Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
In this heartwarming holiday episode, Graham and Ashkahn talk about how to not Scrooge up your float center with your business practices by sharing their philosophy on working your float center during the holidays.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: And today’s question is we thought appropriate. “What do you do for your staff for holidays? Do you keep your shop open or do you let them have the day off?”
Ashkahn: So yeah, if you ask us specifically …
Graham: Of course, every single staff member have worked every single holiday.
Ashkahn: Even if there’s no customers, they just have to sit in an empty shop.
Graham: Running a float center is hard. And they need to learn how to toughen up and suffer and not be around their families.
Ashkahn: Our rules, they’re pretty like just organically developed. We won’t force anyone to work on holidays. We’re fine being closed. I guess one thing to talk about first is would people even book on holidays. Like Christmas or New Year’s or something like that. And turns out they totally do.
Graham: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been open on pretty much every major holiday. I have worked at shop in New Year’s and on Christmas before.
Ashkahn: We had people float through midnight on New Year’s.
Graham: I think we pretty much fill up our tanks every New Year’s that we are open during that time because it kind of sounds like a cool thing to do. Enter the new year in a float tank.
Ashkahn: So customers would definitely come in. If you’re open, they will come. But the question is do you force your staff to work. We don’t. It just been … The amount of money we made for being open on the holidays doesn’t seem worth it to us to make people work on holidays when they don’t want to.
Graham: But we’re totally fine paying holiday pay if people do want to stick around and open up the shop.
Ashkahn: See our basic rule is pretty much if anyone wants to do it. If any of our staff wants to, and we don’t even force it or push it or anything. Like usually the times that we’re open, someone in our staff will go “Hey, are we open Christmas?” “Yeah, probably not unless anyone wants to work.” And they’re like “Yeah, I think that’d be fun. I like to work on Christmas.” And we’re like “Okay, you really don’t have to.”
It’s totally cool if we want to stay closed. And some people, we just had in the past, were really into the idea of coming in on Thanksgiving and Christmas or New Year’s. And the idea of being there and floating people on a day like that sounds really cool to them.
We’re like, okay. Make sure to say something if you want to be open.
Graham: It’s nice having people who actually like their jobs.
Ashkahn: It certainly will feel weird to not be open despite the fact that customers want to come in and our employees want to come in.
Graham: Also, not uncommonly we’re not open for the full day but we have a couple of members who wants to float or something like that, and one of our staff members just decides to be nice and do a favor for someone who come in for one or two float sessions of the day. And be like “Okay, I’ll be there from 11AM to 3PM if you want to actually come and get a float in.”
Because they have this nice personal connections with the members and just be like doing them a favor.
Ashkahn: And also customers end up being really awesome too. We had bring the working people pie and like all sorts of-
Graham: I was thinking about one of those pies. I was working on Thanksgiving, that just delicious pumpkin pie that someone had baked and brought in, which is awesome.
Ashkahn: See, that’s cool. The only thing I haven’t thought about before. We had a conversation at some point about, the perception of us being open. You can see from an outside perspective people thinking we’re forcing the staff to go to work.
And at the end of the day, I was like you know what? I’m not going to worry too much about perception when the actual reality is something that doesn’t seem to be upsetting anybody.
Graham: Yeah, no. And we obviously we still have people scheduling floats and not boycotting us outside for inappropriate labor rights or anything like that.
And that said, I think that we do end up being closed on more holidays than we end up open. I think more often than not, our staff just kind of takes the day off.
Ashkahn: And here’s the list of holidays that we are not open on, off the top of my head.
Graham: Flag Day.
Ashkahn: Yeah, national pie day. There’s Christmas-
Graham: New Year’s.
Ashkahn: -and Christmas Eve, we’re off that whole time. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s we’re usually closed.
Graham: Thanksgiving.
Ashkahn: Yeah, Thanksgiving we close.
Graham: Flag Day.
Ashkahn: We’re close for a week around Flag Day.
Graham: Flag week.
Ashkahn: We’re closed for usually the second half of the day for the 4th of July and the second half of the day for Halloween. And we will close for our anniversary to have a party in our shop. And I think that is it.
I think that’s it. Those are the only days of the year that we’re closed.
Graham: Do we do any weird hours around the conference?
Ashkahn: No, we stay open through the conference, which is insane.
