 If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together and collect wood and don't assign them tasks in work. But rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. There's Antoine de Saint-Uxpere, who's best known for writing The Little Prince. Which is one of my favorite books. And he achieved incredible popularity. His books were translated into over 250 different languages. And his first short novella that got published was in 1931. And he received immediate praise and went on to write novels that received some of the highest awards from both France and the United States. And of course he wrote his novella, The Little Prince. It's my favorite illustration from it, the Baobab tree. In Night Flight, his first novella, he wrote, even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there was something of higher value than human life. And he was a pilot. He disappeared on a flight and was never found, presumed to be dead when he was in his 40s, I believe. And I wanted to talk to you before I get started on my bigger presentation here. Just about the beauty of the idea of what we sell, which is nothing. And there's something really nice about that. Or a better way of putting it maybe is that you're selling direct access to yourself. You're selling consideration, like the other speakers talked about. You're selling relief from gravity, actual biological change. So my talk is going to be on the art of selling nothing. And for those of you who don't know me or are watching online from a video, my name is Graham Talley and I'm one of the founders of Float On. And I'm not going to talk too much right now about the state of the industry. A lot of speakers earlier covered how much it's growing, especially within the last few years and especially within the last six months. So you have a pretty good briefing for that. And what I am going to talk about is our own business. So per month right now, when we're not in crazy construction and closing down tanks, we've been running a thousand floats per month. So far, total, in the two years we've been open, we've done about 17,000 floats total. And the reason I don't have an exact number on that is because last night, when I was trying to look up our exact numbers, here was the error screen that I got from MindBody. More on that to come later. Our center offers a default of 90-minute floats and just a little aside here, a lot of this material I gave during the last two float conferences in both Sweden and down in San Francisco. So I'm going to breeze through a lot of this and hopefully that material will also be available online. But some of this will seem familiar to some of you guys. So thanks for bearing with me. So 90-minute minimum floats. We have two and a half hour late night floats and the longest float, you're able to string them together. So if you can put two floats together and get three and a half hours, three floats and get, what is that, five and a half hours. The longest float we've actually done in our shop is a 24-hour long float paid. And we run 22 to 24 hours a day, excluding Mondays. But we opened up some slots then too, because we just pretty much can't stay closed. We book up so far ahead of time the slots are at a premium. And we tend to book up about a week to a week and a half to two weeks in advance during the non-summer time. I've already talked extensively on a lot of the programs that we've run. But we did an art program where we gave two free floats to 150 artists in Portland. This is one of the first ones we launched with. And out of that we published our art book, which is available outside and artwork from The Void. It's a little sample piece. And we also did a music program where we gave musicians six free floats over the course of two weeks. And as a result of that we ended up with 27 tracks and three CDs worth of music. We launched a chef program recently. We have 22 chefs on board. We put it on hold a little bit for the conference insanity, so we'll be picking that one back up afterwards. And we'll be turning the recipes that they make, which are actually being served in restaurants around town into a floating cookbook. There's lots of other side projects as well that we've done. Smaller ones that aren't as big official programs. We have mixed martial arts athletes that we sponsor. We've run slam poets through the program. It's kind of an ongoing resident poet program. Illustrators and Animators is an ongoing project by one of our employees. And when we were doing primaries just recently, we also ran a politician program where we were floating politicians for free in exchange for interviews. Our intern program is perhaps the backbone of a lot of the things that we're able to accomplish and a lot of our organization. And it's also how we hire people after they come on and intern for us. It's the only place that we've drawn employees so far since we opened. And we go through an extensive training, which if you're curious about our internship program, I'm going to talk a little bit about it later and you can always ask any amount of questions. But we pull people up because after they've come on and interned with us for 20, for 40, for 60 hours, they know the ins and outs of the float tank and they know whether they want to be in the shop to begin with. And obviously they love floating because they've been trading 20 or 40 or 60 hours of their time in order to just be in the tanks. And it ensures that all of our employees are completely passionate about the tanks. And it's also our path to being an owner. So Jake Marty, who you guys have seen presenting earlier, I guess yesterday, Jake Marty started out as one of our earliest interns and we brought him on as our first employee and then our first full-time employee. And now he's actually a partial owner of Flodon as well. We also use our internship program as training for centers. A lot of people have come through from all over the country to come see how we run things and to intern with us for a little bit and find out the ins and outs of what actually goes into a float tank center. And another one that I hadn't talked