 We are here to tell you about a little bit of an adventure that we went on. So about four or five months ago now, I guess, from March to June, we had the pleasure of going on a giant road trip to visit as many float tank centers as we possibly could. And we headed south from Portland down through California. After we hit the border from there, we actually headed all the way east to the east coast. And then from there, up the east coast into Canada. Yeah, up to Portland, Maine, which felt pretty appropriate. From there, kind of went up into Canada, crossed back down to around Chicago. And then from there, back into the center of the United States, down towards Salt Lake City in Colorado. And then just when we thought we were done, instead, we went all the way back up into Canada, up into Alberta. And then from there, finishing up, going over towards Vancouver, British Columbia, and then down towards Portland again, finishing up our full Portland to Portland to Portland round trip. It took us three months of being on the road. And in total, over the course of this trip, we ended up driving 16,000 miles. And when we started out, we really, we kind of had this number in mind that it would be amazing if we actually made it up to, during our three months, hitting 100 float tank centers. And in fact, we hit that number right around there on the trip, up there by Toronto. So we kept on going, and by the time we actually got back, we ended up hitting 172 float tank centers along our trip, which was very exciting. You know, as we went along this journey, we would be telling this story to people outside of the float industry. And it was very common when we would explain what we're doing that we would start getting questioned on why we were doing it. And people would ask us, are we touring around so we can get ideas for our own construction at our center? Are we opening up new shops, and we just want to scout and see what people are up to? Which was not the case at all. They asked us if we were going around to do market research on the industry, which was not what we were doing. People asked us, yeah, just if we had any kind of real business motivation at all. And we said, we absolutely do. We want to grab beers with everyone. And that was pretty much the goal. Yeah, we just wanted to go grab a beer. And we figured along the way we'd take some silly arms-in-the-airs photos with everyone that we went to visit. So this all started one fateful morning as we were on top of a mountain with our business partner, Jake, and we were sitting up there having a really good conversation and talking about how much fun it seemed like bands have when they go on tour. And how we should totally, definitely do that, except that we run a really demanding brick-and-mortar business. And that we don't have a band. So we decided that the only reasonable thing that we could possibly do was to go on a float tour. So we had some bitchin' t-shirts drawn up, which we might have seen around the conference a little bit. Because you can't really go on a tour without a tour t-shirt. And a proper list of stops on the back as well. We got an RV. We packed it up full of supplies. We brought a cameraman along with us. And we basically hit the road with very, very little planning. We just started driving. And pretty much did an awful job warning anybody that we were coming. We would often call people on the phone to let them know what we were doing and that we wanted to stop by and they would be like, oh yeah, what day are you gonna be here? You know, some time next month? We're like outside, we're outside right now. Yeah, I think the most warning we gave anyone was a couple days. And the average was something like two hours ahead of time. Despite that, people were still pretty excited to see us, which was very nice. Almost everybody embraced us with warm welcomes, except for four places. Four places, actually, one we called. Just asked us not to come by. Which was kind of strange. That's a really funny conversation when you're calling. At first they're kind of skeptical, which I understand. They're like, we're running RV and we're in this float tour and they're like, that's all, that's okay, you guys can pass by, and we're like, we just want to say hi. Can we come by and say hi to you and they're like, no, no, don't come say hi. That's all right. We're fine. Aren't you a public place of business? We can't stop us from coming by. Most everybody was very happy to see us as we went around. We heard some amazing things, too. One of the crazy things was that of everywhere that we visited, about half of them had opened within the last year. So of those 172, if we had gone on the float tour just over a year ago, we only would have been able to visit about half the stops that we actually made. Yeah, and it was incredible. We were seeing this everywhere. We were visiting places that had just been open for three weeks. We were visiting places that had had their grand opening a few days before we got there. We were visiting places that were about to have their grand opening a week after we were there. About halfway through our trip, I started looking back on cities that we had already passed through and there were new float centers there. I was like, why did we miss that place? And I looked into