated a full fledged remote distributed digital marketing agency and brought it into it’s first brick and mortar location. I also worked as an employee in a TON of really eclectically different industries trying to find my “thing.” I was searching for whatever it was that felt exhilarating to me and didn’t feel like being dipped in cement whenever I showed up for work! I did really well in some industries, not so great in others, but learned a tremendous amount of information from every endeavor. My problem I kept facing was that while I could find some success in these different industries, I didn’t feel fulfilled, as if my work didn’t have much purpose. I felt like if I didn’t keep searching to find purpose then the mundane day to day of working any job would always feel like cement to me. Eventually I realized that I was more drawn to the healing professions, and that helping people in need sparked a passion for me that endured far beyond waking up to do the same thing every day.

Eventually I started going to school, and I was studying Psychology and Addiction Counseling in my undergraduate degree program with the intentions of being PhD-bound for Clinical Neuropsychology. I wanted to understand the mind and how to help people unravel things emotionally that could be stopping them from making their dreams come true, and how that might be showing up in or impacted by various parts of overall brain and body health. However, I struggled a lot with completing school due to being a mom and COVID happening right as I was getting on my feet in my program. I also realized that I had three kiddos who were getting older and entering their high school/teenager stage very soon, and I felt like they were going to need more time and focus from me than what graduate school would eventually allow.

One day, I saw advertising for massage therapy school show up on my social media feed, so I started researching the wellness industry. I had been a long time client of massage therapy and chiropractic work for many years due to some health issues I have, namely Ehlers Danlos, which is a genetic disorder that causes my collagen to be faulty resulting in hypermobility of my joints and chronic pain starting at a young age. This condition has required me to get regular massage and chiropractic adjustments in order to stay mobile and reduce my pain, because if the wind blows the wrong way I have joints that could become subluxated (which means partially out of alignment). I realized when researching the industry that massage therapy had the potential to provide enough income to support my family, especially if I started my own establishment one day. I researched the program and entered school on October 18, 2022 with the Texas School of Massage. After 14 months of school, I graduated and earned my LMT license in December of 2023. Since I have a background in marketing and graphic design, I launched my brand that same day. I first started as a mobile massage therapy business with the intentions of opening a brick-and-mortar location one day. That dream was realized on the two year anniversary of the day I started school — we had our Grand Opening for the Interstellar Massage Clinic on October 18, 2024.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
In retrospect, this has been one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. My family and I faced a lot of adversity in general throughout the entire time I was trying to complete school. The worst of all of it, however, was the tragic loss of my husband soon after I graduated and had recently launched our brand. He had named our business and was founding it alongside me, so it was a heartbreaking loss that very well could have impacted my drive to do this completely, as grief is very different for everyone. I am thankful that it inspired me to pour myself into this dream we had together instead of making me want to quit, and sometimes I really did want to just quit due to my intense sadness.

I also struggled with working for several corporate franchise spas when I first got licensed, due to their high demand of therapists to complete as many appointments as possible in a given week for very little hourly pay. I literally couldn’t make enough to survive and support my family, even if I worked “full time” and was one of the top therapists for a location. The reason why is because our bodies usually can’t physically perform 40 hours of massage in a week, so this isn’t a regular hourly wage like some other industries offer. The majority of us can only physically perform maybe 25-30 massage hours without injuring ourselves, and remember I have a physical disability in that regard. Of those 25-30 sessions we could possibly do, spas usually have a lot of therapists on staff so you might only ever be 50% booked on a good day. The math just wouldn’t add up, no matter which way I looked at it.

What was even worse was realizing how detached many of the corporate places were from the realities of being a massage therapist — they seemed to not understand how difficult the physical labor of this field is (requiring us to take frequent breaks and pace ourselves physically throughout the day/week). They seemed to only want to push for more, more, more. Unfortunately, many of the owners/managers I came across also didn’t seem to be bound by the same ethical standards we are held to as therapists when interacting with us as a staff. I have witnessed some absurdly unprofessional, unethical, and sometimes illegal behavior from some corporate spas in this past year. It is really bad out there in that part of the massage industry, and I learned that I am not the only one with horrible experiences like that.

Most importantly, I realized that the clients who were seeking care from these corporate spas were often in a lot of pain and would come in for a massage hoping to find some kind of relief, but they were coming out of sessions underwhelmed with relaxation massage. Relaxation is only one aspect of our industry, but most don’t know that. These clients in the spas who were in a lot of pain were actually looking for something more therapeutic to help address deeper muscle issues and improve their quality of life, but nobody in the spas I worked for were really bridging the gap between what they were looking for and what is available in our industry. Why would they? They wanted to keep those clients for themselves, not refer them to the right places where they could get more help than what the spas were willing to offer. This is unethical to me, in my personal opinion.

