How The Escape Game Survived and Thrived during COVID-19
/By Teddy Cheek
February 2020 was the best month The Escape Game had ever had.
At the time we had 18 locations across the US, including 3 in Nashville where we are headquartered. Our stores were crushing it.
At the end of February we started getting cancellations. At first, just a few.
Still confident, me and Mark, our CEO, discussed how we might miss our revenue targets by as much as 15% in March….
Then a few more cancellations came in as rumblings about an unknown virus overseas picked up speed.
For context - The Escape Game locks people in a room with strangers. Not exactly a pandemic-friendly entertainment concept.
And then, the bottom fell out.
On March 20th, we closed our 18 locations.
Most of our 500+ employees had to be furloughed. We were crushed. The company we all loved felt like it might be dead. Done. Finished.
Mark, our CEO and a co-founder, called a meeting for the few of us that would remain on. “Someone is going to have a big idea. A home run.” He described an idea so big that it would save our business. We weren’t going to survive, we were going to thrive.
Mark is not a hype man. He is calculated and methodical. If you’ve read Jim Collins' Good to Great, that’s him.
Next, our co-founders cut their pay to basically nothing and donated a ton of money to an employee relief fund.
We renegotiated tons of deals, including leases, utilities, and hundreds of advertising contracts. We were told not to spend $1 without approval from one of the 3 co-founders. “Scrappy” doesn’t even begin to describe it. This was survival mode.
The first pivot
Jonny, one of our co-founders, turned the production facility where we create escape rooms into a face shield factory. One day our warehouse crew was creating trees and missiles and props. The next day, face shields.
The big pivot
After spotting a tiny bit of new interest online for the term “digital escape room,” we started working on an online version of our escape rooms.
I’ll admit it - virtual escape rooms sound like a crazy idea and the first prototype was less than stellar.
"Jonny, it’s not fun,” I said, discouraged by the first run through with our team.
We pressed on.
Demo, tweak, improve, demo, improve, tweak, improve, demo, tweak, improve
A couple weeks later we launched virtual escape rooms to the world. Our team members stood inside our actual escape rooms, wearing cameras on their heads, as participants directed them from their homes. "Look left - go right. Flip that switch!" came excited commands from participants searching for clues over Zoom.
The idea may have been crazy...but it was a smash hit.
And away we go…
Our team went to work reaching out to press, writers, and influencers. Our timing was perfect. Major media outlets and influencers posted about our new product to millions of followers.
Interest in virtual escape rooms started building.
* This shows Google search volume for the term Virtual Escape Room exploding in 2020.
The next few weeks were thrilling. We brought team members across the country back to work. People from all over the world played our escape rooms. Suddenly, our product was borderless.
While many businesses waited for the storm to pass, we flew into the hurricane with a never-say-die attitude.
We scaled up so we could host larger and larger groups. Hundreds of event attendees were split into teams of 8 to play our escape rooms all around the country at the same time. Even for an escape room company, that’s a puzzle.
Our ability to accommodate groups of any size made us the perfect team builder for a growing list of companies, from start-ups, to the Fortune 500 including Silicon Valley’s top employers.
All of the press we’d generated put us on the radar of entertainment companies looking to promote new initiatives in creative ways. It wasn’t long before major networks and streaming services approached us about custom virtual escape rooms.
Then our retail locations came roaring back to life in 2021.
The Escape Game kept all of our General Managers on payroll throughout COVID so the minute that state and local governments gave us the green light, we were open, running a full schedule. This head start was invaluable. Most of our competitors waited for the green light to begin hiring which put them weeks or even months behind.
Fun fact - when we re-opened we took sanitizing our escape rooms to an extreme level. We filled leaf blowers with sanitizer and sprayed down our rooms between every game. Basically, we ran our games through a car wash 10 times a day.
If you’re wondering, yes, we did destroy props with sanitizer that had to be replaced.
Despite the grim prospects, we survived and thrived, largely because of our co-founders and their leadership.
James, our COO, protected and defended our company culture at all costs. We communicated with furloughed employees regularly and lived out The Escape Game’s mission and values at each and every step of the Covid-19 journey.
Jonny, our CMO and a contagious force of creative energy, was completely in his element as chief innovator. His pedal-to-the-metal attitude drove us to launch new products, pursue partnerships, and push our hardest when other companies pulled back.
Mark, our methodical and wise CEO, guided our course with surgical precision. Decision, after decision, Mark never missed.
It took all of them and it took the best of each of them.
And our marketing strategy was pretty clutch as well :)
Oh and by the way, I’m Teddy Cheek. I lead the marketing team at The Escape Game headquarters. I am lucky to work with an incredible team of smart and resilient marketers. Here are some of the tactics that helped us add fuel to the fire without an advertising budget:
1. Our local store managers became a street team and helped us amplify our message
When we launched virtual escape rooms it became clear we had a hit on our hands that we needed to maximize. We also had 18 store managers on payroll without a lot to do during the day. We turned our store managers into a digital street team. Every morning we did a kick-off call with our new street team and gave them a list of tasks. Tasks included reaching out to press, social media influencers, and potential affiliate partners. We were able to do more outreach ourselves than a $30,000 per month press team would have done.
2. We created an affiliate network and teamed up with our competitors
All of our competitors had to close their retail locations as well. Our new street team of store managers called every single escape room in the US and many overseas (there are over 2,000 escape rooms in the US alone) and offered them commission if they were interested in selling our digital products to their audience. Over 100 escape rooms signed up. They promoted our products on social media, to their email list, and on their website. They helped us build a new product line and we provided a new revenue stream during their closure.
3. We reached out to hyper-relevant social media influencers
We reached out to hundreds and hundreds of writers, bloggers, and hyper-relevant social media influencers. The timing was perfect. Influencers were looking for unique content they could create from home. Writers wanted to write about fun ways to engage with others from home.
4. We went all in on one keyword
When we were ready to launch our new product we noticed that people were searching for escape room style games they could play for home. There were several different keywords starting to get traction.
We felt that our best bet was to settle on one keyword. After studying the Google results for each, we decided that “digital escape room” searches weren’t relevant. These searchers were looking for point-and-click escape rooms and apps. “Online escape rooms” was a mixed bag. People searching “virtual escape rooms” seemed to be looking for live events like ours.
We went all in. We wrote blogs, filmed videos, and built a product page around “virtual escape rooms.”
Our bet paid off. We quickly went #1 for “virtual escape room” and “virtual escape rooms” which is exactly what event planners, team leaders, and HR professionals were searching for on Google. Even though “online escape room” was getting more monthly searches, those searches were less relevant.
As word of mouth spread about our product, it solidified the term “virtual escape rooms” as the keyword for remote escape room team building.
Traditional SEO wisdom would have told us not to base our strategy around one keyword, but we did, and that keyword delivered. That one keyword put our new business into hyperdrive as a new category formed with us at the center of it.
5. We reached out to corporate customers who had done team building at our retail locations in the past
Over the years we’ve hosted every company you can think of at our retail locations in cities like NYC, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Austin. We realized that most of these companies were now working from home and starving for ways to engage their newly remote workforce. We sent emails, we made calls, and we hosted demos. Word of mouth spread within these organizations and it wasn’t long before we went from hosting happy hours for 10 people to becoming the main entertainment for 1,000+ person company events.
And that’s why I love my job at The Escape Game…
Our COVID pivot is one of the things that makes me so proud to work at The Escape Game. I'm grateful to have a front row seat on the rocket that could have been a sinking ship.
Thank you to AMA Nashville for being great partners and for allowing me to tell our story.