Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
What makes a good float center employee? What does Float On look for when trying to find someone to take care of their salt monster tanks and their blissed out customers at the same time? Ashkahn and Graham break down the qualities they look for when hiring, and what makes the people at Float On so special.
Show Resources
What’s your opinion on hiring friends or relatives? – DSP 61
FTS Product – Float Center Employee Handbook Template
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Welcome, everybody.
Graham: Hello there.
Ashkahn: I’m Ashkahn.
Graham: This be Graham.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that be Graham.
Graham: Sometimes I just open my mouth, and things come out, you know? It’s good most of the time, I’d say.
Ashkahn: Pretty much this whole podcast.
Graham: Today’s question is, “what do you look for when hiring employees?” A question, which I’ve thought about so much, I actually feel like we’ve answered before.
Ashkahn: We may have. There may be little nuggets of this in various other episodes.
Graham: Scattered about, so let’s consolidate that.
Ashkahn: Let’s put the puzzle together.
Graham: What do we look for? I look for someone who’s willing to bring me nice whiskey, when they come in for the job interview, and probably every week from then on.
Ashkahn: Yeah, bribery is the main qualifying factor.
Graham: You can’t tell, but I’m touching my nose lightly right now, which is a symbol of agreement. It means on the nose.
Ashkahn: It means on the nose. I mean, I guess so, yeah.
Graham: What are we-
Ashkahn: It means on point.
Graham: What are we looking for? We like people who love cleaning, and we like people who love floating.
Ashkahn: Not in that order. The number one thing we look for in people is people who like floating. That-
Graham: Yeah, for sure.
Ashkahn: Everything else is easier if that is true, and everything else is more difficult if that is not true.
Graham: I mean, honestly, what are you doing in a float center if you don’t enjoy floating?
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: People ask you, “How often do you float?” It’s like, “Oh, once when I first got hired here.”
Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah, it’s a bunch of nonsense.
Graham: It’s a weird thing. It’s such an industry of passion, and the customers who are coming in, especially your members, often are so passionate about it, and it’s changed their lives, and to not have that on the other side of the desk just feels strange.
Ashkahn: If someone is really passionate about floating, everything else fits into place so much easier, in terms of what else is required of them for their job. The next biggest thing we look for is cleaning. If they are good at/like cleaning, passionate.
Graham: Passionate.
Ashkahn: Passionate.
Graham: Passionate about cleaning.
Ashkahn: Passionate about cleaning, because it’s a cleaning job. It’s more cleaning than it is anything else. There’s a lot of cleaning, and cleaning’s a very important part of it, and it’s not easy. There’s salt. We have pretty strict sanitation guidelines, in terms of what we like to see for cleaning, and it’s frequent. You’re doing it every few hours, and in between floats, you’re cleaning the lobby and the bathroom and the dishes, and all that sort of stuff, so it’s just lots and lots and lots of cleaning.
Graham: Yeah, and there are many other parts of the job, interacting with customers and working behind the computers and sending off emails and stuff like that, but if you don’t enjoy the cleaning part, then it can really wear on you. Even the parts of the job that you do really enjoy can be less exciting, if every single day you’re doing this huge portion of it cleaning, which you enjoy less and less every time you do it.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and it can wear on the other people working the shop. If you’re just not pulling your weight cleaning, that gets annoying to everybody who works with you. I guess what we found is the more people like floating, the less the cleaning tends to feel like a burden.
Graham: True.
Ashkahn: When you really like floating, the cleaning feels like you’re taking care of some sort of shrine or something. You’re the gatekeepers of the float experience, and your duty is to provide people this great access to this thing. If you don’t have that, then you’re just like, “Man, there’s a lot of salt,” and like, “Oh, my God, this is salty again!” I think it just wears you down unless you feel like it’s towards a greater purpose.
Graham: I can’t remember now whether it-
Ashkahn: It really will burn you out.
