Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Today’s Daily Solution explores why Float On runs 90 minute floats versus shorter ones, and talks about various float lengths and what choosing them means for your float schedule and, ultimately, your business.
As always, Ashkahn and Graham dig deep into their float bibles and guide us to wisdom, truth, and prosperity.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: We’re going over a question from one of our listeners, which is,
“What are the benefits and downsides of 60 versus 90 minute floats?”
I should probably start this by saying that we have only ever run 90 minute floats and longer in our shop.
Ashkahn: Yeah, we have no idea what we’re talking about.
Graham: This is nothing but gut feeling and intuition and hunches on what’s about to come out of our mouth right now.
Ashkahn: But, there are reasons that we’ve only ever run 90 minute floats.
Graham: One thing I like about 90 minutes over 60 minutes is that it feels a little more intentional or prescriptive in a certain sense whereas our world just kinda runs on 60 minute time blocks so it feels very arbitrary, whereas when you tell someone your float is 90 minutes long it feels more like you’re saying that’s the length of time we think you need to be in there to have the experience that we’re trying to get you to have.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and I think one of the concerns that goes on the flip side of that is that without the option of 60 minutes, people would just think that 90 minutes is too long because that’s kind of their programming is to accept these things in 60 minute blocks.
Graham: I haven’t really found that to be true in our float center. I have had people call and I picked up the phone and as their booking an appointment they ask how long the appointment is and I’ll tell them, oh, you know it’s 90 minutes long, and they’ll often say, wow, that sounds like a long time, and I’ll say that you know pretty much everyone comes out and says that it felt like 30 minutes, and they say okay and they book their appointment, and that’s usually the end of it. I really can’t think of a time that I’ve told someone it’s 90 minutes instead of 60 and they’ve hung up and not booked their appointment as a result.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s one of the great secrets of being a float tank center owner is that what we do is so weird that no one knows about it so they just kinda trust you, inherently.
Graham: They shouldn’t, but they do.
Ashkahn: When they come in, if they say 90 minutes seems long, just you telling them I don’t think it is and you’ll enjoy yourself. They’re like “oh, okay, yeah that makes sense.”
Graham: Especially if it’s their first float. I think people get some benefits out of 90 minutes that they might not in 60 minutes, like just the fact that you can be in there past that kind of 45 minute mark that seems to be about where people kinda slip into the zone during their first float. They get a much longer period of time in that kinda “floaty state”, and I again, totally based on no real data, just hunches, feel like they maybe will come back to float more often after just a single float when you give them that 90 minutes instead of 60.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and that’s definitely something that’s always appealed to us I guess about doing the slightly longer floats is just giving people that extra benefit that comes along with staying in the tank for longer and hopefully better experience that encourages them to come back and if you can’t tell this is our totally unbiased report on 60 versus 90, by the way. I think you can pretty clearly see pros and cons on both sides, equally weighing out.
Graham: The obvious downside is that you can’t run as many floats, and there’s no getting around that. You just literally will not be able to have as many appointments, and you don’t charge 50% more for a 90 minute float that people are charging for a 60 minute float, so there’s definitely some kind of direct, on the surface economic downside to it.
Ashkahn: As long as you’re rocking out and keeping a really high capacity.
Graham: If you’re running a bunch of 60 minute floats but you can’t fill those anyway, again it goes back to the question of “why not just increase it and kinda give everyone a little longer in the float tank?”
Graham: What about for places that aren’t Portland and the bulk of the population wakes up before 10:00 a.m. where maybe they run on a little faster timeline? I hear that a lot of that too for New York or L.A. People wanting to just go in and out of the tank just to be able to fit it in with something like a lunch break, I mean that’s why even places we’ve stopped by tend to offer things that to us seem ludicrous, but apparently have been working out very well commercially like 30 minute floats or 45 minute floats.
Ashkahn: We don’t see them a lot, but there are a few places out there that do it and tell us it’s been going well. Again this is our very Portland experience, but I don’t get a ton of people that I feel like are trying to come in quickly and like work this into their schedule.
I feel like when people come to float it’s much more like when it’s a whole day that they have off and they have something like a picnic planned afterwards and you know it’s kind of the beginning of some big, nice relaxing day they’ve planned for themselves rather than try to just scrunch it in right away between two appointments.
Graham: Maybe that’s cause we’re not offering anything that could be scrunched in between appointments as much? Maybe they just don’t go as deep like in 90 minute floats. It kinda does bring you a little bit to this other realm, you know. Trying to do a 30 minute float, maybe it just takes you a little bit less out of the day to day zone, and people are able to kinda sneak it in almost more like a meditation break or something.
