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.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
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.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Why Do Float Centers use Child Sized Earplugs? – DSP 245
When shopping around for earplugs for float tanks, there’s only a few that actually work well in the float solution. One of these is the Mack’s wax earplugs, basically the standard for swimmers as well. But why do so many float centers buy the child sized ones when stocking their float center?
Ashkahn “Big Ears” Jahromi let’s all of us know what he thinks is going on and that many people may be using these earplugs incorrectly. Graham “Normal Ears” Talley, backs him up with some facts and important reminders.
What Causes that Float Tank Twitch? – DSP 244
Graham and Ashkahn discuss what causes that mysterious twitch people sometimes experience in the float tank, called the hypnic jerk (AKA hypnagogic jerk, sleep start, sleep twitch, myoclonic jerk, or night start ). While the guys offer up some interesting theories, there’s not a lot of research that’s been done on what causes these, so we’re left with theories, more or less.
Ashkahn thinks it has to do with pancakes.
Does floating impact the Parasympathetic Nervous System? – DSP 243
The Parasympathetic Nervous System is the part of your body that gets really excited when the rest of your body is winding down. Taking care of the digestive and rest systems are an important part of human health and physiology. How do float tanks affect this system?
Many of the studies on floating have demonstrated an impact on the parasympathetic nervous system. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the information that’s been studied so far.
Getting Salty With Speakers – Professor Hu – DSP 242
Dr. Peicheng Hu is a researcher from China that studies floatation therapy over there. He’s speaking at the Float Conference this year so Ashkahn decided to take the opportunity to talk to him about the Chinese float industry and some of the differences in the practice as well as the type of research being done out there.
Are Google Ads Important – DSP 241
When looking at online marketing, Google Ads seem like an obvious choice, but are as relevant for Float Centers as they are for other businesses? The most useful thing these ads do is boost search result placement, but if the ads are to boost the ranking of a float center that is the only center in town, it’s not going to affect search results much.
Derek and Graham dissect the platform and really focus in on the uses (or lack thereof) of Google Ads for float centers and provide tools and tips for online marketing and how to make it as effective as possible.
Latest Blog Posts
Fancy Acronyms for your Business Plan: TAM, SAM, and SOM
In this post, we’ll be looking at those enigmatic acronyms: TAM, SAM, and SOM, which are the backbone for the market analysis section of your written plan. We’ve helped a couple hundred float centers to develop their business plans, and we’ve found that this one area generates the most questions, and seems to generally be the most difficult to wrap your head around.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #9
The Float Tour makes a stop in Tulsa, OK to visit Dr. Justin Feinstein’s Float Clinic and Research Center at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research (LIBR).
Rather than following the usual path of incremental progress with its research, LIBR is tasked with pursuing alternative treatments that have a chance of “shooting the moon” and making potentially large leaps in medical progress. Float tanks are just the kind of technology they’re looking to explore.
Float Tank Centers for Sale
On our journey we found at least three owners who are actively looking to sell their float tank centers, and in all three cases the centers are doing well. Life often calls us in different directions than we expect.
In case you’re in the market for a pre-established business, without all the trials and tribulations of starting from scratch, here’s information on two centers that are, for the moment, available to swoop in on…
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #8
The desert is vast and the sun is harsh, but it doesn’t deter floating. We’re officially off the beaten path. From here, the float centers have become a bit more spread out. Everywhere we go, however, the people continue to be kind and eager to see us.
Everything in between Arizona and Texas is nestled in between some of the major manufacturers in the United States, providing some resources that other areas just don’t have. Areas that might find building out a center prohibitively expensive due to additional shipping costs, not to mention that real estate is cheaper than in major metropolitan areas, can save a bit of money when planning their buildout.
