 Who's sticking around for the germs? Okay, that's me. If you like, if you don't know about Float 60, you can go ahead and use this little QR code. It'll tell you a little bit about us. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I know I've talked to a lot of people about who Float 60 is. But today I want to talk about buying and selling. And I mean buying and selling Float Centers, okay? Who here is in the building a Float Center stage, okay? I saw you back there, James. What about looking to possibly buy a Float Center, okay? Anyone else? All right, and then finally, is anybody thinking about their exit strategy? Really? Okay. What do I mean by that? Selling your Float Center, right? Is anybody like in three or four years and you're wondering, huh, how do I get out of this mess that I'm in? You know, sometimes it wears on us, right? And those feelings have to cross our mind. And the truth is, if you haven't thought about that, regardless of where you are in your journey, it's a good idea to start planning for it, right? So before I get into that, because this is going to be a very interactive session, I'm not going to get up here and speak about Float 60. I'm going to tell you a little bit about our journey with emojis up here. At the end, this is going to be interactive and I've been cut a little bit short. So hopefully we can continue conversations later. I want to tell you, for those that don't understand my story, gosh, it's been a freaking crazy journey, only illustrated by these crazy emojis. And keep in mind, I tried to pick these to represent what I was feeling most of the time, but obviously, you're feeling all kinds of emotions every day, right? So my story, for those that you don't know it, my first float was in a Samadhi tank, God bless Lee Perry, in 2015, and it changed my life. Why? Because I'm in corporate America. I'm still in corporate America. I don't sleep well. I was one of those overworked, overstressed people. Not that I'm not now, by the way, but I tried floating and it changed my life. I slept so hard the first night that I was so moved by this modality. I was like, wow, I need one of those in my house. And don't we all know that's a really bad idea, right? So that was 2015. By 2016, February, my first baby was born. It was nine months from the first float to when I opened the birth of Float 60 River North, which is in Chicago. That was kind of the first leg of the stool. So what emoji do I have there? I have excitement, right? It was a totally exciting time of my life. But there were times like I was like, whoa, we just unearthed this ground. What have I done, right? So you're fearful, right? You're excited, but it's all new. So we operated for about a year and a half, and we were very busy. And I was already thinking, wow, we have five float tanks. Chicago's pretty big. It's probably a good idea to open another one. So I started planning that. And then my second one was open in March of 2018 in my town of Sherrill, Indiana. I'm from Northwest Indiana. I'll show you a map in a second. And so that was pretty, pretty fast. But at the same time, that wasn't supposed to be my second center. I had a second Chicago center that almost became the death of me, the Chicago South Loop location. So I had two locations opening that year at the same time. Never a good idea, by the way. Has anybody done that? OK, I'm glad you guys aren't nuts. So then 2018, that South Loop opened. And then I used this very expressive poop emoji for 2020. So yeah, I mean, we all know we've all been there. But literally, one of the problems we had in my South Loop location, aside from all of the obvious COVID stuff, was we had a sewage problem. So it literally was a poop emoji. So I'm not going to get into all of the details of that. But I ended up making the very difficult decision to let that location go. And for those of you who have built a float center, that is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. So that's my closing story, OK? But then I kind of shifted and there were some opportunities to look at some locations that may have already been kind of looking for their exit strategy, not necessarily going out of business. And so the acquired epic float happened in March of 2020. What's wrong with that date? March 1st, 2020, acquiring a new location. Yeah, OK. So poop emoji insert here. And then just recently, I acquired Theta State float. So just from a geography perspective, this is just the tip of the southern part of Lake Michigan. So my locations today, which you'll see five dots, but I only have four open, are my locations, all right? And then this little image in the corner shows you like a little blown out. Most people think Indiana is like in another country, but it's just over the state line. OK, so who again is like looking to build? OK, and then we have somebody over here too, right? OK, so what I wanted to do today, I'm going to put this clicker down. This is basically the last slide. I want to just open up a dialogue. And Gabrielle, my new manager, if you haven't met her, let's give Gabrielle a round of applause here. I've introduced her as our angel. I want to kind of open a dialogue, and that's why this chair is here, because I'm going to sit and we're going to have a little chat. So I want to talk about like the advantages of looking at building right now versus buying. OK, you don't see four sales signs on float centers much, but I guarantee there's people in the industry right now who want to sell and they don't know how, OK? Uncomfortable conversation kind of, right? So I'm going to pick on you, Michael, just for fun. Do you want to give him the mic? So you just acquired a location. Can you kind of talk about like what you looked at in terms of due diligence