Business, Marketing, and Life Advice for Play-Based Business Owners

As you are reading this I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season with your families and staying safe and warm! 

(And if you prefer to listen, you can get this same information anywhere you listen to podcasts on episode 146 of my Profitable Play podcast!).

As you may know I am in Buffalo, New York and we certainly got our fair share of wind and snow and while this holiday looked a lot different than expected since we were unable to travel and spend Christmas with our...

If you follow me on YouTube you likely saw that this past week I interviewed Tiffany from MY Play Cafe and we talked about one of the most widely agreed upon tactics for profitable events amongst indoor playground owners- having kids’ favorite characters attend events.

But even if you watched that video, I wanted to take a moment to share my 3 biggest takeaways from my conversation with Tiffany. I want to share the 3 little nuggets of knowledge you may have missed if you were distracted...

Now I want to give a little disclaimer before we get into this article. And by the way, if you prefer to listen instead of read, I have this article published as a podcast episode on my Profitable Play Podcast here.

If you are one of those indoor playground owners who made it through the pandemic, then hats off to you. This will likely all be a bit of a review– and may even give you a lil’ bit of business PTSD– so you may want to skip this one unless you want some tidying up...

In this article I want to explain more about about ICA’s–or “Ideal Customer Avatars”-- and why you might have MULTIPLE ICA’s in your business– and why that’s OK.

Now if you have read any of the business books I’ve mentioned on this podcast, including Building a StoryBrand by Donald miller which we read together in a 5-part series starting back on episode 114 of my Profitable Play podcast– you should already be intimately familiar with the...

As you likely know, we are right in the middle of the whole black Friday, small business Saturday, cyber Monday sale madness at the moment. 

I talked in last week’s Profitable Play Podcast episodes about sales I recommend business owners take advantage of for themselves and their businesses and also gave some unique ideas for sales that have been successful for my indoor playground in the past. 

But in this article (and in this episode if you prefer to listen!), I want to...

Something I try to do is follow as many play spaces as possible on social media. And this is for a few different reasons. 

I love to show support, especially the places inside of my Play Maker Society program where we all try to follow each other's accounts and engage regardless, but I also like to stay up-to-date on the trends of the industry, as you might expect. 

It was a bit overwhelming to do so when I owned my own space, so if that sounds exhausting to you– it’s...

In this article (which is a reader-friendly version of my Profitable Play Podcast episode 131 which you can listen to here), I am going to quickly share three things I loved about my recent visit to Cafe O Play in November 2022! Now, I could truly list dozens of other things– but I want to keep it simple so that you can walk away from reading this with actionable takeaways you can implement in your own indoor playground, play cafe, or family entertainment center!

This was an extra...

I often hear from prospective indoor playground and play cafe business owners that pricing is one of the most difficult aspects of launching their play spaces.

This is especially true when it comes to the services they’re providing that don’t necessarily have a direct cost associated with them– making it impossible to utilize a simple profit margin calculation. For example, if you were a PRODUCT based business, if your COST was $2 and you wanted to ensure an 80% profit...

If you follow my Profitable Play Podcast, you may have seen that I released a very important "play of the day" for you today– and paying close attention to this tip can help prevent a disaster in your business over the next 2 years– one that I have seen play out ALL too often in real-life businesses every single day, just like yours. 

So in case you didn't listen to this episode (or if you prefer reading!) I am here to summarize for you.

Many popular marketing...

Oftentimes when we close our businesses in observance of a holiday, we assume that it means a pause in revenue as well. 

However, in this article I want to challenge that belief and provide you with some inspiration on how you can generate sales EVEN while your doors are shut.

First, I highly recommend listening to Episode 26 of my podcast, The Profitable Play Podcast, in which I share a very specific strategy about creating a BUNDLE offer. There are many different reasons why I never...