about during my other presentations was how much this is actually a marketing strategy as well. And I think a really good one. It leads to education and to evangelism. And you end up with people who are so passionate about the tanks and who are so excited that you allow them to get in in exchange for time and for education. And the first thing they do is go out and tell everyone they know about the tanks. You can tell maybe by the customers who we brought up earlier today for those of you who were in the workshop for our customer panel the kind of effect that those things have. And so... I guess when we start presenting all of these things and you think about the fact that we've been in business for two years a lot of people ask us just how we get everything done and why we try to tackle so many projects. And all of this is despite in addition to the crazy construction we're doing right now adding on two extra tanks which will bring us up to a six tank center the largest in the US. And in addition to this conference that we're putting on which I didn't say it earlier but thank you all for coming out and it's just so exciting to see such a showing for an industry. Yeah, it's great to see it grow from the last conferences. And so in addition to all of this we're doing all of these other side projects as well. And my answer that I give people is that running and maintaining nothing is a lot of work. But it doesn't have to be miserable work. It really doesn't. And it can be as enjoyable as your free time. So I was getting ready for this talk and I was thinking back on a George Orwell essay that I had read while I was traveling in Paris actually and the essay was on travel which is very appropriate. And he was talking about the difference between work and vacation time and how unfortunate it is that we even have to have a distinction between the two and draw a line between working in vacation or working in time off or free time and business time because really we're just here and we exist. And what we do is what we're doing with our time. It's our vote towards the world. It's what we've decided is important to us. And so the idea that you need to take a vacation from that what are you taking a vacation from that you don't like so much? Why wouldn't we want to work on this all the time with each other? Why wouldn't we want to try to push this as far and as fast as we can? And I'm going to tell you how to make even more work for yourself. And then I'm going to tell you how to alleviate it. Whatever that means for you. And I'm going to tell you what it means for us as well. So it starts with something small. Just conversations and browsing around websites and finding out about floating. We sat down, and a lot of this we've talked about as well, but we sat down for an initial conversation over beer, me and Quinn and started talking about a floating experience he'd had down in California. And when I dragged him up to Portland he had a little bit set aside but didn't want to go into the housing market or anything so he was going really poorly and was thinking about starting up a small business. So we kind of talked and we started talking about his float that you'd had down in California and how awesome it was. And so we started looking up other places to float in our city. And that's where we found Christopher. And this is Christopher's original website for his floating place out of his apartment which this is also still up and live, by the way, due to disagreements with the host. So you can always go and view this kind of archive. We still get calls for the deep haven, actually. So it starts with something small, a first conversation and it starts with saying yes to things, just saying, hey, let's look into it and see. So we started going and floating and reviewing all the different places around the Northwest that we could find to float, which was not very many, maybe four, I think. And in the process of that is, once again, how we met Christopher. It's how we found out about the initial industry and the costs of it. It's how we found out what was going on with the tanks. And it's also how we found two of our ocean float rooms from calling a place down in Ashland that had just gone out of business. And so starting out for us didn't mean raising loans or trying to get investment or even writing a business plan. It just started with seeing what this was all about. And from there we decided to do some market validation, which involved talking to people and trying to get them into the tanks that were in Portland already and seeing just if people would actually go float. Like if we could sell them on it, essentially. So at parties, at social events, just our other friends, we'd call them up and be like, hey, this floating thing, you really got to go try it. And people did. They did go try it. And that was amazing. We got a 70-person mailing list before we'd ever invested any money except for four floats for ourselves. We had a 200-fan Facebook page just for our project and we'd written four different reviews as well. And so then from validation we went on to developing a minimum viable product. The smallest thing that we could do to prove that going further was worth it. And for us that was selling floats to Christopher's Float Center. So we didn't need to buy a tank to sell floats and to make just the tiniest bit of money and we were able to give a $5 discount to people to encourage them to go in. But what that showed is that we actually could figure out how to market these tanks and that we knew what to do to sell them. So we had our entire marketing strategy and our words down before we once again ever made a business investment. And then there was just at some point the courage, I guess. And all of you will face this too, especially ones who are just getting into this to say, okay, I've decided that this is worthwhile and I am just going to go for it. And that's when it starts to get crazy. So we thought we were just opening up a float center. And here's our opening day. As you can see, for those of you who are around, Martin Nancello was playing our