Methods for filling weekday float sessions – DSP 131

This is a challenging issue for any service based industry. The world still operates on a 9-to-5 schedule, often Mondays through Fridays, finding people with the availability to zen out in those hours can be a challenge, but Graham and Ashkahn have been there and have some insights to the experience. They share what they do at Float On to counter this and when to accept the margins where you’re just not getting people in to float.

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

Graham: Our question is, “our weekends are booked up, but our weekdays are so slow. What kinds of people float during the week and how do we get them into our tanks?”

Ashkahn: That’s not an uncommon thing for float centers.

Graham: No, weekends are just naturally way easier to fill up. It’s probably one of those, most people are on a week day on, weekend off schedule and they plan fun things for the weekend.

Ashkahn: I’d really put it into three categories … I put the week into three different chunks. I’d say there’s-

Graham: This is very non-conventional. Usually you just talk about weekdays and weekend. Not like the-

Ashkahn: They’re all wrong. Everybody else is wrong. Here’s how you should think about it. Weekends, I would say is one category and I would say weekend includes Friday. Like Friday, Saturday, Sunday all counts as the weekend to me.

Graham: Going to have to write to some people at MIT and see what they think about this.

Ashkahn: Everyone just scrawls under calendar.

Graham: Calendar-ologist I think is the-

Ashkahn: I see that as the weekend. I would say there’s a pretty decent difference between weekday nights and weekday days. I’ve noticed the evening time in week days are a lot more full than the typical nine to five week day.

Graham: You’d almost define our week into times people are likely to be in an office and times when they’re not.

Ashkahn: Yeah. That’s kind of the most-

Graham: What’s the third category?

Ashkahn: That’s it, weekday days, weekday nights, and weekends.

Graham: Which Friday is a part of, I see.

Ashkahn: Yeah or you could really consider week day nights all part of the weekend.

Graham: That brings us back down to two categories.

Ashkahn: Back to two categories, yes.

Graham: Makes me happy because three’s a lot to remember.

Ashkahn: The weekend is every days evening and all day Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Graham: Friday is usually a little lighter than Saturday, Sunday. But, it’s still a really good day.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s pretty good. Friday’s are pretty good.

Graham: Do a lot of people just have Fridays off or what’s the-

Ashkahn: Ditching work. I’m gonna float, like forget this.

Graham: Outside of school hours would be another way to think about it. I guess it’s because school hours mimic office hours.

Ashkahn: This is a very common pattern. If you look at most float centers out there, you’re going to see that same pattern.

Graham: It’s probably like most businesses as well, not just … I imagine skydiving. It’s similar, kind of.

Ashkahn: Sure, yeah. It’s to the point that like … Even the argument of how many float tanks you should have in your float center. This is a part of that question, you might not be able to keep them full on the weekdays. But, if you have an extra float tank-

Graham: Weekday days.

Ashkahn: Weekday days, yeah, if you have any extra float tank on those weekends that a high capacity you could hit in that time that you’re full. It can be that much of a difference.

Graham: Yeah, definitely.

Ashkahn: The weekday days are hard. It really puts the weak in weekday.

Graham: Sorry, I was just grabbing the question up to try and remember what someone had asked us again.

Ashkahn: It was how do we-

Graham: Now that we’ve defined what weekdays are. How do we deal with the slowness?

Ashkahn: What type of people are coming in?

Graham: The weird part, at least at Float On, that we’ve found and feel free to write in if you have a different experience. But, we’ve found that there’s not really a certain type of person that floats at anytime of day for us. Being open 24 hours, we run floats at 2AM, which you figure if there’s any time of day that’s going to attract a set kind of person, it’s 2AM. But, there’s not, it’s all over the place. There’s computer programmers that come in at 2AM, there’s people in the adult industry come in at 2AM, there’s people who are going to their job as a nurse at 5AM and they come float at 2AM before they start their shift. It’s just there’s no, as far as we can tell, consistency across that and that also applies to weekday days.