Ashkahn: I was just talking to Tom Fine about this actually, because he was talking about his research and how they did 45 minute floats in a lot of his research and how some of this research in Sweden is the same thing, 45 minute. Tom said they’d even done some 30 minute floats.
Graham: As a tangent too, they thought we were crazy in Sweden when we were telling them that we were doing 90 minute floats when we first went over there some years ago.
Graham: Nearly every center over there thought that we were … they were …we were sitting at dinner table and they were actually telling us that we were crazy for doing floats that long. And over there, 45 minutes is really is much more the norm. Okay, tangent over.
Ashkahn: So Tom Fine’s suggestions that, perhaps there’s different benefits that you’d get at the 30 minute mark versus the hour mark versus the hour and a half mark. If someone’s coming in for something maybe more like shoulder pain or back pain, that 30 minutes might get them to the spot where they get the relief they’re looking for and beyond that doesn’t actually contribute a whole lot more. Whereas if someone is looking for a different type of benefit from floating, it might take that full hour, hour and a half sort of time range to reach it. So, I don’t know, and it’s just his theory as well but definitely an interesting thing to think about.
Graham: So you heard it here, we’re not actually certain about anything.
Ashkahn: That’s right.
Graham: What about combo floats? So doing things that are 60 minutes and then sometimes doing 90 minutes. Or running half of your tanks of 60, half on 90 and then the other half on two and a half hours?
Ashkahn: It’s mostly difficult to get around the logistics of something like that. If you have a fixed schedule where all of your floats are starting at set times during the day, like all at 1:00 p.m. and then a whole other batch at 3:00 p.m. and another batch at 5:00 p.m., it’s really difficult to offer 60 minutes because if someone chooses 60 minutes, you’re not gonna shift your whole schedule structure around to shorten everything.
You’re just going to get them out 30 minutes early, and then your float tank is just going to sit there empty for 30 minutes. To me that’s almost a little bit silly because it would have cost you like $0 more to have someone stay in the float tank for that full time. So there’s that and having two different rooms that have different lengths of float mostly just gets into difficulty with your floats not starting at the same time, which is hard for taking groups of people and for noise. Making sure that noise from one room isn’t disturbing a float in another room.
Graham: That’s a good lesson that people can get going into this from the outside and those who aren’t actively running the float tank center right now might not realize, which is that pumps in the float tanks are really noisy. It sounds like a jet engine kicking on in there sometimes, especially when you’ve been in a float tank and you’re used to the quiet solitude and that noise really, despite all the crazy soundproofing we do, actually just blasts right through the walls. It’s very, very rare that we found a float center that can run a pump in a room adjacent to another float room and have that noise not just immediately blast over to whoever is in the other tank.
So when we’re saying about starting at the same time, that’s a little bit of that reason is pump noise is just so hard to block out plus the noise of cleaning and doing walk-throughs. It’s just one of those challenges again that lot of people first getting into this might not recognize as something that needs to be overcome if you want to run those different schedule float tanks.
Ashkahn: At our center we offer two and a half hour floats as well as 90 minute floats and the way we get away with it is we just have a time of day where all of our floats switch. So at 11:00 p.m. we switch from doing 90 minute floats to two and a half hour floats and we do two of those through the middle of the night and then we switch back to doing 90 minute floats. That switch over means there are no gaps in our schedule. All of our floats still start at the same time. We don’t hit any of the snags that I just mentioned, but we do offer multiple lengths of floats.
Graham: And theoretically you could just build two totally separate float centers and do 60 minutes in one and 90 minute floats in another.
Ashkahn: And then you could let us know what the actual information is with real data and not just random hunches.
Graham: People wouldn’t need to trust our random, off the cuff information that we’re spewing out here.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so that’d be good. Someone should do that.
Graham: All right, that’s the benefits of 60 and 90 minute floats, and we’ll see you next episode.
Recent Podcast Episodes
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
Choosing the Hours to Staff Your Float Center – DSP 114
How do you figure out how many people to hire? What’s the ideal hours for a float employee to work? Is there such a thing as too many hours? Too few?
Graham and Ashkahn share their insights with staffing Float On and what their staff looks like to cover all their shifts running a six tank, 24 hour float center.
Tips for Creating an Inviting Float Center Lobby – DSP 113
Not all of us are interior designers, but we all want to have a space that is welcoming to our customers.
