 My name is Nicole Walcott, and this is my workshop about serving military clients up. So, it's serving those who serve how to gain and retain military clients. So, in true Army fashion, and have a little outline for everybody so that we know what to expect. I'm just going to go over a brief introduction about who I am and what I do. We're going to talk about why serve the military. And then we're going to talk about how to make your marketing more military friendly. And then roll right into how to make your center and your services more military friendly. Additional revenue sources, and then I'm going to open it up for Q&A. And so I really would like to just have you guys ask whatever questions any obstacles that you may be facing things like that. So, we'll just hop right in. So, who am I? So, I am Nicole again. I am the CEO of Shanti Wellness Incorporated. We are a wellness company that specializes in chronic pain and stress management. We are comprised of three divisions. So, we have the Fayetteville Wellness Center, which is located right in Fayetteville, North Carolina, right outside Fort Brad. That's where we do all of our individualized services. We service all of our retail clients there. So, we currently are offering float therapy, massage therapy, private yoga, and then we are about to launch in the second-ish week of September cryotherapy. And Norma Tech Boots. So, those are like compression therapy. We have another division, Shanti Corporate Wellness. That is all of our customized onsite. And now because of COVID virtual wellness plans, therefore, medium to large size companies. And then the division that is most important to this talk is Shanti Government Wellness. So, we offer wellness solutions to help optimize and enhance the recovery for service members. We work directly with military units, active duty, we work with government organizations. This is really where our bread and butter is. I am an Army veteran. I found floating in 2016. While I was serving on active duty, I had a spinal cord injury when I was stationed in Korea. This left me with some terrible, terrible chronic pain. And if anybody understands the military or getting out, when I went to the VA, they told me there was nothing wrong with me. Yes, exactly. You're slightly broken and you'll be fine. After about two years of fighting with the VA to get some type of diagnosis, we finally were able to get MRIs and CAT scans done. And they found out that I have degenerative disease all up and down my spine. I also had two bulging discs in my, like, two bottom vertebrae. And so they were like, oh, you were right. You were in a lot of pain. I actually found floating through my pediatrician who was getting out of the Air Force. He was a flight medic for ASAP. And he knew a lot about floatation therapy because their operators had been using floatation therapy to help with chronic pain and stress. He told me that I should check it out. And I was in Portland in 2016 for yoga teacher training to help first responders. And I was like, you know what? I'm in a lot of pain. Like, I'm going to go finally try this floating thing. I had my first float at float on and it was a complete disaster. I got water in my eyes, didn't know about the earplugs. But I think out of the 90 minute float, I was in the float for about 15 minutes just between getting in and out. And that within the first like 10 minutes, I was pain-free. And it was something to where like when you deal with chronic pain all day long and you think that this is now where your life is supposed to be and how you are moving forward. It was like, I hadn't realized what it was like to live pain-free and it was just life changing for me. So I went back thinking not even about a business opportunity, just trying to find somewhere that I could float around Fayetteville. There was nothing in a two hour radius. So then my business frame kind of jumped in and I was like, this is a fabulous business opportunity. And then I started my journey opening my center. We are currently the only company that has been awarded, sorry, that has been awarded a multi-year contract with the military. Specifically, we work with the Air Force Special Operations Command. And so we are the only one that actually has like a contract contract that you can look up on Fed VisOps and things like that. So it's a five year contract. We can't speak about a lot of specifics just because of some of the security issues. However, we provide flotation therapy and deep tissue massage. If anyone was at the 2019 conference in Denver, Dr. Jerry Walker spoke about a study that he had conducted while he was serving in the military on the Air Force. So we were involved in that study. Dr. Jerry and I worked together for a couple of years before he got out. And it really was amazing, amazing results for these operators. So because of where we are located, we work almost exclusively with active duty military veterans and then also first responders too. Our police department is very unique because of where we're located. So we're about 70% veterans. So we have like a whole nother layer of stress and pain and anxiety that we deal with there. And then I'm also a government wellness consultant for other float centers. So I in 2019 started the government wellness portion of our company and I help float centers that may not be familiar with the military gain military contracts and understand how to service those contracts. So why is this work so important? I'm going to play a little video for you and hopefully it works well. But this was a little news piece that was done and we used to be called floating shanties. So we did do a name change. But this is a little piece that I always play with people as it will pull up. Here we go. Minto and physical relief that Gulf War and Special Operations veteran Doug Ray says it's hard to come by. Getting in the truck or jumping out of the plane. When you stop doing that, it's literally like the breaks of the wall and there has to be this smoother transition to it. Ray says float station therapy at Floating Shanty is easing that transition. We primarily target