opening, just like he was playing events this weekend. Here was our timeline for the first little bit. So it goes from our first float in April to opening in October, five months later, which was a really, really fast timeline. From then in January, I came on full-time, Quinn came on full-time, and then in April, we hired our first full-time employee, Jake Marty. What it looked like after that was a series of branches of things coming off. So we have both side projects and actual sub-LLCs of our business. And the way that our business is structured is so that any project that gets large enough that actually finds a following, there are people who want to get behind and end up doing it, and we do an actual separate business. So Cake is partly a sub-LLC of Float On. And same with our writing program to publish our art book. We started Write On, a publishing company. To launch our music CD, we filed for having an actual music publishing company as well, which is Theta State Records. Our artist network program is still a program right now. It's not a sub-business, but it is still very much its own entity, and the art shirts that you saw outside come from is people who float with us and who designed those t-shirts specifically for us. So starting from nothing, I guess the lesson to take away from this is neutral. It goes with anything. The tanks are really nothing. They're just an absence of distraction. So when you're looking at other projects that you want to get started, other things that you can branch out into, other areas that you can explore with floating, the potential is literally limitless. So in 200 BCE, to go back a little bit, acupuncture really came about. And there were 90 actual written works on acupuncture published between 200 BCE and 800 AD. Sorry, that was the wrong one. So so much so that the Emperor Renzong of Song ordered a brass statue made with acupuncture meridians on it for his kingdom, which is really crazy. It lost ground to herbalism as time went on, actually pretty much past 1200, which was thought to be more professional, the herbalism was. In 1822, the Emperor actually banned the use of acupuncture as unfit for gentlemen scholars. This was because of lack of experimentation, lack of scientific evidence, and as they were trying to transition after the Enlightenment era, they were having, they were trying to distance themselves from kind of superstition. This brings us up to 1972 when Nixon visited China and he watched a patient in surgery fully awake after getting acupuncture instead of anesthesia just displaying no sign of pain. It was later found out this was pretty much a hoax and that they chose someone with a really high pain tolerance to actually provide little morphine drips like they were concealed from viewers going under the table sometimes, which is really silly. There was also a journalist in 1971 who did a lot to bring the idea of acupuncture back to the States as well. So from 1972 and 1971 from that, the first legal acupuncture center opened in the U.S. in 1972 and it opened in Washington, D.C. 1973, acupuncture became deducted as a medical expense under insurance. In 97, there were thousands of practitioners and as of 2004 nearly half of Americans covered by their workers insurance had acupuncture covered as well. More than 30 schools of acupuncture now exist in the U.S. with over 5,000 practitioners as of this year. So what does that have to do with the floating business? And what does that have to do with the art of selling nothing? To me, what I take away from it is that education is important. The first thing that opened here wasn't an acupuncturist just providing services. It was an acupuncture school. The 30 schools that are around that are actually training people in acupuncture are the backbone of why we have 5,000 acupuncturists. So when I say that our intern program is one of the backbones of our organization, what I really mean is that I think that education is the backbone of the floatation industry and of anything new that you want to introduce. And a little side note here that's more of a conjecture which is training is a valuable resource and it is in our industry too but unlike in floating acupuncture needles do not cost nearly as much as a float tank for instance. So they have a little bit of a benefit for it being able to spread a little faster. That said, that was the same of computing and I haven't heard of the Raspberry Pi. It's a really interesting little device. It was a UK registered charity released this. Started in 2006 and it released its first batch of 10,000 boards in 2012 and it sold out in minutes. And that's because it has a lot of features that are really useful for micro-programming and computing. Its price point was also $25. And if you hook up a monitor to this and throw in an SD card it's actually just a computer that is about the size of your palm. As of December, 500,000 boards had been sold and Float On bought 11 of these to experiment around with float tanks and to play around with how we can do controls and different exciting mechanisms of adding in a little more automation into tanks with the Raspberry Pi's. So the idea and this is a project that I've had for a little bit and just haven't had time to tackle it all but if someone started a non-profit for float tanks whose goal was to produce really cheap shells or really cheap float tanks and produce them pretty much at cost and get grants maybe even to subsidize them if you can get float tanks down to the low cost to provide to low income areas or provide to hospitals or to do something like that I believe that that is actually akin to the kind of momentum of opening its schools and by being able to train people very swiftly and the same reason that the Raspberry Pi is taking off which is affordable access to essentially open source hardware is an incredibly incredibly valuable tool. So if anyone feels like tackling that little project so where am I going with this? You'll notice a trend here hopefully in a lot of our programs and in what I'm saying right now which is it's one of collaboration but it's something different