it and I'm like, they opened after we were there. And by the end of our trip, we were hitting places that if we had just looped the other way around North America, they wouldn't have existed at the times that we had gone back. So we were doing this very live, up-to-the-minute trip around visiting places and a huge variety of places too, as you can kind of see from the arms in the air photos going on behind us. Everything from just float, the biggest float center in the world, with 11 tanks, to single tanks in people's houses that were still running floats commercially. We visited places that hadn't even been opened yet. We went to one place out near Joshua Tree that was just a desert, like a plot of desert. And they were showing us where their float center was going to go and they like brought out this huge map and it was just all desert. And then they had a square around one chunk of that desert and they're like, that's going to be the desert that this thing's going in. There it is. And the most incredible thing is that we were actually visiting on that. We went to see the desert because, you know, we had to go check it out. And this guy came up on a moped trying to see if we were, you know, what we were doing there. And they started talking about the fact that they were going to open up this float center. And out literally in the middle of nowhere, this guy was like, oh yeah, float tanks. I know about those. He sounds awesome. So the word is getting out. I think we're doing a good job. And the variety continues everywhere to, you know, some people ask us what our favorite stop was on Float Tour and it's really hard to say, but definitely I guess I'm really drawn towards the places that are the most unique and individual. And so here's an example of one of my personal favorite stops. This is down in New Orleans. It's a place called Space Sanctuary, which we only found as a reference from another float tank center. They're not listed on floatation locations or anything. And they said, yeah, you can try to reach out. He's usually not there, you know. And we did. And this is a little pre-float shrine that he has going into the float tank here. It's actually a float and float business. So you can see some Mardi Gras floats out there. And a float tank going in here. And we thought someone was just confused. We're like, no, it's the wrong type of floats. Like we're... And we caught him just before he was going out to Bali to do a float tank installation there. So this is his custom float tank that he built in here, which you can kind of take a look at. No diving signs. Of course. This is actually also hosted... He had a group that he was called the Church of Chewbacca, which is a combination of Chewbacca and Bacchus, and they throw, like, Star Wars-themed black and aliens. Yeah. His nice float tank room was totally decked out with insane LEDs. Back behind his warehouse was a 30-foot papier-mache statue of R2-D2 smoking a giant blunt. Truly amazing. And he used this one largely for personal use and kind of keeping himself sane in there. But yeah, that was one of our favorite stops, to just show you a little of the crazy variety that we encountered. And honestly, one of the most amazing parts of going on this trip was just getting to talk to everyone. People who had been running their centers and getting to hear their stories and their experiences and what their life has been like. Instead of actually coming up here and telling you ourselves what they said, we actually took some video footage, and we'd like to just let the people themselves tell you all about what it's like to run their float centers. Any advice now that you've actually gone through the process from conception through opening that you'd like to give to people who are just starting to get their toes into the salty water of floatation? The biggest thing is just stick with it. It's going to be hard. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about opening a float center or just kind of looking at this whole industry and having quite dip their toes into it yet? Don't do it. What's your negative wisdom that you would pass on? Don't do it. No. Do it. Do it. Absolutely do it. I mean, there was a lot of emotional people. It was so much more work than we anticipated. We got knocked down so many times, first of all, to start out. We got shot down and shot down and shot down and shot down. We anticipated a lot of work. Because a float center is challenging on the mind. Kind of just from conception to getting our doors open was a lot of hair pulling. Yeah, we were thinking, it's going to be a lot of one, two a.m. nights and no, it's almost constant four and five a.m. night. Yeah, and a couple zero sleep. That was without a doubt the most stressful thing I've ever been through. But it's done. You know, I mean, it was just everything that could go wrong went wrong. If anything can go wrong, it will. It's definitely a lot more work than you think it is. Don't worry, it'll take longer than you expect. It's hard. One of my friends refers to it as a petty tyrant. And then we quickly realized that saltwater and dried salt gets everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. No matter what you do, shit's going to hit the fan. Yeah, your float center is kind of like it smacks