When Rudi Haak and partner Helen Ponte started Balance Massage & Wellness, they had so few clients that Mr Haak had to paint houses to keep things going.

Still, he never doubted the studio at 15 Front Street would succeed.

“I had failed at so many other things in my life, but this was not going to be one of them,” Mr Haak said.

He was right.

The couple were able to go full-time within a few short months.

Four years later, he has two Best of Bermuda awards from The Bermudian magazine and is booking appointments six months out.

While some people come in for injuries, often their muscle pain or strain is connected to some deeper issue in their life, problems at work or at home.

“Life is stressful,” Mr Haak said. “I always take the time out to talk to people and ask questions before I start a massage. It is not a race.”

His partner says he has an uncanny way of diagnosing people’s conditions before they get on the table.

“I don’t know how I do it,” he said. “I just see the way they are walking and know they have pain in a certain part of their body.”

He said everything in the body is connected. You could feel the pain in your shoulder but the root of it is in your hip, for example.

Mr Haak came into massage later in life.

In school he struggled academically. It was only when one of his daughters was found to have dyslexia — a language-based learning disorder — did he realise that he had the same challenge.

He painted houses with his father until a friend developed kidney cancer.

“One day he asked me to give him a massage,” Mr Haak said. “I gave him a back rub. He really liked it and was able to lay down. Then I really wanted to help other cancer patients.”

At age 42, Mr Haak went to the Florida School of Massage in Gainesville, Florida, to take a six-month course. There were a few people there his own age, but many of his fellow students were as young as 18.

“The course was intense,” he said.

The one thing he could not do was work with cancer patients. At the time it was thought that massage could harm them, maybe even cause tumours to expand.

“I could have gone home at that point,” he said. “That was the whole reason I had come.”

Mr Haak said the thinking around massage for cancer patients has changed since then.

“The experts have come around,” he said. “I can touch people, before, during and after cancer treatment. I have also taken a course in it.”

He stuck with the course.

“I really wanted to get my certificate and take it home and show my daughter,” he said. “I wanted her to know that she could achieve her dreams, because daddy had done it.”

One of his teachers in Florida was Anne Marshall, co-owner of LifeThyme Wellness in Bermuda.

“She went back and forth between Florida and Bermuda. She was my mentor while I was learning and afterward.”

Mr Haak did so well that he had a job waiting at LifeThyme Wellness, when he graduated from the programme.

He worked with them for several years before going out on his own. He started with a mobile service, before opening a bricks-and-mortar version of Balance Massage.

Mr Haak is in favour of regulating the massage industry in Bermuda.

At the moment, anyone can hang their shingle out and say they do massage.

“It would definitely protect clients,” he said. “I have heard of people going away for a weekend to train, then coming back and they are doing massage.”

He said an untrained person can hurt someone if they do not know what they are doing.

Ms Ponte is also trained in massage but handles the administrative side of the business while he does the physical work. They also run a health supplements store in the same building.

“If I let him, he would work all the time,” Ms Ponte said. “I have to make him take a break and give himself some rest.”

Over the years, Mr Haak has learnt to pull back and reduce his daily workload for the sake of his own health.