it's not quite collaboration because we're not saying hey let's all work together on all these different projects and we're not saying hey you guys should definitely come just like you know do the art program with us or send over people it's more of a call to personal pursuit of excellence to further something greater than yourself just like Antoine de Saint-Ducs Paris said earlier and it always pays off who's not going to offer the people behind Raspberry Pi the most amazing jobs considering their success even if they're not making that much money from the program which I have no idea actually how much they're pulling in and how much is going to charity so I will comment on that. Another quote from Antoine from Night Flight if a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces what a profitable loss it is. So some other small things that we've been doing and this is going to pick up a pace a little bit as we get to the meat of this pregnancy programs research programs pregnancy research programs we also just encourage people around us and our interns to launch into separate projects or to tie floating into what they're doing this is one of our interns Brendan Heppner who is taking a bicycle trip across the United States for an entire year and is right now preparing for the trip and blogging about his preparation and plans on blogging about the entire trip as well and the awesome thing about this is he started finding us and finding floating and now his goal is to while he's bicycling around the country float at and review as many different float places as he can along the way and the reason I'm showing this to you is you should definitely get in touch with me or anyone from Float On or with Brendan directly from his website if you can see up there it's ramblingbicyclist.blogspot.com and if you're interested in hosting an awesome guy who is bicycling across the entire United States and super passionate about floating and will review your float center and post it up on his blog let me know and he would love to come out and visit you we also encourage our employees to not just stick with Float On and do Float On related side projects this is one of our employees who's also a magician and a balloon twister Burke you might have seen around okay so now we get to the really fun stuff and this is where things start getting really crazy so you start launching into sub-LLCs and Cake was one of our first ones and this was designed to once again provide education for people Cake is a series of donation based workshops held every Wednesday and we've held them every Wednesday since the beginning of this year so we're on week 40 or 41 or 42 now I think and for each one we livestream the broadcast, archive the footage put it up online for free and then we pull one page worksheet from both the presentation and the workshop and post that up online for free as a little summary of the information we covered and all of those resources are at cakepdx.com if you're interested in learning a little more of what we have to say about business and what we think about how things should be run like I said this was our next sub-LLC we have the music publishing company and at this point I'd actually like to give the stage one of our interns previously who turned into an employee and is now launching into a sub-LLC company with us and that's how he'll be pursuing his time with Float On and with that I will let Caleb Deleu come up and take the stage and introduce himself Hi, I'm Caleb Deleu and I'm on a mission to tell as many people as I can about Nutrobix I'm also on a mission to tell as many people as I can about Nervolve which is a sub-LLC enabled by Float On's clever business model Now, Nutrobix are basically substances which enhance the functionality, growth and health of the brain and Nervolve is basically a cognitive nutrition Nutrobix supplement company Our mission is to radically rethink thinking Now, I worked at Float On for about two years and before that I worked as an intern Now, over this time I really clicked with the Float On community because of shared ideals of sharing the personal development tools and also through self-motivation and as Anthony put it expanding the frontiers of performance I've always had an intense interest almost obsession with expanding human mental abilities that first brought me to floating and over this time I've really devoured any information I could get my hands on regarding brain functions and how to enhance those functions Throughout this time I began to look at the brain as a series of complex networks of overlapping chemical systems This all started when I was about 15 I was first introduced to Nutrobix as a study aid that helped into a much deeper interest I spent sleepless nights enthralled in reading studies or watching free online Yale classes or TED Talks and I talked with Graham and the Float On crew all night and all day about various things This is, again, the same passion that brought me to floating Now, I began telling everyone I could about the benefits that I found from Nutrobix promising research that I saw I wanted to shout it from the rooftops and I found that people were really eager to listen You see just like floating Nutrobix catch people's attention because they unlock the potential that is inherent in humanity and they're also on the cutting edge but have their claims backed up by a wealth of research and a lot of personal testimony So I began giving my friends samples and they immediately noticed benefits which expanded over successive doses The one downside was that these were really only available in bulk powders and it took a lot of time to buy your own scale and measure these out each day Still, regardless of this people really liked them and so we're willing to go through all of this hardship So, wanting to make these more available to more and more people I brought up the idea to Anthony Natal who you heard yesterday and Graham and we all decided to start carrying Nutrobix in the float shop First, we investigated the sparse selection of commercially encapsulated Nutrobix blends and eventually settled