Thinking about safety and security for offering overnight floats – DSP 133

Being open constantly does come with its challenges, even for float centers. What do you do when the rest of the world goes to sleep but you’re still operating? Doesn’t it get dangerous? What sort of precautions do you have to make to protect your business and your employees.

Graham and Ashkahn discuss security for Float On for the twilight hours when things can go wrong as well as some of the general challenges of running a 24 hour business.

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

Graham: Today’s question coming at you live. Well, not as live. Coming at you recorded is, “I think that 24/7 operating is an interesting way to increase profits, period. How do you maintain security for staff and property at 3 AM, for example?”

Ashkahn: Yeah, because it’s also an issue at 2:59 AM.

Graham: Let me tell you.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s a hard question.

Graham: It’s not that hard. We have distinct things that we do.

Ashkahn: We do.

Graham: Protocols that we do.

Ashkahn: We do, but I mean, it’s a hard problem.

Graham: I see, yeah.

Ashkahn: It’s not super easy to make sure everything is always perfectly smooth at 3 in the morning.

Graham: Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Ashkahn: Depends on where you are, so that’s the first thing. I’m assuming you’re in some sort of area that has foot traffic. If you’re really just out of the way, I don’t really think you’d have too much trouble being open at 3 AM. You’re not a business that has much that people can steal. You probably don’t have a lot of cash on hand.

It’s not like someone’s going to come in at gunpoint and steal one of your float tanks or something. You’re not necessarily a place that, I think, seems like a great deal to someone who would actually be trying to plan a robbery or something, so you have that working in your advantage.

Graham: Yep. If you’re going to look to steal something in the middle of the night, chances are you might break into a shop that’s closed over breaking into a shop that’s open for business. I think that’s almost a little scarier, from the standpoint of a robber, which I’ve gotten deep into that psychology, so I understand pretty well, I think.

Ashkahn: Really, I feel like when we’re talking about security in the middle of the night and stuff like that, mostly what we’re dealing with is people after the bars close coming around and stuff like that. We haven’t had a lot of issues of actual planned violence or robbery or things like that. It’s more just how do you deal with the people who are out hitting the streets at 3 in the morning, wandering into your float center?

Graham: I think the most uncomfortable situations, which have been extremely rare … We’ve really been, I don’t know whether it’s lucky or this is just the way the world works where we are, but there really haven’t been too many issues as a result of being open 24 hours, right?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I think most of those have just been in our parking lot, not in the shop itself. Break-ins, just from the cars of staff working the late nights, which I think has happened twice …

Ashkahn: Yeah, twice in the span of one month. There was one that happened to the same car.

Graham: Things like that, we already put up some precautions, actually getting motion sensor lights for the back there. One of our neighbors has a security camera up there that we can always review the footage for.

Ashkahn: Before we delve too much into the solutions …

Graham: I was raring to go.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I could feel it.

Graham: I want to get it.

Ashkahn: I can feel that you were chomping at the bit there. It should be noted that it is your responsibility to create a safe work environment. That’s your job as …

Graham: That’s our responsibility?

Ashkahn: Yeah. You can’t just be like, “They’ll figure it out.” It really is part of your HR legal duty to make sure that people aren’t being put in danger in your workplace, even from extenuating circumstances like that, like being open in an area where something like that could happen to someone and they’re forced to be there.

It’s something to definitely consider and take seriously, and you do want to take some kind of action to make sure you have something in place to deal with it, if you are being open in the middle of the night in an area where you may be susceptible. There’s my little HR mandatory statement.

Graham: No, that’s good. You might want something like motion sensor lights and a camera that you can access that your neighbors set up. Those are all things that …

Ashkahn: The other thing is, too, we just stopped doing the outside things in the middle of the night. We’ll just wait to take our trash out until the next morning, instead of going back to our dumpster area at 3 in the morning, and things like that, or making sure that we have our task generators in our Helm system, and we have tasks that pop up at 9 or 10 PM that make sure to take out a final round of trash, check our back shed for any extra supplies we need through the night. We have some reminders set up so that we prep for the middle of the night so that we don’t have to be doing things that involve going out back or into the parking lot or any of that stuff.

Graham: Yep, and as you can imagine we don’t get a ton of walk-in traffic in the middle of the night, so for a lot of it, from the outside, we actually don’t even look open. Oftentimes, after 11 PM our curtains are drawn for the business, so once you’re inside it makes sense and it’s lit dimly and stuff, but you’re in an open business, but from the outside you might not even recognize that this is a place that you could go into and cause problems or anything.

Ashkahn: That’s definitely a big one, just light discouragement. That’s mostly dealing with the bars just closed for us, that’s 2:30. There’s a whole series of bars just a few blocks down from us.

Graham: It’s almost like disturbance is much more common than actual danger.

Ashkahn: Yeah, exactly, but the difference between someone drunkenly wandering in and being like, “Hey, what’s going on in this place?” Could just be your curtains are drawn and your lights are dim, and that’s probably enough to make them just keep wandering by rather than looking in and seeing a brightly lit place with someone in it being like, “I’m going to go check this out.”

