 He talked about the anxiety people have of public speaking and I'm looking at my eye watch and my heartbeat is going up and up and up and I think I should have floated earlier this morning but it's surreal to be here today because three years ago 2015 I was here thinking wow I want to start a float center and to be up here talking about it is really just just amazing so I wanted to thank Ashconn and Graham for inviting me my talk is completely different than Justin's and it's all about the business side of the house and just that I understand who in here has already started their float center okay and who is starting a float center okay great so it very balanced in the room it definitely is an art in science right and when I talk about science I'm not talking about Justin science I mean he's he's definitely one up to me here following him is tough when you start talking about science but I'm talking about the math behind running a business so just to kind of level set for those of you that aren't familiar with float 60 we are based in downtown Chicago our first center was floats 60 River North we've been open about two and a half years we have five tanks we have a meditation room and we also do VR we open February 2016 so that was about nine months from the first time I ever floated and that's how profound floating was on my life very fast the second location we just opened about four months ago and that's float 60 Northwest Indiana and for those of you that don't know Chicago geography it's very close to Chicago even though we are treated like foreign citizens from Chicago people it's about 45 minutes south of my first location four tanks there cryotherapy retail and like I said we just open in March the last one here also definitely jumps my heart rate up I've been working on this one for two years and that's the one that's about to open in five weeks or so and that's float 60 South Loop which is also in downtown Chicago six tanks meditation VR studio infrared sauna cryo and retail so that gives you kind of a little bit of an understanding about how we we go to market we've got a little bit of a combination of different modalities so my team is very significant in my operation and I know a lot of us here run our own float centers and actually do every single job that needs to be done in the float center which is amazing and very admirable but my approach from the beginning as I did have a different profession up until about four months ago I have this amazing team and right in the middle here is my family in fact my husband and my son are here where are you anyway oh good they are here actually and then my son is actually working for float 60 he is he just finished the internship program and then I have the beautiful woman on the right there Lisa Martin Lisa right here down here she is the glue that holds float 60 together would not be able to do what we do without her so from the beginning I took the approach that I needed to have key people in place from the from the start so that I could continue to do things and continue to be very strategic in the business and then you could see all of our our other folks we have about nine people at the Indiana location we have about 10 or 11 people at the Chicago location and the idea is to kind of pull those people over all three locations eventually and then if you see that the dog in the middle that is Lola she is a free resource for marketing she's a great resource for marketing she comes to all of our events so as you can see the point is these people are artists and science scientists in the sense that you have to have an art about you to work in a float center you're dealing with very volatile situations very sensitive people so you really have to understand how to adapt your personalities to accommodate these different guests from a science perspective water calculations tank chemistry we are chemists we are actually doing things very strategically very methodically to make sure everything sanitized and in perfect for every guest that comes in so very big part of the business so what I'm gonna do is kind of walk you through the business plan these were our kind of startup projections and for those of you that have not invested in the float tank solution business plan and again they do not pay me I say this all the time but they really provide great resources my business plan and my startup costs were definitely put together through resources and some other things related to the business plan from float tank solutions so first location I have a hybrid of different tanks I do nothing easy I have all different manufacturers that I work with we have three wave rooms a float pod and a Samadhi tank and the reason why I picked a Samadhi tank it is my personal favorite and people in Chicago have that have ever floated or if anybody has visited Chicago and has gone to space time tanks that's what they're used to floating in so from a budget perspective I allocated about 25k per per unit a little bit less for the Samadhi for the build out I said okay based on everything I learned from my apprentice program I'm gonna budget about 50k per room and that should cover other things including the lobby and whatnot so those numbers are never right so whoever's in this stage right now add 20% like no joke okay because everything will go wrong it's it's true but if you if you kind of look at this overall I added some contingency working capital is very important especially if you're going to a bank for a loan do not shortchange and you know just skim yourself so tight that you can't operate so five tank float center in Chicago I said 450k okay that should give you a good guideline now the most important part is the revenue projections so when you're building your float center you have to have a plan and I know everybody in here does we're all very very smart people that you know expect that this is a business and not just a hobby and if it is a hobby that's great but if it is going to be treated like a business there are some you know strict guidelines that I would say I followed in my methodology so I looked at capacity how many tanks do I have how many floats can I do a day a week a month okay so capacity is the maximum we can do with that floating modality so that was about 980 a month or 35 floats a day from a revenue perspective we charge about six we look to get about $60 per float that that makes us comfortable in terms of our business plan so the maximum we could make with floating alone based on that capacity was about 20 hundred $2100 a day 40 14,000 a week or about 58,000 a month so then the reality comes in okay that's your capacity the occupancy is you know whatever you think you can do to fill those tanks and to what level so I picked the number 