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.
Listen to Just the Audio
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.
Recent Podcast Episodes
When Should a Float Center be Profitable? – DSP 170
“When should I start making money?” is a deceptively simple and anxiety inducing question that every business owner has to face. Sometimes the answer is straightforward. There are lots of franchises that have near endless amounts of market research and profitability trends that point to a sensible timeline of when and how much you can expect versus a given investment.
Float centers aren’t like that, unfortunately. There’s simply not enough data out there to create predictability in a market. The good news is that given the relatively low overhead excluding opening costs, float centers have the potential to be profitable almost immediately. Graham and Ashkahn break down this question and provide some tips on the issue.
Should we Pay for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Services? – DSP 169
When opening any small business, you want to do what’s best to gain an edge in marketing and make sure that you’re doing your best for your flowering company. The new trends and changes can be daunting if you’re unfamiliar with technology or the marketing world.
Float centers are no exception. So when you get a call from someone claiming to be able to boost your SEO standing, it can seem like a really good deal. How do you tell if these companies are legit? And do float centers really need SEO help? Graham and Ashkahn break this down and simplify it for the uninitiated.
Should we do Tank Maintenance Ourselves? – DSP 168
As it turns out, there’s no certification program to running a float center. You buy these big expensive machines that require constant, technical maintenance and you’re on your own for how to accomplish that. There aren’t float tank repair persons that you can call (yet) and just have them show up and do it for you, so making sure you’re knowledgeable and prepared for this maintenance is a really good idea.
Graham and Ashkahn lay out the Float On best practices for how to plan for maintenance so that it’s the least disruptive for your center if something goes wrong.
What to Consider With a Home Float Center – DSP 167
Getting a tank in your house and floating some people is a great first step on the path to opening a float center. It helps you figure out exactly what the maintenance is going to be like, along with just the experience of floating other people and introducing them to this neat salty practice.
There are things to consider and there’s a right way and a wrong way to run a home based float center. First thing to consider is your local laws for small businesses and making sure you comply with those. Additionally, you need to decide if you’re just floating friends and family or if you’re going to have paying customers. This is also going to impact what type of float tank you should use and the demands you should consider on your house. Graham and Ashkahn have seen plenty of these and share the best practices as they’ve seen them laid out.
How to Deal With Burnout – DSP 166
Running a float center is hard work. Especially if you just opened up and dealt with months of agonizing, crazy construction, and then go straight into pulling long hours keeping your center open. Even with the reward of seeing floater’s post float glow can fall short of satisfying in some moments.
It’s important in these moments to take time for yourself so as not to get devoured by your work. Ashkahn and Graham share some of the things that helped them stay sane working long, thankless shifts at Float On in the early days and get through the hard days so that they could thrive.
Latest Blog Posts
Listening to Music in a Float Tank
To play or not to play music in the tank…
Some centers start the float with a few minutes of music and then fade away, some don’t play music until the end, and another float center will not let you turn off the light. In fact, they also have the noise of a automatic massage table, pounding away next to you, while other places will leave it up to the floater to decide. READ MORE…
Specific Gravity Specifics
Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of a substance to the density (mass of the same unit volume) of a reference substance. The reference substance is nearly always water for liquids or air for gases.” Specific gravity, then, in the case of our float tanks, is how dense the salt water is compared to regular, run of the mill water.
So, where should we keep the specific gravity of a float tank? READ MORE…
Don’t Squander Water in Your Showers
Once you start planning out the monthly costs for your float center, you’ll quickly come to appreciate a running joke in the industry: although you may think you’re providing floats, what you’re really doing is running a shower business.
Each person that floats at your center will take two showers: one before their float, and one after. These showers are definitely necessary. Before a customer enters a float tank, you’ll want them to shower in order to make sure that water contamination from skin oils and dirt is minimized, and after a float a customer is going to need a shower to remove the salty residue from their skin. READ MORE…
How Do You Properly Use Hydrogen Peroxide?
The Art of Floating, a great blog by the Float Shoppe here in Portland, has been answering questions that hit their inbox. Which is brilliant, and gives a second life to the extensive novellas on that minutiae of float tanks that I find myself writing daily. Here’s the first in what will hopefully be a series. READ MORE…