Graham: Whether it was one of our own staff, who said this to me initially, but I always think of the ideal employee sort of views it as sweeping the stairs to a temple, or something like that, this repetitive motion that needs to get done in temples. Buddhist temples, I guess, is where I know of this happening, they’ll specifically plant trees that do drop leaves and that do create a mess, so that they have this task to do that is more meditative than cleanup, and-
Ashkahn: Yeah, I sprinkle salt around the float center sometimes, too.
Graham: It’s out of kindness. As long as your staff can know that, then they’re good for the job. That’s what I’m saying.
Ashkahn: I really feel like customer service falls into a very similar place.
Graham: Similar to what?
Ashkahn: Similar to the cleaning thing, where-
Graham: Okay, I thought you meant you sprinkle odd customer service interactions around the shop just to challenge the-
Ashkahn: Yeah, little testimonials here and there.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: It’s one of those things where I think it’s our instinct at first to want to hire people with really good people skills, who are good talkers and stuff like that, and I’ve just found that to not be as important in a float center. If someone’s really into floating, they have a very easy time relating to the other people coming out of the float tank, and it’s very easy for them to pick up on conversations and have discussions with people and provide that good customer service, whether or not they have amazing social skills in other contexts in their life.
Graham: Yeah, and same thing for even doing sales and stuff like that, having a qualified person behind the counter, who knows how to upsell a membership and has all this retail experience. There’s no better sales tactic or ability to get someone to float regularly just than being passionate about it yourself and being willing to share that with people and connect on whatever level that they floated at. Even for some of the more technical aspects of retail help, I’d still say that just being passionate about floating is the trump card above all of those.
Ashkahn: When we try to hire people, we try to pull, as much as possible, from places that have already pre-filtered people into that camp of liking floating, so Craigslist ads are generally our last resort. We like to pull from our internship, because those people are interning because they really care about floating and really enjoy it. We’ll ask our current employees to refer people, because they’ll often have that same sort of perspective in mind, and we’ll ask our customers. I mean, it’s almost the difference between posting a help wanted ad on your window, facing out of your business, versus on the desk, inside of your business, right?
Graham: Sure, yeah, that’s a good analogy.
Ashkahn: Where we don’t want the people who are just wandering by. We want the people who are coming in.
Graham: Yeah, and it’s worked out well. I’d say the more that someone not only knows about floating and knows that they like it and has floated maybe a dozen or a couple dozen times before even applying, but the more that they’ve done that at our business and the more they’ve interacted with our staff, and they really understand the Float On vibe, because our float center is going to be very different from your float center. Beyond that, every business has its own personality. Even more than floating, or in addition to floating, I should say, knowing they connect with what you’re trying to do and with the general business that you have, and even the other staff, and the way that you run things, I think, is really important, too, so same thing, like a sign on the front desk, or just appealing to the people who have already liked your Facebook page. I thought the front desk thing was a great analogy, so way to knock it out of the park with that one.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s why I got hired on, you know, is my analogy skills.
Graham: I thought you meant it was the sign on the front desk. Cool, and yeah, again, everything else is secondary to those.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: As far as the most important things that we look for in employees, that’s them: love of floating and love of taking care of the tanks and preparing a room for the next person coming in.
Ashkahn: Yeah, for sure.
Graham: If you have your own questions, or if you want to apply for our float center, you can go to dailysolutions.com/podcast.
Ashkahn: That’s not right. That’s not the right URL.
Graham: That’s true. That’s not even … You can go to dailysolutionspodcast.com, though, and see what happens.
Ashkahn: Yeah, go to dailysolutionspodcast.com. It’ll be fun.
Graham: Yeah, you’ll enjoy it.
Ashkahn: I’ve enjoyed it before, so-
Graham: All right, get out of here.
Ashkahn: Okay, yeah, it’s getting crazy now.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Benefits of a Free Float Giveaway – DSP 315
Float On has been known throughout the years for pulling off outlandish marketing stunts with mixed success. For example, we ran a giveaway on social media back in 2014 for a full year of free floats to our lucky winner.
