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
How do Float Centers Incorporate Massage? – DSP 210
What’s the best policy for a float center that wants to add massage? Do they hire on the Licensed Massage Therapist (LMT) as an employee, or do they bring them on as an independent contractor? Or what about just letting them rent a room in their business and not having to worry about it.
Dylan Calm of The Art of the Float podcast is in the studio with Ashkahn and Graham to discuss this issue, since his float center, The Float Shoppe, offers massage as well as other services, unlike Float On.
Can You Wear Jewelry in a Float Tank? – DSP 209
Sometimes people wear jewelry. Sometimes people float. What happens when these things overlap? What about piercings?
Graham and Ashkahn concisely explain why it’s a good idea to take that wedding ring off before you float in this episode.
What’re the Benefits of Financial Transparency for a Float Center? – DSP 208
There’s a traditional wisdom in business that dictates certain information should be held close to the vest. Financial information, hiring information, performance metrics, and so on should only be shared on a need to know basis. More recently, there’s been a push for more businesses to have transparency in some of these areas.
Ashkahn and Graham explain their stance on transparency and the thought process behind making Float On as transparent as possible, as well as many of the benefits they see on a regular basis because of it.
How to Prevent Losing Members to Cheap Discounts – DSP 207
Many float centers rely on memberships, usually monthly, to help maintain a steady flow of income throughout the year. Sometimes that’s not enough, like during slow months, and a steep discount can seem really attractive for filling up float tanks. What’s the best solution to making sure that you aren’t cannibalizing your own sales with discounts and potentially losing members?
Graham and Ashkahn share their tried and true approach to this nuanced question and share some excellent examples of how Float On rewards its members without losing sales during discounts as well as throughout the rest of the year.
Dealing with Low Flow After Installing a Flow Meter – DSP 206
Flow meters are designed to measure how quickly water travels through a filtration system. This is useful for all sorts of recreational water facilities. Pools and spas have been using them for years. Often times health departments will require them for float tanks, as they help provide a certain level of assurance to the filtration quality of a system.
The problem arises when using flow meters that aren’t designed to handle the specific gravity of float tank solution. So far, only one flow meter is designed to be accurate for float tanks and if a system isn’t using that one, it can be a bit surprising to find out that the flow is different. Ashkahn and Graham talk all about the reason for flow meters and how to troubleshoot problems that may cause a loss of flow.
Latest Blog Posts
Handling Tough Decisions…
I’ve written the introduction to the conference program for four years in a row, and each year I like to share it on this blog. For those of you who didn’t make it out for the 2015 Float Conference, here are a few of my thoughts on the work that float center owners do, and the questions they may face in running a float tank center.
How to Drain and Fill a Float Tank
There are roughly 850 pounds of epsom salt and 200 gallons of waters in an average sized float tank (approximately 8 feet long and 4 feet wide). It takes hard work (and a few tips I’m about to share) to get a tank ready for floating.
The Whys and Hows of Email Marketing
A trending strategy when a small business goes to market is that social media marketing becomes their main focal point. On the surface, social media marketing is easy to get started with, the costs can be nil, and most people are already using it for personal use. The...
How to Deal with a Power Outage in your Float Center
Power Outages = Unplanned Sensory Deprivation It only took a day since the publishing of my last blog post before I would have to put my knowledge of unconventional ways of waking up floaters to the test. The incident did not involve “sinkers” those individuals who...
