bounce houses, inflatable obstacle courses and slides for sale.
Check out our start up and business builder packages. They are a popular money-saving options for starting or growing your amusement business. Today’s inflatables offer the latest in innovative, interactive recreation. From the time-honored castle bounce house to multi-featured obstacle courses, combos and 25 foot water slides!
All of our prices include blower(s), entrance ramp(s) or cushion(s)*, stakes, straps, repair kit and storage bag, game accessories* and built-on business card holder!
*If applicable and included by manufacturer.
Is It Time To Grow?
By Lisa Gerr
If you have a rental company, your fleet is tucked away for the winter and you’ve caught your breath, it’s a perfect opportunity for planning and strategy. For indoor playground owners, summer is your quieter season and your perfect opportunity to plan before your next busy season.
The key question for any business pondering moving to the next level is “is it time to grow?” For you, it could mean abandoning your bunny slippers for real shoes in a real office or commercial space. Are you prepared for the transition? Or maybe it’s time to add a product or service. Have you maximized your exposure to the market with the products and services you are already offering? Do you have a good customer retention system in place? There’s no point in putting more water in the bucket if there are holes in the bottom.
Settle back and let me guide you through some thinking points. If at any point you are inspired to go off on your own tangent, go for it. My suggestion is to have a sketch pad and set of markers handy. The method I am recommending to best capture your rich, non-linear musings is called “mind mapping”. A mind map is a picture you draw for yourself AS IT OCCURS TO YOU. Don’t force yourself to think linearly or you may miss key ideas. Mind maps represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea -- like growing your business. This process is useful to help you generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas. It will help you to see it all in front of you at once so you can organize and study the information which in turn aids you in making decisions. I could write a whole series on the benefits and details of that process alone but for now suffice it to have the tools and get ready to play like a kid with your business growth ideas.
If you are feeling the itch to grow that is a good sign. You are probably realizing 80% or better of your revenue capacity, you aren’t feeling physically or mentally rundown and you and/or your partner(s) have optimism about the future of the business. What can you do to capitalize on this convergence of good? Grab your drink of choice, your kid’s markers and some blank paper from your printer and let’s begin. As we go along, just jot down thoughts or questions that occur to you. Use color! You can color code your map; green for revenue ideas, orange for operations, purple for research questions etc...whatever feels fun and natural. Take a look at a mind map on innovation by Paul Foreman below. You’ll get into it, trust me.
Re-visit Your Business Plan
It’s time to dust off your business plan, review it and see if you were correct in your assumptions. If not, where and why? It’s OK to be off. That’s the point of the exercise; to learn and renew your understanding of your business. Did your actions match your mission statement? Did your mission change mid-stream? Were your ideas of market potential accurate? Did you miss a critical component in your projections? Did your plan include a contingency in the case of an extreme economic down turn? Now re-write the background information to reflect the current status. Plot the actual numbers in the financials. This data is critical to convince a bank or even ourselves of what we will be proposing as our company’s growth strategy. You can take this as granular as you wish. In my opinion the deeper you dig the clearer the picture, margin of error lessened and risk reduced, especially the business environment and financial review areas.
Your business plan should include these sections:
Now you have an updated understanding of your business. Don’t fill in the company strategy, financial review or action plan sections until we have gone through the entire process. At this point you should be seeing a clear image of your business. It should have crystallized for you. I especially want you to see your business in contrast to your competitors from the eyes of your target market. This is two different sets of eyes and two different takes; kids and their moms.
Tighten Operations
Now we are going to put on our “Efficiency Manager” hat. Has your business been running efficiently? There are usually at least one or two things that you can tweak to streamline and reduce expense. Find them and make the adjustment. Are you getting the best price from your vendors? Do your staffing hours coincide with store traffic? Are you taking advantage of special terms and pricing? If you have an indoor facility, could your staff use a team building experience like Birthday University’s on-site training? Fix the leaking faucet. By the way, the LAST thing you should be considering in an effort to save expenses is reducing your staff’s pay. Nothing screams “this company is in trouble” like lowering wages. I am throwing random ideas out there to get you started. Use a checklist.
By now you should be feeling pretty good about having your head wrapped around the ghosts; ‘business past’ and ‘business present’. Now we can call on the spirit of ‘business future’.
Pick the Best Plan for Growth
Based on the leg work just accomplished, you may already know what you need to do. I say look for your ‘low hanging fruit’. A low-hanging fruit is a strategy a company implements in order to boost sales quickly. As it sounds, it’s doing the stuff that easy to reach.
Target New Sectors
Look for a new angle or new market. Who else would want your products? A rental company may choose to balance out the revenue stream by targeting parts of the market that tend to rent more often in the fall and winter months. When the rental industry winds down, push out to sectors of your market that may be gearing up; high schools, colleges, community agencies, worship centers as well as corporations looking for team building ideas or attractions for their family picnic days. Rent space at your local farmers’ market! You’ll be busy all day! These markets are easy to identify and market to.
