Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
If you’re seeing a change in clientele, it can be for a variety of reasons. As different populations become aware about how floating can help them, they generally tell people with like interests who might come try it out, which then slowly creates a community of enthusiasts who are float-conscious.
Graham and Ashkahn talk specifically about how recent research and awareness has helped bring floating to those with serious pain issues, and how that can create a ripple effect in local awareness for any float center.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Welcome, everybody. Today’s question comes in from one of our listeners and it is a very specific one actually which is, “Our clientele used to be more relaxation/meditation oriented. Now, more people come for pain relief and other health reasons. Is this a new trend?”
Ashkahn: Interesting. I don’t really know.
Graham: It’s not something that we’ve heard as far as an overwhelming trend coming in from either our own center or other people’s centers.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I can make some wild guesses which is …
Graham: I’m excited to hear your wild guesses.
Ashkahn: Here we go. Well, one thing I noticed is that the pain relief clientele that we have have insanely great experiences. Some of our best and most of our stories of people have these incredible life-changing experiences in the float tank focus on pain relief, so I can see that having a big impact – just a natural word of mouth. You have people coming in for pain relief. They are probably going to be some of those adamant people going out and telling other people about it. That beams a message that gets spread easily. It makes sense to me.
Graham: Yeah, for sure. It very much is the, I guess, just level of the effects that the float tank has directly relate to how many more people get told about it from that person, how many more people are coming in from word of mouth with similar ailments as well. Fibromyalgia is a good example which we ran a fibromyalgia program. We’re a part of that at our float tank center. We didn’t do a ton of outreach to the fibro community. We sent a couple of initial emails out and I have no idea how much they got pushed from there. We saw a few clients coming in.
Over the course of the next few months, it really trickled up to the point where we had a fair amount of people with fibro who’d found out about it and were coming in to float and telling other people about the condition. When you have these communities, especially of acute disorders that don’t have a lot of outs for treatments, I think that it does really naturally spread within them. When someone actually connects with the therapy that helps them, the idea of sharing that with these other people who are suffering is really appealing.
Ashkahn: What I hear from people with chronic pain all the time is that they’re willing to try anything. When you’re in that kind of persistent pain, you forget about the like, oh, that sounds weird or whatever. You’re just like, “No, I don’t care. I’ll try it. If I can find something that works out, I’ll definitely go and try it.”
Graham: There’s an analogy in the business world, especially in the investment sector of things where investors want to know if you’re building a vitamin or a painkiller. That’s the two categories that you’re putting those into. The relaxation, meditation category is the vitamin. You need to do maintenance everyday. It’s really good for you to meditate. It’s excellent to be able to spend time in a float tank and go in and relax, unwind, shut off a lot of the day’s stress. But that compared to “I have been in pain every single day for the last three months and I floated. Now I’m not in pain.” That’s the painkiller side, this acute fix to something that was going horribly wrong prior.
In the investment world, that’s also what you want is you want the painkillers, not the vitamins is what people say. It’s hard to convince people to do habits that are good for them, but people will do anything to get rid of their pain when it’s happening. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the boost in switch over from that meditation crowd over to the health and pain management crowd is just that, the effects being so much more acute. The same people are probably coming in more often, too. It is hard to build a practice of something that’s not essential.
Ashkahn: Inversely, it might just be that the kind of meditation crowd is possibly some of the first people to find out about a float tank center. They’re already clued into that world. It’s on their radar. Those people probably have heard about float tanks before. When a place opens in town, they’re probably going to be some of the first customers to come try it out. It might be just that. You’re noticing that first wave of people all happens to be someone who are the most likely people to be like, “Oh, nice. A float center is open. I’m going to check that out now.”
Graham: It is true. I hear less so for float centers that are just starting up. But, when we were getting started and for a couple of years afterwards, we had the exact same thing with the Roganite crowd, people who listen to the Joe Rogan podcast, were almost always the early adopters. Half of your clientele, when you first opened up a float tank center five years ago, are all people who just heard about it through Joe Rogan and then slowly that transitions into a much broader general public. You have some more awareness and stability in your community.
Ashkahn: Interesting question though. It’s one of those things as the industry gets bigger, we’ll have more data on and be able to answer these in more sophisticated ways. But, until then, you can just hear us say whatever we think based off nothing.
Graham: Based on fact, not based on fact. It’s a flip of coin at the end of the day.
Ashkahn: It’s all coming out. It’s all coming out.
Graham: The short answer to your question is, no, we personally haven’t noticed any trends.
Ashkahn: Definitely not.
Graham: All right. Thanks, everyone. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
Can you have volunteers at your center?
So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
Floating and Athletics, a Strong Relationship
One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
A Skeptic’s Guide to Floating
I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