on AlphaBrain However, it didn't live up to its name a less than ideal dosage level as well as negative customer complaints including nausea and even night terrors was very discomforting Noticing this void and quality we set ourselves on a path to solving this conundrum With our top priority in safety and efficacy, we went through about 200 different Nutrobix This took me about 6 months of daily reading We then narrowed it down to about 30 of the most efficient From there, we looked at the pharmacology and knit together a synergistic group of 14 Using these 14 and looking at what these 14 function optimally in dosage level we fit them into two tablets using organic binders See, when you think about thinking what comes to mind? A lot of people think about neurons firing across the brain Now, this is true but in order to reach a new frontier in cognitive abilities especially through cognitive nutrition you need to dig deeper and bring your understanding down to a chemical level while keeping in mind the overarching systems which interconnect them You see, when you get down to it thinking is stressful All of the chemical activities and cellular metabolism involved in thinking really wear and tear on your brain They also require adequate support vitamins and precursor levels Any cognitive nutrition must take this into account in order to get its goals in a safe and sustainable manner You also need to increase these different levels if you are to enhance any functions So, we started with the support system Alphalipoic acid is a potent antioxidant which helps prevent damage from ongoing cognitive activities Secondly, we included iodine which is a commonly forgotten mineral which is important for proper brain development as well as ongoing growth After that we added in vitamins B1 B3, B6 and B12 These play an important role in cell growth and immune support They also add to performance by increasing cellular metabolism and therefore allowing more energy for the different processes such as those going on in your brain Then we needed to add neurotransmitters and precursors to those neurotransmitters Neurotransmitters are basically the chemicals that allow your brain to communicate to itself and they play a role in pretty much every neurological process In this arena, we added 5-HTP GABA and L-glutamic acid 5-HTP is the precursor or building block to serotonin your brain's primary neurotransmitter system It's also released heavily during floating 5-HTP has been implicated to increase mood and help balance anxiety levels Many studies have shown that anxiety induced distractions have quite a hindering effect on cognitive abilities This is also something that floating helps with GABA also helps lower anxiety levels GABA has been indicated in many cases to increase willpower and also increase motor control It also has a long history of use with Air Force Fighter Pilots Then, we have L-glutamic acid L-glutamic acid is the precursor to the neurotransmitter which is the primary actor in a system implicated in memory processing and regulation of many focus-related tasks Then, after that we added vitamin D We now introduced elements which pushed the frontier of performance Acetyl-l-carnitine shows lots of potential to increase neuron outgrowth therefore increasing the speed at which your neurons interconnect to one another and therefore creating more connections in a short time than would have been previously possible It also, as a secondary mode of action reduces oxidative stress in neurons Then, we added a small amount of caffeine Now, this is scary to hear for some people but the dosage is low enough that it's actually equivalent to that found in green tea This small amount of caffeine helps sustain performance over the long term and reduces levels of the dangerous neurotoxin beta amylase We personally tested to make sure that this level of caffeine didn't influence sleep or floating Something that obviously is a great concern to us that float on Also found in green tea Altheanine has been shown to reduce psychological and physiological stress and increase focus in a multitude of studies It also acts synergistically with the small amount of caffeine Finally, in the blend we added Pregnenolone This is my personal favorite, Neutropic Neutropic First of its many promising effects it's highly neuroprotective This adds another layer of support and also adds to neuron longevity Secondly it's a potent myelination agent which means that it increases the speed at which neurons are insulated which increases the firing efficiency and firing speed of those neurons Pregnenolone has also been shown in multiple studies to increase spatial recognition and memory on a long term basis Now float on's business model really made this all possible I at first had really just an intense interest in these Neutrobics and a personal use I went out and talked to lots of people and really the only way that I could get these to more people was through float on I really thank them for making that possible Thank you All right, so why the heck in the middle of a presentation on how you sell nothing did I just have someone come up and give you a giant description of what Neutropics are and exactly what's going in there I don't know No, I'm just kidding, I do know I do know It just seemed like a good idea I don't know, stop bugging me So the reason I did it that is how float on has gotten so far and I think that the great benefit of things like Caleb's sub-LLC are only going to gain in power as our business grows and when I came in I promised to talk to you about the art of selling nothing so where does the art come in and I highlighted that for you just in case I'll get up there The art is in crafting a system that is flexible so that we can pursue our own personal side interests as part of our jobs so that we can switch positions within our organization and learn new skills so that we can actually get training in new things and go on to do whatever it is that works well in conjunction with floating it's so that when people decide that they're tired of working at a float shop or their goal of becoming