How do you prioritize what to work on in your center? – DSP 72

It’s human nature to suck at planning. we can’t help having inefficient mental systems for establishing the importance of a project when we’re working on it. This problem can be especially bad for float centers too, given that certain projects, if not addressed quickly, can dramatically become exponentially worse, like with salt damage.

Graham and Ashkahn face these exact same problems when they undertake any project, but still manage to find ways to be productive. In this episode, they share some of their tips as well as personal philosophies on work. Plus, Ashkahn’s strong desire to have a waterslide.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is “how do you prioritize what to work on/what to improve in your center?”

Ashkahn: Oh.

Graham: I assume that’s coming out of the fact that there’s just an endless list of things that you would like to get to, and like to improve, at any given point. Almost like no matter how long you’ve been open, you probably still have that infinite list.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: So what do you put at the top, Ashkahn?

Ashkahn: What I put at the top … I mean-

Graham: Snacking?

Ashkahn: Yeah. Naps, quick naps. Just ’cause then you’re more ready to tackle problems. I mean I guess probably what I’d put at the top is construction stuff that is starting to break. ‘Cause the path between, “Hey, look, that thing’s starting to get damaged,” to “Uh-oh, that thing is seriously damaged,” is such a short one, with float tank centers. You’ll notice a small hole in something, and two weeks later it’s a serious problem.

Graham: Yeah, for sure.

Ashkahn: And just the solution gets worse and worse, over time, right? What you have to do, to fix the problem, gets harder and harder and harder, the longer you ignore it. So to me, that seems like red alert. If you see some serious construction issue, you better get on that kind of as soon as you can.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ashkahn: A lot of times, what we’ll do is do temporary construction solutions, which is crazy. We’ve tiled an entire room once for two weeks until we actually had time to close down and put a proper floor in. I don’t know of any other business that has temporary tiling. But we just had to, because the floor was not gonna make it.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So anything that seems like salt is damaging, I guess, is-

Ashkahn: Or water.

Graham: Should go right up to the top. It almost doesn’t matter what your priority list was beforehand. As soon as you notice salt or water damage, you have to get in there, because it’s gonna do nothing but get worse. For sure. So that’s a really good one.

I guess in a broader, more philosophical scale of prioritization, what are some of the just big categories of things that people, or that we tend to have for our float center to work on? There’s kind of the marketing side of things-

Ashkahn: Yup. Maintenance. Operations.

Graham: Yup, like smoothing out just transitions and talking to customers and things like that.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Actually just quality of floats is kind of in there. How many temperature complaints are you getting? Things like that. And again, all of this stuff kind of blurs together, and it feels like you should probably be working on everything simultaneously, whenever it’s there.

Ashkahn: I guess personal sanity is on that list. That’s the one that seems to always move to the bottom.

Graham: Yeah, always at the bottom. So I guess some of the big things that you should keep in mind here are how much time is it gonna take you to actually do that thing on your list? How much money is it going to cost you to do the thing on your list that you want to get done? And how much are you currently losing, in terms of opportunity cost, or what’s going wrong, both monetarily and just ambience, or improvement wise, that could be improved if you were to do this?

And I personally like kind of making a ranking system of that. And it kind of shows you, and what’s your perceived importance of this? From red alert, we need to get this done right now, to like, if it happens in the next five years, that would kinda be nice. Sort of a good way. And I mean it sounds maybe like a really basic kind of activity, but actually taking the time to write out all of those things that are on your mental to-do list, and kind of write them out in terms of difficulty and cost and benefit that you hope to receive, really helps knock some of the ones immediately off the list, right? Again those ones that are like, oh, this is gonna take a long time, and a lot of money, and we’re not even exactly sure how to do it. And it would be kind of nice if it was done in the next five years. You can totally throw those to the bottom of the list. And sadly, that’s some of the fun things. It almost always ends up like those are the ones you actually want to work on, and you’re like, oh, I guess this doesn’t really provide much benefit.

Ashkahn: Installing a giant water slide. You’re like “alright, I guess it can wait.”

Graham: Yup. Having the entire float tank drop into a bar below, after you finish. Yeah those are the difficult ones. And then you might also find that there are these ones that cost almost no money, probably will take very little time, but potentially have a really big impact on your business, right? And those ones can kind of be escalated towards the top of the list, because you’re like, “Oh, big impact, takes almost no time,” we have a name for that, it’s “low hanging fruit”. Right?

And so some system of doing this. But yeah, and it turns out human beings without actually even writing this down, even if you tried to do this in your head, we’re just terrible at that sort of thing. Trying to keep these lists, and trying to gauge our emotions of what we think is important versus what actually is important, when you kind of have it written out, and cross-compare. I highly urge you to not just try to feel it out, and do what feels right, and prioritize this giant list, in your own brain.

‘Cause it also means you’re wasting time. Every time you’re like, “Oh, what should I be doing next?” You kind of go back to your mental inventory, and go through that entire process again? Way better to have something drawn out.

Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s a lot easier to get just caught up in kind of whatever seems the most pressing, at that moment, if you don’t have some sort of kind of external system you’re using for keeping track of this.

