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

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...

It may be January right now, but I need to take you ALL the way to summertime. And while it may not feel like summer outside of your window (if you live anywhere that’s similar to New York, where I live), I need you to enter that state of mind right now, at least for the next few minutes. That’s right, we are talking all about summer camps for your indoor playground or play cafe business.

(And by the way, if you prefer to listen, you can hear this same info on my Profitable Play...

Well, it’s January– often thought of as the month of self-improvement and renewal. But something I have also noticed is that a lot of indoor playground and play cafe business owners are also giving their spaces upgrades as well.

And this made me think of a strategy we employed in year 2 of our business when we wanted to do the same.

(And by the way-- if you're a podcast fan like myself, you can listen to this information on my Profitable Play Podcast linked here instead of...

I often talk on my Profitable Play Podcast and on my YouTube channel about Instagram, Facebook, and Google Ads. After all, they’re some of the easiest and most common ways for small businesses like indoor playgrounds to get their products and services in front of their ideal local customers in a way that’s much more cost-effective than something like printed direct mailers. 

Plus, these ad platforms give us data we can use to measure our results and make data-driven, informed...

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...