Add A New Location
My friend Jake C in up state NY has this method down pat! I worked with him to set up his very first indoor facility in Fishkill NY in November 2007. Since then he has opened two additional locations and just signed the lease on location #4. He realized he reached maximum revenue capacity but the model was tight and perfect the way it was; size was right, pricing was spot on and services were in the right combination. So what to do when your perfect little business has reached max revenue capacity? Build another....then another.
Add A Model
This is something that either the rental or the indoor facility owner can do...add the opposite component.
If you have an indoor facility, add a ‘to go’ component. Build up a small branded rental fleet and take the party to the customer’s backyard. Conversely, rental companies can drop off a party host with the inflatable bounce house instead of dropping off an inflatable unit in your customer’s backyard and picking it up 4 hours later.
The ‘party host option’ could include a 2-hour party featuring a $10/hour teenage party host, 20 small favor bags and 20 prizes for $200 total sale vs. $100 for a half or full day rental. That one bounce house sent out with a party host can make up to $800 per Saturday versus $100 per Saturday. The additional daily cost to include a party host and small gifts is roughly $100. Hmmm. That’s a lot more revenue capacity. Extrapolated that means that one bounce house can generate $19,200 over the three-month season versus $4800 (for half day rentals) or $2400 (for full day rental). Oh, and you have the added benefit of having someone from your company monitoring the use of your inflatable which limits liability and abuse of your equipment. Heck, your insurance may even go down!
For an indoor playground it may be adding a retail component for ‘add-on’ sales such as party favors or toys, games and gift wrap for that birthday guest that forgot their gift. Our colleague and friend in Toledo OH, says he sells lots of ‘add-ons’ like party favor bags by offering them as an item to ‘check off’ as the customer is placing their online reservation.
Merge and Acquire
Research shows that buying for growth (mergers and acquisition activity) in a downturn can often add significant value. You know the famous ones. In fact, as recently as last month Google bought mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion in cash. The deal is Google’s largest acquisition since its $3.2 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2008. Motorola sold because it has struggled to compete. Is there a competitor who is ready to retire or who just can’t seem to get ahead of the curve? That competitor may be especially interested in selling during a downturned economy and you can pick it up for an especially attractive price.
You may have entirely different ideas. Terrific! If you are a ‘glass half full’ type (like me), hand it off to the ‘glass half empty’ guy. This can be a frustrating and downright disheartening experience but very necessary to test the viability of your business ideas. If you want to bounce your ideas off someone, call me. I have a ‘glass half empty’ guy on staff that is always willing to have a stab at your ideas! ;-P 805-845-0880.
If you have a rental company, your fleet is tucked away for the winter and you’ve caught your breath, it’s a perfect opportunity for planning and strategy. For indoor playground owners, summer is your quieter season and your perfect opportunity to plan before your next busy season.
The key question for any business pondering moving to the next level is “is it time to grow?” For you, it could mean abandoning your bunny slippers for real shoes in a real office or commercial space. Are you prepared for the transition? Or maybe it’s time to add a product or service. Have you maximized your exposure to the market with the products and services you are already offering? Do you have a good customer retention system in place? There’s no point in putting more water in the bucket if there are holes in the bottom.
Settle back and let me guide you through some thinking points. If at any point you are inspired to go off on your own tangent, go for it. My suggestion is to have a sketch pad and set of markers handy. The method I am recommending to best capture your rich, non-linear musings is called “mind mapping”. A mind map is a picture you draw for yourself AS IT OCCURS TO YOU. Don’t force yourself to think linearly or you may miss key ideas. Mind maps represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea -- like growing your business. This process is useful to help you generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas. It will help you to see it all in front of you at once so you can organize and study the information which in turn aids you in making decisions. I could write a whole series on the benefits and details of that process alone but for now suffice it to have the tools and get ready to play like a kid with your business growth ideas.
If you are feeling the itch to grow that is a good sign. You are probably realizing 80% or better of your revenue capacity, you aren’t feeling physically or mentally rundown and you and/or your partner(s) have optimism about the future of the business. What can you do to capitalize on this convergence of good? Grab your drink of choice, your kid’s markers and some blank paper from your printer and let’s begin. As we go along, just jot down thoughts or questions that occur to you. Use color! You can color code your map; green for revenue ideas, orange for operations, purple for research questions etc...whatever feels fun and natural. Take a look at a mind map on innovation by Paul Foreman below. You’ll get into it, trust me.
Re-visit Your Business Plan
It’s time to dust off your business plan, review it and see if you were correct in your assumptions. If not, where and why? It’s OK to be off. That’s the point of the exercise; to learn and renew your understanding of your business. Did your actions match your mission statement? Did your mission change mid-stream? Were your ideas of market potential accurate? Did you miss a critical component in your projections? Did your plan include a contingency in the case of an extreme economic down turn? Now re-write the background information to reflect the current status. Plot the actual numbers in the financials. This data is critical to convince a bank or even ourselves of what we will be proposing as our company’s growth strategy. You can take this as granular as you wish. In my opinion the deeper you dig the clearer the picture, margin of error lessened and risk reduced, especially the business environment and financial review areas.
