Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
How specific do you want to get when walking a customer through a float for the first time? Everyone is gonna have a different answer to this, but it’s important to have consistency when running a business. A lot of places do video walkthroughs, but that runs the risk of losing that personal touch.
Graham and Ashkahn share a little Float On philosophy about how they instruct staff to introduce the practice of floating as well as some helpful tips for making your intro speech grow and evolve over time.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question for you is, “Do you require your employees to stick to a script or just bullet points for their new client introductions?”
Ashkahn: For the walk-throughs.
Graham: The old walkity-walk-throughs.
Ashkahn: The old walkity-walk-through speech-aroonies.
Graham: Yeah, so we don’t, I mean, we don’t have a script so much. It’s also just kind of not Float On style to really force people into an exact way of doing things, yeah. So we don’t have a dress code, no script for our walk-throughs.
Ashkahn: We don’t even have regular, we just pull whoever’s off the street that morning and that’s, that’s who runs our shop. Uh, so yeah, we have, like we don’t have an actual like “hey, here’s exactly what you need to say.” But we do have, you know, when we train people we kind of go through the list of things, you know, I guess like you were saying, a bullet point list of everything that we want to say. And we have that person in training like come and be a part of a bunch of walk-throughs that somebody else is doing. So I think naturally they kind of pick up the same sort of, you know, general feel to each other, and probably the content is mostly the same, like I’d say probably over 90 percent similar between all of our employees.
Graham: Yep.
Ashkahn: And then another thing we do is we have our employees kind of do their walk-throughs in front of each other every once in a while. We have these kind of monthly meetings and every once in a while we’ll just do that, we’ll have a couple people like hop in a room and do their walk-through speech and have other people be like, “oh man, that was good, like that one thing you said about the earplugs, I’m totally going to start saying that, that’s useful.” Or, “hey, I mentioned this other thing that you didn’t say.” And that kind of just doing it in front of each other allows for the people to kind of transfer things back and forth and bring a little bit more consistency to our walk-throughs.
Graham: Yeah. Or like things that went horribly, like oh, maybe you shouldn’t make those off-color jokes during your walk-through, you know. You might want to consider removing that from…
And, you know, so one of the benefits of this, which is one of the reasons that we kind of don’t like just passing down a one-size-fits-all kind of script, is I think it’s really important when you’re introducing someone to the float tanks for the first time to be really sensitive to that person and their needs going into it. And a lot of our walk-throughs start initially just by getting a sense of how much people even know about floating, right? Like a person coming in who it’s still their first float but they’ve done a bunch of research, their wife has floated a bunch of times and maybe is a member, is different from someone who’s coming in and it’s their birthday and their wife is surprising them with this weird float thing that neither of them has done and he didn’t even know where he was until he took off the blindfold, right? So, even just the level of knowledge and education, and people’s fears, too, I think can be addressed better when there’s not a very strict script that everyone is sticking to.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and I think people just, when they do things that feel comfortable to them they do it better.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: And I don’t know if they’re like, man, that’s not how I would say that. Like forcing someone to say something in a way they wouldn’t say it is probably going to make them sound artificial when they actually go to say-
Graham: Hello sir or madam-
Ashkahn: You call like any customer service or big chain company, and like whenever they pick up the phone, like you can hear the script that they had to say, and like they say it three times the normal speed humans usually talk, and it’s like, it’s like way more kind of articulated words than people are used to using in sentences, and it’s just so… it feels very like artificial and forced from above or something. I don’t think, it’s not going to, you know, we don’t have a call center of people working in float centers, I don’t think it’s going to get quite to that level. But I think to a degree that same sort of effect can happen if you’re really forcing someone to do something that they maybe don’t think is the most comfortable way or the best way that they could express it.
Graham: Yeah, and I just think being in tune with how much people are paying attention, as well. You know, some people are just really excited when they’re going in to float and they’re not exactly focusing on everything that you’re saying. And being able to like see that on their face and pay attention to it be like, “no-no-no, look, the earplugs, like you can, they’re optional. You can put them on or not.” You know and they’re like “okay, okay.” Or, you know, like oftentimes we’ll finish a walk-through, and it’s amazing the amount of times you finish and you’ve said exactly that the music’s going to come on at the end of the float and that’s how they’ll be notified, and you kind of finish up and they’re like, “wait, how do I know this is over again?” And you’re just like, oh man, how much have you actually been tuning in, you know?
So, again, like I feel a script encourages people to pay attention to what they’re saying. And having bullet points or all these general things are important to cover but letting them kind of wing it on the fly makes them pay attention to the customer more.
Ashkahn: And, you know, I feel like our walk-throughs have improved as employees are like, “hey, you know, maybe we should really be mentioning this to people,” or something like that. Like having that kind of flexibility for it to-
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: -organically grow and become better as people think of better ways of saying things or information to include is also nice. Not that they couldn’t change the script, I guess. Like that’s, you’d have to, ideally if you had a much more regimented thing you’d want some sort of system in place to allow people to update it.
Graham: Yeah. And that’s kind of more a general philosophy, but any system that you set up that has difficulty changing or can’t be changed at all is eventually going to be a very bad system. So kind of continuous evolution is at least a goal to build into things regardless of what they are, script or anything, what you eat for lunch.
Ashkahn: Um, and, I don’t know, I can see the concern of not having a script being that people won’t say everything you want them to say, and so I think that’s just where the rest of it comes in, having people hear each others’ walk-through speeches, going through information like that. Like it just takes a little bit more effort to make sure everyone’s on the same page and kind of hitting the points that you want to make sure everyone’s hitting.
Graham: Yeah. And everything slips over time, right? So if you only do this once a year expect at the end of that year your walk-through speeches do have some differences between them, right. But if you’re doing it every couple months or every quarter or something like that, having everyone kind of review things, you’d probably be surprised at how consistent they stay, and how much do kind of just improve little by little over time.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So I think that’s it.
Ashkahn: Cool, alright. Well, great. If you guys have other questions that you want us to answer you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and send them our way.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Monthly Budget for Float Centers – DSP 305
Graham and Ashkahn break down the real truth about how closely they watch their budget for Float On on a monthly basis.
The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
How to Sign on Float Ambassadors – DSP 304
Float Ambassadors have been with the industry since the beginning, but gained popularity sometime in the last few years. What are ambassadors and how to float centers find them? When they do find them, how do they get them to represent floating?
Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences with the practice of finding float mavens out in the world and the impact they’ve had on Float On.
How do you Talk about Psychedelics? – DSP 303
It’s no secret that the inventor of the float tank, John Lilly, was also an early psychonaut and used the tank for mental exploration in conjunction with LSD. Not everyone in the float community appreciates this shared history and some actively try to distance themselves from it given the taboo nature of psychedelics.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on psychedelics and floating and how, as a business, they can be completely separated while still being important, as well as explaining why some people might reasonably decide to disassociate from them.
What About 75 Minute Floats? – DSP 302
Most float centers divide on floats offered between 60 or 90 minute floats, but some split the difference right down the middle and offer 75 minutes. Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on this tactic, what they see as the pros, cons, and things to consider when implementing it.
Free Floats for Teachers – DSP 301
Graham and Ashkahn give their perspective on the pros and cons of giving free floats away for teachers. Giving out free floats is the Float On way and giving them to a specific group of people who could really use them sounds like a good idea.
The guys break it down and address some of the concerns any float center may have about running a program like this.
Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