So, what kinds of people come in? Humans who aren’t at the office right now, definitely not nine-to-fivers, but outside of that it’s really hard to tell. Even some nine-to-fivers, their weekends are Tuesday, Wednesday. Even that’s a little hard too.

Ashkahn: Anyone in the service industry or a freelancer, or any of that those sort of stuff is all kind of on a different schedule than this typical-

Graham: Which is a lot of people.

Ashkahn: Yeah, especially here in Portland.

Graham: Especially here in Portland. Lots of retired twenty year olds.

Ashkahn: Those people will come in, in the middle of the week. I almost find that our really regular customers, who have kind of built floating into their routine, are often floating on one set week day. That’s like Wednesday night at 7PM is always their time.

Graham: I was taking a look through our schedule a little earlier to see if I noticed any consistencies, like members are taking up more night floats or day floats or anything like that. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern, as far as like, first-timers or regulars, and members, and things like that for time of day, at least that I could distinguish.

Ashkahn: How do you fill them up? How do you get people in there on those weekdays? I recommend the morning. One more thing.

Graham: I thought you were asking me a question. Usually you start to pause for an answer after you ask a question.

Ashkahn: I do often see that the later it gets in the day, even as soon as it hits 3PM, things start to get busier. The earlier in the morning on a weekday, kind of like the lighter and then it gets more and more full, like at 1PM and then more at 3PM. People must be getting off work real early.

Graham: I think that also might be a Portland thing. The hardest time we have to fill up is 7AM is light then 9AM is more filled, but still light. Then by 11 it’s evened out for our day time. Then around 5PM it really picks up fast and gets into evening time.

Morning floats are … Historically, 7AM is as difficult for us to fill as 2AM, if that’s says anything about Portland and our early rising habits. So, how do we fill these up? I’m glad you asked that. There’s our method of filling these up and then there’s other float centers method of filling these up. We don’t really make distinct effort to offer specials or anything like, for certain times of day nor do we have any kind of restrictions on discounted floats or free floats that we give out.

Whenever people are coming into float, paid or not, they can always choose what time they want. That applies from our staff, or our customers, pretty much everyone, except one member who get a really special deal coming in five days a week at 7AM. Other than that one customer, everyone gets to float whenever they want. A lot of our marketing strategies aren’t geared around specifically filling times of day. They’re just based around increasing our capacity in general and knowing that as that capacity increases, the first thing that’ll happen is weekends and nights will get booked.

After that, if there’s more demand, then weekdays start filling out more and more. When we notice holes in our schedule in general, whenever they are, and they almost certainly are on week days more than not. We’ll end up just launching into marketing campaigns to fill those up. Often for us, that means giving out a lot of free floats. Choosing some good groups of people, preferably again, if you’re trying to fill up week days, not nine-to-fivers, that you can give just bundles of free floats to.

Hopefully, in some kind of interesting way. We’ve talked on other episodes and very publicly on stage, and in private conversations, about the different projects that we’ve run. Our book, doing our chef program, getting musicians to float. These are all kind of creative things that we’ve launched to give away free floats. But, it can be as simple as … I think we talked about this during another episode too. But, during Veteran’s day, we gave out a couple hundred free floats to a veteran’s association with the understanding that they would be passing through their counselors down to veterans. That’s another way to fill up your empty slots.

We can go more into the philosophy. We’ve talked about this before for, why Float On, kind of chooses free floats. But, primarily, it’s … The reasoning behind it is, the expensive part about running a float center, it keeping it open at all and getting it started. Then, your cost per float is actually not the most expensive thing in the world as a float center owner to you.

So, giving away free floats is a nice way to get people to experience floating without breaking your own advertising bank and as long as you have empty tanks, it’s almost always worthwhile to give out those free floats, so, that you can reap the rewards of word of mouth, from the people getting in. Even if we had two full days of nothing but free floats filling up the schedule, but that schedule was full, I think the next five days would see a big boom and would be less empty during the day time hours as a result of that.