Derek and Ashkahn provide a follow up on the success of that campaign and talk about the primary, secondary, and tertiary benefits that came from doing such a major giveaway.
The Importance of Social Media – DSP 314
Social media seems to be the only marketing platform that anyone talks about anymore. How to do facebook ads, when to post on Instagram, how to improve Google SEO… it’s a broad topic that seems to dominate the conversation in marketing.
Ashkahn and Derek explain not only why it seems this way, but the misconception of relying too heavily on social media in marketing strategies, as well as a defense of social media as a platform.
How to not be salesy selling memberships – DSP 313
Derek and Ashkahn give the low down on pitching memberships to customers. A lot of float center owners don’t want to come off as pushy sales people after people get out of their floats.
Ashkahn sympathizes with this a lot, since that’s exactly how he felt when he first started selling memberships for Float On. He and Derek suggest a perspective shift on the idea of memberships, as lots of customers end up being appreciative of the opportunity, and don’t feel like they’re being overly pitched to.
Why is Water Treatment Important? – DSP 312
If float tank water is safe, in part because of all the salt, then why is there such a huge emphasis in the industry for water treatment? After all, there haven’t been any reports of anyone getting sick because of floating.
Ashkahn and Graham tackle this question and challenge the idea on its face, because, well, just because something hasn’t been reported doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, and given how little is known about water treatment in float tanks, it’s a good idea, as an industry, to minimize the risk of infections and illness as much as possible. Really, there’s a lot of reasons, from peace of mind, complying with health regulation standards, and even marketing, to maintain your float tank solution to as high a standard that you can.
Soundproofing Windows of Your Float Center – DSP 311
Graham and Ashkahn discuss soundproofing windows of a float center, but first they talk about which situations may even warrant soundproofing in the first place. It may be that soundproofing is better prioritized elsewhere.
If you do decide to soundproof your window, the guys give you some tips on how best to do it and what to look for when picking out which type of glaze you may want along with a few other options.
Latest Blog Posts
What? Another Product Announcement? The New and Improved About Float Tanks Guide!
We’ve learned a lot since then, so has the industry and the rest of the world. Floating is no longer considered some obscure practice. The industry has become very well established the world over and is continuing to grow. As such, the About Float Tanks Guide in particular desperately needed updating.
There has been new research, new standards in manufacturing, and as an industry, we have a much better understanding of all things float tank.
Download the latest version today!
Announcing: The 2017 Float Tank Industry Report
In 2014 we started gathering answers to a survey that would eventually become the very first State of the Float Industry Report. We've released one every year since, and this year we (once again) have the most contributions that we've ever had. In total, 193 existing...
Working with a Landlord
If you’re planning on opening up a float center, it’s likely that you’ll end up renting and, therefore, working closely with a landlord. Like any business relationship, it takes communication, discernment, and openness to make a renter-landlord relationship feel truly comfortable.
Everyone involved is taking a risk and the reality is that, when it comes to floating, it’s probably more risk than your average small business – craft shop, bar, hair salon, law office, what-have-you.
This piece also includes a free download – a compilation of support letters from float center landlords!
Employees vs. Independent Contractors. Which is better when offering additional services?
Part of what makes all of this so confusing is there isn’t a one-size-fits-all set of actions that differentiates a standard employee from an independent contractor. Your State regulators, the federal Department of Labor, and the IRS all have their own criteria for what constitutes an “independent contractor”. Here, we’ll just be using the IRS definitions as a sort of jumping off point to the issue. If the status of employees is ever challenged, the IRS determines the status on a case-by-case basis over several criteria by a panel of judges, very similar to American Idol.
Basically it comes down to who is in control of the work. How much control does the company have over the type of job being done vs. how much control does the person providing the service. This manifests in different ways, but to fit the definition of an independent contractor, a service provider really does have to be independent. Beyond just using this guide, you should always consult an HR lawyer if you feel like there’s any confusion or ambiguity.
Basically, the rules fall into three main categories…
