 Thanks a lot everybody doing all right today? As Ashkahn said, my name is Kevin Johnson and I'm here this weekend with my incredible wife Carol Johnson who is not only my best friend in the world but also my partner at Zero Gravity Institute. We also design and manufacture Zero Gravity Float Rooms which are technologically advanced luxury scale float rooms designed specifically to meet the demanding requirements of a busy high-traffic commercial floatation center like the one that we're operating down in Austin and like the one that you all will hopefully be operating when you take all this great information that you got this weekend, take it back and apply it to your successful businesses back home. I'm also involved in consulting on about a dozen new float centers that are opening not only here in North America but in South America and Europe and even as far away as the United Arab Emirates. So even though I don't have a formal education in business and marketing, I can rely pretty heavily on my years of experience in and around the floating industry as well as the incredible learning experience that consulting can be to inform my perspective and it's a perspective that I hope you all will find useful and interesting today. So I've had the distinct privilege of meeting many of you this weekend as you've taken an opportunity to stop by our booth and learn more about our float rooms and I've listened to your stories, your dreams, your aspirations, how you got interested in floating to begin with and what brought you to the decision to get involved in the floating industry now and when I think about your stories and I think about your businesses and my own and the businesses of the clients that I consult with, I realize that we're essentially all looking for the same thing and that thing is success because with success comes freedom and I'm not just talking about financial freedom, it's something more important and that's freedom over your time and your schedule and it's this success and this freedom that translates into happiness and a higher sense of well-being which is after all why we own businesses to begin with and why we chose floating specifically as a place to invest our time and our energy and our money. So if you want these things, the success and the freedom and the happiness, the most important thing for you to realize up front is that you already possess the most important tool that you'll ever need and that's you because you are the most valuable resource that you have. To put it simply, nobody's going to want these things for you the way you want them for you and for your families and for the ones that you love. And so my goal here today is not to try to sell you a float room but rather at this time of great abundance in my business world, I wanted to try to give you a few things to think about, things that I think you should know and consider as you embark upon the challenge of creating a successful business in an industry where the traditional modalities of marketing and branding may not be the most efficient way for you to proceed. I don't have a lot of time with you today and so my goal here is to touch really briefly on each of these five points and hope that I can leave you with something that's useful you can take away from here and apply it to your business. So the first thing I wanted you to know is that everybody loves a story and so it's going to be up to you to figure out what your story is and how to articulate that story when you're given an opportunity. Now we all work in a very novel industry and so I do believe that you'll have that opportunity to tell that story in the process of giving interviews for newspapers and magazines, television news programs and podcasts and the like. So what's your story? Where are you from? How did you get here? Where are you going? And then maybe most importantly, what makes you the expert? Because that's number two on the list of things that you should know and that is that when you open a float center everyone around you is going to expect you to become the expert. Now my own story around floating that starts back in the spring of 1986 you can tell by the fashion here. This picture is taken in my very small apartment in Midtown Manhattan. A group of my friends we'd all finished college and we were just about to head out into the world to make our mark. That is me at the top there with the Scott Bayow haircut holding up the wall of the apartment. What's significant about this picture is that if you take a close look you'll see that four or five of us have already developed a keen interest in the altered states of consciousness and the exploration of non-ordinary reality. It's exactly that interest that led me to the 1980 Ken Russell classic altered states. There's William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who ingests Mexican psychedelic mushrooms inside a flotation tank. Now I have to tell you this movie captured my attention. It wasn't until I didn't really realize at the time that the the flotation tank was a real thing. I just thought it was a mechanism for this movie and it wasn't until a couple of months later when I had relocated to California that I stumbled across an article in the LA Weekly that was describing a commercial flotation center a place where you could go and get in one of these tanks and have this experience for yourself. I got pretty excited about it and I made an appointment and early the next day I found myself at Altered States Mind Gym in West Hollywood, California. And I can tell you these were my people. I knew it. They had this mirrored box that you could sit in when you meditated. They had a biofeedback device. These people had a gram potentializer and a synchroenergizer in the same building. That's right. Most importantly though, they had six of these beauties. Glenn and Lee Perry had been manufacturing Samadhi flotation tanks. And so for the first time in the world, these tanks were now available in commercial centers where everybody could go and try them. My first experience in the flotation tank was profound to say the least. Although unlike the character in the movie, I did not emerge from the tank as a proto hominid. Rather, after my first floating experience, I emerged as the most complete human that I had ever been. I went straight home, changed clothes. I went down to the beach. I took a long walk. And as I watched the sunset on the Pacific Ocean, I realized that I felt calmer and clearer and more focused than I had ever felt in my life. And honestly, I was having a hard time believing that this was the effect of something as simple as floating in a dark box full of saltwater. And so I made another appointment to go back a couple days later and have another float. And it was on that visit that I was lucky enough to meet one of the owners of Altered States, Jeff Labneau. And he was kind enough to offer me a job, which I eagerly accepted. And I was therefore given the opportunity to observe this successful flotation business being run at a time when the industry was really in its infancy. And we were learning new and important stuff every single day. I also took great advantage of my free floating benefits. I floated over 300 times in the years that I worked at Altered States. Well, eventually, I left that company to pursue my own career goals. And I floated whenever and wherever I could, although as many of you know, the industry took a deep slump in the 90s in the early 2000s. So it's getting pretty hard to do. Now, fast forward, if you will, to about 2012, the industry is experiencing this incredible reemergence, thanks mostly to a few hardy float centers that had managed to survive those lean times, some early adapters who were beginning to open float centers around the world. And then, of course, there was celebrity advocacy by guys like Joe Rogan and Aubrey Marcus, who we heard from yesterday, who were beginning to commit a lot of time on their podcast to the benefits that this remarkable therapy could be. And so, faced with my own need to change my career path, I took out and dusted off a dream that I'd been carrying around for years of opening my own float center. And so I began work on Zero Gravity