you around, you know, just, you know, and it's like, ah, that hurt. Higher professionals. A budget, budget more. Take your worst case scenario and add 50%. It's going to be, you know, longer and more expensive than you think it's going to be. I kind of idealized that it was going to be a lot easier. And it's going to cost more than you had anticipated. I remember there was a day when we went before the health board and we thought it was just us and the gentleman and it turned out it was not only the entire Davidson County health board, but the state health board was there. Yeah, we decided we need to do it and got a float tank in our basement and destroyed my basement. It was in the pages of all our notebooks, you know. And they grilled us. I felt like I was, like, had killed somebody here and they were, you know, taking me down. I don't know. So, yeah, our pods had to come through those windows right there, which was not the plan at all. Single light hanging in the room should have been a clue, I suppose. It was on all of the electrode wires. Just going to try and steal a plate in front of our shop as the cars go over and we will be giving a lot of refunds and free floats. Just let us know you have your lifeguards lined up. We all need these signs that say, like, no diving. There's, you know, just, like, a giant machine like smashing the road in a hard spot. But it was hard and I know we left there and I felt so broken and, like, this is never going to happen. We've spent so much money. I guess it's ironic that a business that one of its features is helping people to avoid stress at times was extremely stressful. We have failed. We have changed our floors at least once a year. We have spent more money than we ever thought we would. We have worked harder than we ever thought we would. If I'm making one for myself, a little more effort I can make them for other people. I had no idea it was a totally different ballgame. I was so naive. So it's hard. Yeah, it's very difficult to run a float tank center. It's very difficult to start up a float tank center. Basically anything that salt can destroy, it will destroy. Even for us on this tour, we had to go into construction while Ashkahn and I were gone and almost destroyed another of our business partners, Jake, who a lot of you know probably. It was actually a result of the city doing this insane project. They had started planning the project before we even opened our center of redoing 100-year-old sewer pipeline, literally a once-in-a-century project, was going right down in front of our shop, taking one month per block to tear out old rails and sewer systems. This is what our shop looked like when we were out on tour. Yeah, that was fun. And so we decided to take the opportunity as long as we couldn't run floats anyway to do a little bit of renovations ourselves, which of course wasn't easy either. We started taking apart one of our rooms that we needed to update, only to find that one of the walls that we had never touched when we moved into the building, when we finally got back there, was actually just cardboard that some contractor had mudded over back in the day. Had old Asian Times newspapers shoved in there as insulation as well. And some small burn marks from a fire that had happened at some point in the past. So a good lesson too if you take over a space that we totally recommend gutting it down to the core before you build back up, because who knows what people did beforehand. We actually went to take apart one of our rooms, do some fixes on it and put a new float tank in there, and in that process, by trying to get our permits, we found out that we actually needed to take the wall between our rooms, completely destroy it, and rebuild it five eighths of an inch over to meet ADA requirement. So yeah, that's what our float center looked like while we were out galvanting around the country. So even we who consult with people and try to help them avoid these problems cannot even help but stumble into them ourselves. You know, it almost doesn't matter how much experience you have. Those float tank centers really are kind of petty tyrants like David Knieley said. So why the heck would anyone even open one of these things? A guy was chain sawing a tree and dropped the chain saw onto his arm. And before the chain stopped, it went through his ulnar nerve. I actually lived with chronic pain for about 24 years and I thought, oh my gosh, I'm not going to make it through this day. Maybe if I get a massage, I can function. I had a really, really interesting physical journey. So I was like bodybuilder, giant muscular guy who worked out six hours a day. I was in a bad motorcycle class. It's 70 miles an hour now. I was just telling you earlier, both my knees were operated on. I went up on my back and my neck. I did that, tried a lot of things. So he had a significant nerve injury on his other arm, for which he had 30 surgeries and four pain management. And then one day my body just stopped working. I ended up having a back injury and I was kind of struggling with trying to work on figuring out my back and getting it pain-free or not or fixing or whatever. This is a man who was accident prone throughout his life. I was bedridden for roughly two years where I could not get out of bed. I couldn't stand. I