Tips for filling an empty service schedule – DSP 90

There are fewer things more stress inducing for a float center than seeing their schedule for the week and having it just be completely empty (Maybe watching your pump start up and spray water over your entire float room, but it’s a close call). What do you do in that situation? And how do you prevent it from happening in the future?

Well, Graham and Ashkahn have tried everything, from doing shout outs and deals on social media, to literally walking down the street trying to convince people to come in and float while the tanks were empty. Some tactics are more effective than others, but what it really comes down, at least in Float On’s case, is being prepared to give out a ton of free floats.

The guys talk about the effectiveness of each strategy they’ve tried and  how they’ve reached out to contacts to form mutually beneficial business relationships and really get the ball rolling with filling up their tanks.

FTS Blog – What Happens When You Give Out 700 Free Floats?

FTS Blog – Empty Float Tanks and What to Do with Them

Listen to Just the Audio

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

Graham: Today’s question is, “My schedule is empty this week, how can I fill tanks quickly?”

Ashkahn: Oh, okay. Empty schedule this week.

Graham: How do you fill tanks quickly? Well, I can tell you what we tried at the very beginning, that doesn’t work very well, which is actually just running down your street and trying to hand free float certificates to whoever happens to be out and about and convince them to come and float right then.

Ashkahn: It really didn’t work at all. Like we were-

Graham: We were pretty enthusiastic about it at the beginning, too. It seems like something that was weird enough to work.

Ashkahn: There was a group of four who canceled like twenty minutes before their appointment and all of a sudden, like, all of  our tanks were empty. This is when we have four float tanks and we just went like totally empty. We’re like, “Oh man, we should just go get people in here.” And this was like, this was in the days leading up to Christmas, too, which was the most amazing part to me. Like, so we walked down the street and we tried to just like just go up to people and be like, “Hey, this is going to sound totally weird but we run this business down the street” and just got nobody.

Graham: “Congratulations, you won a free session.”

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Woo hoo!

Ashkahn: Everyone thought we were a bunch [crosstalk 00:01:42]of weirdos simultaneously-

Graham: “I’m just having coffee with my friends”

Ashkahn: Yeah, “can you leave me alone, please?” At the same time as we were doing this, there were literally like people walking into our store, like, every few minutes to buy gift cards full price. And like we literally couldn’t give them away.

Graham: And it turns out that so the worst time to try to get someone to come in and float, or the worst time to try and fill empty tanks is at the moment that they are empty.

Ashkahn: Uh, huh.

Graham: And, in fact, the further away you get from that, the easier it is. So, if you think that you’re gonna have a light schedule next month, like a month ahead of time is actually the easiest time to start pre-stocking people with floats and fill up your schedule in the future.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: So week of is somewhere in that middle ground, right? It’s not you’re trying to fill up floats five minutes from now but it’s also not a month from now. So it is in that part where it’s a little tricky to get an entirely packed schedule last minute for the week.

Certainly getting a few extra floats in there or managing to pad the schedule a bit is easy enough.

Ashkahn: OK, so that’s where they are, they’ve gotta fill some floats.

Graham: Yep. So, Float On, like pretty much the Float On bread and butter is giving away free floats.

Ashkahn: Yep.

Graham: And our reasoning is that it’s just the best marketing that you can do. I would so much rather spend money on giving away free floats and introducing someone to the concept of floating and actually getting them into the tank then I would spend that same amount of money or even more money to take out a full page ad in the newspaper or to take out a big ad in their state travel magazine or, or even spend the money for us on Facebook. I mean, we’re very free float-centric I guess you could say – at Float On with our marketing strategy. How we give those out gets into more of the strategy, but that would be my tip number one. I don’t know if you have a different one but it’s give out as many free floats as possible. Today and tomorrow so that the rest of the week people are coming in and using those.

Ashkahn: ‘Cause the cost is really not going to be that much. Like the amount you’re gonna pay for people to be in your tanks versus not being in your tanks.

Graham: If you’re open already-

Ashkahn: Yeah-

Graham: If you have any openings in your schedule-

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: The cost is super low.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I mean, you could go on vacation for a week I guess, I mean like the other end of the extreme, but short of that, like, I, I  would just try to fill your float tanks.