Graham: Not that there are any other float center anywhere in the world. If you are leaving your float center, you might want to give your staff the conference time offs so they can tune into the livestream.
Ashkahn: Yeah, I think it is all the big holidays.
Graham: All right, that’s our Christmas episode everyone.
Ashkahn: We thought about just playing an hour-long of yule log audio burning. But we had a question to answer.
Graham: And our audio engineer nixed that one.
Ashkahn: All right. We’ll if you guys have more questions for us, you can always hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast. And I hope you have a very nice rest of your day.
Graham: Yeah, hope your staying warm and happy out there. Bye everyone.
Ashkahn: Bye.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Common Float Tank Issues – DSP 295
Graham and Ashkahn give the skinny on the foibles one my encounter when purchasing a float tank. These aren’t specific to any one manufacturer, but they are useful things to look out for when shopping around for a tank.
What is Float On’s North Star Metric? – DSP 294
Graham and Ashkahn talk about the guiding principles and metrics that dictate how they run Float On and what they measure for success. While they don’t have any float center secrets, they do provide some useful advice in how to look at numbers, when to pay attention to them, and perhaps more importantly, when to ignore them.
What Can you Say About Float Centers Closing? – DSP 293
It happens every once in a while that a center you knew closes down and it can seem like a dark omen for the rest of the industry. The reality is that these are individual circumstances that are brought about not because of a major trend as much as just life events coming up.
Graham and Ashkahn share their take on other float centers closing and what they know about it and how frequently they think it’s occurring.
How to Build a Green Float Center – DSP 292
Graham and Ashkahn talk about the options available for sustainable options when building a float center, or more accurately, the lack thereof. Unfortunately, the materials necessary to make a float room saltproof and waterproof tend to be very unfriendly for the environment.
The guys break down the specific options available and what to consider when adding green technology to your own center.
How We Financed Float On – DSP 291
Graham and Ashkahn are asked about how they financed Float On.
As the guys explain how they started, they go along slight detours to talk about all the mistakes they made along the way and how they’re unsure that Float On could even start today like it did back in 2010. They then go on to explain the pros and cons of the extreme bootstrapping they did to make Float On happen.
Latest Blog Posts
The Heart of Floating – Guest Post by Kevin McCulloch
“When we commit to The Heart of Floating, we form relationships and communities. We share experiences, we connect, we learn, we teach. We care.”
In this guest post, Kevin McCulloch, owner of Float St. Louis and organizer of the Rise: Float Community Gathering, explores the heart of floating and it’s power and potential to connect, heal, and grow individuals, relationships, and communities.
The Most Ambitious Float On Project Yet
We have a new endeavor that we’ve been working on in private for awhile now, and we think that it’s going to make a big splash in our salty little industry. After many years of testing behind closed doors, we’re finally ready to take the plunge and release our secret project to you, the floatation community.
You might want to sit down for this one….
The Start-a-Center Giveaway Returns!
Everyone knows that, when it comes to gifts, it’s much more fun to give than to receive. With this year’s Start-a-Center Giveaway, however, I’m not so sure anymore. With over $13,000 in Float Tank Solutions products going to one lucky duck (plus $4,000 worth of goodies from other float industry homies), we humbly suggest that we may have finally tipped the scales in favor of the recipient.
If you’re Charlie, this Giveaway is the Golden Ticket, which I guess makes the Construction Package a Wonka bar and the Ninja Fans are the Fizzy Lifting Drink. So, what do you have to do for a chance at all the Everlasting Gobstoppers?
It’s been three years since our last Giveaway, and we thought that it was long overdue for another one. So, what’s the dealio? The Giveaway is a chance to give a big ol’ boost to a deserving Float-Center-To-Be. This time around, we’re taking things to a whole new level, with over three times the value of products and services being given away. To you. For free.
Dear Everyone: Please reconsider building your own tanks
Look, we get it. Really. Float tanks are expensive – especially for what can seem, from the outside, like a glorified bathtub with spa parts attached. It doesn’t take long to go from, “Why is this so expensive?” to “I’ll bet I could save money by making my own tank!” After you start mulling it over, you get excited. You could be offering something no one else does right now… because it’d be your own creation! How hard can it possibly be?
As experts in only thinking about half of the consequences of our actions (at best), we’d like to say, “Incredibly hard, actually!”
