The typical Length of a Float Transition – DSP 67

A fundamental part of a float centers daily schedule is the transition between floats. It’s when the rooms get cleaned, the water runs through its filtration system, floaters need to shower, linens need changing out… So how long do you need to get all of this done? Naturally, the shorter it is, the more floats you can run in a day, but how close to the wire can you cut it?

Graham and Ashkahn lay out very clearly exactly why they do what they do at Float On for transitions and help illustrate some of the benefits and major hurdles they have had to overcome to get to this sweet spot in their scheduling.

FTS Blog – 60 Minute vs. 90 Minute Float Sessions

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

Ashkahn: So, we got a question today about transitions: “how long is the optimal time for a transition?”

Graham: Great. Yeah. So, let’s, I guess, start with what a transition is for those who don’t know, so a transition is just the single craziest time that happens in your float center, which is in between floats when the rooms need to be turned over. Lots of times, a lot of your operations will center around this transition time. So, you have your float, the person gets out, and then as fast as humanly possible, you need to run the pump, clean the room, get it totally set and sanitized and ready for the next floater who’s coming in.

Ashkahn: So, how long for transitions? What do you think?

Graham: I don’t know. First of all, half an hour seems to be really the industry standard.

Ashkahn: That’s definitely the one you see most commonly.

Graham: I don’t know of anyone who has successfully done under half hour transitions and kept them.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I know someone who started with 20, and then switched to half and hour.

Ashkahn: Oh yeah? I was trying to think about it, too. I’ve been trying to wrack my brain for who I know that does less than half and hour, and I haven’t been able to think of anybody.

Graham: Yeah. So, if you’re out there and you’re doing under half an hour transitions, write us in. We’ll send you a little trophy or something like that.

Ashkahn: A picture of a trophy, probably.

Graham: We’re not rich over here.

Ashkahn: But, yeah, so, 30 minutes, or I do know some places do longer. So, 30 minutes is very, very common, but I’ve definitely seen centers that do 40 minutes, 45.

Graham: Even up to an hour, I think.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I’ve seen a place that does an hour. I think I’ve seen a place that does an hour 15, maybe. Yeah.

Graham: Wow.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I know. Hardcore. But so, we do 30 minutes at our place, and we actually do six tanks and we switch them over all at once. So, we do a six tank transition in 30 minutes. That’s pretty crazy. I actually don’t know of a lot of other centers that do a six tank turnover in 30 minutes. Most centers I know of that are six tanks or around that size or bigger are often doing, you know, three tanks on this hour, three tanks on that hour, sort of set up, or some sort of staggered schedule.

Graham: Yeah, and the other side of this, too, which we’ll just mention as a side point, it’s probably worth its own podcast episode is how to run the transitions and how to time them. I think a lot of people go into opening a float tank center thinking that they’re going to have their tanks on this staggered schedule of when the floats are going to run and when their transition time is going to be so they can run it with one staff on hand. You can cycle between these transitions.

In reality, lining up your transitions ends up being a lot more feasible, if for no other reason than just noise. The noise of opening and shutting doors, the noise of running the pumps, which tends to go between any rooms that are adjacent to each other. In practice, it ends up being really hard to do this fully staggered kind of transition schedule. So, you do end up with people who are either all of their tanks are on the exact same schedule, or maybe they have one half of their tanks on one schedule and one half on the other.

There are centers who do manage to get every single tank on a staggered schedule, but that’s a lot less common, and sound pollution is the reason for that.

Ashkahn: Usually when someone’s able to stagger it, they’ll have tanks on opposite sides of a hallway as the actual barrier, so three tanks on one side of a hallway on one schedule, and three tanks on another. And a hallway tends to be the normal amount of soundproofing that centers do, a hallway tends to be enough buffer so that you can’t hear the pump noise from one side to the other side, and not having a hallway tends not to be, is typically what we’ve found.

So, from one room that’s sharing a wall with another one, it’s pretty hard to not hear the pump from one to another. But a hallway is usually enough. So, we’ll see that. It’s basically how you do your schedule, it’s almost like a noise versus staffing question.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Those are the big things on either side. Noise pollution is the best reason to keep your floats on the same schedule, and how many people you need working the shop at any given point in time is the best reason to stagger your floats. So, those are the two big contenders that you’re trying to find a balance between.

Graham: Of course, there’s a huge incentive, too, going back to your original question of length, to keep the transition time relatively small in between there. One, if you are on a staggered schedule, the length of time means you’re just interfering with the other floats less time because you’re making less sound, and just for a pure monetary reason. The shorter your transition time is, the more floats that you can run in the day, which obviously very directly affects your bottom line for how much money you can bring in.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Definitely. I guess the other part is just how chaotic everything feels. When you have these fast transitions, you gotta get good at both doing them quickly, and having this aura of peace and calm and everything’s under control sort of happening in your lobby space.

Graham: Yeah, if you go backstage at Float On, you’ll see during transition time our staff just sweating and running around like crazy between the rooms, and then walk out the door to the lobby and they just are totally composed and they’ve wiped their brow with a rag to make sure that their sweat isn’t just dripping onto the floor, and they’re like, “Oh, hello, can I check you in?” And then they walk back, “Oh, I just need to check on something.” And then full blown just running across the hallway again.

So, yeah, keeping that front of house versus back of house energy good is a challenge for sure.

Ashkahn: Yeah. That said, we do pull it off. It’s a little tricky, and every once in a while we do get someone into their float tanks late just because the way that people ended up coming out, if they were taking a long shower or something like that, or at the end of the day, that does happen to us and probably would happen less if we had longer transition times. But, we make it work. We can flip six tanks in 30 minutes with two people, and get that next batch of people in, and have been running that way for years at this point.

