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
How Many Managers Does it Take to Run a Float Center? – DSP 200
Not every float center owner wants to be tethered to working their shop for the rest of their lives. In fact, even some that enjoy that work immensely can be doing their business a disservice by focusing on day-to-day operations as opposed to dedicating their time to marketing or expansion.
So how do float center owners get out of the shop? How many managers (Or Taco Supremes as they’re called at Float On) does it take to effectively replace the shop owner at a business. Ashkahn and Graham have successfully implemented a system at Float On that allows them to be much more hands off on the business than when they first opened and they share how got to that point and how their business structure has evolved.
Float Centers in Hip Neighborhoods – DSP 199
Do float centers in the hip part of town do better than ones on the outskirts? Graham and Ashkahn are well versed on this in that Float On is in a fairly hip part of Portland.
The guys break down some of the benefits of being one of the “cool” businesses in town as well as some of the serious drawbacks. Naturally, things like foot traffic aren’t as important. Almost no one walks into a float center and hops in a tank off the street. So there are fringe benefits to it, like awareness, but if you decide on going to a different part of town, then you’re not automatically doing a disservice to your brand.
Can You Clean a Float Tank with Vinegar? – DSP 198
You have to change out your float tank water eventually. Is it a good idea to give your float tank a vinegar cleanse when you do? is that effective? Is it too much work for the results? Are there better solutions to keep your tank clean and fresh?
Graham and Ashkahn discuss while providing assurances like “either you’re not crazy or we’re all crazy”, so that’s nice.
Have you Experienced Challenging Floats? – DSP 197
Graham and Ashkahn share stories about their most challenging floats. Everything from extreme physical discomfort to literally staying in too long.
They also share stories of floats from friends and customers that they’ve accumulated over the years and discuss the value of experiencing these difficult moments in the tank and how you might approach them when one occurs at your center.
What’s the Best Representation of Float Tanks in TV or Movies? – DSP 196
It happens every once in a while, a tv show or a movie will feature a float tank and the entire industry gets a jolt as if to say “we made it to the big time!”
But not all float tank cameos are created equal, so which one does it the best? What is the best representation of floating in media? Graham and Ashkahn go through the list of everything from Altered States to Stranger Things to find out what it is.
Latest Blog Posts
Lessons for Float Centers from a Mainstream Marketing Conference
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Copyblogger’s Authority Rainmaker Conference in Denver, Colorado. As a self proclaimed marketing nerd, this was an opportunity to mingle with my people. I believe no matter how much experience you have in...
A Quick Note on Insulation…
Insulating the roof/joists of your float center... Basically, what you're trying to do here to create an envelope around your space. You're trying to create a barrier between a conditioned environment (your float room) and an unconditioned environment (open air). This...
Encouraging Creativity After Floating
Most float tanks centers have customers. So as to have a place to put these customers where they will be able to sit, or stand, as they please and not be in the way, most float tank centers also have lobbies. So as to have something - some surface upon which these...
Float Center Education Through Internships
Why Have an Intern Program? I (Marshall) started my career in floating as an intern, coming in to the shop each Monday to learn about floating, sanitation, and better understand the intricacies of construction projects. For every four hours I worked, I was expected to...