66 percent I felt that that would be a good start you know we have a big pool of people in Chicago so I anticipated about 23 floats a day and about a hundred and sixteen weeks 647 you get you get the idea so in terms of revenue that comes out to be about thirty eight thousand dollars a month 39 and then I also have retail I factored in about a buck or two per person for retail knowing that most people won't buy anything but if they do you might spend you know 30 or 40 bucks a ticket selling various things from salts on it products whatever whatever you choose so overall with that 450k investment the overall capital or the overall revenue that you could anticipate is about a half a million dollars added in some gift cards too okay so this is where the big reality check is for me and again this is our plan okay none of this is our actuals so this is what I went with in terms of just studying business knowing business over the years there's three major things especially if you're not going to run the float center yourself your labor your rent and your marketing I don't know about you but any of these numbers scare you a little bit or do they look right to you me or did they seem high does it anybody startled by those numbers hi what's that make more for labor okay yeah I mean it's it's definitely the three dynamics that for us are the biggest investment and I I find just in consulting and working with folks that you know maybe the marketing is something you add on later but let's just take a look at it a healthy business service business over you know multiple industries they say about 30% should be allocated towards labor rent Chicago's a different dynamic I envy those of you that are not in big cities you can get so much real estate it's so awesome but we have a you know pretty high so about 12% of that 500k or you know 60 grand a year and for marketing this this number and I'm a marketer so I I definitely lean on spending money towards marketing but when you're a startup they say that you should spend anywhere between 10 and 12% of your top line revenue towards marketing I don't know many people who do this I basically do a lot of the marketing myself so I save a little bit here but I've compensated in other areas that we'll talk about so when you look at that and you look at that monthly number that should give you some kind of perspective as to what normal businesses that sustain over time would actually pan out to be so going back to that marketing number what I wanted to do today is kind of break things down there's definitely an art and science to kind of knowing how to spend those dollars as you think about your monthly spend and so I broke it down into five categories advertising and promotions experience the actual experience inside your float center so that's an investment that's a marketing expense to social relationships partnerships and community and then my something that's near and dear to my heart coming from data and analytics is data and management so just to break these down and by the way thank you Justin for mentioning the Cubs we love the Cubs that that was our ad in the I think it was the day they announced David Ross's retirement we had an ad there you could see it very proud of my Cubs so advertising and promotions definitely an art and science art being you have to have good content right public relations and comprehensive branding something we really invested in that I kind of lump into that category then we've got the experience and content so definitely more art here your guests this picture here that I'm showing your guests actually provide great content in terms of arts and you know sharing experiences whether it's through storytelling testimonials I definitely lump that into the art category the other thing that we invest in is something we called service recovery so when we have a situation inside our studio where something isn't quite perfect or we feel that the float could have been a little bit better whether it was really our fault or theirs we'll go ahead and comp somebody's flow so there's there's an art to kind of understanding when and how to to do that to make sure the customer leaves wanting to come back and certainly refer other people then you've got social and relationships I find just working with different businesses that a lot of people take would take this $5,000 right that we're talking about a month and lump it right into this category so many people are spending significant dollars on Facebook ads which is very effective wildly successful but there are other things that you know you want to kind of spread your dollars across so social media of course all channels I'm talking about here influencer marketing is something that we're recently investing in that's more of a manual process we're not looking at tools or technologies for that yet but they're definitely some out there and then we invest very heavily into the referral programs so we have a different referral program for our members then we do regular customers and we really feel that most of you know this once a customer tries your experience and they love it they share right so putting a system in a process behind making that automated is very very powerful some of the tools that we use we use tell them there's a very easy way to actually do this within the software you use already so very important in terms of social and relationships that's probably where most of the budget goes when I look at it across the board this fourth category I talked about this yesterday in the marketing forum we were talking about them the membership drives we invest a significant amount of resources in partnerships and community building so we actually have brand ambassadors that are part of that labor number that 30% you know this is including this position these people that go out in the community and go from door-to-door I mean we're talking feet on the street people going business to business and building relationships and we kind of formalize that with offering our members offers to their businesses and we have reciprocity there so we invest in that through resources in people that's big part of our labor and then finally I said this was near and dear to my heart data and management the science behind managing your database so for those of you that haven't started your float center yet are you already collecting emails somehow through like a landing page or something like that can I see a show hands that's not enough people definitely need to do this the sooner you can get ahead of collecting customer data the better off you're gonna be over the last two and a half years we've been super aggressive to this I drive Lisa crazy with this every event we go to we really try to collect emails in fact