couldn't do anything. A woman that came in with her husband holding her from behind because she couldn't stand. Just a, you know, tortured series of years of pain and awfulness. Went to this lovely lady's home and I walked down and told her what was going on and she said, you know, massage might help you a little bit, but I have this tank in my basement. I spent everything that I had on different modalities to get back to functioning as a human again. Sure, a tank in your basement, why not? Take me down. A friend of mine brought it up. Like, you should try floating. Oh, yeah. It looked like a coffin and I got it anyway. And he led her into the tank, got her in the tank, and she had described to us that she had ligaments that had pulled away from her spine. So he comes to us and he's healed enough, you know, that he can get into the tank. The first float was pretty amazing, but she floated for the next two weeks or so. It was just sort of like, we have no idea what this is going to do for you, really. It may help, it may not. She woke me up an hour later by knocking on the tank and I felt pretty good. The way I felt after the float. I had a hard time believing that that came from something that was as deceptively simple as laying in a dark box full of salt water. Like, how did that make me feel this way? I went and floated, and I noticed immediately the tingling in my hands, my feet started, you know, getting better. And just from the series of three floats, it was amazing what had happened. And floating was one of the things that really helped my progression all leap forward. She wrote us an email and said, well, I'm not having surgery. Basically, the pain is going away and I can live with this. And she walks in now, her husband's not tailing her. My husband hang out with my godchildren and my nieces and go out with my friends and go out to eat and do normal things that I never thought I could do again. And I'm thinking, wow, this is life changing. When you live with pain and suddenly you can live a normal life. She keeps coming in, she's like, my doctor is still very impressed. So we floated and then we came back the very next morning and floated again. And I didn't have pain for three days. It was the first time since I was hurt. And he came out also in tears because he had no pain. His severe, burning, tingling, awful pain was gone. And that's how this place happened. That's how I found floating. That's where we are today. I knew right then that I would float for the rest of my life. So of course, that is of course the reason we're all doing this. It makes all of those late nights that we're there fixing pumps dealing with salty disasters and moving walls 5 eighths of an inch. All that is worth it when you get to see people coming out of their floats and having these incredible experiences. So this is a demonstration of someone having incredible experience. But this is from a PTSD program that we were running at our shop. And one of the things that we did was had people do drawings before and after they got in the float. So we gave them a sheet of paper and some crayons. And this is one of the post-flow drawings from one of our PTSD participants down at float on. And we actually asked them to draw a picture before and after their floats. And this is what the picture they drew before their float was. So that's the transformation from before or after that single float. And you know, this is, I think, why we're all in this room right now. There's some people who come in and float and have a good experience. There's other people who maybe it's just okay. But there's some people who come in where it feels like this is giving them their lives back. You know, that things were going in a totally different direction. That they weren't able to really function in their day to day anymore. And then they find this and it's a complete game changer for them. And to me it's such an incredible experience. And I think all of us who have float centers here have experienced that. And it's such an intuitive reason for why we wake up every morning and go in there and deal with whatever catastrophe is happening to our float center. Yeah, it is difficult to open a float tank center. But it legitimately just changes people's lives. And as a result of that, I think is why we have this kind of magical community that you can all feel even here at the conference. I think it's almost palpable. And we get compliments every year from the hosts of our different events and parties saying that despite the size of our group, that we're just the easiest to deal with people that they've ever had and that their entire staff just loved us. And I think it is. I think it's a result of that kind of going through that trial by water is what I like to call it. And then also coming out the other side and actually being able to impact people so much. Yeah, and we get to have this experience where we run our centers where we see the impact of giving back to people. And I think that translates directly into what we do with each other. We're a group of people who get to see how good it feels to help other people. And then when another float center opens up and you think back on your experience of all those crazy late nights and you know what they're going to go through, it just