Rachael Nemeth 0:00
Hi, everyone. I'm Rachael Nemeth, the CEO and co-founder of Opus Training. Really excited about our guest today. I wanted to start by just talking about the fact that when your product is the experience itself, the technology has to work. And your team has to guide guests through something that they've never really done before. And the energy in the room has to be right. So scaling experiences is very different. And Jason Thompson, who's the COO and co-founder of Sounds Fun Entertainment, the parent company behind Activate Games and Breakout Games with over 50 locations and aggressive plans to double that footprint is my guest today. He started it in the restaurant world. We'll learn a little bit more about that. Saw an opportunity in a location-based entertainment space, a really interesting space where, in fact, experience is the product. So today, we're going to dig into what drew him to the business, what it actually takes to scale an experiential concept to 100 units. And what service really means in the entertainment industry. So Jason, welcome to VAC2Basics. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Jason Thompson 1:05
Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Yeah, this will be fun.
Rachael Nemeth 1:10
Well, let's start with, I think, the burning question on my mind, which is, yeah, I shared a little bit about your journey. But I'm curious to learn the why. How did you get from frozen yogurt to entertainment?
Jason Thompson 1:23
Oh, that is a good story.
Rachael Nemeth 1:25
Long story for beers.
Jason Thompson 1:27
It is. So we started with, as franchisees, with Orangely Frozen Yogurt. And we opened. This was in the frozen yogurt craze where you were getting it and weighing it. And for whatever reason, people were like, whoa, you can weigh it and put all the stuff in you want. And we had lines out the door in November. It was snowing. And it just went really well. And we really liked operating, not just starting. And so we expanded to 12 locations. From that group, our connection with some of local partners, our farmers. And we started thinking about, how do we use this more? How can we bring more kind of healthy alternatives to Kentucky? We're based in Lexington, Kentucky. And so then grew Vinegar Salad Kitchen, where we started sourcing things from local farmers and putting things together in a salad, which we started. And then randomly, we just played in a escape room. I think there were 20 escape rooms in America by 2014. And we went to Nashville and we played one of our competitors, which we're really good friends with. And we were like, whoa, this is amazing. Came back and we kicked off Breakout Games in Lexington from there. So it doesn't have a clear path at all, except the business model for entertainment is a lot, I would say, easier. And there's some plus sides to what we do with the entertainment space as opposed to the restaurants.
Rachael Nemeth 3:00
Well, and that's actually, that's why what I wanted to understand is like, what was it about the entertainment space that made you want to go all in? If it is easier, what is easier about it?
Jason Thompson 3:10
Well, I think a lot of times when you have a business, it springs from your personality and who you are. And so I have three business partners. We're all very competitive. We're all really good friends. And so the competitive part of the entertainment space with Breakout Rooms and then Activate is just like kind of who we are. We do things around the office that's competitive, like, hey, how many push-ups, that kind of stuff all the time.
Rachael Nemeth 3:36
You're doing push-up contests?
Jason Thompson 3:37
We're doing push-up contests. We're doing pull-up contests. It's kind of crazy. So I think it fits our personality. And we just kind of fell in love with it. And we didn't set out to say, oh, we're going to be in the entertainment space. In terms of restaurants, I think what we found is that we like eating at them, but we're not necessarily restaurant tours. You really have to have a love and passion for it. And we know some amazing people in that space that that's what they love doing. They can't sleep at night. They're thinking about how to put more ingredients or more recipes together. We don't do that. That's not what I lay in bed at night thinking about. And I think that became clear to us. And so while we like that, we're not as passionate about food as we were and are about the entertainment space.
Rachael Nemeth 4:29
Well, in the restaurant industry, you're managing a different kind of inventory, too, which I would imagine is what complicates things. But were you also franchised before? Were you franchising before? I guess this is a broader question around the financial side and just what looks different on the P&L in entertainment versus restaurants?
Jason Thompson 4:53
Well, I think the easy.
Rachael Nemeth 4:54
What would surprise a restaurant operator about your business?