at the end of this presentation I'm gonna give you a chance to give me have you give me your email to I'm sure you're excited about that we have a little giveaway but what we want to do with that is nurture your existing customer base so much of our activities that I see are around customer acquisition and not necessarily reinvesting your efforts into your existing customer base we kind of think okay they've been here they love us they'll come back but there's a huge opportunity to kind of drive that one incremental visit by doing more effort around retaining the existing customers you have so when I say database that could be an Excel spreadsheet it could be you know float helm mind body whatever you're using some are much better than others you want to have complete control over that data there's a lot of third-party companies out there be very careful about letting other people control your email your database that is your intellectual property that you definitely want to keep control over right from the beginning CRM relates to customer relationship management so that can be done in terms of a tool this is where the technology comes in we really don't need to invest in really robust CRM systems here we really can keep it pretty simple I mean even using MailChimp or constant contact yes that's an email tool but it's a CRM tool so you want to have something that's allowing you to manage the different customers you have and allow you to target them differently so that's what I refer to there and that's really what the last piece is segmentation personalization we have an intake form that we use it's kind of like a waiver intake form we ask a bunch of questions like what do you want to get out of floating sleep improvement anxiety reduction you know just the laundry list of things we ask we don't do a good job of then segmenting our content around those questions these people have shared all this information with us and I believe most of them are hoping that somebody's looking at it at some point but we don't so I'm looking at myself going out you know I've been working in marketing for 20 some years working in data and I don't even do this so I'm embarrassed by that right so this is kind of a 2.0 float 60 effort Lisa you're taking notes on this right this is this is our next thing right we really want to focus on segmenting this database if you have 20,000 people in your database there should be different buckets that they fall in and then you can personalize not not to the person but to at least their interest of why they're there to float and then this content that we have like this this information from Justin I'm sitting over here in the back just in addition to watching my heart rate go up I'm thinking oh my gosh this is so powerful in terms of content right if we could kind of segment our database by people who do have anxiety and share one or two of these a month it's just it's just so it's such a powerful thing that's so much more than doing a social media ad right so that's that's going to be a big focus for us so the last point on this slide is customer acquisition versus customer retention and I've talked about this on a couple podcasts so forgive me if you've already heard me say this but we have two different types of float centers at float 60 we have an urban footprint right in the city that the two locations in the city and then we have a suburban right the Indiana location is much more of a bedroom community is what they refer to it as and the way we're having to market is much different so in the city of Chicago or New York City or wherever your center is in a big city you have such a pool of new blood coming to your float center all the time right so focusing on customers acquisition often and regularly makes total sense you should do it anyway but what I'm saying is focusing more on customer acquisition makes sense in a suburban location focusing on customer retention I think is tenfold even more important it doesn't mean the other one goes away right we never want to not do customer acquisition but nurturing the people have that have already come in becomes much more important because you only have so many people to pull from so these retention strategies the segmentation and personalization I believe becomes much more impactful and critical to sustain your business over time you know unfortunately the reality of you know growing businesses is there's going to be a lot of growth at one time and then over time people will kind of drop off just because they might not be religiously staying disciplined in these these different things or they might be burned out if they're doing everything themselves so this to me is it is a key thing if you think about your float center right now are you in a fixed geographical area where there's only so many people to pull from or are you in a place where you're constantly going to get fresh blood like Chicago and you have to kind of modify your strategies accordingly so I'm not sure how much time I think I'm close but as far as acquisition and retention I just wanted to touch on this one more time from a membership perspective the retention part I believe is membership right because you're you're trying to get a customer to convert and commit to you to be loyal and so our membership strategy has been very significant to us over the last couple of years we are now laser focused on building value for our members that goes beyond a discounted float price we try to do things like upgrade to 90 minutes in you know in Chicago I know this is a big debate in the industry but we are float 60 because people float for 60 minutes in Chicago normally we'd love for them to float for 90 but people are resistant so 90 minute floats for members are free right there's so it's a value add for our memberships we give a free birthday float that's pretty normal we also have prioritized scheduling so coming from the hotel industry we had so many hotel rooms and we had to block some rooms for VIPs and I take the same approach with managing the capacity of my float center we'll block off a couple floats here and there because we do fill up on the weekends so we call them VIP blocks that way a member can always call and usually find a space and then usually the day of will will release them so that we can you know make sure we're full all the time we also do favored nation pricing for members meaning that the member will always get the best deal better than any package or promotion so that's included in it but the real significant thing here and it goes back to the partnerships and community art and science is those brand ambassadors I talked about this map here represents kind of a cross section of the partnerships we've developed in Chicago this is a very labor