Institute in Austin, Texas. It was during this time that I was putting this business together that I also came to the realization that for me, there wasn't really a tank out there that functioned the way I wanted it to function in a commercial setting and in the kind of environment that we were creating at Zero Gravity. And so at that time, I also accepted the challenge of designing and manufacturing Zero Gravity float rooms, which we talked about earlier. And it was during the process of building these two businesses that I passed another milestone, and that was 500 floats in my life, 100 of which were done on consecutive days earlier this year while doing a research study that we did at Zero Gravity. So that's kind of my story. And I tell you that story mostly to illustrate the first two things that you should know on the list. And that is that if you know your story and you know how to tell it, then you can use that story to convey useful and insightful information that will help to satisfy people's expectations about your expertise in floating. And let's face it, becoming an expert at floating is pretty fun to do. You get to float, you get to float a lot, then you get to read about it, study about it, you get to listen to other people's experiences. And that way, when you're given the opportunity to give interviews to publications and such, you can highlight your experiences, and you can communicate those experiences clearly and confidently. Because after all, you are the expert, you own the float center, and that's why these people are coming to you to get the interview. So the third thing on the list of things that I think you should know, is that you have to develop your brand. And this is a huge subject, and there's not enough time to commit to it today, but for the purposes of this presentation, I want you to think about your brand as the service that you offer. And there's an important distinction here. Floating is not a product. A product is something physical that you buy at a business, and you take it away, and then you have a relationship with that product. But floating is a service, and service is an experience. And oftentimes, the way that you feel about that service is the way you feel about the relationship you have with the people who are providing you that service. And so you need to remember that in a very real way, you are your brand, you actually control people's perceptions about your brand, about the service you provide. And it's that service, your brand, that hopefully attracts people to your business. But see, it does even more than that, because a brand, your service can actually change a person's experience. So it's your service, the brand that you create, that actually allows people to become long term customers of yours. This brings me to the fourth thing on my list, which is to realize that not every customer is the right customer for you. And this is a little counterintuitive. And I think it's best illustrated if I can show you this graphic. This is the adapters curve. You'll notice there's five constituents here. There's a small group at the front called the innovators. There's a slightly larger group called the early adapters. Then there's this huge group in the middle, the early and late majority. And then there's that group on the end, the laggers, these are the Johnny come lately, as you know them, they still don't have an email address, they still don't carry a cell phone. So if you're working within traditional modalities of advertising and marketing, what you're going to do is you're going to lop off the small edges of this curve, and you're going to focus all of your efforts on this middle group, the majority, the early and late majority. So here's the problem that I have with this. These, this group of people here that they are bombarded with advertising efforts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, they have become very, very good at ignoring advertisers. So I look at it like this, if you're trying to talk to everybody, you're probably talking to nobody. So as you set up your businesses, I want you to think about the possibility of focusing your efforts on these first two groups, the innovators and the early adapters. So these are the guys that are particularly interested in the latest technology. They have all the latest gadgets they want to know about the new theories and new technologies and new therapies the moment it's available. These are the people who can help you spread your ideas to the other group. So now that you know who your target is, the obvious question is where do you find these people? So you find these people through a number of resources, you have specialty publications like magazines and periodicals. And when I'm talking here, I don't want you to think about running a traditional advertisement, a print advertisement. They're not that functional. There's not enough space there for you to convey useful information to someone who knows nothing about floating. Instead, try to find magazines and periodicals who are willing to dedicate stories, print space, to the ideas around floating in your businesses. We all know about the importance of technology like websites and social media like Facebook and Twitter and the like. And we don't need to talk about that. We all keep up on that pretty well. TV news programs can be really important to you. Realize that for a lot of you, as you open your float centers, you'll be the first people in your community that are doing this. And so TV news as well as magazines and newspapers, they're always looking for something new and interesting to write about. And I can't think of anything more interesting than floating until you should have pretty good luck as you approach these people and these resources. Podcasting, new media, is particularly important. Biggest bang for the buck going is a podcast. This is where the innovators and the early adapters are looking to get the specific kind of information that they're interested in. That's how podcasting works. So in a one hour podcast, you can reach thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of people. And the idea here is to spread your ideas. Because put simply, ideas that spread are ideas that win. But it takes a remarkable idea to actually spread. Lucky for all of us, floating is remarkable. The effects of floating are remarkable. And so I don't want you to be afraid to approach the people who control these resources. Tell them your story. Tell them the story about floating, the one that they don't know. And I imagine that you'll find a lot of success there. The last thing that I want to share with you today is the secret of fulfillment and a higher sense of well being. If you want these things, it obviously takes dedication. It takes hard work. And it takes sacrifice. But for me, the most important element in this formula is optimism. Dr. David Landis explored this idea in his book. It's called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. And he says, I quote, the difference in this world is belief. In this world, the optimists have it. In optimism, there is everything. Revival, transformation, art, renewal. The optimists take the risks that others fail to see. He goes on to add that the pessimists, the pessimists only have the lone consolation of knowing that they were failed and that they could say that they were right all along. And the last thing is courage. And so I want to leave you today with this challenge. As you go about your business, when you come to that fork in the road, don't take the path of least resistance. The path with no obstacles rarely leads to any place worth being. Instead, let's opt for the path that runs along the cliff, the one without the handholds and the guardrails. Because I can assure you that being on this path, the exhilaration of this path and the pride that you will feel as you meet and exceed your goals, will fill you with optimism and confidence and give you the confidence to take more risks and to receive more success. And every day that you spend on this path is a day that will leave you feeling ultimately more fulfilled and with a higher sense of well-being. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.