Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
How do you figure out how many people to hire? What’s the ideal hours for a float employee to work? Is there such a thing as too many hours? Too few?
Graham and Ashkahn share their insights with staffing Float On and what their staff looks like to cover all their shifts running a six tank, 24 hour float center.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Okaly blokaly guys, welcome back to the podcast.
Graham: Today we have a good one. It’s about our staffing, “How many staff does it take to run your shop? How many hours are they working on average?”
Ashkahn: Good question, listener.
Graham: Yep. Thanks for sending that in, and we’ll talk to you all next time.
Ashkahn: Have a great evening.
How many staff does it take to run a shop? There’s two ways to answer that question. How many people do we have there at any given point in time, and how many total people do we have on staff? This sounds more like they’re asking how many total people we have on staff.
Graham: But we might as well answer both of them.
Ashkahn: We have two people on at a time at our place, and that’s a whole other conversation I think about, how many people you need working at your shop at any given point in time.
Assuming you have that part figured out, it takes us about, for a 24 hour operation like ours, with two people on staff-
Graham: And six tanks.
Ashkahn: And six tanks. We have about usually 12 to 14 employees. Somewhere in that range.
Graham: I just double-checked. We’re doing some training right now of some new people coming on, so we might lose maybe one of those? But we have 14 people right now.
Ashkahn: We always seem to hover somewhere in that range. Twelve seems to be the lowest, and 14 seems to be generally the highest that our staff pool goes. That does not involve us, so we’re not really working any hours in there.
Graham: It does involve two shop managers as well, so of those 14 right now, two are managers, and 12 are more regular shop staff.
Ashkahn: Those managers are working hours too, and when they’re working, they’re working as one of those two people, so it’s not like two people plus a manager. It’s a manager there for however many hours, and then they’ll also work hours not at the shop doing more managerial stuff.
Graham: Pretty much the only time we’ll have more than that is when we’re doing deep cleans, when more people actually makes things go faster. You can crank through more tanks at a time.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: Or when we’re doing training, so if we have someone who’s coming on board and doing training, then we’ll have our two regular staff and then the third person who’s training up will also be there, shadowing them and helping out and learning.
Ashkahn: With 14 people, we tend to have a mix of how many hours those people are working. We have a handful of those that are closer to full-time in the mid to high thirties every week. We also have a handful of people around part-time, like 20 hours-ish a week, and usually just a few people down lower than that, like 12 to 20 hours a week.
Graham: If we let people get down there, it tends to be staff who have been with us for a really long time, and maybe they’re even transitioning into doing other things with their life but still want a presence in the shop or something. It’s nice to have their experience.
We found just practically, when you start getting down below 20, or I’d even say often 25 hours a week, it gets really hard to have people stay up to date on everything that’s going on and changing, and which tanks are down, and what pump is having trouble, or anything like that.
If there’s something new they have to learn and they’re only working eight or nine hours a week, just practically it’s been very hard to keep them in the loop and as good as the other staff members.
Ashkahn: It’s kind of like one shift. If someone just has one shift a week, in your shop it tends to be tricky for them to be as caught up as everybody else is.
Graham: Definitely, I’d say, and looking at ours it definitely is around the 20 hour week is where most of our people are, like 20 or above. Then it’s about two-thirds are in that 20 to 30 range, and then one-third is in the 30 to 40 range. It seems to be. At least the current breakdown.
Ashkahn: How many of those people have other jobs?
Graham: Quite a few. I think at least everyone who’s under that 30 hour mark, and some who are above the 30 hour mark also have other jobs that they’re working.
That’s an interesting decision. Obviously, you need to make your own decisions for your float center too.
Some of the philosophy that went into this, and a lot of it, was even less philosophy and more trial and error, was just that in the process of trying to get people who are working more full time, it means that if anything goes wrong with one of those people, or if you have to let go a full time person, another one of your full time people is sick, it’s really hard to find anyone to cover those shifts.
Obviously, the more people working full-time, the less overall people you need at all, so there’s just less hands around to actually cover those shifts.
Ashkahn: The other side of that is pretty much the less people you can run any sort of business with I think the better. With more people comes more difficulty across the board. You have to communicate between a larger group of people.
Graham: Which gets exponentially more complicated.
Ashkahn: Even small things like buying food and beer for a staff meeting becomes more expensive the more people you have. A small agile team tends to be a better general philosophy in terms of business, but you have to balance it out with making sure that your current employees can take time off if they need to take time off or go on a trip if someone wants to leave for a week and a half to go travel somewhere.
