Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Not every float center owner wants to be tethered to working their shop for the rest of their lives. In fact, even some that enjoy that work immensely can be doing their business a disservice by focusing on day-to-day operations as opposed to dedicating their time to marketing or expansion.
So how do float center owners get out of the shop? How many managers (Or Taco Supremes as they’re called at Float On) does it take to effectively replace the shop owner at a business. Ashkahn and Graham have successfully implemented a system at Float On that allows them to be much more hands off on the business than when they first opened and they share how got to that point and how their business structure has evolved.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Alright.
Ashkahn: Hey everybody. My name is Ashkahn.
Graham: And I am Graham, and today’s question is. How many managers would a woodchuck chuck if necessary. “How many managers do I need if I want to get out of daily operations? How many managers do I need to take my job?”
Ashkahn: How many managers?
Graham: How many other people make up a single one of me. So I think we can get this. Thank you for submitting that question. I wasn’t trying to make fun of it. It’s a very good question. What would you say? At the least, zero.
Ashkahn: To replace us? At the most? I guess, the full human population?
Graham: That would be yes. Now that we have those upper and lower limits …
Ashkahn: So, I think it’s probably somewhere in between those.
Graham: Brilliant! So what do we … we don’t work the shop.
Ashkahn: No.
Graham: How many managers do we have?
Ashkahn: We kind of have like-
Graham: Kind of have is already the start to another great answer there, huh?
Ashkahn: Kind of like two and a third. We have like one full manager and two like two-thirds managers.
Graham: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Ashkahn: You know what I mean?
Graham: Yeah, so we have like, yes, you know a normal business would call it as Tacos and Taco Supremes.
Ashkahn: That’s the hierarchy we have and that we Float On. So, we have one taco supreme at the top and then, right below that person is two just normal tacos and below that is just, kind of, the rest of our employees. So, there’s really, kind of, three classes of people.
Graham: It’s really hard to get away from needing one taco supreme, at the least.
Ashkahn: It’s basically, like one person could do it, but.
Graham: Yeah. One is the loneliest number.
Ashkahn: Yeah, one is the lonely, and it’s just like, sometimes what the manager person is doing is like covering shifts that don’t get covered and going in when things are broken, and stuff like that. So, if you only have one person who is kind of that safety net for putting fires out, then sometimes they are not available. You can’t expect someone to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People have to have days off or go on vacations or sleep or all sorts of numbers of non-work activities.
Graham: Get sick.
Ashkahn: Unfortunately they have to do because they’re humans and not robots. Once we get robots, we will be able to answer this question then.
Graham: Oh yeah. One robot. Done.
Ashkahn: It’s nice to at least have two. That way, between the two of them, there’s a lot more just coverage that can happen. It’s just a nicer work environment, too. I think it’s just nice when you’re in charge of something to have someone to bounce ideas off of and really just have that back and forth. I think it just helps refine ideas and make sure that you don’t do something totally crazy. That, to me, is a nice number.
Graham: There is a good lesson there too. Whenever possible, having back up or redundancy in different positions is ideal for all of those reasons. Or, on the other side, if someone quits. If you’ve trained up one manager and they have been working at your store for four years and they know the ins and outs of everything and then they quit. That’s a really painful transition.
Ashkahn: Right. Or get sick, you know, all sorts of things even if they don’t want to leave your company. There are so many things that can happen. They can break their leg and they need to deal with that for two weeks or something like that.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: It’s having that redundancy. It’s one of the really tough things about running a business of our size. It’s just very difficult for us to have good redundancy in place, because we have such a small group of people to begin with.
Graham: We did have two managers for a while. That did also work great. Then, having this one main manager and two sub-managers or one Taco Supreme and two Tacos has been working out well.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s a different model around those, sort of, numbers, I think, can all work out as long as you have things distributed well.
Graham: Initially starting out, we didn’t even want managers. We really tried that for a while. Even as calling things by their taco names, is us really still not liking the idea of a manager, specifically.
Ashkahn: We do love tacos.