for your acquisition of float brothers? Yes, so this is kind of an exciting story and I didn't get to talk about. Keep it short. We only have seven minutes for everyone. So you get 30, you get 30 seconds, 90 seconds, 30 seconds. So I had already gone through the architecture and was trying to build with a partner, a float center in Fort Myers where I was living, which gave me an introduction to the float collective, which gave me the information. So I had been a year and a half, two years of due diligence, of money down deposits made, architectures paid. And from that due diligence and coming from the background of my vision of what the sweat lodge gave me, there was so much work done to get to the point of the starting point of float brothers ending point. And you guys follow all that? I'm so grateful. Well, I'm just I'm so grateful for the failure of a year and a half of work to understand the industry, ask a ton of questions. And from failure, you can learn so much. Yes, and you didn't have to experience that yourself. So I bring this up because I know, personally, being someone who's acquired two float locations, somehow like float 60 is thought of as, oh, they must be just going out and buying all these locations. That's not our strategy, by the way. So we have plenty to do. We're good. But I get these emails and so people are looking to kind of feel us out in terms of buying locations. So again, that tells me I know there's a lot of people out there who might be thinking about selling. And I want to talk about like what I look for. And you know what I was hoping like maybe we can talk more about this with you, Michael, when you acquire a float center, you you're looking at several factors. Personally, I look at what is their existing rating? Like are they five stars? Are they three stars? Like are they already respected? We don't want to like go in and take over a space that everybody disliked, right? We want to start a float 60 foundation with a good foundation already. And you know, I look at things like how many customers are on the database? How many emails do they have? How many memberships do they have? Do they have recurring revenue, right? Those are really good buying indicators. But the first thing I always ask is can you go under NDA with me and share your financials, share your asset list. So in my little post to tease for you to come to this meeting, I said, hashtag get your ass at lists together. Have an asset list as a minimum, right? Like if you don't have a list of everything in your float center, that's like a red flag to me. Because, you know, we need to kind of quantify what you have, right? Now for me and when I look, I'm already thinking, can that place be a float 60? I don't want to take on another person's brand, which again, makes you interesting because maybe you had ideas of creating your own brand, but you realize float brothers had a good presence. You made the decision to keep it that way, right? So those are kind of some of the things I look for. So again, for people who you don't have to raise your hand, in fact, everybody close their eyes. So you can't see who's raising their hand. Is there anybody that like kind of wants to feel out a discussion about selling just so that I know, hey, there's a couple of hands raised. Don't look, don't look. But yes, so I wanted to talk to those people and maybe you're not there yet, but someday you will be, right? You're either going to close or sell at some point, right? There's only four options, building, buying, selling, closing, right? So when you're selling, having that financial order in place, having a CPA or a bookkeeper where you feel really confident that your numbers are good, you want to have that before you think about selling, right? Before you have to sell or have to close. So that's something like if there's the number one thing, just do that, right? So is there anybody who's thought about closing their center? Okay, I think there's a lot of people in the industry who are in that space right now. And again, this is why it's a tough conversation. But this is why I also encourage those that are looking to build, to approach centers that you respect in your area and just have a conversation. Like, what's your exit strategy? Are you interested in selling? Like, just start a dialogue with them. It's not comfortable, but I know that there's a lot of people out there. So let's chat about a couple more things. How many, we're good on time. When you go into a new market and you are thinking about starting a new business, what are some of the things that you guys look for? Like, I'll pick on you because you're looking, right? You want to give them the mic? And then we're going to take questions here in a second. I'm not going to pick on everybody, don't worry. So one of the first things we looked at was the traffic count of the location, what the demographic was, what the average household income was, what the likelihood of people willing to commute because our area has a lot of very heavy traffic. You could be two miles away, but if you're on the wrong two miles, they won't come to you. Yeah. We wanted to look at modalities that we thought would appeal to the particular audience that we are seeking to have them take up our services. I needed proximity to my preexisting brick and mortar so that I could go back and forth between the two. We were also particularly interested in a landlord that gave good concessions and had a rated retail space for us. So it was important to us that we had a landlord that was excited about us being there, not indifferent to us being there. So those were our main criteria in terms of location and initial launch. Got it. Can you bring up an excellent point about the landlords and the lease