How I Built My Reiki Business

If I had followed common sense, I never would've started Om Reiki. Certainly, I wouldn't have started it when I did.

It all happened back in 2007, just after I learned that my daughter Om had been conceived. Crazily, that same week, I also found out that my partner's first child – who had been living in Taiwan – was about to get shipped out to us.

This was totally unexpected, and it meant that I was about to get two kids for the price of one.

At the time – having spent years studying and travelling – I wasn't working, so most people in my situation would've gone and got themselves a 'sensible' job.

But I hadn't (and haven't) ever worked a 'sensible' job in my life, and I didn't intend to start. In fact, prompted by my intuition, I decided not to succumb to the fear of my growing responsibilities and found Om Reiki.

I didn't have any models for this. I didn't know anyone who had done anything similar. I simply made my decision and set about making it happen.

You Don't Have to Get it Right, You Just Have to Get It Going

Not knowing where to begin, I settled on learning to code websites. I figured that it would be important to have a website, and not having much money, didn't want to pay anyone to build or edit it.

I remember people telling me that learning to code would be too difficult (I had, after all, studied literature and philosophy at university). I remember people telling me that I'd never successfully build a website. But I ignored them. I learned to code HTML, and I built the site I still use today.

Admittedly, these days, I wouldn't bother learning to code (just use WordPress, anything similar, or get someone to build you a site!). And yes, my site isn't the most elegant one out there. But it has done the job – particularly since I also took a course in SEO which helped me rank well on Google.

Since I already practised Reiki every day, and had studied under several excellent teachers, I was confident that the practical, hands-on side of the business would be fine. So that meant I could dedicate myself to building the business side of my business, and the next step was to find a location to set up shop.

At this point, my intuition once more gave me clear instructions: it said to move to Daylesford. As far as I recall, I had never been to Daylesford before, but somehow I just knew it was the place to be. So my partner and I drove up there, visited several real estate offices and, after a few challenges, found a great place to live and run my business – right by the side of the Wombat State Forest.

The thing I want to emphasize at this point is that I didn't really have a clear roadmap for my business. I just had an end goal – to get going, have fun, help people and make a profit – and I kept trusting my intuition and taking the next step.

With a new home, I set about writing manuals for my Reiki courses and, after that, promoting them.

It's fair to say that my first course was a modest affair: one participant plus a friend who came for free to pad out the numbers. So it didn't make me rich. It may not even have covered costs, but it was a start – something I could build on.

My next course was in Melbourne, and from memory I had about 4 participants. I rented out a tiny room in Johnston Street, Fitzroy, and then proceeded to squish into the course every good Reiki thing I could think of!

Later on, I learned that everything you teach is far more impactful when taught at the right time, but to begin with, I just wanted to share as many great techniques as I could. Over the years, I have continued to fine-tune my course content, but as the saying goes, 'You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going.'

If you aim for perfection, you'll never start. So aim for somewhere between good to great and then learn on the job and improve on what you do.

My philosophy has always been that at a bare minimum, I need to provide equal or greater value to customers than what they pay me. So as long as you're confident you can do that, then you're ready to start. You will always get better, so no point waiting until you're as good as you can be, because that day will never come. You will learn from every Reiki session you take. You will learn from every course you conduct. So just get going, happy in the knowledge that your future self will be an improved version of your current self.

The comforting thing about Reiki is that it is hard to do a bad job. In almost every case, students will love what they learn, and clients will get a lot from your healings. So even starting out, customer satisfaction should be high. Just be sure you are practising consistently on yourself, be sure you have had plenty of practice on friends and family, and then stop agonizing over whether you'll be good enough or not and take the leap.

Ultimately, you'll only gain true confidence through action. You'll only know you can do a good job after enough people have complimented you on your work. You will almost never gain true confidence through preparation, no matter how much you do. Things simply don't work that way.

Keep Doing the Work – Consistently!

If I look back on my Reiki success, I'd say a few things that helped were:

Reiki was something I loved and did for pleasure in my spare time.

I was willing to work consistently hard over a long period of time.

I decided that I was going to succeed no matter what, and didn't let the thought of things not working enter my head. I just determined both that they would work, and that I would do whatever it took to make it so.

In the beginning, I both taught and offered healing sessions. Like with my courses, my healing career started slowly. Each week, I'd typically have 1-2 clients in Daylesford, and something similar in Melbourne.

The sessions in Daylesford were fine because I did them at my home. But in Melbourne, having one or two customers on a day I paid $90 for the room and $20-30 for petrol wasn't exciting – not from a financial point of view, in any case.

But often life is simply about building momentum. You have to accept that the moment you put your foot down on the accelerator, you're not going to hit 100km/hour. So you simply hold the accelerator down, and before you know it, you're zipping down the highway gathering speed.

Again, I want to repeat that what helped my success was a willingness to keep building my business. I was always doing something to grow it and move things forward. I was playing the long game and didn't need an immediate 'return on my investment' of time and money (although I tried to keep spending to a minimum).

For instance, in the early days, I offered free distance Reiki healing sessions. My idea was:

To gain more healing experience

To win over new customers by giving them a taste for Reiki.

Another thing I did was start up monthly practice nights (something I'm still doing, all of these years later!).

Like most things, my practice night started off humbly. I probably had about five attendees for the first one, but over time the numbers grew, until now they are generally between 20-30 (which is about all my Reiki room can hold).

