 Hi everybody, my name is Dylan, I'm Sandra, and we're with the Float Shop. We agreed not to do that. So we're here to tell you what it is that we do at the Float Shop as what we consider an integrative wellness center founded on flotation therapy. We've been open since 2011. We started with two float tanks, so we added a third float tank, added massage and acupuncture and soon we'll be integrating counseling as well. Just a word to all of you out there opening float centers, this will happen to you. It's not just float on, you will grow crazy mustache and ladies, you're not excluded. She grew a cat beard. What is a wellness center? Well, a wellness center is a welcoming therapeutic space where people may find multiple resources for their attainment of health and wellness by whatever means it is that they define it. Benefits of a wellness center include a wonderful environment that welcomes people to join you in what it is that you offer, in which multiple people exist to facilitate that healing process for you. One of the things that we offer is massage in combination with floating. And just a few notes on ways to combine this. We found that with people coming in talking about conditions of different sorts of psychological over activation such as anxiety, insomnia, sometimes PTSD, fear of water, that having a massage before a float does tremendous things to help facilitate their transition into that deep state of relaxation. And as they come to know that deep state of relaxation, it'll be more accessible to them in the future and they will be able perhaps to develop that neural network as we've talked about. So if you have a float before your massage, that provides your body with that wonderful weightless environment and rinses all your muscles with magnesium, which is just a wonderful natural muscle relaxant. Taking that then into a massage allows the massage therapist greater access to all of those things that may be happening in your body that are holding your muscles tight. We have two clients who recently have used floating in combination with massage in the treatment of whiplash injuries from motor vehicle accidents. We're always wondering how we're going to fit into this medical system. And one of the ways that we've seen so far is that massage is often covered. So their massages have been covered by the other people's motor vehicle insurance. Floating isn't, but they're still seeking us out. It's an important part for us to research, I think, maybe a good entry. And so now we can go on to acupuncture. So floating and acupuncture is a really interesting combination. I'd like to tell you just a tiny intro to acupuncture and Chinese medicine first. For those of you who aren't necessarily familiar with it, Chinese medicine utilizes a perspective of the body as an energetic system through which energy flows in certain meridians. And acupuncture points, access points along those meridians to facilitate the continued flow, release energy from one area to another, to cause everything to be more imbalanced. And after an acupuncture session, which are very relaxing, and I've fallen asleep during every one I've had, it is recommended that a person take that shift in energetics and rest so that it may take hold. What better place to do that than a float tank? Also, just before, I mean at, you know, 245, I received a response to a call to our clients for just a little thing that we might say. And it was just so perfectly poetic that I'd actually like to read it to you. So this is from Janelle, who is a treasured client of ours. And she's been to us countless times since we've been open and was very happy about the acupuncture. So she says, I've been an avid floater since 2005, but only recently began combining floats with other wellness services, including massage and acupuncture. There is something intentional and quieting about acupuncture that allows me to go deeper than usual in my floats. I enter into stillness faster, and whatever has been set in motion prior to the float integrates at a deeper level, because that's what floating does. It takes whatever you bring into the tank, clears and integrates it gently into your life. So imagine what we call the spacewalk, which is a 90-minute massage and acupuncture session and a float, depending on how you want that ordered. It's just amazing. It's six hours of incredible time with us and one of my favorite things that we do. So now Dylan's going to describe a bit about how this all works together. Oh, and then I'll talk with you about our future. Thank you. Last year I got asked the question a lot when talking about having multiple modalities if we make more money based on having massage and acupuncture. By the way, I'm messing up too. I'm going to just go over some of the more business-y parts of it as she's talked about how they combine and the benefits. So just the short answer is no, you don't make more money. If you're doing an exclusive float center, that's a good idea. You will make more money that way. If you charge X amount, no matter how much you charge for the other modalities per hour, if you are maxed out, you're pretty much always going to be making more money with float tanks. So then why the heck would you want to have a wellness center? Like, we do. There are a lot of reasons. There are financial benefits and there are spiritual benefits. One is simply feeding your passions. It's not just about your bank account. We're not all here because we want to get rich quick. We are passionate about health. Excuse me, not health. Wellness and health. Sweet. So you want to feed your passions. So we're all passionate about float tanks if you're also passionate about massage therapy, acupuncture, counseling, any other treatment, then you can also have that in your center. It can work well and feed your soul. You can increase the overall wellness of your clients. Floating has their benefits and so does massage, so does acupuncture. Combining the model in the same center means that you're able to treat them from different angles and there's some synergy there as well. There are also some real pragmatic reasons. If you have a room in your building that's too small for a float tank, put a massage table in there. If it's too small for a massage table, it might work for acupuncture. If it's too small for all those, it could be great for counseling, which is what we're doing with our smallest room. So you can work with your space. Sometimes it's simply about what works physically. Also financially, float tanks cost a little bit of money. So sometimes you don't always have the funds right away. Open with two float