They promoted our products on social media, to their email list, and on their website. 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. We created an affiliate network and teamed up with our competitorsĪll of our competitors had to close their retail locations as well. We were able to do more outreach ourselves than a $30,000 per month press team would have done. Tasks included reaching out to press, social media influencers, and potential affiliate partners. Every morning we did a kick-off call with our new street team and gave them a list of tasks. We turned our store managers into a digital street team. We also had 18 store managers on payroll without a lot to do during the day. When we launched virtual escape rooms it became clear we had a hit on our hands that we needed to maximize. Our local store managers became a street team and helped us amplify our message Here are some of the tactics that helped us add fuel to the fire without an advertising budget: 1. I am lucky to work with an incredible team of smart and resilient marketers. I lead the marketing team at The Escape Game headquarters. And our marketing strategy was pretty clutch as well :) It took all of them and it took the best of each of them. Decision, after decision, Mark never missed. Mark, our methodical and wise CEO, guided our course with surgical precision. His pedal-to-the-metal attitude drove us to launch new products, pursue partnerships, and push our hardest when other companies pulled back. Jonny, our CMO and a contagious force of creative energy, was completely in his element as chief innovator. 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. James, our COO, protected and defended our company culture at all costs.
Despite the grim prospects, we survived and thrived, largely because of our co-founders and their leadership. If you’re wondering, yes, we did destroy props with sanitizer that had to be replaced. One day our warehouse crew was creating trees and missiles and props.
Jonny, one of our co-founders, turned the production facility where we create escape rooms into a face shield factory. “Scrappy” doesn’t even begin to describe it. We were told not to spend $1 without approval from one of the 3 co-founders. We renegotiated tons of deals, including leases, utilities, and hundreds of advertising contracts. Next, our co-founders cut their pay to basically nothing and donated a ton of money to an employee relief fund. If you’ve read Jim Collins' Good to Great, that’s him. We weren’t going to survive, we were going to thrive. A home run.” He described an idea so big that it would save our business. Mark, our CEO and a co-founder, called a meeting for the few of us that would remain on. The company we all loved felt like it might be dead. Most of our 500+ employees had to be furloughed. On March 20th, we closed our 18 locations.
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