Are you ready to take your attraction venue to the next level? ROLLER recently hosted an insightful webinar titled “Scaling Success: Growth Strategies for Your Attraction Venue.” Packed with actionable tips and expert advice, this event was a goldmine for any business owner looking to scale effectively. 

Watch the webinar below, or keep scrolling for a summary of the unmissable growth strategies shared!

Meet the hosts 

Caroline Cannon, VP of Strategic Growth at Thrillz High Flying Adventure Parks 

Caroline shared the story of Thrillz, which started as a standalone trampoline park and evolved into a family entertainment center with three locations. The transformation was driven by Caroline's parents' vision and entrepreneurial spirit, who saw the potential in creating a unique offering with elevated obstacles over giant airbags (take a tour of Thrillz in this video!). This concept differentiated Thrillz from other family entertainment centers and became a major attraction for guests. 

Luke Finn, CEO and Founder of ROLLER

ROLLER is an all-in-one venue management platform that helps operators, enterprises, and groups grow their businesses. During the webinar, Luke emphasized the importance of technology in enhancing customer experiences and operational efficiency. He also highlighted how tools like ROLLER can provide valuable feedback that helps operators make data-driven decisions and continuously improve their services.

Top tips for business growth 

Be clear about your motivation

"Resilience comes from all of the problems and challenges that you're faced with throughout the journey. That internal driver and the motivation is what keeps us going.”

Caroline Cannon

VP of Strategic Growth, Thrillz

During the webinar, Caroline alluded to the fact that building a business is more of a marathon than a sprint. One piece of advice she shared was to be clear about what motivates you and what your objectives are. This helps to keep you on track and ensure you’re moving in the right direction over time.

“If I wasn't clear and set on my motivations, I wouldn't have that inspiration, that internal drive to keep going and to keep hustling every day and doing what's needed to be done to grow this thing to the kind of vision that I have in my mind. So, really get clear on what motivates you.

“Resilience comes from all of the problems and challenges that you're faced with throughout the journey. Say we are faced with a challenge. We figure out how to deal with it. We move on. We're faced with another challenge. We figure out how to deal with it, and we keep moving on. Little by little, we're making progress. But that internal driver and the motivation is what keeps us going.” Caroline Cannon, VP of Strategic Growth, Thrillz 

Nail it before you scale it

Luke spoke about the importance of ensuring your business is ready for growth before plunging head-first into expansion mode. Or, as he eloquently put it, “Nail it before you scale it.”

“In the early days, you've got to stay close to the numbers and guest feedback and make incremental improvements over time, and then you can scale your venue. If you scale it before you nail it, some real cracks will appear, and trying to fix things after the fact becomes much harder.

“I’ll caveat this by saying you don't want to let perfection get in the way of progress, but I think there's a balance. You don't necessarily need to make everything perfect before you launch the next couple of venues, but doing your best to build something that is repeatable before scaling up is super important.” Luke Finn, CEO and Founder of ROLLER

Putting guest experience first and delighting parents 

Caroline spoke about the importance of deeply understanding your offering and capturing guest feedback to measure how it connects with your guests. This helps keep a venue exciting and attracts families of all ages, which means more bookings and revenue over time! 

“We are always working on improving our parks and bringing in different attractions. We just installed a couple more interactive projectors in the wall that shoot a projection onto the ground. Kids will step on it. They can play soccer with it. Little enhancements like that just make the environment more fun and exciting.

“But they're not necessarily these big monetary gains. We'll probably make money back on the attraction after a year and a half, maybe two years. But that's not what it's about. It's about facilitating this amazing, exciting experience for our customers and making the park accessible, exciting, and fun for people of all ages, including parents. Because parents are really happy when their kids are happy.” Caroline Cannon, VP of Strategic Growth, Thrillz 

Maintaining culture while scaling 

“It's important to be deliberate about the types of people you want to bring on board – how they treat the customers and align with the values of the business."

Luke Finn

CEO and Founder, ROLLER

ROLLER has been experiencing its own growth journey in recent times, having received a round of funding in 2023. Luke discussed how to maintain a company culture during times of growth and shared some tips on how he has achieved this. 

“It's important to be deliberate about the types of people you want to bring on board – how they treat the customers and align with the values of the business. Putting it down in writing is really key because pre-50 people, everyone's close together, and they kind of just feel the culture and see what everyone else is doing. But when we went from 50 to 150, then we're hiring people all around the world. Therefore, you need to really invest in teaching people and being deliberate about what the culture is so that you can try and scale effectively.” Luke Finn, CEO and Founder of ROLLER

Choosing the ideal location for a new venue 

During the Q&A, Caroline was asked how she chooses a new location when expanding, and her answer proved to be one that many business owners can learn from and action in their growth strategies. 

“You want to look into demographics and have a really solid understanding of how many schools are in the county, city, or town that you're going into. You want to know how many students and families are there. That is a really solid indicator of all the people that could be potentially having birthday parties at your business.

“And then also,  look for areas that are very accessible either via highway or major roadways, so that people can easily get to your location. Obviously, it's ideal to be on a main road that a lot of cars are driving by every day. However, you're going to pay a higher cost for rent. So, for us, it's really just been trying to find the best bang for buck based on population and location. But you really wanna focus on areas that have a lot of kids and have a lot of middle schools, elementary schools, and high schools.

All of that's public data. You don't need to buy software or beg your real estate broker to get you some of this data. You can do this all for free online.” Caroline Cannon, VP of Strategic Growth, Thrillz 

Want to learn more growth strategies?

The “Scaling Success: Growth Strategies for Your Attraction Venue” webinar provided a wealth of valuable insights and strategies for growing your business. From understanding your market and leveraging online booking technology to fostering a strong company culture and continuously innovating, the tips shared by Luke Finn and Caroline Cannon are essential for any attraction venue looking to scale.

Schedule a chat with us to learn more about how ROLLER can help you grow your business.