I’ve always wanted to run a business that allows that. I would hate the idea of someone not being able to go on a trip because we can’t get the shifts that they’re working covered.
Graham: It’s not like we started out with this kind of number in mind, or had all of this really planned out necessarily, but just organically growing to it. We really haven’t had to turn down many vacation requests or anything like that.
Ashkahn: Almost none. I actually can’t think of one that someone has sent in, and we’ve denied it.
Graham: And at this point the amount of shifts that you or I have to cover is none. With this current set up our managers are pretty much able to swing in to cover if any of the other staff can’t. At least for us, again, with six tanks and running a meager 24 hours a day, we seem to find our stability 20 to 40 hour range and with 12 to 14 staff.
Ashkahn: It’s still organic. We have no system in place to keep it that way or keep these numbers the same. These aren’t policies that we have or anything like that. It’s just stabilized to that over the years, and it tends to hover right around those numbers.
Okay, well as always, make sure to grab em before they’re all gone. If you guys have
other questions our there, you can always hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and type them in. See you later.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How Often Does Float On Party? – DSP 225
Ashkahn and Graham have developed a bit of a reputation over the years within the industry as party animals. Anyone who has met them can confirm this to be true. But how often to the throw parties at Float On? What are good occasions for float center parties and how do you throw one?
The guys share their party philosophy and offer some nice tips and tricks for throwing a sensory deprivation shindig.
Is there a “Best” Float Position? – DSP 224
Ashkahn and Graham thoroughly debunk the myth of a “best” float position. The Float On boys explicate their philosophy that there is no right way to float and instead talk about all the different positions they enjoy floating in. They learn more about each other than they expected to in the process.
What to Look for When Hiring a Float Center Employee – DSP 223
What makes a good float center employee? What does Float On look for when trying to find someone to take care of their salt monster tanks and their blissed out customers at the same time?
Ashkahn and Graham break down the qualities they look for when hiring, and what makes the people at Float On so special.
How Do you Incentivize Return Floaters without Memberships or Packages? – DSP 222
How many times has a float center owner had a first time floater come out of the tank and said something along the lines of “that was amazing! I need to do this every week!” and then they never see that person again? How do you get them to come back without committing to a membership or a high ticket package of floats?
Ashkahn and Graham share their thoughts on this exact problems and some of the creative solutions they’ve implemented at Float On to combat it. The key, for them, has been keeping it simple and making it accessible.
How to Schedule Your Float Center During the Slow Season – DSP 221
For most float centers, the summer months drastically change how busy it gets. It seems that zenning out to nothingness is moderately less appealing when there’s a lot of outdoor activities to enjoy.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on a reduced schedule. Float On runs 24 hours almost every day throughout the year. so reducing their schedule is typically against their philosophies. They explain some of the reasons people might consider it, what are some good ways to go about it, as well as explain some practices to consider avoiding when cutting hours.
Latest Blog Posts
Float Quarterly – January 2016
It’s been our pleasure to be actively involved in the float industry for over five years now. In 2016, we’re already on track to have more new centers opening, more press covering floating, and more resources for people just entering our salty world than ever before.
With so much action, we’ve decided to send out brief, quarterly updates on our industry to keep people posted on the all the latest happenings. Welcome to our first installment!
Training to Become a Certified Pool/Spa Operator
Each year at the Float Conference, we put on a Certified Pool/Spa Operator (CPO) training course. At first, that might strike you as an odd thing to have as part of a float tank conference. This post will explain what CPO training is and why we think it can be a really useful certification to have on your belt.
Increase Sales by Offering Retail in Your Float Center
On their own, float tanks have a limit to their profits. Retailing has the potential to bring extra money into your shop, but it also requires a lot of work and attention on your part to really be successful at it. At Float On, our retail contributes 6.5% towards our overall sales and 3% of total profit. While this might not seem like a large contribution, depending on your sales, it could end up paying the wages of a whole extra employee.
The Health Department and Float Tanks… How to get Approved!
If you’re working on starting a float center, chances are you’re nervously anticipating having to call the health department. We’ve all heard horror stories of people being asked to follow pool rules that don’t make sense for them, or having to do costly changes to their pump systems.
float tanks not regulatedBelow is our best advice for working with your health department to get your float center approved, but before we dive into that, it’s important to get a bit of an understanding as to how the health department works.
