Introductions
Hi. This is me, Dave Gale, on the left with my brother (and now business partner) Pete. We wanted to introduce ourselves here on our shiny new website, as we start off on our Exciting adventure. We’ve talked on and off for years about starting our own business, but finally this year things lined up in our personal and work lives to let this happen. We’re so excited about getting this Escape Room business going, and bringing the fun of Escape Room adventures to a whole new audience in Southampton 🙂
19th September 2016 GOT THE KEYS
Today was a great day. Its taken a few months of work with solicitors, chartered surveyors, planning officers and bank, but it was all worthwhile today when we got to pick up the keys!! I got to spend some time just going from room to room, building a MASSIVE to-do list for the coming weeks. We’re gonna be busy.
26th September TESTING, TESTING, TESTING
We ran a post on our Facebook page last week and got over 50 people volunteering themselves to test our new rooms which was fantastic. We also hit 500 Likes which really gives us a lot of confidence there is a real appetite out there for these experiences. We’re doing the draw for the next few days for the testing roles and will post the results online. Hoping to have the testers in from mid October 🙂
18th October 2016 BUILDING, PAINTING, HAMMERING, FIXING…..
We are about three weeks into the build proper now and its going well. We have two sets of escapes rooms to build, the reception, a control room and utility room all before we have our first testers on site starting the 31st October. It’s going to be tight, but I think we will get there. Our favourite bit so far was probably getting the signs up on the shop front. Made it all feel very real then. It’s also been great getting people walking up on the High Street and asking us questions about what we’re doing – loving the level of interest already!
14th October 2019 Three years on……
I’ve just taken the chance to reread this blog, almost three years to the date of writing it. I’m sat here surrounded by boxes, managing the project plan for our 5th site. We got the keys for Croydon two weeks ago, Peter is on site managing the building work, and I’m trying to order all the materials we need and planning out the works in the coming weeks.
In some ways we are both having the same days as three years ago, but we are now doing our 18th to 21st rooms (at the same time!), recruiting our 5th Branch manager and their employee number will be in the 200s, we are about to hit our 8k Like on Facebook, and have had over 60k customers!
Its been an awesome journey!