intensive exercise it looks easy that we you know we built this map but each one of these little pots is one of our partners that we've actually built a relationship with we have our brand ambassador to set up a program where we give their their members benefits at float 60 or maybe they give us benefits so it's a really great reciprocal beneficial it's like it's a three-way mutually beneficial relationship so I really encourage people to do this because I think it's goodwill for the community and it's just it's great all all around so this is something that we're really going to be focusing on more and more okay I promised in the bio or the talk overview that I talk about my favorite tools so I am like a I don't know how many apps I have on my phone I know I have 83,000 emails but I have more apps I guarantee than anybody in this room and it's a sickness really it is I have that shiny toy addiction so I'm always trying different apps that's just my in my blood again I drive Lisa crazy because I she's not a technologist and I'm always imposing this on her you have to be careful but these are the favorite tools for those of you that are just starting I know there's a couple of my consulting clients in here where I've stressed you get quick books or whatever accounting system you want to get get it now I don't care if you're just starting like five minutes ago get it now because you need to put this conference in your quick books you need to put the travel in your quick books and they make it so easy it's right on your phone you can integrate it to your bank account you can do your accounting right from your mobile phone by the way most of my business is run right from my iPhone and that's why these tools are really important so Sprout social is kind of a listening social media app where you can in one place pay a subscription to monitor all of your channels to see if people are mentioning you so you're not hunting and pecking like I've been doing the last three years this is a very good tool to you know really just optimize your your work Mailchimp I think we all know what that is Google Drive duh right I mean if we're not using Dropbox or Google Drive to share documents with our accountants or partners I mean it's just like a no-brainer Google Analytics so much power in analyzing the website traffic that you have and I could talk another hour about website but we're not going to do that today definitely just use the tools you don't have to be a data scientist these days they make it pretty easy to have you like get a handle on your numbers really comfortably I'm going to mention Grasshopper on the side I was talking to somebody at the bar last night and my phone was ringing it was an overflow call that went to the studios that then comes to my phone so anywhere I am I'm able to answer the phone from any three of my locations because of this Grasshopper app and there's other ones out there but this is the one we use it basically rings at the physical location that you have and then overflows to whoever's on call which is you know usually me LinkedIn I'm mentioning this because this is how you develop your community relationships go out reach out to the businesses find out who's managing what find the right resources and make connections with those people it's very very powerful for us and then slack who uses slack in here yeah see I told you so slack in again I love float helm but the float helm with multiple locations there's just a couple limitations that I'm sure Ian and the magic wizards will eventually add to their to their functionality but slack is great for when you have multiple locations or you're working with partners to have communications kind of in an organized way so it gives you different channels if you will that are topics you can have a marketing channel you can have a manufacturer channel and it's just a great way for us to kind of keep track of things most importantly my vision for using slack is to make all of our employees feel as there's 29 of them now want them to feel like they're part of one team and slack really enables us to do that so I'm happy to go in I'd love to show you my phone upstairs you really will freak out you see how many I have there's there's a lot of great tools out there that I'm happy to talk about and with that okay this is the last one I told you everywhere we go we collect people's information I promise in here you're not going to get an email we're literally giving away a gift card and I'm doing this just so that you understand how we do it with our customers alright so I have a hundred dollar gift card and I'm going to give it away upstairs I just want you to go to this website it's our way of building traffic float 60.com slash promo just fill out that little form and imagine you're a you're a prospect for your float center okay put your mind around this being your float center you're at an event or you're out at a bar or you're at a restaurant and somebody asks you about what you do you just click on this home page from your phone and hand them your phone they'll put their information in now you have captured their information from wherever you are it does not have to be fancy it's like four fields on the back end I'm collecting emails left and right so when we go out and do these wellness fairs or these you know different community events I'm now monitoring in the back end okay we collected 50 emails here we collected 60 we collected zero so this is this is how we build our business and you know probably we're at like 24,000 people in our database over two years that's to me a very exciting metric so go ahead and get your phone out I know sounds crazy right all of you get your phone out no only if you want to while you're doing that in the background I want to show you does anybody have you seen the slide before this logo slide you're supposed to not see it the point of this slide is this is called a MarTech slide this is a 2018 MarTech marketing technology slide representing marketing companies that are hot right now not all of them these are just the ones that are recognized by this company they're they're categorized by advertising and promotion content and experience social memberships e-commerce and sales data and then management anybody who tells you they're a marketing expert they're full of it nobody can be a marketing expert in today's world so the point of this is you're gonna need help understanding what's out there we keep it simple don't try to do it all yourself hire people who are subject matter experts in each of these categories versus just generalists because there's a there's a lot out there so yeah you went ahead and signed up we will be answering questions upstairs and I think I'm out of time so thank you very much