Graham and Ashkahn definitely have an eye for this, especially after visiting so many float centers. They share some of their favorite designs they’ve seen, as well as common tactics to help make your center comfy and inviting without necessarily breaking the bank on furniture. They also share some of their pipe dreams for their ideal designs that never came to be.
The Weight of a Gallon of Saltwater – DSP 112
When Graham and Ashkahn get to definitively answer a question, it’s like Christmas. Birds sing and the guys bust out their “Answering a question definitively” dance, which has the added side effect of better crop yields during the coming harvest. It’s an exciting time.
There’s a very straightforward mathematical equation for measuring the weight of salt water based on specific gravity, which is excellent. And useful!
Also, whoever wrote this question needs to contact Graham and Ashkahn ASAP!
Tips on Structuring Your Service Menu – DSP 111
There’s a lot of nuance to how you structure your service menu that can have a significant impact on how your customers spend their money. The size of prices, how they’re ordered or arranged, what price you put first on the menu, etc. all make a difference. Given all these small details, it can seem daunting and make some business owners unsure of where to start or who’s advice to take.
Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have been at this for a long time and really dig marketing psychology, so they have lots of advice, tips and even some of the psychology behind why we do the things we do.
Latest Blog Posts
Slowing Down, Letting Go, and Stepping Up to iFloat
My intention for this first blog post is to give you some background into my life, and how and why I ended up running a float center, and teaching courses about metaprogramming in float centers. For as far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated with exploring...
We’ll All Float On
This is the introduction that I wrote for the Portland Float Conference program. I wanted to repost it here, so that all of my zany predictions for the future of floating could be recorded for all time. It also seemed like a good piece to kick off this month's topic...
The First Post (in which the nature of the project is revealed)
There is not enough content out there about float tanks. There is certainly not enough for those of us that are actively running, or trying to start, a center. Float Tank Solutions was launched in an attempt to crush this problem. We've already put up a good amount of...
Show Highlights
Show Resources
Show Transcription
(in case you prefer reading)
Recent Podcast Episodes
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
Choosing the Hours to Staff Your Float Center – DSP 114
How do you figure out how many people to hire? What’s the ideal hours for a float employee to work? Is there such a thing as too many hours? Too few?
Graham and Ashkahn share their insights with staffing Float On and what their staff looks like to cover all their shifts running a six tank, 24 hour float center.
Tips for Creating an Inviting Float Center Lobby – DSP 113
Not all of us are interior designers, but we all want to have a space that is welcoming to our customers.
Graham and Ashkahn definitely have an eye for this, especially after visiting so many float centers. They share some of their favorite designs they’ve seen, as well as common tactics to help make your center comfy and inviting without necessarily breaking the bank on furniture. They also share some of their pipe dreams for their ideal designs that never came to be.
The Weight of a Gallon of Saltwater – DSP 112
When Graham and Ashkahn get to definitively answer a question, it’s like Christmas. Birds sing and the guys bust out their “Answering a question definitively” dance, which has the added side effect of better crop yields during the coming harvest. It’s an exciting time.
There’s a very straightforward mathematical equation for measuring the weight of salt water based on specific gravity, which is excellent. And useful!
Also, whoever wrote this question needs to contact Graham and Ashkahn ASAP!
Tips on Structuring Your Service Menu – DSP 111
There’s a lot of nuance to how you structure your service menu that can have a significant impact on how your customers spend their money. The size of prices, how they’re ordered or arranged, what price you put first on the menu, etc. all make a difference. Given all these small details, it can seem daunting and make some business owners unsure of where to start or who’s advice to take.
Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have been at this for a long time and really dig marketing psychology, so they have lots of advice, tips and even some of the psychology behind why we do the things we do.
Latest Blog Posts
Slowing Down, Letting Go, and Stepping Up to iFloat
My intention for this first blog post is to give you some background into my life, and how and why I ended up running a float center, and teaching courses about metaprogramming in float centers. For as far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated with exploring...
We’ll All Float On
This is the introduction that I wrote for the Portland Float Conference program. I wanted to repost it here, so that all of my zany predictions for the future of floating could be recorded for all time. It also seemed like a good piece to kick off this month's topic...
The First Post (in which the nature of the project is revealed)
There is not enough content out there about float tanks. There is certainly not enough for those of us that are actively running, or trying to start, a center. Float Tank Solutions was launched in an attempt to crush this problem. We've already put up a good amount of...
