Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Being strapped for cash isn’t a fun situation to be in. With an operating business, you have options, fortunately.
Graham and Ashkahn brainstorm some ideas for quick cash and some they’ve even used at Float On when a surprise expense has come up. It’s worth noting that to get money in the short term, you’re likely sacrificing something in the long term.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question is, hilarious, sort of. And desperate. It’s: “I need a huge influx of cash right now, what are some things I can do to raise some quick funds?”
Ashkahn: Oh boy.
Graham: Well, first of all, we’re probably not actually releasing this tomorrow so, hopefully this podcast gets to you in time.
Ashkahn: Yeah, how urgent is this?
Drugs are a very profitable industry to be in.
Graham: I think we have at least three kidneys.
Ashkahn: You could … selling your plasma? I’ve heard that’s a … that’s a quick buck right?
Graham: Faking a fire? And claiming insurance money? Actually, that sounds really long term-
Ashkahn: Solves all your problems. That’s true.
Graham: Probably years-
Ashkahn: There’d be an investigation, and you’d have to do the jail time.
Graham: Years for insurance claim … yeah, you’d be serving time for that, yeah.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s hard because …
Graham: Whenever you need something specific and you need it right now, is the hardest time to get it.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: The more ambiguous your goals are, and the more that they can be done in the future, the easier it is to eventually accomplish them. So money right now is one of those things where, you’re gonna probably have to sacrifice something in order to get it. Again, toes, kidney, plasma …
Ashkahn: So there’s a few ways to do this with your float center. And they basically just involve running sales mostly, if you really need money right now.
Graham: Yep.
Ashkahn: So Groupon in one way of getting an influx of cash, although, they hold on to some of your money. But you still get a decent check within, what, a week?
Graham: Yeah, a couple weeks.
Ashkahn: Something like that?
Graham: Yeah, and running your internal sale. If you have a big mailing list, if you have a good Facebook following, just blasting out … and when I say, when I was kind of alluding to sacrificing something earlier, what I actually meant is, even something like running a sale, you’re really sacrificing future sales. In exchange for getting sales right now. Because, presumably, the people who are buying these floats at a discount could potentially be full-price float purchasers. Maybe just not right now. If you’re trying to get that money immediately…
Ashkahn: Yeah, and if you’re not sacrificing that, you’re sacrificing your perceived value and how much people are used to paying for floats. The more sales you do, the more you’re just getting people not used to paying full-price.
Graham: But, sometimes you just need that, and-
Ashkahn: You need the money-
Graham: And that’s fine. We’ve definitely run sales and treated our floats almost as a line of credit.
Ashkahn: Yeah for sure. Almost … most of our Groupon or sales situations, I think, have been originally motivated by some sort of construction cost that we needed to find money for immediately.
Graham: Yeah. Pretty much, if you’ve been following us for a while you we only run two sales during the year. One in December and one in June, and so anything outside of that … if you ever see a discount at Float On in April, it’s probably because we needed to replace a set of floors or something.
Ashkahn: Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with us.
Graham: Yep.
Ashkahn: And that’s … those are your most immediate options. Other than that, you could go to the bank-
Graham: Yep, having a line of credit with the bank is actually-
Ashkahn: A line of credit is cool. And it’s usually the lowest interest of almost any way of lending money from a bank. It’s good to set that stuff up when you don’t need it, so that it’s there when you do.
Graham: So that it’s there when you do. Yeah.
Ashkahn: But often, if you have a few years of being in business and you have a healthy bank account history, then … from what I can tell, and I don’t know too much about this, getting under a hundred thousand dollars in a line of credit is generally not the craziest thing in the world. And often, just requires the approval of whoever’s working the business desk at the bank. So if you’re going for a low amount like that … and usually even you pay it back in a certain amount of time, I don’t think there’s any interest on it?
Graham: Yeah, for sure.
Ashkahn: So that’s definitely a good thing to have in your back pocket.
Graham: Yeah, there’s also … it depends on when you’re expecting money coming in, and what you need it to pay for. But on the paying-for side, often there’s way more leeway there than you might imagine-
Ashkahn: Right, for … especially for construction stuff.
Graham: Yeah, the ability to push back some of your costs by a month, or a couple months, is … you have way more negotiation leeway there than you might think that you do. Even for things like bills, or talking to the electric company, or things as simple as that. They’re used to dealing with such huge amounts of money, that even though a float center is not a cheap thing to run, it takes a good amount of funds to keep it going … in the scope of this much broader business world, we’re still itty bitty businesses. We are tiny, brick-and-mortar shops. And so, if you need to delay even something like 10,000 dollars up to a couple months out, you might be shocked just calling the company that you owe that money to and having a conversation … might just yield that time extension.
Ashkahn: Or especially if you need this money because you need to do some sort of construction fix. You can usually negotiate … they call them net-terms, like net-30’s or net-60’s, and that’s just the amount of days after something is done that you need to actually pay the bill. So you could have someone do a plumbing project for you and it’d be two months before you actually have to pay them for it.
Graham: Yeah, and so in the past when we’ve had to do emergency repairs on our walls or our floors or something like that, we’ve done a combination of that. Find the contractors that you can do the net-terms with, or the materials providers, push that out as far as you can. Take a little money from a line of credit, run a sale, and kind of all those things combined ends up being more of the solution that we’ve implemented.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Or you … I’ve also heard crippling credit card debt can be a useful thing for people.
Graham: And I do know float centers who have used credit cards to get past very similar experiences. That one of course is just terrifying because the interest rates get so high if you wait a little too long to pay them back.
Ashkahn: So then you just pay it off with another credit card. That’s the key.
Graham: And if you do it right, you can just get non-stop rewards during the process, so … sort of like, you can’t see, but I’m drawing a triangular-shape thing.
If you sell credit cards to other people, and then they start using them, you get a bonus for every charge that they do.
Ashkahn: Yeah, you should really get into some financial business.
Graham: So there are some ideas. What else? Child slavery?
Ashkahn: Yeah, those are the real ones.
Graham: Yeah, for sure. There’s only so much you can do to really generate that money in the short term.
Ashkahn: Maybe asking your friends and family for a loan is the next option?
Graham: Yeah, I just really, I don’t even … I didn’t even want to say that one.
Ashkahn: Uh, yeah …
Graham: Yeah … I was going to make a joke about going to your rich uncle or something, and I was like, “Eh, that’s not even good as a joke.” Because it’s so … then if you can’t pay your uncle back it’s awful …
Ashkahn: It’s just …
Graham: You’re going into-
Ashkahn: You pay him with a credit card, you know?
Graham: Pay off your uncle with a credit card.
Alright, anything else to add over there?
Ashkahn: I think that’s probably it.
Graham: Alright, good luck.
Ashkahn: Yep.
Graham: Good luck out there. Hope you raise some quick funds.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: And if you have any more emergency questions, definitely go to a professional.
Ashkahn: Don’t send them into the podcast.
Graham: If you have more slow-paced questions yeah, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and shoot them off there.
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Latest Blog Posts
Timeline for Opening Up a Float Center
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.
