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
When should you call it quits? – DSP 94
Deciding when to close down is a challenge in any business, but it can hit especially hard for a float center. The upfront costs to build out are much higher than other industries, many of which simply cannot be recouped. When do you decide that it’s time to cut your losses and move on? What expenses can you recoup?
Graham and Ashkahn tackle this difficult question with laying out some sensible guidelines about what it means to run a business and how to go about it in a way that makes you comfortable.
Leaving a tank unattended for a week – DSP 93
Float tanks are like giant salty babies sometimes. Between water sanitation, temperature control, and filtration…they require a lot of attention and care, and even when you do things perfectly they can still make giant salty messes everywhere. So how do you leave your baby alone for a week? How do you prepare for that? Unlike a human baby, you can take your float tank with you (or at least it’s unlikely).
Choosing a Shower Disinfectant for your float center – DSP 92
A recommendation for a shower cleaner should be a fairly straightforward answer, right? Well… maybe not. Graham and Ashkahn are very particular about the definitions of things like “sanitation” “disinfectant” and other common cleaning terms. In this episode, they take the time to explain what product labels typically mean and what you want to look for when getting a surface cleaner for your float center.
Be ready to dive in and do some extra reading when getting into this episode. There’s a lot of terminology to parse and clarify. Fortunately, it’s Graham and Ashkahn so they have lots of really clear advice, like “don’t mix bleach and ammonia (or any homemade cleaning product, really)”.
When Does a Float Start? – DSP 91
Time management and maintaining your schedule is one of the most important quality controls in a float center. If you can’t get people out on time, it can throw off your schedule for the rest of the day. So, when does a float start? How do you measure that time? And what do you do if a floater starts late? Cut off their float? The next persons?
Graham and Ashkahn have been running Float On in a particular way for a long time now, and have particular insights into the challenges of how you manage your schedule.
Tips for filling an empty service schedule – DSP 90
There are fewer things more stress inducing for a float center than seeing their schedule for the week and having it just be completely empty (Maybe watching your pump start up and spray water over your entire float room, but it’s a close call). What do you do in that situation? And how do you prevent it from happening in the future?
Well, Graham and Ashkahn have tried everything, from doing shout outs and deals on social media, to literally walking down the street trying to convince people to come in and float while the tanks were empty. Some tactics are more effective than others, but what it really comes down, at least in Float On’s case, is being prepared to give out a ton of free floats.
The guys talk about the effectiveness of each strategy they’ve tried and how they’ve reached out to contacts to form mutually beneficial business relationships and really get the ball rolling with filling up their tanks.
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