Graham: Yeah. Paying customers or not.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So giving away those free floats, I mean kind of the easiest one is and, a nice thing to do probably in addition to these other things is just call your, like, friends and be like, “Hey, like I just have a bunch of openings this week. If anybody wants to float this week, totally let me know and you can come in.”

Graham: Yep, and encouraging them to bring someone else, too, especially that hasn’t floated or getting your friends who haven’t floated in, too. I still, seven years later, have close friends who have not actually hopped into a float tank yet-

Ashkahn: Crazy.

Graham: Who just keep saying, “Next week, next week, man, and next week’s going to be the week, you know.” So get those people in, for sure, is a great way to do it. We actually do that with our whole staff, too, when we just have a little bit of lightness. You know, maybe we’re not empty, but the schedule’s not quite as packed as we want it to be. We just reach out to all of our employees and say, “Hey, now’s a great time to encourage a couple of your friends each to actually come in and get a free float, you know, and try it out.”

Ashkahn: And then, you know, everything gets a little bit harder from there but also gets like more useful for you from there. So there’s also the idea of reaching out if you have any connections with other businesses around you – gyms, something like that – people you’ve been talking to and working with for a little bit, those are good people to approach. It’d be like, “Hey, let your next class know that if anybody wants to float like the next day. We can get them in, you know, either for free or you can do like some sort of sweet deal or something like that.” Or say it’s just like a benefit, a little bonus for being in that class. It’s nice to have some sort of justification for giving away free things but it’s amazing how little the justification has to actually be for people to accept it.

Graham: Yeah, for sure.

Ashkahn: A bonus for being in this class is like a business relationship thing is enough for people to be like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, like I earned this float.” And so, finding anything around you, like any other business or thing that you’ve already had some sort of connection with. It’d be hard to go from like zero to 60, like approach someone for the first time and be like, “Hey, you should let people know tomorrow,” but if you have a pre-existing relationship with someone, this is a good time to kind of hit upon that.

Graham: Yeah, and it’s also a great time to start those relationships. Wanting to give away a bunch of free stuff is actually a great time to go out and make friends with the local businesses or other people you might want to partner with in the future, as well. See, now don’t let the fact that you haven’t actually had conversations with the local rock climbing gym stop you from going out there and offering free floats for all of their instructors or something like that to try and get them in.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean, it’s and it’s a good thing to do no matter what your schedule looks like. The more you’ve kind of done some of that legwork, the more that when this random week of emptiness comes upon you, you’ll be able to have people to reach out to.

Graham: I guess just backing up slightly, too, you know, part of like the large impetus for this and the huge reason this is our philosophy is to give out free floats comes from the fact that it kind of doesn’t matter where your floaters are coming from, but if you have a totally packed schedule one day or if you have a packed schedule for three or four days in a row, that natural momentum kind of carries forward.

You know, I often find that the times when we’re giving out the most free floats and when our schedule is the most packed, we also have the most paying customers. Because that word-of-mouth from the free floats is able to kind of go out there and saturate the community more, and spread and I guarantee you that even someone that you give a free float to will never have the money to pay full price for a float, they have plenty of friends who can, who will even buy them presents in the future because they know that they like floating and all of a sudden they become a regular customer who’s just not paying for their own floats or something like that. It just has this snowball effect once you start getting those tanks filled.

So anyway you can, paying customers or not, discounted, just keep the tanks as full as possible. And I think a lot of people have this hesitance to devalue their services by giving away free floats. Or to make people think they’ll always get in for free or something like that. And it’s a really hard fear to kind of get rid of, I think, even in your own head, but in our experience, we’ve just found the exact opposite. Again, you know, the more free floats that we give out, the more it really comes back to us. We get glowing reviews on social media, you know,  I think there’s a kind of sense of social obligation if you’ve received a free float to be nice to the business and do things. And I guess this is as opposed to discounts, which I actually feel have a bigger risk of devaluing your service than giving out free floats.

Ashkahn: And, yeah, and I mean, and basically it’s just really hard to not talk about floating after you did it.

Graham: Right.