becomes supernatural for you to help them as well. And you can see it around here. I think everybody in this room has come up to me at some point just in this conference and told me this exact same thing about how everyone here is so open and sharing and kind and willing to help each other out. And yeah, it's an incredible thing that we have going on. And it's not just us that are up here saying this, you know, this is I think a persistent message that we've actually been hearing from everybody in the industry. I just want to say I love this industry. I love the people in the industry. We're just, we're like this family. It's like float family that exists. There's a bunch of weirdos, man. And I like that, right? There's a bunch of fun, weird people out there. If you have that type of personality, then I encourage people to open up those centers because everybody needs a float. People care and they know how to treat others and they know how to support each other and this kind of thing. Because anybody that's opening a float center, in my opinion, is coming from the heart. We're in such a unique industry to not be able to share that with other people. It would be a shame, yeah. And it just bonds everybody. It kind of takes the whole competition thing away a little bit and just you get to share. It feels good. Float centers are going in now all over the U.S. And no longer are we this lone float center in the southeast. We're starting to see a lot more pop in. And that has made our life so much easier. We experienced going from the only game in town to this just flowing up. And I'm going to say there's nine of us here between Marietta and Brown San Diego County. And it's done nothing but grow our business. I think community is one of our biggest assets, I guess you can call it. I feel really lucky to have such a wonderful life. You know, you guys fell into an industry who would want to be in somewhere else. The more people float, the better the world is. That's the truth. That's the truth. Well, you know, to me the part that is exciting is being able to come to the float conference and actually talk about it and reveal it to people who care. We discovered that there was a whole community. I met you all for the first time. Discovered this whole community that people were very encouraging. I had been concerned that as the industry grew that we might be in danger of the only money humbliness coming in or of having a change in a way that you couldn't keep the goodness of it all. But I don't see that that's happening. We've built a very unique, wonderful thing. I'd like to see it sort of maintained like that as we grow and the bigger companies or the corporate world starts to get involved in the float industry. I don't want to see that fade from the community or the family, I guess, that we have built. Just spread floating, man. Spread love, spread floating. That's it. If you do that, you lived a good life. So on those days when you feel beat up, whatever it is, I'll talk you off. I'll talk you off the roof. You can call any float center and ask for advice. Reach out to some of the people in the community that are running float centers, ask them how they're doing it. This is Mike Jones. He wants to start Insight Floatation Center in San Jose. Tap other people in the industry for information. Just learn as much as you can and float a lot before you open your center. You know, in helping other people run their business just by sharing straight up advice. If you can help people, you should help people. That's a reality. Today we are giving Mike and donating to Mike $500 to open up Insight Float Center. Awesome. We all are lucky to operate in an industry that's so open and so friendly. Everybody loves to share help and, you know, build this community, you know, rise up. So that's probably the best thing you can do. And so people like us talk to each other. That helps and do that. We all get what you're going through. We are all going to be like, oh yeah, we have so been there. I'm so sorry. You're going to make it. It is the best therapy I've ever had in my entire life. That ability to give back makes it worth it to turn the key and open every day. Even having to step up and take that role in the community where other people are reaching out to me trying to, you know, ask for help or suggestions, it's really honorable, honestly. And so, you know, there is a ripple effect and I don't know where this ripple is going to go. But it's moving. I mean, it's clear that there's ripples occurring all over the freaking country now. So at this point, it might feel a little bit like we're preaching to the choir here. You know, I think everybody in this room kind of understands this, but I actually think it's really important to take a moment and appreciate what's going on here. I think there's something very special about what's happening in this industry and the fact that even as this is growing and we're all running our businesses and places are opening up closer and closer to each other, this kind of culture in this community that's being grown is, in my opinion, becoming stronger. I mean, that's the only thing that we saw on our trip. We were everywhere we were going. Everybody who was opening their centers seemed just right on the same page as the people in this