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

On my Play Cafe Academy Youtube channel as well as back on episode 149 of my Profitable Play podcast I talked about how to price for your services– and specifically classes and events.

And after I published that content, I got a really great question that I wanted to address.

The question was regarding when we should consider CANCELING an event or a class based on low registration numbers.

Because in the example I gave, one of the assumptions I made in order to share my calculations was...

I know it’s the week after new years and as Larry David (any Curb Your Enthusiasm fans out there?!) once said, you can’t say happy new years after January 7th– but even though it’s January 9th I wanted to put this episode out there to give you some inspiration if you are STILL in need of a business resolution for 2023.

Now in Play Maker Society we talked a lot about our words of the year.

In the past my words have been No (my year of boundaries), Steady (my year of...

So often I get questions on my Youtube Channel or in my Instagram messages saying, “hey Michele, I am thinking about offering X— what would you charge for this?”

And the latest example of this was on my youtube channel on my 2023 Indoor Playground Business Trends video, so shout out to Elizabeth for being the inspiration behind this episode. And PLEASE– read this one until the end. There are some really key takeaways I need you to hear and we are going to wrap this all...

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...