Graham: Yep. Another one is putting in place some kind of one-way locking system.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s like … Dim lights and curtains and a few things like that are the general stuff that helps sway people away from this. Then we have actual things in place to, if it comes down to it, actually protect people.

Graham: Yep. That’s really common, especially around that 2:30 mark when people are getting out of bars. The one-way lock system is people can get out of the building from the inside and open the door fine without any, yeah, any obstruction, which is a legal requirement.

Ashkahn: Yeah, you can’t lock your doors from the inside while you’re open for business.

Graham: Or at least not all of them.

Ashkahn: In Oregon, yeah.

Graham: There’s fire regulations for what you’re allowed to shut off and things. That’s pretty much the reason for it, is if there’s a fire and everyone’s running towards the front door and it’s locked. That’s a potentially terrible experience. It can’t be locked, but from the outside it can. It’s totally fine to have the door locked from the outside.

If someone ran out in a fire, they left something inside, they’re not necessarily encouraged to go back in, so you fulfilled your legal obligation there, but it does stop the people getting out of bars at 2:30 from actually wandering in, even if they think that it’s open or if they think it’s closed and they’re just trying every single handle along their walk on their way home to see what they can get into. That will prevent them from coming into your store.

We have a little buzzer on the outside that we put there, the equivalent of a doorbell, so that in the middle of the night, if someone does need to get in or has heard we’re open 24 hours and just wants to come wander by and peruse our retail selection, they can still do that.

Ashkahn: We also have two people on staff through the night, just as an extra level of … I mean, we have them for other reasons too, but that’s one nice thing, is it’s a lot nicer having two people in there than just a person by themselves through the middle of the night.

Graham: Yeah, for sure. For many, many reasons involving safety as well, but yeah, certainly dealing with anyone who might be coming by trying to actively cause problems. Also very nice. Someone can be talking to them and holding them at bay, not physically, but just making sure they’re not doing too much or even observing them while someone else is in the back calling the police and different things like that are really nice.

Ashkahn: Yeah, another thing that we have that at least for us has not been too successful is our street, we’re on a commercial business street, and that street has a little business association, and they hire a security company to be there to walk the street at night or be that street security. We have the phone number and we pay into it as one of the people who can call it.

At least for us, they just hired a horrible company. We call them, they don’t answer. If they do answer it takes them 45 minutes or an hour to show up. We actually, I think, stopped paying for it, because we were just like, “This is useless. You are the most incompetent security company we’ve ever encountered.” Then they even fired the security company and hired a new one. They were exactly the same. Absolutely terrible at their jobs. Maybe if you are on a street that has something like that, maybe you’ll have better luck than us. That’s a potential type of solution that hopefully works.

Graham: Yeah, definitely.

Ashkahn: Yeah, last resort is if you’re in a serious situation, yeah, you’ll just have to call the police.

Graham: There’s, I guess, another side of this, this is applicable not just to late nights, but any time, which is make it so that if you are robbed or if people are stealing things, they’re not actually stealing that much of value. We have a little safe in the back where we do cash drops into from our cash till.

If it gets over a certain amount, so even if someone does come in and, again, in broad daylight or in the middle of the night, try to rob us, our staff of course instructed to give people whatever they want, it’s like, “Don’t try to engage in conflict,” but that amount they can actually get out of our cash box is relatively little because we’re doing these cash drops into a safe that is going to be very, very hard for someone to grab and run out with in the middle of the night.

Ashkahn: It’s also 95%-ish of our transactions are credit card, so we’re not necessarily a cash-rich business either. If you had someone making daily runs to the bank or something, you probably never even have that much cash on hand.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Just enough to make change for people.

Graham: And same even for our retail up front. We have supplement pills, Onnit and things like that that we carry, and all of the boxes and little bottles up front are filled with Epsom salt, actually not with actual pills. It feels like a full bottle. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone ended up thinking they’d stolen a $30 bottle of supplements and gotten home and it’s just …

Ashkahn: Got salt pills.

Graham: Yeah, five cents of Epsom salt instead. Things like that, right? It’s where even if the worst-case scenario does happen and someone is coming in and violently or non-violently trying to steal from you, just making it so that they’re not going to get that much value is of course a large part of protection as well. That said, we’ve never had anything violent by knifepoint or gunpoint.

Ashkahn: No.

Graham: We’ve never actually been robbed at all.

Ashkahn: Certainly no intentional hazard has ever been slung at us. The only thing we’ve really had to deal with is people who were, for whatever reason, drunk or on something. You’re like, “Okay, you got to get out of here.”

Graham: Yeah, again, much more disturbance than danger. That’s over six and a half years of running floats overnight, so there you go. Some of the things that we’ve ended up doing.

Ashkahn: Yeah, one of the benefits of being reservation-based rather than being 24 hours and just having to have your doors open.

Graham: Yeah. Um… Yeah, we’ll leave it there.

Ashkahn: All right, if you guys have other questions you want us to answer, hop over to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

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