Five years ago, there were only about 20 escape rooms in the entire country. Today, there are more than 2,000 escape rooms — and counting! If your city hasn’t been flooded with them yet, you should consider opening an escape room. You can turn it into a profitable enterprise in no time as long as the demand for one exists in your area.
Before you start designing the trendy experience for your business, though, you should take the time to learn how to make your own escape room company. It’s not as simple as just renting a building and throwing some escape rooms into it.
Check out the steps you’ll need to take to bring your escape room business to life below.
Create a Business Plan for Your Escape Room
When you first decide that you’re going to start an escape room business, you might be tempted to begin by planning out the designs for each of your escape rooms. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself!
Before planning out your escape rooms, you’re going to need to put a business plan in place. This business plan should provide your escape room company with a sturdy foundation from which to grow.
Your business plan should include:
- The name of your escape room business
- The mission that you want to accomplish with your business
- The market research that you’ve done on escape rooms in your area and other areas
There is a decent chance that you’re going to need to obtain funding to get your escape room business off the ground. A lender or investor will want to see a business plan to make sure you know what you’re doing.
Find the Best Place to Put Your Escape Room Business
One of the things you’ll want to think about when putting a business plan together is where you want to put your escape room. You want to put it in a place where it’ll attract a lot of attention from those driving and walking by.
You also want to put it in a building that’ll provide you with more than enough room to spread out. To run a successful escape room business, you’re going to need at least five or six escape rooms for your customers.
Think About Which Escape Rooms You Want to Offer to Customers
Once you know exactly where you’re going to put your business and have some idea of how big it’ll be, you can start thinking about your actual escape rooms. They’re going to be the main attraction and will make or break your business.
You should consider coming up with different themes for your rooms. Look at a company like Breakout Games for inspiration. They have cool themes like Mystery Mansion and Island Escape for people to choose from.
You should also consider which age groups you’re going to cater to. If possible, you should have one or two very challenging escape rooms, one or two very easy escape rooms, and several escape rooms that sit somewhere in between.
Design Your Escape Rooms
Escape rooms aren’t the only things on the rise. There are also a lot of escape room design companies that are starting to pop up to accommodate those escape room businesses that are throwing their hats into the ring.
If you feel confident in your ability and think you know how to make your own escape room, go for it. But if you don’t have the slightest clue as to where to start, give a designer a call to see if they would be willing to lend you a hand.
Either way, you’ll want to spend a considerable amount of time cooking up the best escape rooms possible. It’ll set the stage for your business and give you a chance to wow your customers.
Market Your Escape Rooms to Those in Your Community
You can create the coolest escape rooms in the country. But if you can’t convince people to come out and give them a try, what good will they be?
From pretty much the moment that you commit to opening an escape room business, you should market it, market it, and then market it some more. You can do this by:
- Advertising in your local newspaper
- Launching a website
- Using email marketing to your advantage
- Setting up social media pages for your escape room business
If you’re able to build up the anticipation for your escape room business, you shouldn’t have any trouble attracting crowds. You might even want to consider providing special offers to those who buy tickets for your escape room business in advance of its grand opening to create some much-needed buzz.
Prepare to Update Your Rooms Every So Often
The one tough part about running an escape room business is that you can never sit back and rest on your laurels. Even if you do amazingly well in your first year, it won’t be long before people have worked their way through all your escape rooms.
You’ll need to start planning to update your rooms almost as soon as you open. Sketch out some escape rooms that you would like to add to the mix later so that you’re prepared to do it when the time comes.
As long as you’re able to stay one step ahead of your customers, they’ll continue coming back to see which new escape rooms you have in store for them.
Know How to Make Your Own Escape Room Business From the Start
Escape rooms are all the rage right now. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to take the time to learn how to make your own escape room business before you start doing it.
You should do plenty of market research to make sure people in your area will come to your escape room business. You should also market your business so that everyone in your area knows about it once it opens. This will increase your chances of achieving success.
Read some of our other articles to see more steps you can take to make a business a success from the beginning.