Ashkahn: We do see that, when we’ve running these big programs and given out a ton of free floats. We’ll have really busy months after that because there’s just so many people out there talking about floating. They’re like “why did you skip work on Tuesday” and you’re like “Because I was down at the float tank center.”

Graham: We do know other centers that take a more tactical approach and actually have times of day where-

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: You can either get specific memberships that are only valid for those times of day, but are cheaper than the regular memberships or they just have regular one off floats, but that are cheaper from, for example, 11AM through 3PM on weekdays.

Ashkahn: Kind of like a happy hour, right? Happy hour float thing.

Graham: Yeah, exactly, like happy hour floats.

Ashkahn: Some people even build it in, so that you can float during these … You get like four floats during these times and you can float as much as you want in the mornings, on weekdays. Different structures like that, that really encourage people to fill those times that are less popular.

Graham: I’ve heard that those work pretty well. So, definitely if you’re at an end of things that you’ve thought to experiment for yourself and you haven’t experimented with actually just reducing the prices during different times of day. That might be something that really benefits your center. For us-

Ashkahn: It can add complexity, is one of the difficulties. So, you just have to make sure that doesn’t layer on top of a bunch of other promotions you’re doing and make things really confusing.

Graham: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say for us too. The reason we haven’t done that is because we try to be as simple as possible in all of our promotions and our pricing and because we don’t like giving discounts. Again, our model at Float On is very much, I’d rather give away free floats to get people to try it and just know that again those will cascade into the times of day that I want. Rather than, give discounts to specifically fill certain times. There’s no right or wrong way to do either of those, that’s just our Float On philosophy at work. It lines up with a bunch of other business practices that we have, so it works well for us.

Ashkahn: There are just naturally light times too, so I wouldn’t feel like your specifically doing anything wrong, if you’re noticing that pattern.

Graham: If it’s dropping off from 100 percent full on weekends to 20 percent full during the weekdays, that’s where I’d say, “Kick in some emergency gear.” If it’s going from 80 percent on Ashkahn’s extended weekends of nights plus Friday plus Saturday plus Sunday.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s the time I take off.

Graham: That’s dropping down to 70 percent during weekdays or something like that. That’s just to be expected. They’re naturally not going to fill up as much, but if there’s a giant differentiation, I would say, kick into drive and try to solve that. But, any empty tank to me feels painful. Our tanks in Float On are our marketing. We don’t spend very much marketing dollars on advertising. We spend a lot of effort actually just filling up all of our slots, again, paid floats or free floats.

Ashkahn: I just think the more full your schedule is in general, like the more marketing you’re doing, the more it starts to fill those spots that are maybe not peoples first choice. If someone calls into float for 5PM and everything from 5PM onwards is booked, they’ll like, okay, I’ll make 3PM work. Stuff like that can fill up the other spots too. Generally, just improving the amount of people who are floating through whatever your marketing is doing or though those free floats has a ripple effect.

Graham: So, there you go. There’s no specific type of person, at least, that we’ve noticed that floats during weekdays. That problem is exceptionally common.

Ashkahn: Other than people who don’t have nine-to-five jobs.

Graham: Then people who don’t have nine-to-five jobs. Just play around. This is one of the things for marketing that you have to do, which is just experimentation. You notice something going wrong, like your week days don’t have enough floats and you just start making a list of different ways you can brainstorm to fill them. In our case, the way we go about it list those things in terms of, ease of implementation, how much money it’ll take you to get going, and then the things that don’t cost that much and don’t seem that hard to get going, but have the potent to really fill up your tanks. Start with those experiments and you might not hit it right off the bat, but as you work your way down your experiments, you’ll just notice your attendance during those weekday hours, just naturally going up. Anything else on your side?

Ashkahn: No, I think that’s good.

Graham: All right. Thanks for the question and if you have any others you want to send in go to floattankssolutions.com/podcast and we will talk to you tomorrow.

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