room and the people you're familiar with. And it really seemed like people were coming from the heart when they were opening this place. And it's something that we like to say all the time, you know, that our biggest competitor isn't other float tank centers. You know, we're not competing over a limited asset of people who can benefit from floating from people who are interested in floating. Our real competitor is just lack of awareness. Getting it out there, helping the industry rise up together. You know, a rising tide raises all ships and that was, again, the story that we heard time and time again as we're traveling around. And it starts with even just small things like going out and borrowing hydrogen peroxide from your neighboring float tank center or giving them an extra filter or a bag of salt when they needed. And we heard that many, many times when we'd go to different stops. We heard even more incredible things than that. We were down in San Diego and we're talking to Mark, one of the guys you saw in the video there. And he was talking about a float tank center opening up and he called them on the day that they were first getting ready and filling their tanks and they were just having a lot of trouble and kind of nervous about filling their tanks for the first time. And he was like, hold on a second, I'll be there in an hour. And hopped in his car and went down to what other people would regard as a competitor and help them fill their float tanks for the first time. Yeah. And then we stopped by Floating Earth County to visit Glenn. And he had just been there as well helping Glenn cock the bottom of his tanks with the new cocking that he'd found that held up really well against salt water. So he was just out doing good deeds for float centers around him on a regular basis. And we heard, again, even more extreme stories than that. Like Floating Asheville when Mark over there had a heart attack suddenly and left Amy alone to tend the center. She posted up on Facebook that she was having all of these troubles and was really stressed out and she hadn't been the one taking care of the tank. Mark was the one who was doing the more technical stuff with the tanks. But Brooke Brinson offered to come down from Ohm Floats and go tend the center for them and help out. And he did tank repairs. He worked there for several days with no fee. Amy gave him some money for gas and really filled in, visited Mark in the hospital. And that's the kind of community that we have. Jeremy Warner also reached out to Amy and offered the exact same thing. And she had to be like, oh, sorry, spots filled and other float tanks were offered to come down and run it for me. And we can sit here and talk about this in all these different complex ways. But honestly, the message is pretty simple and I think everyone in the industry kind of gets it at this point. So how do we do this? How do we support this as we get bigger and as more people start entering and opening float centers and as potentially this idea of competition and actually having more floaters in the same area develops. And I think it just really starts with the simple things. We here in Portland get together with the other float centers in town once every handful of months and we just all go grab beers with each other. And that's kind of it. There's no, like, ulterior motivation for it. There's no other agenda. We're not trying to form some sort of business alliance. Although Jeremy DeLong here does call it the float mafia every time we get together. But we just get together and have beers and swap salty stories and just remind ourselves that we're all humans and we're all just trying to get people into float tanks and we all actually have the same goal. Yep. And Trika Drake as well organizes the same kind of thing up there in Calgary for all the float centers around. They go out on regular float dinners up there too. And all of them were really bonded and really close to each other and that was so great to see as we were passing through. And I guess we really just wanted with our talk to find some way to encourage you to do that, to just reach out to the centers around you. Go out, grab drinks, grab tea, grab beer and just hang out with each other. So we put together a website which is floatdrinks.com and after this conference if you guys contact the float centers in your cities and you all get together and grab drinks and you hop on this website and you send us a little arms in the air photo of you all getting together then we will cover the first round of drinks for everybody who decides to get together. And it would be our pleasure to do so. Definitely, definitely actually take use of this forum. Go contact the people around you and make those connections. We've talked about some lofty things, things like just destroying your floors, destroying your sanity by opening up a float tank center. The meaningful stories of changing people's lives of trying to change this world for the better. And I guess the point we really want to get across is that that doesn't start by trying to launch into these many months or year-long projects. Changing the world starts with the simple things. It just starts with being human and hanging out with each other. Thank you. There we go. Excellent. Thank you guys so much.