Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Most float center owners read Goodnight Moon to their tanks every evening, lock their doors, and go home to spend a restful night in their non-saliferous/aqueous beds. Others buck such norms, and stay open all night.
Tune in to this week’s episode of the Daily Solutions podcast, where Graham and Ashkahn discuss what it’s like operating a 24/7 float center. While securing the right person to staff the graveyard shift has its challenges, its generally a worthwhile endeavor.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Our question for today is, what’s it like being open 24 hours a day?
I feel like there’s a sub question there of, “Are you mad men or geniuses?”
Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s pretty much both I think.
Graham: I was going to just take a second to say it’s both, right? It’s totally insane and I love doing it as well.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s both my favorite and least favorite thing about our float center — I love it. I love being open 24 hours a day, I love having people float in the middle of the night, I love interacting with customers in the middle of the night. It’s like the perfect response to someone saying, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to have time to do that.” I’m like, “Well, you can come in at two in the morning,” and boom, they don’t have any excuses anymore. There are so many great things about it.
Graham: To give a little background, we’ve been a 24 hour shop for six years now. Very shortly after we opened, we didn’t open as 24 hours a day, we opened for 12 hours a day initially and very quickly that went up to about 18 hours a day and just kind of built from there. I should say that right now we’re actually only running floats for 22 hours a day. We have two hours a day that we do cleaning, from 5 to 7 am, which ended up, of all times, being the hardest ones to fill for us.
Five to seven is cleaning time, but our door is never locked. Our shop is actually open 24 hours despite only running floats for 22 hours of those. Sorry to let you listeners down here, thought we were actually running floats all 24.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s a really nice thing to offer. It also makes sense economically. People do come in and float, and certainly two in the morning on a weekday night is not the most popular time in the world, in fact I think it’s the least popular time that we have. We still get people coming in and floating and even if it’s just one or two people, that’s enough to pay your employees to be there and to keep the lights on and to justify the cost of being open for that time. Your float tanks are already set up and they’re humming along and they’re hungry for floaters all the time so being able to get as many people in to float is also a really nice feeling when you’re open 24 hours a day.
Graham: Right. The economics actually work out surprisingly well. If that’s all you were looking at is the numbers of can you make money being open 24 hours a day or are you going to lose money on staffing, that actually works out really well in favor of the float tank center, especially if you’re willing to send people home if there’s no one booked for say 2 am. It means that pretty much for one person, at least in our center, floating at 2 am covers the cost of staffing, which means if there’s two people floating, we’re actually making a little bit of money for being open then. If there’s no one floating, then the staff can just kind of leave and go home early.
At our center we do things a little bit different, but theoretically running that way you’re almost guaranteed to not lose money on an operation like that. Plus if there are only two people floating or one person floating and you have say a four or five tank center means that you can start deep cleans on those other rooms way early so even by the time the people are getting out of their floats, it’s likely you still haven’t lost any staff time just for the time it took to clean your other rooms and get the rest of the shop closed down and then you do those final rooms as a last cleaning touch. The monetary side definitely works out.
Ashkahn: And it’s hard to say exactly, because those people who are booking at 2 am might book at other times of the day if you didn’t have those available, so you’re kind of crunching your capacity down. It’s all a little loosey goosey and there’s no way to be extremely concrete about it.
Graham: Turns out that the world’s a confusing and complicated place that we can never fully grasp.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Apparently things don’t just nicely break down into yes or no answers. That part, it’s not that hard to justify. Having the float tanks open, the economics of it, even the part of it that involves getting customers to float, that’s all the easy part of it. The difficult part is having people run your shop in the middle of the night — without destroying them.
Graham: Plenty of people can run the shop in the middle of the night but it takes its toll over time on those people.
Ashkahn: Totally — we get a lot of people who apply to work for us even when we specifically looking for night positions who swear up and down that they’re night people. Usually what that means is they’re used to staying up until four in the morning playing video games or watching Netflix or something. That ends up being fundamentally different than actually working and having to clean a float room at five in the morning.
