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.
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The Float Tour Blog – Issue #27
Our northern neighbor – a sister city, of sorts – Seattle is the largest metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the land of Microsoft and Kurt Cobain, and the culture here embraces both simultaneously. It’s tech business professional in the front and rock n’ roll grunge in the back. This blend creates a perfect storm of high energy business life and high energy nightlife, making relaxation a valuable commodity. Floating helps fill the void left by nightmarish traffic and overcrowded restaurants.
Given that it’s so close to home, the float centers in Seattle are a lot more familiar to us. Our visits here were more like a high school reunion than they were like the first day of school. During some of our visits, we were picking up conversations right where we left them.
The Float Tour Blog Issue #26
Vancouver is the largest metropolitan area in Canada, and third largest on the West Coast. It’s a major hub for international trade, with one of the largest ports in the world, giving it a large migrant population, mainly from Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. It’s also been a long-time home to the Canadian film industry, and has even been nicknamed “North Hollywood.” Dozens of film and television productions from major studios film here every year.
Vancouver is very much an international city. It has large boroughs dedicated to varying cultures, including one of the largest Chinatowns in the world. The society here is more receptive to new ideas, always looking for the next big thing; it’s not surprising that floating has blown up in Vancouver as much as it has.
In the last 3 years, 10 float centers have opened up, most of them being larger 4–6 tank centers. The really interesting thing is how they all opened within the same short amount of time about 1 ½ to 2 years ago, within months of each other.
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