Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question is, why do you call yourselves Grashkahmn?
No, it’s not. “At what point should I open a second float tank center?”
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, so, we only have one float center. I feel like we should-
Graham: Yeah, so maybe after 10 years is the right length of time here.
Ashkahn: So, take our advice with that in mind. We don’t have a second float center, but we’ve got lots of thoughts, that’s for sure. Many opinions.
Graham: Unfounded, most of them.
Ashkahn: Yeah, but we’ll tell them to you.
Graham: So, I would say … personally, I think you shouldn’t open a center before a couple years, but I would say one year maybe minimum, and even that makes me really nervous.
Ashkahn: So, why? What’s the benefit of waiting?
Graham: I don’t know, I just chose a random number and ran with it, man.
Ashkahn: Mine was gonna be 1.28 years.
Graham: No, so, the reason is because it’s such a sensitive, delicate thing opening a float tank center and running one, and there’s so much that can go wrong, and some of the stuff that can go wrong happens to really expensive materials and doesn’t happen until a year or two years have passed.
I would say by about after three to three and a half years, we kind of realized a lot of the materials that we could destroy in a float tank center. So, that’s this risk of if you open up another center after eight months, you just opened, you’re crushing it, you have enough money or a loan or something to go forward with a new location. You decide to, and then a year in, so four months after you’ve kind of started construction on a second location and gotten it going, you realize your floors are falling apart in your first location, and you’ve just invested a ton of money to put the exact same floors in your second location, right?
Same goes for soundproofing. The same goes for all of these things that might start failing after a short amount of time. So, that’s why I say at least two years, because two years is enough time you get to see what you did wrong in the first center, and you get to save a lot of money by fixing those mistakes in the second.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Construction is definitely a big part of it. Then just understanding how the flow of your appointments and stuff works, too. If you do it too early, you might not realize that summer makes a big difference in terms of your schedule, or maybe your schedule’s not as heavy as it was when you first started because you were brand new and exciting and there was no float centers around you, and you were kind of a pressure relief for people who wanted to try floating, and that’s not the case anymore two years in.
Some stability in terms of your marketing and getting to the point where you can actually reliably keep your tanks to a certain capacity that takes a little bit of time to figure out as well.
Graham: Yeah, and it might be, if you’re the first center in your area and you’re thinking about expanding to a second because you’re killing it and your area definitely has the market demand to support a second center, maybe by the time you finish construction, you won’t be the first center there anymore. We’ve seen this happen in other cities where as the second center of someone’s being built of the only float center in town, two or even three other float tank centers have kind of sprung up just between when they’re starting construction and when they finish. So, that, too, can really affect the planning process.
Ashkahn: Yeah. All the benefits of doing this earlier are the ones that I think most people think about going into it, right? Obviously you can get another part of town there are no float centers in, and-
Graham: Yeah, kind of market domination early.
Ashkahn: Yeah. But the part that you don’t think about is this stuff that doing it too early might end up with some mistakes that you’ve now duplicated or replicated from place to place that you would be able to avoid had you waited a little time to kind of suss that stuff out.
Graham: Initially, even though we don’t have any second locations, we’ve thought about it a lot over the years. We almost opened another location in our second year.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: And in our third year, and in our fourth year, and I think after that we kind of realized that maybe we’re gonna invest our time into other parts of the industry, but even now, it’s only really after about seven years in business, which is where we are, that I feel like I’d be totally confident opening another center, and I feel like we’ve learned all of the mistakes we made the first time.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and I guess the other side is personnel. A lot of people are opening this as this is your first business, you’re getting into the swing of things, you’re putting a lot of your own personal time and work in dealing with this first center and being there when emergencies pop up and covering shifts that don’t get covered. It might be a good idea to have some systems figured out for that sort of stuff so that your center is running a little bit more independently before all of a sudden you have two centers that you have to deal with and be there for emergencies and cover shifts that nobody’s covering and you’re kind of a little bit more in a pickle there.
Graham: Yeah. If your plan is start with multiple centers just sort of immediately start up and have three centers in an area, maybe-
Ashkahn: That’s a little, yeah.
Graham: Maybe do one, and see how that goes, and then expand. That’s even more risky because you don’t know what the demand is, you don’t know how packed your tanks are going to be in your first center, so starting with multiple centers … well, I say you should not open your second one until after two years, so obviously starting immediately with multiple is against my own beliefs.