Graham: Sometimes there’s just no getting around it. Sometimes you do have to get your customers in a little bit late. If someone gets out with only three minutes left before the next person’s float, there’s just no getting around that.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: So, what do we do to encourage people to make it out of their room on time, I guess, is a good question. How do we minimize the amount of times that people just take forever getting dressed and getting ready?

Ashkahn: Yeah, a lot of float centers have some kind of put yourself together room, vanity room, outside of the float tanks where you have hairdryers and stuff like that, so I think that is one way that people are able to take some of the time that someone would need to put themselves back together and have it happen outside of the float room.

Graham: Right, yeah. Makeup time, hair drying time.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: All of that stuff. The more you can have that happen not inside the actual float room, obviously the better for transitions.

We also have some different wake up tracks that we’ll play, so this is to deal with specifically people who are really deep in that float experience. So, we kind of have our initial floaty, mellow tracks that come on to lightly bring people out of their experience, and then we have our kind of more upbeat one, like, “Get Up Stand Up” is one of my favorite songs that we end up playing to people in the float tank if they’re not getting out. Then we actually also recorded my lovely voice coming in and pretty much informing people like, “Hey, the sound of my voice means that your float is actually over,” and kind of spell it out for them. Again, the music isn’t just playing so that you can stay in here and enjoy yourself. You should actually get up and shower off and probably get out of the float tank and rejoin the rest of consensus reality.”

Ashkahn: Yeah. Other than that, we don’t really have a ton more control over it. They just, they’re gonna shower and get their clothes on and come out, and other than people not, once they’re actually aware that they have to come out of their float and they’re in the process, there’s not much else we are able to do.

Graham: Yeah, I’d say, so a couple things. One is driving it home during the intro speech, is another really good one. So, when you’re first introducing people to the tanks for their very first float they’ve come in for. During that speech, actually reminding people that, “Hey, there’s people coming in after you, so especially when you’re getting out of the tank, if you could just kind of try to shower and get dressed at a reasonable speed.”

Ashkahn: It’s usually, I tend to phrase it in the positive. “Hey, afterwards you got about 15 minutes to shower off and get ready,” because I feel like some people get nervous that they’re taking too long, too.

Graham: Sure, yeah.

Ashkahn: You don’t want to create this feeling of stress after hopping out of the float tank, that they’re kind of delaying your business operations or something. So, letting them know, “Hey, don’t worry about it, you got about 15 minutes.” It lets them know how long they have, and allows them to be comfortable kind of showering and putting their clothes on, as long as they know they’re kind of in that window of time.

Graham: Yeah. Totally.

Pumps are another part of this, right? Actually getting in your full pump cycles to make sure that the water is fully filtered in between every person who’s coming in.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: This is one that also might be deserving of its own full episode, but just really briefly without going into too much explanation, at Float On, we’re very careful to never run the pumps when someone is actually still inside the float tank. Again, that can go into much deeper explanation. We’re basically afraid of hair entrapment. But as a result of that, we always need to make sure people are physically up and outside of the tank before we start running the pump, which means that for us, we end up being big creepers and listening at the doors to the float rooms for if their showers are running, and right now we’re just having something installed with shower sensors, or we can see on a little controller whether or not the showers have come on in the different rooms, and how long they came on for, and actually have a really good sense for who’s out of the float tanks, which is really nice.

Even with that, we still try our best to not turn on the pumps, even when people are still inside their float rooms. But, ultimately, it takes our tanks about 15 to 17 minutes to cycle through the three or four turnovers that we need for our filtration, and if it hits that 15 minute mark and someone is showering but isn’t out of the float room, then we’ll still turn on the pump when they’re in there. Often times we’ll give them warnings beforehand, too. Again, during the walkthrough speech, letting them know that, “Hey, if we’re getting close to that 15 minute mark, we might have to turn on the pump while you’re in the shower, and that might kick on and make a little noise, so just a little warning.” Otherwise, it can totally freak people out when this really loud monstrous pump kicks on and they’re in this relaxed state.

I think that’s about it for trying to make sure that the transitions actually happen in that half an hour period.

Ashkahn: The other nice thing about our center is we, I would say the 90 minute floats is a bonus when it comes to things like this.

Graham: Sure.

Ashkahn: Getting someone in five minutes late off of a 90 minute float I think is just kind of less of a big deal than getting someone five minutes late in a 60 minute float. People tend to me more forgiving, and it just doesn’t seem to be that much of a kind of issue when it’s 85 versus 90 minutes.

Graham: Or a half an hour float, I bet those people are pissed if they need to get in a little bit late, even. We notice it for our two and a half hour late night floats, too.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We’ve gotten in customers 10, 15 minutes late for the two and a half hour floats, and they just do not care.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: That’s a long enough time where they’re like, “okay”. I guess there is one other point, too, which is if we do get people in late, for the next floaters going in, get them in five minutes late or even something like 10 minutes late, a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll try to make that up on the back end. Right? So, we’ll say, “Hey, we’ll keep you in for as long as we can,” and this is one of the nice things about being able to run music separately in your different float tanks. But we’ll turn on the music for everyone else, and then turn on the music for them after another five minutes, or after another 10 minutes, and just let them know, “Hey, if you could try to shower and dress off pretty fast afterwards, then at least you’ll have that longer float experience, and we can kind of get things back on track.”

So, that’s another way that we kind of correct, I guess, throughout the day.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Definitely. Cool. All right. Settled.

Graham: Done. Thanks for joining us, everyone. If you have questions you’d like us to answer, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and ask us there.

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