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.
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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.
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The Float Tour Blog – Issue #28
Home sweet home! After so many months on the road, it was strange being back here in Portland. We were exhausted, excited, and a little travel weary. The first night back, I slept in my own bed for the first time in three months and the world just melted away.
Having travelled across the United States, I’m reminded of how insular Portland is. We are aggressively fixated on keeping things local. Local beer, ketchup, bikes, pet food, pillows, phone cases… it’s part of our charm. We want to reward people for living here and being a part of the community. It’s so pervasive that, after living here for so long, I kind of forgot that Secret Aardvark hot-sauce isn’t available everywhere, and that most cities don’t even recycle, let alone compost.
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.
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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.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #25
We finally made it back to the West Coast! We went through the Canadian Rockies and were overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. We drove through hours and hours of winding mountain roads, fertile valleys, and tiny towns so picturesque they looked like movie sets. It was so captivating, in fact, I suspect Graham and Ashkahn may have secretly replaced themselves with robotic doppelgängers to hike throughout Banff.
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