people with chronic pain and anxiety issues. Client shower before entering the dark and soundproof chamber. This allows all of your muscles to simultaneously relax while allowing your brain to completely shut down. It actually turns off the receptors in your skin that sense cold and hot. Giving your body and brain an hour of relaxation. Treating underlying conditions. Jeff Dardia with the Task Force Dagger Foundation works with wounded special ops vets and soldiers. Now partnering with Floating Shanty has an extra resource for service members. An alternative to medication. It doesn't require prescription. There's no adverse effects to it. It's not like you're going to OD on a float tank. Mind over matter. A holistic approach that's helping everyday people and veterans like Ray work through their struggles. It's rejuvenating in a way that you didn't realize was available before. So in case you're wondering how the tanks are cleaned between clients, they're actually monitored by the Department of Public Health and they use about four different methods of sanitation. We're now reporting in Fayetteville, Akilah Davis, ABC 11. I witness news. That's one of our favorite pieces and it really just kind of drives home. I know there are some of us that have served in the room, but it just drives home. Some of the really unique needs of veterans and active duty military of, you know, why it's so important to have them float. Now, on a business side and a marketing side, how does this specifically help some of our operators? Now, we, for people that are not military friendly, we use the word operator for all of our special forces. And that's primarily who I target just because they tend to have more flexibility in their funding of how they're going to be able to spend their money. And they are a little bit more open-minded to alternative therapies. So as we already know that this is some great language, how does this help some of our active duty guys? It's going to reduce their recovery time. It increased their lifespan. And when we talk about lifespan, we're talking about their lifespan when they're in the service. So it actually increases their amount of time that they can spend in the service, not being injured. It decreases their incidence of injury. And then also this one is like the big drive home because anybody that's been in the military knows we have a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms. It decreases the use of chronic stress coping mechanisms. Okay, so here's kind of like the meat and potatoes. Let's talk about military friendly marketing. So the military has some very unique meats. And typically our float industry loves to focus on the stuff that really is life changing, right? So expanding consciousness, getting that super, super deep state of relaxation. However, we have to look at if we're trying to attract more military clientele, we have to meet them where they're at. We have to look at their totality of circumstances, exactly where they are. We have a lot of guys and girls who are dealing with some severe, severe chronic PTSD, traumatic brain injury. Also too, if you've ever been in the military, there's a lot of, I'm okay. I don't need to do a sick call. We're not going to talk about it because this could impact meat getting promoted. It could impact meat being able to stay in the military. So we kind of shove it down, drive on and keep moving forward. However, everybody knows after 20 years, 15 years, that doesn't always work. But so we have to be able to meet these guys and girls where they are. So what we found success in is that when we first opened, we only talked about the physical part. We only talked about, for lack of a better word, the safe stuff. So we talked a lot about, hey, are you in chronic pain? Do you have pain? Do you need to recover faster? This float tank will help you do that. We didn't even realize in 2018, we had marketed it so well about the pain and the performance optimization. People didn't even realize they were getting in a tub of water. They would be like, oh, I'm getting wet. So we were able to successfully do that. So one of the big pointers I always talk about is know the market that you are addressing and make sure that you market straight to their needs. So we talk a lot about pain recovery performance optimization, sometimes depending on where we are in the year. We will start to touch a little bit on PTSD. The Army right now is doing a lot of studies on sensory deprivation, not necessarily float tanks, sensory deprivation in general. They do a lot of dry sensory deprivation and it's specifically for traumatic brain injury. So this is something that is starting to become more popular in the military. And so it allows us to kind of slide right in because we offer a form of sensory deprivation. Using their language. So the military has a million acronyms and commonly used words. Being able to understand some of those very simple acronyms when you're speaking with the military, also when you are marketing to them, right? Being able to understand their daily lives, understanding what the word like PCS means, permanent change of station, it means they're moving, they're leaving. You know, being able to understand, you know, like very simple things like the P.S., right? That's there like on post exchange, things like that. Putting that in your marketing to be able to draw the military in because, again, military responders are very similar. We typically tend to stay with our own. We sometimes struggle to trust, especially when you're going into such a vulnerable space. I can't tell you how many guys and girls we have that come in here that talk to us in our center that say, ooh, 60 minutes alone is my thoughts. It's the scariest thing I've ever thought of in my entire life. So we have to be able to create that safe space even before they walk in the center so they know that it's okay to be there. So we do a lot of that by meeting them where they are and letting them know that like, hey, we're one of you and even our staff, that's not military. We are military friendly. We are one. Another great one