type? One of the other things we look at as we're evaluating opportunities is what is the duration of the lease? What are the extension terms? Like anybody in this room who has an existing lease, you're probably thinking about, do I extend? Do I renew? That's when the closing selling dialogue starts going on in your mind, right? It's like you are up at night going, oh, should I keep doing this or not? And so that's a very important thing as a buyer that I look forward to when I'm looking at a potential acquisition. So anybody else who else in the back was looking for additional locations or I guess, OK, can you talk a little bit about what you might be looking for? The mic's coming to you. Well, I did. So my second float center I actually acquired. One of the things for me and I was talking about this morning, I have a very specific way I want my life to look and my businesses to look. So that's a little bit different for me than it might be for other people in terms of like just looking hardcore at numbers because I've passed on a number of float centers where it was a great business opportunity from an income standpoint, but not a great choice for me in the Beth Jones movie, right? Like in figuring in where this goes. So there were things I had to say no to that that otherwise looked like solid business investments. Right. In the what I'm looking for standpoint again, like you were saying the asset list is massively important whether or not somebody has legit financial records and bookkeeping is massively important because I've talked to a lot of people in the last few years where I'm like, what are your numbers? And they're like, well, my rent is $2,000. I'm like, okay. Like what else? Yeah, let's keep going. Yeah. And so those things are important. Like Gloria is saying in terms of defining an exit strategy and just setting yourself up for success or if and when that day comes in the future, like just like any consumer, right? If Gloria is going to sell me a pack of gum, I'm going to ask her how much it is. And then I want to know the things. Well, how many pieces of gum are in the pack, right? Don't chew them all at once. Did you guys hear the memorial? That was really cute. So those, there's a lot to that. For me, it's numbers, obviously, like just that there's a viable actual functioning business, what the issues are and whether or not those are issues that I personally special, if they're in my wheelhouse and overcoming those particular things. Study staffing, whether there's a staff in place at the very minimum for a transition or if I get real lucky they're on brand so I can kind of train them in the way we do things but I don't have to recreate that wheel. Yeah. On that note, Beth too, that's another thing that I personally look for because again, I don't work in my centers. I think most people have heard my story. I work full-time and so I have an amazing staff that has to execute so as I look at new locations, I definitely look to see is that center being run by one person? Now the two that I acquired were run by one person that in both scenarios they never had an employee so I was very nervous to take those steps to acquire those locations and I still am. That's one thing like back to the emoji slide. If there was a nervous emoji that would just be like all the time but having staff in place and having a succession plan for yourself if something happens to you is also a very critical part to your exit strategy and plan that I don't think we like to think about. It's kind of like writing your own will and it's not comfortable but as a buyer I like to see that there's an infrastructure in place for it to operate without the actual person who's selling it because that makes it much more attractive. So one of the other things that is super critical to me in terms of how I look at what the business feels like. I normally have looked at just the assets because I am going under the expectation that I'm going to change the brand, right? That's just been our strategy but if I were a buyer right now or a builder I would be considering like if I'm looking at a float center I'd look at their web presence, their SEO, their digital footprint, right? Their personality online. You want to make sure you understand not only the reputation I mentioned in the beginning but just what infrastructure are you gonna have to put in place versus like stepping in and taking over, right? So I'm sure that was another consideration for you in keeping the float brothers brand because they have such an amazing online presence, right? So those are the things as if I was selling right now or thinking about putting myself on the market I would start to catalog all those things. So assets are one thing, physical assets, what tanks, what stuff do you have in your space but think of your digital assets as well and your intellectual property. Those are really tangible things that you know again not for me because I'm going to try to put everything under the float 60 umbrella but for others that's a big consideration. So I'd like to also understand existing float center hold owners, who are you? Okay, there's tons, that should be the majority. How many of you want to scale to multiple locations? Okay, okay, yes, yes, yes. Okay, let's talk about how hard that is because I think like it sounds really easy and you think you're going to have economies of scale and you do, but I think in my last year's talk I was the teaser for the virtual and I talked about like going from one to two was really, really game changing, right? Then two to four was a little bit easier in terms of like kicking off the business but the one to two changes everything. Who uses helm? Okay, good, they're really good at this stuff, right? I've driven them