Graham: Yup. So that’s my broad philosophical overview of getting some of these things down. That said, we tend to really prioritize things that push towards a better customer experience, and specifically in the float tanks. If we do have a list of things, and they’re kind of at that same level of importance, and level of ultimate benefit that we think might come out of it, our philosophy is always focus on improving the float experience, and everything else will slowly slip into place. Right? So if we do have an extra $5,000, and a week to launch into starting to plan some new project, probably what we’ll plan is not our next big marketing push. We’ll probably take that $5,000 and say, “Is there something that we can do to improve the quality of floats in one or all of our rooms, with that $5,000?” Right?

So that kind of ends up towards the top. And then if there aren’t complaints coming in, if there isn’t a huge need to immediately fix the float environment, or improve that side of things, then we start leaning more on-

Ashkahn: That’s when you build that water-slide. That’s when you get there.

Graham: You just skip straight to water-slide, huh? No in between? It’s like float experience, water-slide.

Ashkahn: That’s what I … I mean yeah. We’re talking about priorities.

Graham: I almost might put things like improving the staff experience above water-slide.

Ashkahn: It’s interesting, ’cause there’s a lot of aspects of improving the staff experience that actually end up improving the customer experience. Like I’d put transitions. Making transitions easier. Very much in that category. ‘Cause the easier you make your transitions to do for your staff, the better they’ll do them, and the nicer your rooms will look, and the cleaner they’ll look for your customers.

So making that kind of staff experience easier and better and kind of less tedious on them is totally gonna just turn into happier staff and cleaner rooms and less clutter and stuff like that.

Graham: Yup, for sure. I guess another really high priority is actually getting people in your tanks. If your tanks aren’t getting close to 70, 80 percent full, for all the float tanks you have for the hours you’re open, that should become … it’s almost like salt water damage, or something. That becomes prime candidate for what you should be spending your time on.

And it also goes into improving the float experience, because if you haven’t tackled that side, if people are coming in, and they’re having a lousy float, it kind of doesn’t matter if you’re throwing a bunch of effort into getting more people through the door, because they’re not gonna have the great experience, when they get in there. So I would put that almost next on the list, after that one, is make sure your tanks are full.

Ashkahn: Mm-hmm.

Graham: And there are right and wrong ways to do that. Without going too deep into it, for this short episode, spending all of your time posting on social media, and kind of developing these complicated advertising or marketing campaigns, I would say, is almost the wrong way to go about trying to fill up your tanks.

And instead, devoting time towards interviewing your current customers, and finding out what they like, and how you can appeal to other customers coming in, or actually doing active reach-out to different communities, and trying to make inroads with some group, like fibromyalgia patients, or local naturopaths, or whatever it is, to really try and get awareness built, and giving out lots of free floats, obviously, is what we always preach.

But I think it’s really easy to feel like you’re being productive from the comfort of your own desk chair, and from the comfort of social media, and because you’re doing work on it, it does feel like you’re staying busy, and helping the bottom line, and I guess I feel like that’s a … it’s not that that stuff’s not useful, it’s just that it’s a dangerous path to go down. And the more that something feels like work, and you feel like you have to kind of put yourself out there to actually make these emails, and phone calls, and have in-person meetings, oftentimes that’s the work that needs to be done, that we tend to put off, and put lower on the priority list, just ’cause it does have that barrier to entry.

Ashkahn: I think, too, there’s a concept that I think people … I guess like a pitfall that people fall into sometimes, which is this idea that you’ve already put so much work into something, you might as well finish it, even if you’re now realizing it’s probably not the greatest idea, or the best use of your time.

Graham: Ah, the old “sunk cost fallacy”.

Ashkahn: Yup. And it’s just very much like human nature. You’re like, okay, well I’ve already spent like 20 hours doing this, I’m five hours away from finishing it. I’m now realizing this probably isn’t what I should be working on right now, but I might as well just push through, and that’s just not the right way to think about things. Those last five hours could be spent doing something more productive than just kind of being spent on that project, ’cause you happened to already put 20 hours into it. And you’re never gonna get that original 20 hours back. That’s kind of the fallacy, is that you’re not gonna … that what you’ve put into something is already put into it, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t kind of throw good money after bad, is often what they say, in terms of mechanical projects, where this comes up a lot.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good advice. You know, and the last thing I’ll say is just working on anything that’s in that realm of pushing things forward, either financially or construction-wise, for your business, is better than sitting around worrying about it, right? And as a business owner, for myself, that’s one of the greatest struggles, is feeling like there’s this mountain of work to do, and just knowing I have to sit down and only work on one thing. It’s like whenever I’m working on that one thing, somehow I feel more guilty about everything else that I’m not working on, than when I’m not working on any of it, and just enjoying myself. Like, “Well, maybe I just need a little time off,” and at least then everything is getting the same level of attention, which is none. But yeah, there’s a certain benefit. This is kind of beyond priority, but just how to work on things. Of realizing you’re never gonna work on the single thing that is the most important thing for you to work on right now. Or if you do, you’ll just luck into it, right? There’s almost no way to even know what that is.

So at some point, you just have to realize that there’s limited hours in the day, you’re not gonna get everything done, and working on something, and working diligently on it, again, is probably better than sitting there being concerned about the exact right thing that you should be working on right then.

Ashkahn: Yeah. You might as well just start work on that water-slide. Get those hours in.

Graham: And when you do, send along some photos, too. We’d love to see it. All right, thanks everyone. And as always, if you have other questions you’d like us to meander our way through, you can send them off to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

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