a master's MFA in theater our business can create a sub-LLC somehow tie it into float tanks or not and make that possible for people when they sign up for our organization they're coming on for life and so that we can personally settle down or travel or work remotely so that our personal growth will encourage our business growth and vice versa and I think that making something that both creates value for that creates value for the world and produces a profit and makes everyone including your customers and your employees very satisfied with what you're doing to me that's winning and to me that looks more like an art form than it looks like a typical business plan excuse me okay that's good for now I was thinking about time the next thing that I want to talk about is software that we've developed which is another sub-LLC and I said that I would teach you how to make more work for yourself which I think I did showing you how to create sub-LLCs and everything like that and now I'm going to tell you the alleviation part and part of that was this ability to actually pursue your passion to make yourself happy to say here's where I want to be in my life and to tie your business into that I think that does a lot for alleviating get rid of it but it makes it better work like I said and the next thing that alleviates your work is what I'm about to show you oh boy this thing resized hold on hold on I forgot that the screen resolution goes down to 800x600 on here hold on a second alright so here we go alright and perfect so here is what we use to run business so when you first log in and this is just a little test server to give you a demo you end up on the screen that you were just on and we call this the helm specifically the float helm and we started designing it when Ashkan and I were bartering computer programming lessons for floats because once again we wanted to kind of pursue this path of self-interest improvement and we decided that learning programming was something we always wanted to do and so we found this lovely character named Ian McIntosh who was willing to hop in the float tank in exchange for teaching us how to program and so Ashkan and I started this by ourselves and then it quickly got too crazy we got really busy but it turned out Ian really loved what we were doing and really loved floating and we brought him on as another partial owner in the float space and he's now our full-time programmer so he took over the project and it's really just exploded so we're able to approve our intern shifts and everything that's going on with those in our internship program people actually log their various hours you can kind of see up here three hours what tasks they had any notes that they had for the tasks the rating of the actual program and of their time in the space and this system is what allows us to approve that and get them floats automatically put on their account so if you go to now let's approve these guys and go to advance and here's our little user search function up here you can view any of the oops, vein you can view any of the interns that you have in your system and exactly what they've done exactly what they've completed how many shifts they've had what they did during them and this goes a long way towards maintaining a complete internship program in your business from there we started doing just a lot of other really fun things so here we go we started realizing that we were just keeping our logbook in google docs which is a great resource by the way google apps is wonderful but it was getting really crazy to kind of search through and read so we created a logbook function where you can log whatever is going on in the shop and then view it you can add comments to it so you can comment on threads and then to keep track of those you can view it unilogically or by discussion which is how we monitor everything that's going on despite having so many employees and interns and owners of float on at this point cash box tracking another thing we implemented and the thing to keep in mind with this is that this is another thing that is a story that we get to tell and I'll take a little break in the middle here as you're watching this and as you're thinking about that Neutropics presentation and thinking about our LLCs just everything that I'm tossing out there today think about marketing and selling as the act of making a story that's worth spreading and giving people the tools to spread it around as well creating it making an easier system for employees to operate within our business gives them more time to do their sub projects which we've also set up time for them to do allowing this robust internship program actually allows us to pull on and manage a lot of interns which would otherwise be impossible which gives us more man hours in the space and more people to educate who then become those evangelists to go out and tell everyone else about floating it just builds our story and the more that we do things like this the more that we just allow these crazy companies to start the more that our story becomes more and more robust and more and more worth passing on so we moved on to cash box tracking you can actually view all of your cash box entries make deductions from the cash box see what's going on with all of the spending we started adding on clocking in and clocking out for our employees and now you can view all of the employee time sheets see if we have any logged here yes here I just logged that one this will show every single employee and how many hours they worked within a certain date range which you can change and I'll show you some live data from us in just a second too so we're just starting to take more and more away from the realm of what we need to do and customize more and more in a way that we were unsatisfied with mind body and unsatisfied with any software that we found out there for actually running the space because no one has made software for float tanks before it's such a small industry there's no reason to and without this system of sub LLCs it set up where we can actually give our programmer a portion of this business