How to handle ‘Summer Slump’ in your float center – DSP 83

Many a float center has hit their first summer and seen their schedule thin out. What causes this? Is it just a seasonal thing? What about places that don’t really have seasons? Or tourist towns? What exactly causes this and what are some good tips to combat it? Graham and Ashkahn address this phenomenon head on in this episode.

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

Graham: Today’s question is, “I’ve heard about the summer slump for float centers – should I expect my summers to be really light? And is there a best season for floating?”

Ashkahn: Uh huh, okay.

Graham: So kind of a couple of questions, I’ll let it slide this time.

Ashkahn: He got lucky.  Well there’s a few sides to this I would say. I think there’s a difference … I’ll say the one exemption maybe to some of this stuff that we’re about to talk about is very touristy towns. Who I think still have seasonality, it just may not line up with kind of the exact things we’re saying here, or that we’re about to say, about summer and winter and stuff like that.

Graham: Or places in the Southern Hemisphere where winter and summer are actually switched.

Ashkahn: Well, there’s still winter and summer.

Graham: Oh, I guess there’s still winter and summer, it’s just different months.

Ashkahn: So that’s fine.

Graham: Yeah, yeah. Alright yeah, so tourist towns and also peak places that are really hot all year round.

Ashkahn: Just all the time.

Graham: Is another interesting one.

Ashkahn: Okay, so this is all coming down, I think initially, to the idea that people don’t seem to like to float as much when it’s really hot outside.

Graham: Yeah, I know. We’re giving qualifications before we’ve even answered anything yet.

Ashkahn: So that seems to be part of this. I think it just feels kind of like a wintry, warm, bathtub, snugly sort of situation.

Graham: It’s really hard to train your own brain to understand what neutral temperature feels like. You know? So even though float tanks are theoretically this neutral temperature, they sound warm and inviting in the winter time, but somehow they don’t sound cool and inviting in the summertime even though they probably should.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Logically. So that’s part of the theory behind it. And I should say for almost everywhere worldwide, that just has normal seasons, there really is a summer slump. It seems to be the weakest season year round, minus those few exceptions we gave at the beginning. So the summer slump is a very real thing, especially for us in the Pacific Northwest where it rains for nine months out of the year. And then we have an awesome summer. For us it just took us incredibly by surprise. We hit that first summer, and it felt like someone had just slapped our float center across the face or something. It went from being booked out two weeks in advance to being like half full day of. Our attendance took a giant plummet. So for us it was kind of like, the pilgrims surviving their first hard winter or something. It was like if we can just get past this first hard summer, we’re really be able to thrive.

Ashkahn: Yeah you can still see it on our schedule. The first week of nice weather that happens in Portland, boom we just immediately have a drop in the number of floaters.

Graham: Day of, people are like, “Ah I’m really sick, got sun sickness.”

Ashkahn: My dentist is sick. They just cancel their floats.

Graham: Yeah, so it still hits really hard. So the summer slump does exist. So I guess let’s talk about the exceptions to this that we mentioned at the beginning.

Ashkahn: Yup.

Graham: So a tourist town, what’s the seasonality there?

Ashkahn: It really just, I think it’s just with the tourism, the influx of tourists I think just like, is a stronger effect than seasons. I mean they’re often based on seasons, right?

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: I think that’s just such a bigger effect that it kind of outshines everything else.

Graham: And there’s probably tourist towns where they do have specifically like spring and fall tourists or something, but all the ones that I’m familiar with it’s really like summer and winter.

Ashkahn: Yup.

Graham: Right? And usually it oscillates between the two. They’ll have like winter sports or something like that, like skiing in the winter for example.

Ashkahn: Yup.

Graham: Then mountain biking or summer sports in the Summer. Then for them those lulls occur on the off season, so in the Fall and in the Spring.

Ashkahn: Right, which for us Fall is a great time. People are getting back into it, the weather starts to turn. People start to get like re-entering this idea of doing indoors activities.

Graham: And this is specifically from the end of September, beginning of October on I would say.

Ashkahn: Yeah, for us in Portland.

Graham: Yeah. In Portland.

Ashkahn: Fall’s a little, comes a little later here than other places.

Graham: Okay, so that’s tourist towns. Then there’s places that are kind of warm year round as well. Texas might be an example.