Your business plan should include these sections:
- Executive summary
- Company overview
- Business environment
- Company description
- Company strategy
- Financial review
- Action plan
Now you have an updated understanding of your business. Don’t fill in the company strategy, financial review or action plan sections until we have gone through the entire process. At this point you should be seeing a clear image of your business. It should have crystallized for you. I especially want you to see your business in contrast to your competitors from the eyes of your target market. This is two different sets of eyes and two different takes; kids and their moms.
Tighten Operations
Now we are going to put on our “Efficiency Manager” hat. Has your business been running efficiently? There are usually at least one or two things that you can tweak to streamline and reduce expense. Find them and make the adjustment. Are you getting the best price from your vendors? Do your staffing hours coincide with store traffic? Are you taking advantage of special terms and pricing? If you have an indoor facility, could your staff use a team building experience like Birthday University’s on-site training? Fix the leaking faucet. By the way, the LAST thing you should be considering in an effort to save expenses is reducing your staff’s pay. Nothing screams “this company is in trouble” like lowering wages. I am throwing random ideas out there to get you started. Use a checklist.
By now you should be feeling pretty good about having your head wrapped around the ghosts; ‘business past’ and ‘business present’. Now we can call on the spirit of ‘business future’.
Pick the Best Plan for Growth
Based on the leg work just accomplished, you may already know what you need to do. I say look for your ‘low hanging fruit’. A low-hanging fruit is a strategy a company implements in order to boost sales quickly. As it sounds, it’s doing the stuff that easy to reach.
Target New Sectors
Look for a new angle or new market. Who else would want your products? A rental company may choose to balance out the revenue stream by targeting parts of the market that tend to rent more often in the fall and winter months. When the rental industry winds down, push out to sectors of your market that may be gearing up; high schools, colleges, community agencies, worship centers as well as corporations looking for team building ideas or attractions for their family picnic days. Rent space at your local farmers’ market! You’ll be busy all day! These markets are easy to identify and market to.
Add A New Location
My friend Jake C in up state NY has this method down pat! I worked with him to set up his very first indoor facility in Fishkill NY in November 2007. Since then he has opened two additional locations and just signed the lease on location #4. He realized he reached maximum revenue capacity but the model was tight and perfect the way it was; size was right, pricing was spot on and services were in the right combination. So what to do when your perfect little business has reached max revenue capacity? Build another....then another.
Add A Model
This is something that either the rental or the indoor facility owner can do...add the opposite component.
If you have an indoor facility, add a ‘to go’ component. Build up a small branded rental fleet and take the party to the customer’s backyard. Conversely, rental companies can drop off a party host with the inflatable bounce house instead of dropping off an inflatable unit in your customer’s backyard and picking it up 4 hours later.
The ‘party host option’ could include a 2-hour party featuring a $10/hour teenage party host, 20 small favor bags and 20 prizes for $200 total sale vs. $100 for a half or full day rental. That one bounce house sent out with a party host can make up to $800 per Saturday versus $100 per Saturday. The additional daily cost to include a party host and small gifts is roughly $100. Hmmm. That’s a lot more revenue capacity. Extrapolated that means that one bounce house can generate $19,200 over the three-month season versus $4800 (for half day rentals) or $2400 (for full day rental). Oh, and you have the added benefit of having someone from your company monitoring the use of your inflatable which limits liability and abuse of your equipment. Heck, your insurance may even go down!
For an indoor playground it may be adding a retail component for ‘add-on’ sales such as party favors or toys, games and gift wrap for that birthday guest that forgot their gift. Our colleague and friend in Toledo OH, says he sells lots of ‘add-ons’ like party favor bags by offering them as an item to ‘check off’ as the customer is placing their online reservation.
Merge and Acquire
Research shows that buying for growth (mergers and acquisition activity) in a downturn can often add significant value. You know the famous ones. In fact, as recently as last month Google bought mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion in cash. The deal is Google’s largest acquisition since its $3.2 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2008. Motorola sold because it has struggled to compete. Is there a competitor who is ready to retire or who just can’t seem to get ahead of the curve? That competitor may be especially interested in selling during a downturned economy and you can pick it up for an especially attractive price.
You may have entirely different ideas. Terrific! If you are a ‘glass half full’ type (like me), hand it off to the ‘glass half empty’ guy. This can be a frustrating and downright disheartening experience but very necessary to test the viability of your business ideas. If you want to bounce your ideas off someone, call me. I have a ‘glass half empty’ guy on staff that is always willing to have a stab at your ideas! ;-P 805-845-0880.
* added March 17, 2011
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