Ashkahn: When you float like, that’s, someone asks you what you did that day or you know the next day, like people just it’s like it’s very rare I think for someone to go try floating, especially for their first time. They’ve never done it before, and they go float, the chances that that person is going  to tell nobody that they just did this extremely weird saltbox thing is very slim. So, that’s that’s where that snowball comes from. It’s just float tanks are kind of a natural word-of-mouth machine and you’re just feeding the beginning of that machine by giving away free floats.

Graham: And you know, if your goal is really to fill up, you know, almost an entire week and get that going, don’t be afraid to figure out ways to give away 200-300 free floats. Only a small percentage of people will actually redeem those. Especially if you’re doing more of this blanket giving.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: You know, if you’re doing something really targeted, if it’s a group that’s already been floating and is aware of it, those people are way more likely to come in and use a higher percentage but if you’re really reaching out to an organization you haven’t had much work with, or to a whole group of people you haven’t worked with before, you might even see only like a five to ten percent redemption rate, if that, sometimes. So, you know, even though the idea of 300 people all of a sudden using their free floats at once can be kind of scary, that’s definitely not how it’s going to go down. You know, they’re going to trickle in and a lot of them are never going to use them even those a really nice value to them.

Ashkahn: You can also for the customers you do have who are already booked, you know, you can let them float longer, too. If nobody’s after them, just let them have a longer float, like rewarding the people who are currently paying you and being like, “Hey do you want to float for two hours or three hours?” Or something like that. Like those people who want to and have the time are going to be stoked.

Graham: And let them know beforehand, too. You can totally let them know when they come in but if you call people a day ahead of time, if your schedule’s relatively empty, and just say like, “Hey, I could extend your float or double it free of charge if you want.” Like, that’s an awesome thing.

Ashkahn: Yeah

Graham: Then they can plan for in their day and they’re more likely to take you up on it.

Ashkahn: And they’re more likely to be regular customers for you in the future, keep your schedule full.

Graham: Yeah, I will say that I really like doing this gifting of floats on more of a private side. So, you know what we do less frequently is just go on Facebook and say, “Hey, the first 20 people to  respond to this will get a free float.”

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: We’ve played with things like that before but that almost has that reeking of desperation or like to keep the free floats on the DL.

Ashkahn: I’ve put it on Twitter before, like for us it was when our schedule is like really packed out, you know, like a week or two weeks out sometimes and we’d have like a random like chunk of cancellations, a group of three canceled or something. We would hop on Twitter and say like, “Hey, whoever wants to come float in three hours can get like, you know, $40 floats or something,” and that like, I think that worked okay. Our schedule generally full. Those messages were not going out that often. And it was kind of in the context of cancellations but at the point that you’re doing that every day, or you know, like that’s where it starts, I mean you’re kind of like devaluing yourself without even getting anybody to come in or giving them discounts or anything like that. It does kind of dig you into a little bit of a hole in terms of perception.

Graham: And a nice little trick if you really do want to do this more public social media giveaways is just attach something to it, whether it’s, “Hey, if you write us a paragraph about your float experience afterwards, you can come get a free float.” Or, “Hey, if you’re willing to sit for five minutes and let us do a video testimonial of you afterwards then you know the first 15 people who respond to this will get a free float as long as you’re willing to do that video.”

And that also keeps that exchange kind of mentality going. It’s not just that they’re getting a freebie or that you’re trying to fill up empty tanks, it’s that from their perspective I think it’s kind of justified and they say, “Oh, and this business wants some nice testimonials and that’s why I’m getting a free float, not just because they’re launching them out there and desperately trying to fill their empty tanks or something like that.” So, whatever it is, I always like to add some kind of justification onto it.

So there you go.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I mean, that’s, again, free floats are definitely are our go-to for filling up those empty slots. And, as you get further out even, you know, again, if you’re planning on filling tanks a month out, getting those tanks filled and launching some kind of larger campaign with your free float efforts can yield a lot more results if you have a slightly longer runway.

Ashkahn: Cool, excellent. Well, if you guys have other questions of us, you can always hop over to  floattanksolutions.com/podcast. And we’ll answer them.

Graham: Yep. And, if you haven’t already, too, definitely go onto iTunes and subscribe to our podcast or on Overcast or whatever podcast player that you use and it’ll automatically download our voices to your phone every single day.

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