Ashkahn: Mm-hmm.

Graham: I’ve heard from some places that they just still have the summer slump, and they’ve been pretty definitive they’re like, “No it still exists.”

Ashkahn: Yeah I mean there is just school and vacations, and it’s when people do a lot of traveling and all that stuff kind of plays into it.

Graham: Yeah that’s what I was going to mention too. I have also heard of kind of this double dip phenomenon, where at the beginning of Summer they’ll hit a slump. So it’s like June through early July, attendance really drops. Then from kind of like mid July and August sort of like evens back out. Then end of August, September kind of drops again and goes back into it, and I’ve heard that a few times as well.

Ashkahn: The double dip.

Graham: My theory is that that involves a lot of things like June weddings, stuff like that, beginning of travel plans, and also a lot of school. A lot of people getting out of school and immediately going on vacations. A lot of people just getting back into school in the Fall and all of the attention that that takes. I don’t know exactly of course what’s causing it, but that’s always been my kind of story that I tell myself.

Ashkahn: Yup. I guess really the lesson of all of this is that, once you know about it, you can prepare for it.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: After that first year, that’s what we’ve been doing ever since-

Graham: Just shut down for the summer.

Ashkahn: Go on vacation, you know? Actually there are float centers that do that, we’ve heard of a few places that will just close for a few months in Summer.

Graham: It’s true, yeah.

Ashkahn: When we think about our marketing or when we have an idea of trying to do like a big push to get a bunch of people in or when we decide to do our one single big sale we do every year, and email our whole mailing list, we do those things pretty much at the beginning of Summer. Like we do them specifically to try to shore up that kind of empty, those empty spots we have traditionally. So that’s where a lot of our effort goes into and it’s nice, once you have that kind of focus you can really push that and in general we’ve been able to kind of offset that Summer slump by dedicating a lot of marketing efforts towards it.

Graham: Yeah, certainly it seems like if you’re going to be saving up money and a certain amount of resources for like a big marketing push during the year or something like that, definitely trying to do it during your off season, which for most places is the Summer, is the best idea for it. And we’re really only able to survive the summers because of that really big sale that we do at the beginning and we kind of up marketing in a few other areas. Up our ad spend on Facebook just a little bit. And all of those things combined kind of begin to even it out towards what it normally is. And still, despite all of that, our attendance is still lower than it normally is in the summertime’s. The last part of this question as well was, is there a good season? Like what’s the good side of this?

Ashkahn: Yeah, the nice thing is it’s pretty much a lot of the rest of the times. Once the Fall starts, things start to pick up and become pretty strong. Then we have like the holiday season, which is always like, a huge boost.

Graham: Yup, crushes it. And if anything I would say January for attendance is almost the strongest because you just had all of these gift certificates going out in December, and they start to get cashed in right when January hits.

Ashkahn: So we do a lot of floats and then that even makes a few of the next months really strong too, because that’s oftentimes new people who haven’t floated before and there’s just a lot of word of mouth from it, there’s just so many people coming through our shop that we see the effects of that for multiple months. So it’s nice, there’s a decently long strong season. All the way from Fall to, as that kind of weather starts to turn to be nice again in Spring.

Graham: Yup, and again, it might be a little different where you are depending on what your actual weather patterns are. It almost seems to have more to do with weather than the exact date or something like that.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: But yeah, for us at least … almost like the drearier it gets outside, the stronger things are and those holidays hitting helps. So again, right kind of in the dead of Winter is actually our strongest months.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I will say I’ve always … maybe we should look back at our data to confirm this or not, but I’ve always felt like there’s been a small slump right around when taxes are due.

Graham: I’ve felt that too.

Ashkahn: Like mid April, like all of a sudden you’re like, you just hit this week in the middle of April you’re like, “Why is our schedule so light?”

Graham: So much so that like I’ve called around other centers and they’re also freaking out around that time. So we should look at the data and confirm, but I agree. There does seem to be some weird little flukes that rise up year over year and tax season is one of them. People should be floating during their taxes, it’s a great way to relieve your tax stress.

Ashkahn: That’s right.

Graham: Alright. Thanks so much for the question and don’t forget to submit your own out there if you haven’t already, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and send us your saltiest, craziest, weirdest questions that you want to hear us address on the air.

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