And that’s …
Ashkahn: Yeah. Some stuff to weigh in the side of, I think is probably less intuitive for people. I think it’s a little bit more tempting to just want to open a bunch of places at once, so there’s some things to consider in terms of waiting longer.
Graham: Yup. I think it’s really standard business practice, too, for people who have this expansion in mind, to think on the one year timeline. I guess I’d urge you for a float tank center just because it’s so unique and so delicate to instead think about maybe two years before you take that jump-
Ashkahn: Definitely.
Graham: To another center.
Ashkahn: I’d say especially the construction. That’s almost the highlighted thing of this, is that you just can’t tell that construction is failing until a little bit. Sometimes you won’t even know until a few years in that you made a wrong decision with some material that you used, so giving things time to fail.
Graham: Yup. All right.
Ashkahn: Great.
Graham: If you have more questions-
Ashkahn: You can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Graham: Blast them our way. We’ll answer them.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Common Float Tank Issues – DSP 295
Graham and Ashkahn give the skinny on the foibles one my encounter when purchasing a float tank. These aren’t specific to any one manufacturer, but they are useful things to look out for when shopping around for a tank.
What is Float On’s North Star Metric? – DSP 294
Graham and Ashkahn talk about the guiding principles and metrics that dictate how they run Float On and what they measure for success. While they don’t have any float center secrets, they do provide some useful advice in how to look at numbers, when to pay attention to them, and perhaps more importantly, when to ignore them.
What Can you Say About Float Centers Closing? – DSP 293
It happens every once in a while that a center you knew closes down and it can seem like a dark omen for the rest of the industry. The reality is that these are individual circumstances that are brought about not because of a major trend as much as just life events coming up.
Graham and Ashkahn share their take on other float centers closing and what they know about it and how frequently they think it’s occurring.
How to Build a Green Float Center – DSP 292
Graham and Ashkahn talk about the options available for sustainable options when building a float center, or more accurately, the lack thereof. Unfortunately, the materials necessary to make a float room saltproof and waterproof tend to be very unfriendly for the environment.
The guys break down the specific options available and what to consider when adding green technology to your own center.
How We Financed Float On – DSP 291
Graham and Ashkahn are asked about how they financed Float On.
As the guys explain how they started, they go along slight detours to talk about all the mistakes they made along the way and how they’re unsure that Float On could even start today like it did back in 2010. They then go on to explain the pros and cons of the extreme bootstrapping they did to make Float On happen.
Latest Blog Posts
The Heart of Floating – Guest Post by Kevin McCulloch
“When we commit to The Heart of Floating, we form relationships and communities. We share experiences, we connect, we learn, we teach. We care.”
In this guest post, Kevin McCulloch, owner of Float St. Louis and organizer of the Rise: Float Community Gathering, explores the heart of floating and it’s power and potential to connect, heal, and grow individuals, relationships, and communities.
The Most Ambitious Float On Project Yet
We have a new endeavor that we’ve been working on in private for awhile now, and we think that it’s going to make a big splash in our salty little industry. After many years of testing behind closed doors, we’re finally ready to take the plunge and release our secret project to you, the floatation community.
You might want to sit down for this one….
The Start-a-Center Giveaway Returns!
Everyone knows that, when it comes to gifts, it’s much more fun to give than to receive. With this year’s Start-a-Center Giveaway, however, I’m not so sure anymore. With over $13,000 in Float Tank Solutions products going to one lucky duck (plus $4,000 worth of goodies from other float industry homies), we humbly suggest that we may have finally tipped the scales in favor of the recipient.
If you’re Charlie, this Giveaway is the Golden Ticket, which I guess makes the Construction Package a Wonka bar and the Ninja Fans are the Fizzy Lifting Drink. So, what do you have to do for a chance at all the Everlasting Gobstoppers?
It’s been three years since our last Giveaway, and we thought that it was long overdue for another one. So, what’s the dealio? The Giveaway is a chance to give a big ol’ boost to a deserving Float-Center-To-Be. This time around, we’re taking things to a whole new level, with over three times the value of products and services being given away. To you. For free.
Dear Everyone: Please reconsider building your own tanks
Look, we get it. Really. Float tanks are expensive – especially for what can seem, from the outside, like a glorified bathtub with spa parts attached. It doesn’t take long to go from, “Why is this so expensive?” to “I’ll bet I could save money by making my own tank!” After you start mulling it over, you get excited. You could be offering something no one else does right now… because it’d be your own creation! How hard can it possibly be?
As experts in only thinking about half of the consequences of our actions (at best), we’d like to say, “Incredibly hard, actually!”