Graham: And we love tacos, yeah. But, there are things that are just really hard to, like tasks, that are hard to get addressed without having someone who’s in that higher level of responsibility and often getting a higher level of pay as a result. Like Ashkahn said earlier, a lot of those involve things like covering emergency sick time, going in when something breaks in the middle of the night to get the pumps back up and running. Basically, being that around the clock kind of safety net. You know?
Ashkahn: Yeah. Or just deciding something every once in a while. You know? We have a lot of fear of authoritarian decision making happening where if there’s one person at the top just making decisions willy-nilly, but in reality, sometimes people just don’t want to have to make the decisions themselves. There are certain decisions where everyone else in the company is like, “Great, we’ve discussed two or three options. You just choose whichever one sounds good.”
Having someone to, at the end of the day, make a decision or two here or there just to decide on something and keep moving forward is a useful thing to have too. So having someone who feels like “Okay, the buck stops here.” I’ve heard a lot of “We’ve all come up with a bunch of good ideas but we can only choose one of them. So, let’s go this direction.” I think our model works really nicely now too. Especially with the two two-thirds managers.
Graham: Tacos, yeah.
Ashkahn: Two tacos. Because, it turns out almost that we needed more than high level decision making. It was flexibility. More people to be available to go in and deal with missing shifts or things breaking or having to order something at the last minute or whatever. Having three people instead of two to spread out that availability. I think our shop functions just as well as it did before. I think their lives are a bit easier. It’s still a little less stress on people individually.
Graham: And it actually, ultimately, saved us a little money on payroll.
Ashkahn: Actually, it did.
Graham: Doing it that way.
Ashkahn: By changing and paying more, like, all three of those people got paid a slight pay increase when we did this. It’s still saving us money.
Graham: Yeah. Which, of course, depend on what the heck you are paying to begin with. It’s almost arbitrary to our circumstances, but worth mentioning.
Ashkahn: Really, you want to start this process early. Getting people trained on, especially like, how the pumps and filtration systems work and things like that. It just takes some time.
Graham: Yep. How you like your breakfast, since one of the managerial responsibilities is to cook breakfast for us every morning. You know?
Ashkahn: Yeah, the shade of brown your coffee is. Like, how much mocha that goes into it.
Graham: Yeah. Well, before you even hire a manager, you should start this process of grooming, or I guess shadowing is almost more what it is. It’s just when you’re doing stuff that only you know how to do, make sure there is someone else around also doing it with you. It’s a great motto.
Ashkahn: Yeah. That’s the nice thing about having a couple people, too. They’re kind of always shadowing each other. If one person leaves, it’s not as debilitating for you as having just a single person there who could leave.
Graham: Yeah. Even though we only have one main manager right now, the fact that there are, sorry, Taco Supreme. The fact that we have these other Tacos’ means that if our Taco Supreme takes off, you know, one of those Tacos can become Supreme themselves. A lot easier than you can just take a normal employee and turn them directly into a Taco Supreme.
Ashkahn: Yeah, the sour cream.
I guess that’s our recommendation. Is, two to three. It seems.
Graham: Yep and use food-based comparisons, rather than straight managerial titles.
Ashkahn: It really spices things up. Great.
Graham: I really enjoyed this episode.
Ashkahn: Question answered. We did it. Done.
Graham: I’m glad we all came together here today.
Ashkahn: In the bag. Alright. If you have more questions that we can just crush like we did this one, you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Graham: That’s it.
Ashkahn: That’s the whole URL there. Yeah. Go there.
Graham: Yeah. Go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast. There’s a little surprise for you there, too.
Ashkahn: You don’t even have to type in the name. Just go there.
Graham: If you go there, whatever day you are listening to this, there is a little surprise there for you. You should check it out.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I don’t even know what it is. That’s the surprise.
Graham: Yeah, that’s right. You should, you know, just go take a peek.
Ashkahn: Alright. Okay.
Graham: It’s a box asking for questions, though. I ruined the surprise. I ruined the surprise. Alright. Bye everyone.
Ashkahn: Bye.
Recent Podcast Episodes
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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.
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Latest Blog Posts
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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.
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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.