because it's nested under our own we would probably still be a really long ways off from getting float tank specific software now it's underway so from here we started thinking wouldn't it be cool if we could just enter our float tanks in as people and track what's going on with those so we designed a system where you can actually view all of your rooms and what's going on with their different levels so if I want to see what's going on with H202 and all of my tanks I can go in here and view all of them separately or compare two different tanks same with alkalinity height temperature specific gravity clarity and it also gives you the little safety range in there as well which makes your job a lot easier running this place you can set the date range that you're curious about to see how things change over a set time that's maybe a little shorter than you were planning on before and all of these are there we go entered in through a really simple system right here where you can just open this up enter in whatever measurements you want and save it you don't need to enter in all of the data you can just enter in whatever and it automatically timestamps it and adds it to your tanks log which is now how we keep track of all of the quality of our water in our tanks everything is commentable so even when you submit this entry or you make a log book entry or anything else that happens you can create comments on it let's see so the next thing I want to talk about is the task system that we set up and this is really where you get into severe management of float tank systems the problem that we had with most project management software out there is that it's for managing projects it's not for managing businesses much less managing things that are so specifically suited to float tank businesses so we started making things where you create tasks and you can kind of see up here what the difference between an urgent task and a regular task and a backburner task is up there and you can kind of see here's the project that it belongs to the assignees and here's a full list of projects over here that's going on and this isn't a full list of our projects ours is I think now up to around 60 or 75 projects that we have total going on with float on this looks when you actually go to view a project so here's all the tasks that have been assigned any comments that have been made on it and you can assign out tasks and this is kind of a fun one we started at it we realized you could just add keyboard shortcuts on to anything so little keyboard fly out for assigning a task and what this looks like is you automatically assign it into whatever project you want to so let's say conference we have a task you select any details that you want to write about it who you want to assign it to and let's assign this out to Vance as well to give him some more to do you can set the priority you say it requires completion by all assignees or not and this makes it so that everyone has to check it off before it's marked complete you can also say that you must be at the float center and this program will actually capture the IP address of your float center and only show your tasks up to employees who are working at the time or to people who are there currently and not to anyone who's working remotely and viewing it from home you can set a due date which is incredibly useful and of course you can then assign it out and because these things get completed as more and more things happen more and more comments get made on the helm you get notified of every single thing that happens which means that you're staying totally on top of your business without having to be immediately there and once again how does this tie into marketing and how does this tie into selling your float tanks this is what gives you the time that you need to be able to go around and have those conversations to be able to sit at a coffee shop when you're waiting for a meeting and check in exactly on what's going on in your shop of what you end up doing for your solutions for these things think about marketing and what you spend doing it as a two factor thing there's what you're doing and there's what you're making time to do and the more that you save time on other projects the more that you get to invest that into more and more that you're doing and so when I say that we're trying to alleviate a lot of the same time constraints that we're causing and the same busyness that we're causing what I really mean is that we're trying to alleviate that so that we can just launch into more crazy projects this might not be what you're all about but this is part of my advice and this is our story and rooted back to marketing this is the story that we really want to tell and like I said we want to be the people who represent float tanks and who are really all about it and are trying to push forward the industry in every way that we can and this is part of that and whatever story you decide to do make sure that you really push it the most dangerous place to be is the middle ground go one way or the other is it either completely abandon an idea or this is not a story that's just a comment it's just something that happened from here we get into some fun things all projects have their own log books and you can actually view all of the projects that are currently going on within an organization at slash projects and from there you can see all of the recent updates so there are project members, how many tasks remaining all of this interesting information and then from there you can actually see what those tasks are, what the comments are on them mark them as complete and so this gives you a really complete snapshot in the same way the project view gives you a very detailed snapshot of what's going on with the tasks my favorite part about this and the reason that this is not project management software although it can be used like that is our generators the task generators are the ability to automate completely whatever it is that you're doing and we have auto generators set up so as you can see it's kind of like a task you enter in the information let's