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 Many Managers Does it Take to Run a Float Center? – DSP 200
Not every float center owner wants to be tethered to working their shop for the rest of their lives. In fact, even some that enjoy that work immensely can be doing their business a disservice by focusing on day-to-day operations as opposed to dedicating their time to marketing or expansion.
So how do float center owners get out of the shop? How many managers (Or Taco Supremes as they’re called at Float On) does it take to effectively replace the shop owner at a business. Ashkahn and Graham have successfully implemented a system at Float On that allows them to be much more hands off on the business than when they first opened and they share how got to that point and how their business structure has evolved.
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Graham and Ashkahn discuss while providing assurances like “either you’re not crazy or we’re all crazy”, so that’s nice.
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They also share stories of floats from friends and customers that they’ve accumulated over the years and discuss the value of experiencing these difficult moments in the tank and how you might approach them when one occurs at your center.
What’s the Best Representation of Float Tanks in TV or Movies? – DSP 196
It happens every once in a while, a tv show or a movie will feature a float tank and the entire industry gets a jolt as if to say “we made it to the big time!”
But not all float tank cameos are created equal, so which one does it the best? What is the best representation of floating in media? Graham and Ashkahn go through the list of everything from Altered States to Stranger Things to find out what it is.
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