Many entrepreneurs develop plans for startup businesses through a painstaking process that blends their accumulated knowledge of an industry with research focused on profit potential.


For Robert Calvert, founder and publisher of Spokane-based Massage Magazine, the experience was much more sudden.


I had an incredible vision, a 20-year vision, and it was a magazine, he says. It came to him, he says, in the spring of 1985 on the Big Island of Hawaii, just after he had watched a TV commercial touting a sports cream.


It was a gift given to me somehow, because I didnt think of it, he insists. It was clear. It was truly a vision. It was one of those odd things, but it was right, and I knew it.


Calvert started the magazine the next day, and nowapproaching the end of the time span his vision encompassedit has become a multimillion-dollar-a-year business that boasts subscribers around the world.


The Calvert business enterprise, thoughhe owns it jointly with his wife, Judi, a physical therapistincludes more than just the magazine. Through Massage Magazine Inc., the couples umbrella corporate entity, it has expanded into the sale of books, videos, music, posters, and other products. For example, it sells professional liability and premises insurance to people in the massage industry through what it calls the Hands on Trades Protection Plan, and in January, it even plans to introduce its own line of massage oils and creams.


I think thats the futurediversification and multiple revenue streams, Calvert says.


He has written four books, including an illustrated work called The History of Massage that was published last year, and is working on three more. He also does consulting work, which he says took him last year to such distant locales as Australia and New Zealand.


One of his priorities here at home is reopening the World of Massage Museum that he and his wife founded about three and a half years ago and filled with thousands of items they had collected through their travels.


The museum operated for a time on the second floor of a 13,000-square-foot building at 1636 W. First, which the company leases for its headquarters, and also at 518 S. Maple. It has been shut down for about a year, but Calvert says he has been negotiating the possible lease of space on Spokanes North Side and hopes to reopen the museum soon.


The magazine, though, which claims to be the only independent magazine in the world devoted to massage and related touch therapies, continues to be his main focus. It is a bimonthly, full-color glossy publication that currently averages about 200 pages and has a press run of about 55,000. The majority of its circulation is through regular subscriptions, Calvert says, and its sells most of the rest of its copies on newsstands. Its subscription price is $26 a year in the U.S. and up to $47 a year (U.S.) abroad.


Aiding the industry


Calvert says the magazines mission is to provide massage and touch therapists with the tools, information, and other resources they need to succeed.


The magazine covers topics such as massage techniques, products, and laws, and also offers business tips and publishes research articles and profiles on therapists. It says its typical reader is a 45-year-old, college-educated woman who is a practicing massage therapist with more than 700 hours of massage-school education and a pre-tax income of more than $35,000.


Calvert speaks highly of the estimated 200,000 to 250,000 people in the U.S. now believed to be making a living at massage and touch therapies, also sometimes called bodywork.


I think that most of the people see it as something very special and unique that they love to give. It has a very spiritual philosophy to it, he says. They really believe in what they do, and the reason they do it is because they see the results every day.


Massage Magazines November-December 2003 issue includes a cover story about a Los Angeles-based volunteer organization called The Heart Touch Project that provides free massage therapy to AIDS patients, the elderly, ill children, and others. The issue also includes stories on an Australian massage method called the Bowen Technique and on guidelines for working with survivors of sexual abuse.


The issue is packed with full-color advertisements from vendors of everything from massage tables, creams, and music to courses and seminars. A full-color full-page ad sells for about $2,900, with frequency rates and a number of other ad sizes and classified ad space available.


Massage Magazine employs 10 people here, all at its headquarters on the edge of Brownes Addition, and also leases office space in Santa Cruz, Calif., where its editor, managing editor, and associate editor are located. Although it has a small full-time editorial staff, the magazine uses a host of contributing writers from the industry, and Calvert also writes for it regularly.


The magazine has experienced slow, but very steady growth since it was founded, Calvert says. Like other businesses, it was affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but has more than made up for that setback and now is having its best year ever, he says.


He declines to talk specifically about the companys annual revenue, but says, Its in the multiple millions. I can tell you that.


Calvert moved the magazines headquarters here from Davis, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento, about 12 years ago. He says he and his wife, who formerly had lived here, wanted to be near our families, so we decided to bring our business with us.


They had moved the magazine to California from Hawaii about five and a half years after its founding because, It needed to become an international publication, and there was no way that could happen from Hawaii, Calvert says.


He says they had chosen Davis because of its progressive, upbeat feel, but became repulsed by the poor air quality there and moved again, this time back to Spokane, about a year later.


From iron work to bodywork


Like the magazine he heads, Calvert has undergone considerable personal transformation over the years. A former iron worker, from a family of iron workers, he decided to leave that trade to pursue other interests. He obtained bachelors degrees in psychology, philosophy, and political science from the University of Idaho, and did masters studies at Whitworth College in applied-behavior sciences.


He started a massage school and clinic here in the late 1970s, and says he expanded that to include services at several Spokane-area health clubs and salons.


I had quite a little entrepreneurial thing going on, he says.


That all changed in the summer of 1984, he says, when a fire destroyed the building he owned near the Division Y that housed his business, his apartment, and two rental apartments.


It was very traumatic. I lost everything. I got away with my bicycle, says Calvert, who for a time was a competition bicyclist and Olympic hopeful. Thats the only thing I still have from then.


He tried to get back into doing massage work in the Spokane area, but says, It was just too hard. I just couldnt do it.


Soon thereafter, he says, he flew to the Hawaiian island of Maui to buy a massage clinic, but didnt like its location on the rainy side of the island. So, in the spring of 1985, he and his family moved to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, where he began writing textbooks on massage theory and practice, which he believed the industry lacked. It was four or five months later, he says, that he had the vision for the magazine.


The first press run of Massage Magazine was just 3,000 copies, Calvert says.


It was pretty funky, new age. It was 36 pages then; we are 204 pages now. You cant even compare them, he says.


Massage Magazine occupies only part of the building on West First, but subleases most of the other space there to a variety of massage practitioners and counselors. Calvert says his wife is staff massage therapist for the magazine, and also operates a private massage-therapy practice there.


Befitting the fact that he experienced his business Epiphany in Hawaii and the magazine was born there, Calvert regularly wears Hawaiian shirts. Also, his office is decorated with various island- and aquatic-oriented mementos and decorations, such as a turtle-shaped wall hanging and a number of fish images and sculptures, arranged to fit the Chinese-based Feng Shui design philosophy.


Most noticeable, perhaps, and located directly behind Calverts desk, is a large blowup of a photoused on Massage Magazines first covershowing massage therapy being performed on a picturesque Hawaiian beach.


The magazine has had a long journey since then, but Calvert says its last moveto Spokanehas proven to be a good one.