just say that we want to enter in the change filters and let's say we want to change the filters twice a week and we just want this open to any employee who is at the shop so the priority is normal, that's fine it's just a normal task and now we go down here so this is an enabled generator it'll happen every let's see it'll happen every Monday and every Thursday which is actually one of our schedule scheduled for filter changes due by 5pm and generated say 8 hours beforehand active from until it'll always be active we always have to change filters come on salt submit now from now until eternity every Monday and Thursday a task will be assigned on the helm that tells you to change your filter and it'll pop up and as soon as an employee or whoever's working at the shop actually does it and marks it done wherever you are you will get a notification that that task got completed and can view it and can view any comments on it and can make comments yourself and toss it back to someone and make a new task you can do this with every single thing in your shop from restocking brochures at different coffee shops around town to taking all of your readings to going out and having meetings yourself you can automate everything that's going on and once again all of that will then get notified to other people who are part of projects we've also worked on privacy settings so anyone who does not belong in certain projects you can still assign tasks out to them from that project and they will not be able to see anything else with incited so coming soon to this is employee scheduling and that's really what we've been working on doing as the stepping stone into actually float tank scheduling and when you can do that things get really exciting because then when you're actually replacing the software you're using to book in people and tie it into this system you can say after 25 people have floated in the tank automatically assign out a task to change a filter after this many people have floated in a tank do this when someone misses their appointment you can send a message and assign us a task to give them a call and check in with them you can literally start automating everything that you want your rules to be and it's a flexible enough system that you can customize it according to what you want to do for your float center I miss anything Ian or is that a good walk through thanks I'm not taking any questions you can ask me anything afterwards I'm in a hurry I already ran out of time so I need to come back and actually tell you guys how to market things I guess was that good did you have anything to add Ian okay so that was that can you switch back to my presentation for one second Josh Fitz or maybe I can do it okay we're good really quickly in the last couple minutes before they actually pulled me off stage with a hook I want to share with you some acute float on marketing strategies and once again the main thing to remember from all of this is that you need to figure out a way to tie in your passion to what you're doing unless you're really just in this for money which is fine and you can run this like a straight business but that is not my advice and that's not how I want to live my life and however you decide you want to live it make sure that your business is structured accordingly and the more that you do that the more that marketing will just naturally happen the more that people sense that and the more excited they get about it and the more they want to talk about your business and the more excited you are the more work you're just going to do and the more exciting things you're going to come up with it's just an employee guide really quickly just a little brief on float on marketing 101 this is one of the first things we designed before we even opened our doors we had a little brochure holder sitting outside that Ashcon mocked up out of a single piece of paper and cut into a brochure plus pen holder that allowed people to leave their email address and also take one of these guys that described exactly what floating is this thing is our bread and butter we have released more than 20,000 of these total in the last two years around the population of Portland that we have and using it for their own tank center can download it and modify it in Photoshop or they can contact me and I'll even add their information on there and they can use that to describe what's going on in the tanks it's amazing we don't use business cards because we're able to hand this to people and they can read it and know what's going on with floating and who cares what our personal information is if we want them to have it we'll write it in a sharpie on the back of this guide but we're providing something useful and they're forced to take this if they want our information we didn't take out ads for a long time we still don't pay for them this is a really nice barter program that we've been able to arrange more like a trade with our local newspaper Tales from the Tank which if you do take out ads look into advertorial systems they're generally considered to be some of the best ads that you can take out but then we realized that what we really want to do is create conversation about floating now that we've created all this interest now that we have so many programs and we've pulled in artists and musicians and everyone from all over we want to generate buzz and be able to spread it on to other people and tell them about it so we started taking up giant full page conversation starters in the paper and if you're wondering what that little gray text is it's the description of floating from our beginner's guide then we just recently this week took out another ad which I think is maybe even more of a conversation starter which you might have seen in the papers around and what I'd like to say and tie this back into once again is do what makes you happy we think this is hilarious there's a conversation in my life when I can take out a giant ad in a local paper that says fuck gravity and it's a smart business move if that's not success then I don't know what is and that concludes my talk thank you very much