for marketing is knowing their holidays. So I specifically just put this first little thing in. It's a pet peeve of mine and I know that some people it is, but other people don't care. Please, when you're doing your marketing, know the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Memorial Day is honoring those that have passed away. Veterans Day is honoring everybody that is a veteran. There are some like discussions to whether active duty is considered a veteran and it's up to each person. But that's really important knowing who you're celebrating what you're celebrating and then also to the difference like in the somberness. Most people don't want you to be so excited like, hey, Memorial Day, let's go have a barbecue. We're going to have a super big sale for Memorial Day. That's very insulting. What we have done for the last three years, which has been amazing is we block out the entire schedule for Memorial Day. If it falls on a weekend, we typically try to also block out the weekend. We're a very small center. So we do have like the capacity limitations. We give away free floats for Gold Star families. Gold Star families, if you're not familiar with that is a family or a spouse that has had a service member that was killed in action. So we do that for free all weekend and it's fabulous. Another great thing to keep in mind is if you are close to a military post, know what their training schedule is and know when there's three days and four days are. So that's like three days off in a row, four days off in a row. Those typically are going to be the times that you want to make sure that like, even if you're not typically open, make sure you're open for that because they've got off. They want to be able to do something. Typically in your equity world, they have one three-day or one four-day every single month. And so that's a great way to be able to start marketing and say, hey, you've got an upcoming three or four-day, come spend it with us, come relax, things like that. And I added this in because I don't know about where everybody else is from, but us in Fort Bragg, Faith, and we're also the home of special forces. So we're super sensitive to everything going on. This has really been a huge issue in our community, sensitive to current events. So I can say right now, regardless of what your political views are, a lot of guys and girls are feeling very strong feelings about what's happening over there right now and their own military service. And we get a lot of clients that come in that are very upset and they're questioning like, is what I did worth it? Did we have any impact? You know, we lost a lot of people over there. We did a lot of things that are plaguing us now with flashbacks and feeling guilt. And so what we have started to do is we have tried to be able to reach out to those people and check on them and make sure that like, hey, do you need anything? Can we give you a float? Have you taken care of your mental health? That's really important right now. Are you making sure that you're taking care of yourself? We are able to kind of connect through our emails and things like that. And I know that I'm just on a lot of email chains because of what we do and being a veteran and I know that everyone has just been reaching out to say it's okay. It's okay if you need to talk, it's okay. And then the next one is going to talk about the experience. I think the best way to accomplish what makes a center military friendly is just be very sensitive, trauma sensitive, have trauma sensitive practices. And that can really go all outside the military to you never know what someone's holding in or what they're holding on to. And I understand that everyone's center is their own center. We are very, very neutral. We typically tend to have everything very neutral just because that's our market. But so when we talk about images, we try not to use a lot of Sanskrit just because you never know that could be triggering if somebody was deployed back to the Middle East. You just never know. So we try not to use a lot of imaging where the person is floating in corks pose triggering things like that words again goes back to like corks pose, or if you are having something that could be like a triggering word. And it's still it's the same thing for anybody that suffered trauma smells is a big one. So I love the smell of like Cedar. I love the smell of bergamot things like that. But you just never know that Cedar could have some type of a triggering effect when a client walks in that may have, you know, had some issue with trauma and that specific sense. So in our center we try to have a very neutral smell lavender works really well. And then we just typically try to make sure it's not like overpowering things like that interaction. So this is a huge one. COVID has actually kind of helped with it because of everybody keeping their distance. So there's some things that we train our staff on just being sensitive to trauma and being sensitive to our specific clientele when they interact with our clientele. So like a big one. Don't walk up behind somebody and not announce yourself. That's super triggering, especially to our law enforcement officers. We make sure that when we're interacting, we're not stepping into their space. We're keeping our own space until they invite us in. A lot of our active duty guys especially they're super closed off when they come into their first load, like won't say a word to you. It's almost like they don't even want to be there even though they paid for the service. But it's because when they come out, they're completely different. They are wanting to talk, they're smiling and even the ones that don't say anything like the guy that we showed you that was crying. He floated with us for two years, like almost every day. And I had become very friendly with him just because it's a small community. He's an awesome guy. And I asked him if he would do this news piece because we needed somebody to do it. We have never had a deep conversation about floating or why he came to the center ever. I never got that vibe of that he wanted to share. And I just