I also used to work hard to fit clients in wherever I could. Because I was only down for one day a week in Melbourne, I also used to see clients before and after teaching my courses!

I'd see a client, teach all day, and sometimes even see another client after that! They were long hours, but I was determined to do whatever I could to grow my business.

Are the Limits of Your Success, the Limits of Your Mindset?

I'd probably been going for a year or two when I had a daring thought: What if I raised my maximum course capacity from 6-8?

It seems laughable today, but that was a big leap for me back then. It also meant that I needed to hire a new – more costly – Reiki venue (the Gertrude Street Yoga Centre).

Right away, my numbers grew, and almost every course was full with eight participants. This gave me confidence, and another year or so later, I had an even bolder idea: What if I expanded my maximum course size to 12 participants?

The danger of aiming high is that from a logical point of view, the risk of failure increases. This can be hard to take psychologically. For instance, if my maximum number of participants is 8 and I get 8 of them, then I've been a total success. But if my maximum number of participants is 12 and I only get 8, then my course is only 2/3 full! This can feel like a failure.

So it takes a certain sort of emotional/psychological courage to go for a bigger goal, but my experience is that our universe tends to expand with our vision.

So while I didn't always get 12 participants to my courses, I typically did. This made me realize that the limits of my success were very often simply the limits of my mindset. If I thought 8 participants were the maximum number of students I could successfully teach, if I thought they were the maximum numbers of participants I could attract to my courses, then so it was. But if I raised my vision to 12, then that soon became the new reality!

I'm not saying I could just hope for 10,000 students per course and they'd magically appear. But no doubt we can all raise our vision and achieve greater success without anything dramatic needing to happen.

Courses by Donation!

After a few years in business, I tried another experiment: courses by donation.

Call me naïve, but I liked the idea of anyone being able to come to my courses, no matter their financial state.

Yes, almost everybody who had tried something similar (in a variety of different businesses) warned me against the idea.

Yes, Mrs Takata (the most influential Reiki teacher after Mikao Usui), even made up a story about Usui healing a beggar for free in the Tokyo Beggars Quarter and realizing it was a mistake (the healed man supposedly returned to begging, saying that it was easier to make a living that way!).

But I was determined to make it work, even if others had failed to do so.

Ultimately, I stubbornly continued the experiment for six months before abandoning it – learning a crazy lesson along the way: It really is better for people to pay – or at least invest something – for learning Reiki!

Sadly, the donations courses didn't have the same feel as regular fee-paying ones. In general, participants weren't as committed, and after a course, they wouldn't do as much practice. If a healing crisis (what I call 'healing cleanse') occurred, they typically stopped practising instead of continuing on and completing the cleanse.

Just as bad, often they simply didn't turn up to class, many would turn up with an 'entitled' attitude (as if it were my moral obligation to teach them for free), and many were far less polite than their fee-paying counterparts.

A lot of it defied commonsense logic, but that was how it was: fee-paying customers were far better to deal with, worked harder on their Reiki, and as a result, got more from the classes!

Those six months were the least pleasurable of my teaching career, but they did help me get over any lingering angst I had about charging for my healing services, because once I realized it was in my clients' best interests to pay me something, I understood that doing so was a win/win.

Note that I'm not saying you need to be dogmatic about this, and I'm not saying that a client always needs to pay you in money. But some sort of exchange almost always helps them get the most out of your courses/healing sessions, even if, at times, your intuition may still prompt you to let someone come along as a non-paying guest.

How I Continued to Grow

One of the keys to the consistent growth of my business is that I have continued to take courses and learn new skills. In fact, some years I've spent as much as 30K on course-related expenses for personal development. This is a lot of money, sure, but it has meant I have continued to evolve as a teacher, practitioner and person. As a result, my business has never grown static. Rather, it too has continued to grow and evolve.

A lot of people say that you should invest ten percent of what you make into self-development. Perhaps that sounds like a huge amount, but there are probably few investments that will net you such a good ROI, and if you work in a field like Reiki and healing, these courses also have the benefit of being tax-deductible expenses.

Building a Newsletter

One of the most valuable things I did for my business was start a newsletter. For years, I've been sending out weekly emails with articles, tips, and updates about my courses and services.

This has been crucial for building and maintaining relationships with my community. When someone signs up for my newsletter, they become part of my world, and over time, many of them become students or clients.

If you're starting out, I highly recommend building an email list from day one. Use a simple autoresponder service and offer something valuable in exchange for signups – perhaps a free guided meditation or a short ebook on energy healing basics.

Monthly Practice Nights

Another cornerstone of my business has been monthly practice nights. These events serve multiple purposes:

They give my students a chance to practice and improve their skills.

They build community among practitioners.

They keep me connected with my student base.

They often lead to referrals and new students.

Starting these practice nights was one of the best business decisions I ever made, and I encourage any aspiring Reiki professional to do the same.

Final Thoughts

Building my Reiki business has been one of the most rewarding journeys of my life. It hasn't always been easy, and there have been plenty of challenges along the way. But looking back, I wouldn't change a thing.

If you're thinking about starting your own healing business, my advice is simple: start. Don't wait until everything is perfect. Don't wait until you feel "ready." Just begin, and trust that you'll figure things out as you go.

The world needs more healers, and if you feel called to this path, then honor that calling. Take the leap, and trust that the net will appear.

Good luck on your journey!

Jeremy