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
Funding your center through Kickstarter – DSP 119
Crowdfunding has made so many projects possible that would otherwise not exist. It seems perfect for niche ideas, concepts that would otherwise never see the light of day, and passion projects that just need to happen. This sounds perfect for float centers, but there are some caveats.
Crowdfunding is time intensive and there’s not guarantee of success. Aside from that, there are some issues with it that complicate things for float centers that other crowdfunded projects likely won’t face. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the successes of float center crowdfunding and the not-so-successes as well.
Don’t Build Your Own Float Tank! – DSP 118
For anyone considering a DIY float tank, give this episode a listen first. This isn’t a discussion on the merits of doing things one way versus another or expressing an opinion on one side and playing devil’s advocate for the other. Graham and Ashkahn know painfully well from personal experience the pitfalls of falling into the hubris trap of thinking you can build your own float tanks. They built two large open tanks in Float On and even years later they still cause headaches.
What’s more, they’ve spoken with dozens of people who’ve also gone through this themselves and heard their horror stories after they didn’t listen to the advice of not doing it.
The perception that it can be a cost-cutting measure or a more reliable way to get an operating float tank in your center by going DIY is generally pretty flawed. There’s so much to it that you just can’t consider before the fact.
Should Your Float Center have a Blog? – DSP 117
This seems like a good idea on paper. It helps with SEO stuff for Google. It gives you an outlet to write about floating and share information about the industry. And it seems to fall in line with something that other businesses do, right?
So what are the downsides? How much time and effort does a blog really take? What sort of impact does it have for a float center? Graham and Ashkahn lay out the pros and cons as well as things you may not initially consider about the responsibility of having a blog.
Thoughts on Buying Yelp Ads – DSP 116
There are lots of businesses that experience the dogged persistence of Yelp sales people calling them. Float On has done both buying Yelp ad space and living without it and Graham and Ashkahn break down exactly what that experience was like.
They also go into exactly what Yelp ads mean and how it impacts your float center (or doesn’t, as the case may be) as well as how well Yelp stacks up in comparison to other ad sources.
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
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