thought he liked it because of the pain relief. And then he did that, that one minute video took us an hour to shoot because he could not get through his interview without the tears. And it was something to where I didn't realize how important it was to him and how it was saving him because of his PTSD and his depression. It was something to where you never know what somebody is carrying around and they may never share it with you. But they keep coming back and they keep using the services because they're able to have it as a private therapy to them. They don't have to go to the VA and have talk therapy and relive all of this trauma. They can leave it all in the tank and then share when they want to, when they want to. One of the things that we started to do was we have a bunch of just notebooks that just say share your experience or write something down. And I didn't think anybody was using them. We keep them in our relaxation room. They didn't really look worn and I started to open them and read people's experiences and what they're leaving in the tank and things like that. That's truly powerful to know what is being left in the tank. But we try not to be too much in the beginning and we let them come to us when they're ready to discuss if ever what their experiences are and things like that. Also too, COVID has made this a lot easier, but we don't touch anybody. And then a lot of these are like general central practices, but we don't touch anybody unless they are okay with being touched. Like even the nice warm like touch on your shoulder or your elbow or something like that. Another thing is center setup. So this is important a lot for our law enforcement guys and girls. But where are your exits? As soon as one of my guys or girls walks in, I can see them. They want to know where their exits are. They want to know what they're supposed to be doing. You have to remember that this specific clientele is used to being told what to do. Funny story is part of the reason why, and I told the grandmas a million times why I had such a crazy first flow was because I had just gotten out of the military. I was used to like being told what to do. So I did not know anything about the flow. And I wanted to be told like to the tea, like you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this. And I was totally totally different like atmosphere. And the guy was super cool for their clientele. He was like, yeah, you can wear the earplugs if you want, you know, some people don't use them. No, you should have told me, girl, put your earplugs in because it's going to be a disaster. Yeah, exactly. And so we need to make sure that when we interact and we're doing our center setup that we are, if this is who we're marketing to and who we really want as military and first responders, that we are able to make them the deal state. So even in our like front lobby, we have chairs that are their back is facing the street, which is not great for some of our police guys, but we also have chairs that their backs are not facing the street. So when we do our orientation, the first thing that we point out when we get into the room with them is, here's the lock on the door. This is how you know that you're secure in the in the room. We also opted, this is like kind of a picture of our floater and we opted to have the wave tanks that have the glass. And that was just so that they did not feel like they were super enclosed at all times because you can see through the glass. So always let them know you are in control the entire time that you're in the tank. If you need to get up and take a break, you can if you need to open the door. If you want to keep the big fluorescent light on the whole time you can do that, your control of everything because a lot of our clients, their biggest fear, which is so beautiful when they finally do allow the control to release is losing control. So know that everything that they need is in control if they ever need to get up and get out of the tank and take a break and talk. That's totally fine too. We also make sure that we have our safety plan in place. So because we're working with a sensitive population, we have form strategic alliances with mental health therapists. There's also some great nonprofit organizations that can help out if you have a client that maybe is having a flashback or maybe is having a PTSD episode. It is very unnerving. You can see it in their eyes sometimes. But so one of the biggest things that we always talk about is just stay calm. Just talk to them, stay calm if they want to talk to a therapist. We do have a therapist that we can call at all times that can talk. There is a great organization called the Veterans Helpline. That is if they are suicidal or they are in a deep depression. So 1 in 100 number, we have a bunch of their cards. We have a local wounded warrior project that helps out too. So we just have all of these plans in place because things happen. We have been open since 2017 and I would say that out of the thousands of clients that we've served, we've had maybe 10 that have had adverse reactions to it. And a lot of it has been, hey, I push a lot of stuff down. A lot of stuff came up. I'm not ready to deal with it right now. So I got out early and I'm going to go. And that has pretty much been the extent of it. But so just make sure that you have a safety plan in place, especially if you've never really dealt with PTSD or TBI too. Make sure that you understand what the things that you should be doing are. And then kind of the last thing about safety too is if somebody is a singer, if you know what that is, somebody who stays past the music wake up and the light turning on and things like that. We have a special way that we make up our military and active duty clients versus like an average client because we have an and we let them know about it too in the beginning. We have an escalating way. We have to be very careful that we do not disturb them to where they are spooked and then we could end up in a situation that we don't want to be in. But so just lots of things to think about with your client experience when it