Jason Thompson 4:58
I don't know if it would be surprising. I think the easy answer to this is, at the bottom, there's money left when you get to the bottom. With cost of goods and food, I mean, my brother is a Chick-fil-A operator. And their margins are as good as it gets, but it's still pretty slim. And they have to really hone in on every aspect of that. Well, when you take the food cost out and you have fixed costs plus labor, there's not a lot of extra costs. You don't have anything going bad. You have really no waste. And so that model is, for us, something that is a little bit easier to manage. And you see margins really grow in the entertainment space.
Rachael Nemeth 5:46
And I mean, that makes me really want to dig into service because, ultimately, service and experience is what your product is. Before we do that, though, I just want listeners to just better understand the operating model at Activate or Breakout. Or maybe just briefly describe the difference between Activate and Breakout. And then just run us through what does just daily activity at one of those locations look like for your staff?
Jason Thompson 6:14
Yeah, so Breakout is our concept that we founded and started. It is solely owned by us. And the way we grow fast is we had business partners in some of the other locations. So we went to some of our friends, which is how you started business. Hey, do you have money? Do you have time? Do you want to do this with us? And they would be like, what? Are you talking about locked people in a room? This was when no one knew anything, right? Or like, yeah, you can buy all this stuff on Amazon. You can do it really easy. And so some of our best locations are our worst locations because our storefront was our website. And so you don't know that it's hard to get to. You don't have to see it. We were playing the Google Analytics game. And if we could be, Escape Room World is, it's a generic name for everybody, Escape Room. That is the industry. And so it's really hard to separate yourself in that world. Because if you're somewhere, the amount of friends and family that I had that said, hey, I always since so and so, and I played your breakout game. And I was like, we don't have one there. Because they just saw Escape Room. And so we were able to grow that. And we got to a point where we were, I think, at 42 units maybe 45, I can't remember, of Escape Rooms. And then it was just saturated, right? So Escape Rooms became big. They were, instead of 25, there were 2,500 in America. We just kind of stopped growing more units at that point. And we started growing by new rooms. But at that point, we started getting itchy and saying, well, what are we going to do next? And randomly, someone sent us an email. We saw an ad for Activate Games in Winnipeg in Canada. And we were like, whoa, this looks pretty cool. And so literally the very next day, we got on a plane and went up to Canada. And we just played Activate. And we were like, this is special. This is different. This product is amazing. And so we got in contact with the owner who had just literally opened it, beginning of 2019, and said, hey, we want to partner. We not a skilled business. And he hadn't done. He had an escape room and then opened one of one activity. And so we were like, we want to partner and bring this to the US. And so by the end of 2019, we had our first one open. And we are able to come up with a partnership with them with a corporate group and the owner and founder to license for America. And now it's kind of grown into more than that. But yeah, so that was kind of our path.
Rachael Nemeth 8:53
Well, and I do want to learn a little bit more about the daily operation, maybe a breakout. But one thing that comes to mind is you were talking about how in 2014, there were only 25 escape rooms in the whole US. What shifted in the market to where all of a sudden it became saturated to 2,500 escape rooms in the States?
Jason Thompson 9:15
Well, barrier to entry is a huge issue when it comes to opening anything, right? So barrier to entry was very easy for escape room. You can open one in your garage. And people work, right? They were like, oh, I've got three boxes here. I've got these locks I got from Home Depot. So we always say that we would not have had an escape room business if Amazon didn't exist. And in the beginning, it was, hey, we have this cool idea for a casino room. And then our next step was, what can we get on Amazon? And how can we order stuff to get here? Well, everybody else was doing that too, right? So the amount of time we spent on Amazon at Hobby Lobby and Home Depot was like, I mean, a daily two times a day. It was crazy. And we were just doing these clues and making them ourselves, which means that anybody could do it and anybody could put a puzzle together. So then it became, I don't really have to have a sexy storefront. I don't have to have the best retail space. I can be kind of wherever and have a website and people can book. And that's how it became really saturated, really fast. You've seen that really downsized now. That is not the case anymore. You have bigger companies like us that have kind of just taken the market. And there's like four or five major companies now with several still one-offs, but not like it was.