tanks, expand with or and float, excuse me, and have massage, have acupuncture, have these other modalities that are cheaper to enter your business with. Also differentiate yourself from your competition. We started out with competition who did floats really, really well. I forget the name, what are they up to? Okay, yeah. Anyway, so we decided we can either compete with them directly or we can try to have something that makes us stand out. And it's just, naturally, goes with what we believe in anyways with having these other modalities. It just, it does feed us. So being able to differentiate yourself so that if a customer knows of these two places, they immediately know what the advantage is to your business is quite nice. A single client can access more in one day, which means you can make more money per client when they come in on a single day. If a person goes in for a single float, they spend X amount of money. If they come in and spend X amount on a float plus Y on a massage plus Z on acupuncture, you've made more money from that single person as they've come in. So mathematically, if you're completely maxed out, it does lend itself to floating. If you're not completely maxed out, or again, if you have these extra rooms, you can have supplemental income. And really, I would say it's more than just supplemental income. Long-term benefits are there as well. Some more spiritual reasons are that you can. It can lend itself to developing stronger connections with clients. And you're gonna have strong connections with your clients no matter what. It's awesome running a float center. You're gonna have more people talking with them and spending more time connecting with them with your massage therapist and with the other modalities you offer. You're simply naturally gonna, it's gonna feed itself to have deeper connections. And it's more of a home. It's a place to go to that you really do feel at home. You also have clients who are on a regimen for massage. If I tell somebody they should float twice a week, or excuse me, twice a month, or four times a month, it has a certain amount of weight because I float and I know what I'm talking about. But I don't have a license behind what I'm doing. If there's a massage therapist saying you should have a massage twice a month or once a month, they're more likely to come in more often. They're spending more time in your business and they're more likely to float. Similarly, practitioners are gonna be talking about floating, all of our practitioners float. They all love it and they talk about it. So we don't require it of them. It happens naturally. Clients are walking into the float shop. They wanna know what floating is. So they ask about it and they have the answers, which is cool. Also, you get to have a balanced business. I almost didn't wanna include this in the slide because it's a really scary idea that at some point, the interest could wane. Something could happen so that float tanks aren't able to exist in the States for whatever reason. If you have more legs on a table, you're simply gonna be more financially stable if something ever happens. The flip side to that is that if you only have floats and floating continues to go on the trend that it's on, then you do have access to more money, most likely with simply float tanks. Yes, and I wanted to add to that two small points that we value, and that's that we have something to offer all of the practitioners who work with us. Oftentimes we end up utilizing each other's services because we support the wellness of everybody who works together with us. And so we can say, please do get in the float tank. Go ahead, it's open right now. And they've utilized that and it's been tremendously helpful to them. And yeah, sorry, go on. Thank you. I'm gonna briefly go over some technical things, just that there are technical things that go along with not just having a float center but other modalities, including scheduling. That's something you need to do very tightly and you need to educate yourself on how to do that. We found that there are materials that you need, physical things like rogue, et cetera, that make transitions easier, educating the clients, your staff, et cetera, intake forms, privacy practices. There are also challenges. Again, there's the money issue, if you wanna consider an issue. Educating potential clients can be a challenge because if I simply have a float center, I simply need to tell you what floating is. If I'm marketing towards an audience and I need to tell you what floating is and what massage is and acupuncture and how they combine with each other, a 30 second elevator speech is difficult enough just with floating. So adding all of that in means a lot more work. With our print advertising, we started, I think, two months ago. We haven't even mentioned that we have other modalities. We're just trying to get the information across that we exist as a float center. So that's interesting. There's more to handle overall and there's also a larger margin for error because there's so much with scheduling and all the maintenance involved with that. There's a larger chance of messing up and decreasing the positive experience of your visitor. Because there is so much to cover, we decided, well, I run a blog called theartoffloating.com. I encourage you all to check it out. It's a blog I started also a few months ago that is simply about starting, running and refining your float center. I'm just getting started. There's so much information and I hope you all join me on theartoffloating.com. It's been really fun and cathartic. And also, today we probably automatically posted just a few minutes ago. Everything that we've covered today, if you are interested in more modalities, there's a lot of technical information that you can find there and we're actually gonna have a second post on the same thing. So what's up for us next? As we become more and more the wellness center that we hope to be is to integrate counseling with flotation therapy. Here in the audience we have David Ryan who's going to be working with us soon. He is a wonderful counselor and we're very happy to have him. Also, we have Dr. Sarah Voris who's going to be joining us. And also, in the space right next door to the float shop, we are opening a community center which will have regular yoga classes and other movement-based therapies as well as workshops that will integrate with floating and all kinds of really, really exciting things. So please follow along with us and we look forward to sharing this wonderful future with you all. Yeah, whoo, thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.