comes to the military. So sorry, one more thing, music that you play. I never even thought about it. I, even though I'm a veteran, I love yoga music. I love the hymns and the mantras and things like that. But it's not appropriate for my center just because of the clientele that we work with. Hmm. I'm sorry. What do you offer them for? We just play like spot drops, things like that very neutral. Like a little slightly upbeat music. But yeah, it's super low. We can barely hear it just so it's not dead silent. So here's another great portion of working with the military. So there are ways to gain additional sources of revenue when you're specifically working with the military clientele. One of the guys that you saw in that video, his name is Jeff Daria. He is the head of the soft with it, which is the Special Operations Special Operators Fund Health Initiatives, which is within the nonprofit organization called Task Force Dagger. They're a national nonprofit organization. They're actually based in Texas. There's also other nonprofits like Wounded Warrior Project, Homes for Our Troops, things like that. They have a lot of donations and money that's available. And if you have a strategic alliance with them, they are able to offer some of our services to these veterans for free, but we're still getting paid. I ran into when I first opened, like most centers do, you want to do good. That's a lot of why we open and you want to help those who need the help. However, we cannot continue to give our services away for free because if we aren't making money as centers, we will go out of business and we can't help anybody. So I figured out kind of a workaround to where I can still offer some of these things for free, but somebody else is paying for it, which is beneficial to both parties. So military nonprofits are awesome. They are always looking for ways to be able to support active duty and veterans. And this is an amazing therapy that a lot, especially a lot of your special operations, active duty is already familiar with because they're already using it with their units. The next one is community center donation campaigns. We do a lot of things, especially around Veterans Day. We do a buy one, give one. So this is where we kind of open it up to the community. We put out a lot of social media posts and emails about, hey, it's Veterans Day. Help a veteran out. We're going to give you a discount. You buy one float for yourself. You buy one for a veteran. We have a fund that it goes into. It's called the Freedom Floats Program. It is a fund to where anybody can donate floats into it, like our members can donate some of their leftover floats. We can have companies that can buy a block of floats. It goes into our bank of free floats, technically. And then we have people apply on our website for different programs. And so we have a Freedom Floats Program. We ask them some very basic questions about their military service because you'll find, especially when you're working with some of these nonprofits, they have special populations of the military that they will only support. Like Task Force Dagger is only special operations. When you're a warrior project, you have to be service disabled. So there are some requirements to that. Military contracts. So the last two is something that my government wellness company specializes in. Military contracts. It is a lot of work to get the contract to source it. It's super easy to service it because it's what we do. Like this can be very lucrative and it can also be a source of stable income for you when things are kind of fluctuating in normal business cycles. I love military contracts because I know exactly how much money I'm going to make every single month based off of the contract. This a lot because it doesn't go through the normal procurement process because they don't really know who we are or what we do yet. This is a lot of groundwork of talking to the units, talking to your clients that are active duty, being able to figure out who's in charge, who holds the money, how can I get to them and to talk to them about why they need this service. And it always helps if you have private members using your facilities. So one of the things that I train my front staff on all the time is, especially if someone's coming in uniform and we can distinguish if they have some rank on them. Hey, if you love this and you've been coming here for a couple of weeks, like did you know that your unit can pay for this? Did you know that we can find you a way to have your unit pay for this? And then we help them with that because we understand some of the intricacies of the military contracting. And then the last thing is government grants. So there are a lot of grants out there in order for you to be able to start your own study. They want to be able to see that we are helping, that we are helping with pain, stress, things like that. The government grants are also very competitive. However, it's great because there's not enough of us to be competitive against each other. So it's typically us just educating people and finding ways that we can fit in. Right before the shutdown in March of last year, I had included white paper for optimizing human performance. They put out a request for proposals for any type of technology or services that would enhance the performance of their special operators. And I was like, I got it, I know. So I made a white paper, educated them all on it. If we hadn't had the shutdown and it hadn't happened, we wouldn't move forward with everything. They lost a lot of funding because of having to move funds around. But again, if you can just educate the people that hold the purse strings about the services that we offered, it really can be life changing. And so now I'm just going to open the floor up for some questions. If you would like to contact me about any specific questions or help with the treatment. I mean, this is my cell phone number and my email address. And then this specifically is our government wellness website. But yeah, anything that you guys have questions wise, I would love to answer, talk about anything like that.