Graham: I usually like to say that salt destroys everything from our walls to our floors to our favorite shoes to our night shift employees. It’s incredibly destructive. It is, everything’s a little bit harder at that time of night for people to do. Especially when you do get sleepy, your body so much wants you to just go home. I don’t know if this is anything you can relate to Ashkahn as I’m talking about this. Even the most mundane tasks are easier wanting to go home at 5 pm than they are easier wanting to go home when it’s 5 am.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s just hard to totally switch your sleep schedule around to really accommodate it. That’s what we found. We’ve definitely had a lot of people who have, after six months or so, just had to tell us they weren’t quite able to handle it the way that they thought they were going to and have to bow out. It certainly has some of the highest turnover of any of the shifts that we have.
I don’t know if we have a perfect solution or have fully overcome that hurdle yet. We’ve been trying and trying a lot of different things. It certainly actually has been the more difficult part. You’d think getting people to come float at two in the morning would be the hard part of staying open in the middle of the night. That part’s actually not that hard, people want to float in the middle of the night.
Graham: I actually started out as our first night shift employee so have a really good idea first hand of what that’s like running the shop day in and day out on a nightly basis because I, or at least used to be largely nocturnal. It actually, for the right person, I think it works out really well. I actually really enjoyed being in the shop late at night. The problem was that I had told myself that I would be able to do background work on Float On since it was night time and I wouldn’t be having all these phone calls I could really crank on some background business stuff while I’m also facilitating floats. Boy, was I 100% wrong.
I have never been able to, night shift or not, work in the float center and not be drawn into only working on the float center stuff. The idea that I could somehow get something else done external to running the float center then was horribly naïve of me, so eventually had to drop that off, which is a totally different story. We’ve had one night shift employee now who’s been incredibly stable for a really long time.
I think it also helps that her boyfriend is on a night shift schedule as well. This fits into this overarching scheme of her life rather than some of our other staff.
Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely. It’s just like with hiring anybody, a lot of it is just trying to find those right people. I think it’s just a bit of a bigger filter and a more difficult person to find to have that right person who can work in the middle of the night. That’s mostly where the challenge comes from.
Graham: If people are thinking about moving to night shifts, let’s say they right now close at 10 pm, what would they have to change about their operations to get to a 24 hour full blown operation?
Ashkahn: We started just doing it on a few nights of the week. We did Thursday and Friday night when we first started. I’d probably recommend actually Friday and Saturday night as the two if you were to try it out right now. The one thing that I did notice once we did that and as we opened up more nights of the week was that it took awhile, like a month or something like that, for people to catch on to the fact that we were doing it.
For the first few weeks our schedule that we had opened up in those times were pretty empty. Then slowly but surely people would come in to float and be like, “Wait you guys are open at two in the morning on Wednesday nights?” It just took a little bit of time for that to work its way through people’s awareness and for people to start booking those up. Then they did become a lot more stable and normally booked after that, but, yeah, don’t be too discouraged if you do it and it’s not immediately taking off.
Graham: It’s a good reminder for testing just about anything. If you’re switching to a new membership structure even for example, you’d want to give that many months to see if it takes off. It’s the same for adding on extra hours or removing hours, you won’t really know if your schedule is panning out and if people are paying attention to it until you give it that several months buffer, three to six months. If you are thinking about opening up night floats, even just a couple days a week, definitely consider doing that as a long term experiment. Not as something you just try for a couple weeks and then give up on.
Any other difficulties that we’ve had? What are our busiest nights out of the week?
Ashkahn: Our busiest are Friday and Saturday night, from last I checked, are definitely noticeably busier than other ones. I will also say, we do two night shifts, or what we call night appointments. One starts at 11 pm and one starts at two in the morning. The 11 pm one is really not that hard to book at all. That one’s pretty full very often.
11 pm seems decently booked and not that significantly different than a 9 pm spot or things like that. It’s really once you start getting into the extremes like two in the morning that you’ll notice a difference in how much people are booking.
Graham: I guess that’s another thing, being a late night shop does not mean you also have to be open 24 hours and be total mad men like we are.
You can definitely run until one, two in the morning. Again we’re able to do that actually without much trouble. That’s definitely one of the more surprising things that’s come out of doing this is how late people are willing to float even if it’s not those 2 am ones, the fact that 11 pm fills up, that was shocking to me. I didn’t expect so many people to come in at 11.