crazy making like multiple float center access, right? So when you have two locations, I'm just planning these seeds, think about how, number one, you're going to structure that from a corporation standpoint. Usually you're going to have multiple LLCs but if you're going to have a model where you have a membership that can be used at multiple locations, you have to have the infrastructure in place to understand that location one might have been paid as a member and they're going to go to location two. Now that means on paper that location one owes location two money, right? And true rest I know is in the room. I would love to sit down and understand like how you guys work all that out because it's a very complicated accounting problem, right? And it really, it becomes a problem with two. I can't imagine like how many true rest are there? Like that's got to be like a freaking nightmare. Yeah, so that's like next level but it's a consideration that you don't think about. And so one other thing that I also look at when I'm posed with an opportunity because we're not actively seeking this out is how many existing credits does this potential seller have outstanding? How many existing gift cards does this potential seller have outstanding? How many existing group bonds does this person have outstanding? Because guess what? Those customers who have paid for those from AKA Epic Float expect that they'll be able to use them and you are the evil devil if you don't accept them even though you never got the money. I can't tell you how many times I've had the conversation with customers because by the way, that was the location I acquired March of 2020 and my heart was huge and I was ready to accept everybody's credits like we'll just do it and then COVID happened. So six months later, I'm sitting here with 3000 credits. That's not an exaggeration. Be careful not to oversell, okay? Especially if you're selling. So I've got 3000 people expecting to use these credits for a two tank location that I'm not gonna see any money from, okay? So that's a very difficult decision to say, okay, now we did say we were gonna take them. It's been six months with COVID. We're not gonna do it now. I've had to have the conversation like this. Yes, it was a Burger King. Now it's a McDonald's. We both sell hamburgers but we have nothing to do with each other. I'm sorry that you bought the Burger King gift cards, right? You have to literally put it like that for people to understand and they still hate you. So that's another huge consideration when I bought the second location that I acquired the first thing I asked, how many outstanding credits do you have? So it was palatable enough that I was like, okay, I'm gonna deal with that. So we're dealing with that now. That was just in July. So we're still taking people's credits because guess what, if you don't, you're shooting your potential customers who already told you they wanted to float, you're shooting them and saying goodbye. You're blowing them out. So it's a tough, tough business decision. So that's just another consideration. All right, yes. Go ahead and give him the, thank you. I was just gonna say, if I understand correctly, Michael, you were going to build the center and then you ended up buying one, right? And you kept the brand, correct? Okay, so in that situation, it makes a lot of sense to try to make dues with, I mean, essentially you're looking at a balance sheet and credit liabilities on the liability side, but you're buying, just like you're buying their debt per se, you're buying their credit liability. And it would make a lot of sense to like, hey, take care of those customers because we're keeping the brand and we wanna keep that reputation. If you're coming in and you're saying, now float 60 owns this or whatever, it's a different building, different business. I mean, you don't necessarily need to stay married to those service credits, you know? At least that's kind of my take on it. Yeah, it's very situational. And I know we're, I'm getting like, beep, beep, you're over time. So I would love to continue dialogue about this. And I just thought it was important to kind of broach the topic because it's not comfortable to talk about, but we do get phone calls, we wanna have more dialogue about it, but just my personal own plan, I'm just sharing with you. I'm not giving anybody advice because I'm in no position to do so. Don't do what I did, that's what I'll tell you, is just get your financial house in order. Think about like, how many gift cards you're selling, what you're managing on your books, having that in a very organized, palatable way so that if you do leave for any emergency reason, maybe you find a killer opportunity and move out of the state and you wanna get rid of your float center, you have to tell a story in your financials. That's like the number one piece of advice. And I'll leave you with this. For those of you that did not go and experience the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit upstairs, I highly recommend it. This was one of the first things I saw when we walked into the exhibit. I also believe that it may happen that one succeeds and that one mustn't begin by despairing, even if one loses here and there, and even if one sometimes feels a sort of decline, the point is nevertheless to revive and have courage even though things don't always turn out as one first thought. This like spoke to me. I was like, oh my gosh, Van Gogh is speaking to me, right? Just kind of keep that in mind. There's, if you have multiple centers, you might have a couple losers and a couple winners, right? And you have to just kind of ebb and flow and put the structure in place to recover or pivot, if that's the case. And that's it, have a good one.