When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115

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.

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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.

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