This stay-at-home mom of eight years decided she was ready to head back into the workforce three months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Jessica Ollie is a registered massage therapist, exercise and shockwave therapist. Starting back at a clinic pre-COVID, she still wasn’t feeling satisfied.
Jessica’s dream, ever since she can remember, had been to open her own business. And once COVID hit, that’s exactly what she did, deciding to turn half of her garage into a private practice.
“I had hired some people to help me do the space, then — with of course the pandemic and not being able to work — we were in lockdown. I had to build it myself,” Ollie said.
With a small space to work with and building an extra wall from her home to garage, she finished just in time to reopen in March.
“At times I didn’t think I was going to be able to. I had my doubts and it was really hard emotionally, financially, but I have this fire inside of me and I was like, ‘This is happening.’”
Starting with massage therapy, Ollie wanted to continue; helping people is a true passion of hers, especially when is comes to children.
“I’m very passionate about working on kids,” she said. “Because I do believe that if we can nip this in the bud at the beginning, at the age of 12, and we work on the posture early on in life, then we can prevent a lot of these issues that arise when we are in our 50s and 60s.”
Treating all types of pain from car accidents to realignments, she truly does it all.
“Carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitis, sciatica pain, low-back pain, I do therapy on people who have had surgeries, shoulder tears, anything.”
Very few RMTs are able to perform shockwave therapy, but in this case, booking in with her, you can get it all. Buying a shockwave machine allows Ollie to really work deep into the tissue and help with long-term healing.
“It’s radial pressure waves that go into the skin and into the muscles and into the tissue and the pressure goes in and it kind of gets stuck, where it can’t get through, so the waves of the radio pressure should be able to just fly through the tissue,” Ollie said. “But if it can’t, then it kind of works on breaking the tissue up, so it works really, really well on scar tissue post-surgery.”
Since opening four months ago, the support from family and friends and former clients has just been incredible for this RMT. She is finally doing what she loves, and that’s helping others.
“The passion and the drive and the fire was just burning inside of me, but I don’t want anybody to live in pain.”