Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
The Question: Will the home tank market and its low prices affect the commercial float industry negatively?
Our Answer: We don’t think so! In fact, home tanks increase the visibility of our industry.
Tune in to this short Daily Solutions Podcast, or read the text below if you’re at work and you need it to make it look like you’re doing important stuff.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: So today’s question is, How does the invention of low cost in home float tanks affect the viability of starting and running a float tank center?
Ashkahn: I think it’s probably not going to have much of an impact, or maybe a positive impact if anything.
Graham: Yeah, that’s my feeling very much as well. I don’t think that you’re losing a lot of your most regular customers or anything, even to having a float tank in home.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I mean like, if you have a float tank center by this point, you know how hard it is to have a float tank setup somewhere. It’s crazy. The amount of salt, the amount of maintenance, all that sort of stuff. Hopefully that stuff will get better over time, but it’s still going to be a lot of people who prefer to go to a float center than to have the space for one in their home, or the cost of one in their home, or the maintenance of one in their home.
For the people who do have one in their home, to me that’s just like a huge point of conversation. Any time anybody goes over to that person’s house, they’re going to be like wait what is that, and that’s just that many more people that know about float tanks. I don’t know, I could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if that like took down the industry, because everyone started buying float tanks for their houses.
Graham: At the point that you’re floating less than once every couple weeks, or once a month, or so. If your thing is you like to hop in a float tank once a month, or once every two months it still probably doesn’t make sense for you to have a float tank in your home necessarily. Right? So there’s this whole market of people who are not coming in incredibly regularly, who just for no other reason than financial viability won’t go down that route.
Ashkahn: Time will really tell what ends up happening, but I don’t know that’s my personal hunch is that it probably won’t have to much of an impact.
Graham: In a similar sense that public pools and stuff aren’t destroyed by people having private pools in their house, or places where gyms where people can go and go into a sauna or a hot tub, aren’t destroyed by people able to have personal home gyms, or saunas, or hot tubs at their house.
It’s just there will of course be people who want that privacy, and want to take advantage of it. I think though there’s always going to be a broader group of people who are just not that regular users who would want to go to a center, and even having people take care of you. Not having to clean up after yourself is another big thing that I think drives some people in when they just want to be pampered.
Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely or just kind of everything about the amount of space it takes. I mean there’s some float tanks out there that are trying to fix that issue for people’s homes. Make them more space wise I guess.
Graham: I guess here’s what I’m trying to say, is I don’t feel like they’re competing markets. Like I feel like there’s a huge benefit to having a float tank in your home, and there’s a whole group of people who’s stoked about it, and that number of people is growing. I think that also the people who are excited to go into a float center and go float, of course there’s some overlap because floating is involved, but I think fundamentally they’re just two totally different markets growing in two very different directions, but both growing right now. I don’t see that much competition between them.
So, like we always say, take a walk or you’ll never know what’s out there!
Recent Podcast Episodes
Using Ozone in Float Tanks – DSP 340
Ashkahn and Graham talk about Ozone in this episode. Everything from different types of ozonators to the efficacy of it as a water treatment system compared to other systems.
Ozone is very effective, but there are concerns about its use that aren’t present in other types of water treatment, and fortunately the guys give us a lot of information on what to consider when putting together our own systems.
Credit Card Processing – DSP 339
Graham and Ashkahn delve into the wild world of credit card processing. There’s a massive industry of businesses that exist between when your customer swipes their credit card and when it goes into your bank account. The industry seems to be designed to be confusing and some companies only perform certain tasks, making it very difficult to compare services.
The guys give their advice on how to handle finding the right credit card processor for float centers and what to look out for when you’re on the hunt.
Floating While Pregnant – DSP 338
There are tons of anecdotal stories about pregnant people having great experiences with floating, but what are some of the things you should consider if you’re going to encourage floating while pregnant.
Graham and Ashkahn share what they’ve heard about it and how to frame the conversation with an expecting parent while still covering your bases from a liability standpoint.
Giving Shares of Your Company – DSP 337
A lot of small businesses have a romanticized idea of what “shares” in a business actually mean. Float On did, once upon a time. What does it mean to give shares of your company to someone? Is it a good way to reward a valuable and dedicated employee? Are there other, more appropriate rewards that you can offer instead?
Graham and Ashkahn review this question in detail, sharing many questions that any float center owner should consider before offering an employee ownership of your company.
Is a Business Plan Necessary When Buying an Existing Center? – DSP 336
Do you need a business plan if you’re not building a business from the ground up?
Graham and Ashkahn chime in and give a solid “maybe” as a response. It depends on a lot of factors, for sure. Do you already have financing? Are you maintaining the existing business model or revamping it?
Latest Blog Posts
Beginner’s Guides from Everywhere!
If you’re not familiar with the Beginner’s Guide, it’s basically our intro brochure at Float On. About 5 years ago now we made the creation files easily available so folks could edit it as they pleased and sent it out to everyone with an open invitation to do with it as they pleased for their own centers. We know most centers don’t have graphic designers on staff so it seemed like a nice way to help others have reliable, easy to access information for their clients and also serve as a way to save them time and money from having to create their own.
The result of this is that years later, dozens and dozens of centers have a version of these brochures, some of them not even realizing where they originated from. Naturally, we’ve taken a copy from all the centers we’ve visited and we thought we’d share some of them with the rest of you.
The Daily Solutions Podcast – Our Top 5 Episodes from March
Here we go again. Another month, another difficult choice of deciding which episodes will make it into the Top 5. We had some really killer episodes this month, including our 100th episode and a special interview with Justin Feinstein. Here are the episodes that we...
Float Success Story – Float Los Alamos
At the Float Conference every year we hear inspirational stories from float center owners who have carved a piece of the industry out in their salty image. Everyone defines "success" in their own way, and we thought it would be cool to share what that meant to some of...
The Daily Solutions Podcast – Our Top 5 Episodes from February
Well, we’ve done it again. We’ve gone through an entire month listening to Graham and Ashkahn share their floaty knowledge. In any case, here are a few of our favorites from the month of February. We're almost at episode 100 (in which we have something special...