In summary, I realized very quickly that the only way I would be able to “make it” as a massage therapist with a disability would be if I opened my own clinic one day, and that clinic needed to provide education and solutions, not relaxation alone. We needed to not be afraid to send clients to the “right place,” if our clinic happened to not be the best fit for their treatment needs. And we needed to be in touch with the realities of working in the industry so that our therapists don’t get burnt out or injured. After experiencing the struggle to make a living wage, witnessing the level of dysfunction that can exist in the spa industry, and hearing the stories of countless clients who wound up on my table, it sparked a massive drive in me to create a completely different kind of business model than what I had experienced in the corporate scene. I started networking with others to come up with business funding, and I was VERY fortunate to acquire enough funding to do what we call a “lean startup” and open the clinic doors. We have been building and growing ever since!

We’ve been impressed with Interstellar Massage, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My clinic provides primarily therapeutic massage services to our clients. We do offer relaxation massage, but the majority of our clients are people who are struggling with chronic pain and seeking solutions. My team and I work to provide as much client education as possible, and we make a lot of referrals to coordinate our care with other wellness professionals like chiropractors, physical therapists, personal trainers, and nutrition consultants. We create treatment plans for our clients to follow along to start once a week while we address various muscular issues, and then we work toward a less frequent “maintenance level” of massage therapy moving forward.

Our “thing” is that if we can help you fix some of this pain, you will tell 20 of your favorite friends and family that we helped you change this aspect of your life and tell them to come see us, and they will be excited to give our clinic a try! We would much rather gain new clients that way than to try to siphon as many appointments as possible out of people with no real improvement to their pain levels. We write out referrals for our clients who we suspect may have something going on that is beyond our scope of practice and help them get more help than what we can provide, and we advocate for our clients if they aren’t sure how to explain something. We are working to eventually train our entire team on accepting medical insurance for our services for some clients, as therapeutic massage is becoming more and more available to be covered under insurance with a physician’s prescription for it, and we have made a commitment as an organization to pursue as much training as possible in the therapeutic realm of massage so that we can continue empowering our clients to understand what is happening in their bodies.

We are also now one of the highest paying clinics in the area for therapists, since we have offer 50/50 split for all services performed. This is 2-3x more than what therapists can make in a corporate spa setting, which gives you an idea of how little therapists are paid per hands-on hour in that part of our industry. We keep our overhead to run the clinic as low as possible so that we can give the therapists more of the revenue coming in, since the entire business is built on the hands and skills of these amazing people. This is important for reducing turnover and it is also very impactful to many people’s lives, especially in the holiday season! Our therapists control their own schedules, they have more freedom for developing treatment plans for our clients that are more in-depth and using more advanced modalities than what spa settings typically offer, and they can promote their own massage therapy businesses when it makes sense for the client to do so. Should they choose to start off on their own adventure one day, we fully support them and hope their clients follow them! The reason that is all important to know is because when you have happy and empowered therapists, that comes through in the quality of the service you receive from them every time. We want therapists as happy as possible so that our clients are as happy as possible. We don’t look at clients OR therapists like some kind of property here, we are all people and we are coming together as a team at this clinic to do some REALLY cool things. These are all major differences between our clinic and a traditional corporate spa.

What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
I truly believe that happiness comes from the inside. Adversity is everywhere, every day, and that is an inevitable part of being human no matter how much we may dislike this to be the case. My husband and I used to remind each other often, “you create your own reality,” meaning that it is not necessarily what happens TO you that determines your happiness, but how you choose to perceive it and respond to what happens that ultimately determines your experience with life. It was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through was to lose my best friend. But instead of letting grief swallow me up like it could have, I chose to turn that intense feeling into a fuel that drives me to do something good in the world that could possibly change countless lives for the better.

It makes me happy every day to wake up and help people learn more about what might be making them unhappy, like their chronic pain, and how they might have the power to change those circumstances at least a little bit. I encourage them to try to take control of their outcomes by increasing nutritional awareness, balancing the muscles through targeted physical training, and receive combined chiropractic and massage to bolster their recovery from chronic pain. And it works! When my clients come back and report how much better they are sleeping, how they are experiencing less headaches, and how they are getting more excited about being more active and noticing increasing range of motion, this makes me really happy and makes me feel like I am doing something good in the world.

We graduated our first client to “maintenance status” recently, and the amount of joy I felt was everything I had hoped it would be and reassured me that THIS is the industry I belong in as an entrepreneur. I don’t feel dipped in cement when I show up to work anymore. I truly love my work and the help I can give to clients… after such a tragic year, I really needed that to remind my heart it can still feel happiness. The most important lesson has been that happiness does truly come from within, and you can find it no matter what tragic heartbreak you have suffered… you just have to believe in yourself, be bold, and be unabashedly you.“

You can read the original article on the VoyageHouston Magazine website here: https://voyagehouston.com/interview/community-highlights-meet-bailey-mier-nava-of-interstellar-massage