All right. There you have it. The float gospel as told by Graham and Ashkahn. Have a wonderful day over there all you listeners and we will talk to you tomorrow.
Recent Podcast Episodes
HIPAA Compliance – DSP 330
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) required the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop regulations protecting the privacy and security of certain health information. This means that most medical information recorded by healthcare providers has to be stored based on a certain standard of security.
This is only just now becoming an issue in the float industry as centers are starting to accept insurance and medical referrals. However, this is still extremely rare. If this is something that may affect you personally, definitely research additional resources to make sure you’re in compliance.
Getting High (on air) in Float Tanks – DSP 329
Graham and Ashkahn light one up to honestly answer what they think about people coming into float centers high.
The guys share their experiences having Float On share a wall with a dispensary and the number of problems (or lack thereof) that it has caused over the course of many years.
Sit back, grab some munchies, and enjoy the ride with these guys.
What you Need to Know about UV – DSP 328
Have you ever wondered why the UV light on a float tank needs to be replaced so often? If the light is glowing, doesn’t that mean it’s working?
Ashkahn and Graham tackle everything you need to know about UV light, how it works in a float tank, and most importantly, how it can go wrong. This episode is dense with information useful for anyone who uses UV in their float center.
What’s going on with the MAHC? – DSP 327
The Model Aquatic Health Code is a document released by the CDC and has made waves throughout the float industry as this year it included a section on the ideal health department code for float centers as well as pools and spas. Some folks are worried about this because it may mean more rigid and unruly regulations in certain areas.
It’s been a few months since its release, so Graham and Ashkahn give an update to how it has impacted the industry and what it means going forward. Also, Ashkahn learns to abuse the show notes.
Logo Copycats – DSP 326
If you’ve ever looked at a collection of logos from various float centers, they can start to look a little similar. How do you avoid this when designing your own float center logo? Is it a big deal?
Graham and Ashkahn dish on logo design, the importance of simplicity, and a not so subtle reminder that the “don’t be an asshole” rule exists for a reason.
Latest Blog Posts
Should I Have One or Multiple Styles of Float Tank?
If you had every model and type of float tank you’d be running the Burj Khalifa of float centers, with an estimated 38 unique float tanks, which include pods, custom open pools, cabins, vertical tanks, and inflatable or portable float devices currently on the market (not even counting old models).
This is all to say that there are a ton of options out there when considering tanks for your center.
Whether you’re opening a two-tank center, or a bajillion-tank center, do you want all the same model, or will you have some variety?
Why ROI Calculators Suck! (or at least why you should use caution)
“What is an ROI calculator?” I hear you asking. “ROI” simply stands for “Return on Investment”. An “ROI Calculator” is just a tool that outlines the cost of something and generates what your anticipated profit will be over a certain length of time. Usually annually.
We should make a distinction between a simple ROI calculator (i.e. a widget built into a website with limited inputs), and a financial plan (complete with P&L, cashflow, and balance sheets). Both are going to try and do the same thing, but one is going to be far more detailed and accurate.
Roughly what we’re going to be talking about is a return on investment for your whole business, but return on investment can (and should) be used for lots of different aspects to your business to help you determine how best to spend your company’s money. Usually, though, that’s going to require a lot of detail that a simple widget can’t provide.
How to compete on price without slashing prices
Let’s say you’re a float tank center and more centers are starting to show up in your town…
Or, maybe you are that other center starting up a town that already has float tanks…
As new centers enter the market, the typical response is to run promotions on daily deal sites, promote large specials, and/or run Facebook Ads selling floats for much less than the usual offerings.
The best case scenario is this price slashing behavior subsides shortly after the neighboring center opens.
But what if it doesn’t? What if an existing competitor decides their new price is even lower?
How do you compete with a price slashing neighbor without competing on price?
Learn a few ways to make price a non issue with your customers…
Float On’s Halloween Spooktacular!
‘Twas briny, and the epsom groves fluttered with salt-bats, a lurking fog floating atop the murky bog. From the dark maw of silence came a guttural groan, an eerie utterance akin to those of monsters. From the depths of darkness, that groan turned into what mortals...
