From Down $100K
to Best Month Ever

In December 2019, Jessie Puryear was running Urban Float University Place in Washington State. Six float pods. An Urban Float franchise location that corporate had largely left to fend for itself. His previous marketing agency’s contract was ending. Results hadn’t come.

He rated his own business success at 2 out of 10.

The numbers told the same story. Revenue was down almost $100,000 for the year. Appointments had dropped from 25–30 per day to 10–19. He was averaging $2,500–$3,000 per month on Groupon just to keep bodies in the tanks. Membership sat at 120 — roughly $10,000 per month — with a goal of 300.

Corporate was, in his words, “indifferent when it comes to marketing.” The franchise-provided social media was generic. The pricing had been dictated from above — at one point selling seven days of floats for $40, which filled his tanks and destroyed his margins. The systems he needed weren’t coming from the franchise.

He found More Floats through a link on another float center’s website.

The first moves were structural. Membership pricing was rebuilt. Groupon dependency was addressed directly. Ads were launched with a clear focus: new customers first, then retention. A first-time float offer at $45 was the entry point, but the real play was the membership funnel behind it.

By January 2020, 25 new members signed in a single month. By February, the center was $8,450 ahead of the prior year. Ads were performing well enough that the conversation had shifted from survival to strategy: which conditions to target, how to pitch membership earlier, whether to start running Google Ads alongside Facebook.

Then COVID shut everything down.

From March to June 2020, the center was closed. Zero revenue for months. The response wasn’t to wait it out. It was to prepare.

Marketing costs were cut to a reduced plan. The 30-day notice requirement was waived. And while the doors were closed, the business was redesigned. One float tank was removed and replaced with an infrared sauna. Red light therapy was added. The service mix shifted from float-only to a multi-service wellness center.

Videos were produced around sanitation protocols and safety measures before the doors reopened June 1. And when they did reopen, Jessie didn’t come back as the same business. He came back as a different one.

When Jessie opened in 2018, the pricing model was broken. First-time float discounts at $45. Groupon. An unlimited float option at unsustainable prices. In 2019, with those prices in place, the center filled 70% of appointments in its best month and still booked a $115,000 loss. Over 9,000 floats that year, but only 5% of customers converted to members. One person paid full price for a non-discounted float the entire year.

The problem wasn’t demand. The problem was that the pricing had locked in a perceived value that made the membership feel expensive instead of like a deal. A first-time float at $45 made a $59 membership feel like a price increase, not a discount. Every discount trained the next customer to wait for a better offer.

The strategic work over the following years dismantled that model piece by piece. The first-time discount moved from $45 to $59 to $65, then was eliminated entirely by June 2021. Groupon was cut. Package discounts were restructured so that membership was always the best value. The single session price was set at $89 — not because that’s what every customer would pay, but because it established the perceived value that made a $59 membership feel like an obvious decision.

The results were immediate. In the second half of 2021, after the first-time discount was fully eliminated, memberships surged. The year ended at 331 members. By the end of 2022: 568 members, 2,100 new clients, and $676,000 in revenue. The only structural change was pricing.

Jessie was invited to present this framework at the Float Conference — walking the industry through the pricing psychology research, the data from his own center, and the step-by-step process of restructuring a float center’s pricing to drive membership conversion. His staff commission structure, membership terms, and seasonal promotion strategy were all shared openly with the room.