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

We talk a lot on my Profitable Play podcast about delegation and with that comes the entire conversation about recruiting, hiring, and retaining high-quality employees. However, as I described in more detail back in episode 163 of the Profitable Play podcast, that can be easier said than done.

(And by the way, if you'd prefer to listen to this article via audio format, it's available on my podcast here!)

Forecasts by Korn Ferry cited that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs might go unfilled as...

As an indoor playground or play cafe business owner, you may find yourself overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities that consume a significant amount of your time and energy. 

Coupled with the difficulty to hire and retain retail employees right now– creating a delegation system to lessen your workload can often seem impossible.

However, there is a lesser-known option you have that can allow you to maximize your productivity and focus on the essential tasks only YOU can do in your business–...

Summer camps are a great way to provide children with a fun and enriching experience while also adding to your bottom line as an indoor playground or play cafe owner. This added revenue can reduce the seasonality of your business and therefore provide you with a more consistent and predictable income year-round. 

However, running a summer camp is no easy task. 

To ensure the success of your camp, it is important to be organized, efficient, and lean into the strengths of your space as well as y...

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 that ...

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 consistency), Grow (my year ...

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 or mult...

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 tips. But this will...

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 recommen...

It was recently estimated by the CDC that over 5.4 MILLION adults in the United States  (2.21% of American adults) have ASD.  The states with the greatest estimated number of adults living with ASD included California (701,669), Texas (449,631), New York (342,280), and Florida (329,131). And similarly, the nationally representative survey suggests that about 1.5 million U.S. kids have autism, or about 1 in 40.

To put it in perspective, most indoor playgrounds serve between 25 and 200 kids per d...

One of the biggest reservations I hear from play space owners who are nervous to install a full cafe in their space is,

“well, I can’t afford to hire additional staff a cafe would require..."

If you haven’t listened to episode 55 of my podcast yet, go back and listen to it because I break down this objection in painstaking detail, but today I want to share two ways with you that you use to dispel this fear even further.

And just to recap ONE point from episode 55 in case you missed it, b...