Rachael Nemeth 10:41
Right, right. And I can remember an escape room I went to with my family years ago in like an old strip mall and nothing else was there. And it didn't really matter because you're inside and you're in this experience. So that actually, that's interesting. Restaurants have just a big real estate issue right now. And so I can see why it's not only just different unit economics, but just development is different. That being said, OK, so let's go within the four walls. So you help us understand what's the day in a life of a front-line team member there. Is one person kind of running the show? Are these more junior people? Do you have to hire people who have more experience?
Jason Thompson 11:31
Well, the difference between what Breakout is and Activate is a little bit different. With Breakout, the way that we have always been very particular about how we do hospitality. So we have tried to keep that as close to a one-on-one experience as possible. And by one-on-one, I mean one person is running one game. When we go and play, we play escape rooms all the time. And it's kind of fun being in my world because part of my job is to play as many games out there and see all the things. But when we're in an escape room and you're like asking for a clue and you have to wait two or three minutes because that person is watching several different games. I see. So the way it works is you have one general manager and then you have Game Masters. It's pretty simple. And you will have a Game Master for a game that you're going to play if you come in with your family. And they're going to walk you to the game, give you an intro. They're going to go sit at a computer. They're going to help you, watch you, make sure that you're moving through the game and having a good time. And then they're going to greet you when you get out, take your picture. It's pretty standard. Like in the industry, everybody kind of does the same thing. So it's pretty simple. It's a manager and then really entry-level employees. There's a lot of young part-time employees that we have. We're looking for personality over as Phil said.
Rachael Nemeth 12:54
Well, and that actually is what's coming up for me is what does good service mean to your customers? Like, and to put it another way, what are you training your team on? What are they learning if it's such a relatively simple operating model?
Jason Thompson 13:12
Yeah, so we're looking for people that want to take care of other people. We're looking for people that have high empathy. We're looking for people that are passionate. They don't have to be extroverted. I think people think extroverted, introverted. We're not necessarily looking for extroverted people. We're looking for people that can look at a situation and proactively engage you so that you are getting what you want. And so one of the key phrases that we use is called creating yes. And that kind of comes from Danny Meyer and kind of comes from the improv world. But we try to empower our team to say we're gonna get to a yes. It may not be the yes they thought they wanted or needed, but we're gonna give you the license to be created to get them to a yes. And we want people that want that. We are policy last. And so we say policies are made to be broken for the people that walk through the door. And if you get that, that's great. So if you're a high judgmental person, if you're a high justice person, it may not work well with our culture because we're more like, you know, they're, yeah, you're probably right. The customer is not always right. And sometimes they get under your skin. But we're going to give them the best that we can all the time and assume the best.
Rachael Nemeth 14:36
And so if a customer is walking out of a breakout game, are they defining good service then with, it sounds like it's more than just, well, they like gave me clues when I needed them quickly. Like these two people are the game master and the group of people are in separate rooms, right? So how are they interacting or how would a customer define good service, I guess? What's leading them to a five star rating?
Jason Thompson 15:07
Well, here's the trick of the trade. What we want you to do is go in and feel like you came up with all of the clues. You didn't need help. You are the most clever person in the world. So what we talk about is the hero's journey throughout. So when you walk in our space, we want you to feel like you're the star of the show, you're the hero, right? And really you are. You're on the quest, you're on the mission and we want you to win. And so it's an art, really. So when they're watching the screen, they are able to talk to them as they go. And we've automated some of our new games so that it's like a voice that's really cool talking to them. Like in our monopoly, Mr. Monopoly is talking to them or whatever. It's really cool. So the best experience that they're gonna have is several wow moments throughout where they feel like they're getting small rewards. We have two or three big wow moments. Like, whoa, I can't believe that thing just dropped from whatever. And so we teach our team and coach our team to give minimal clues that will be very helpful and give clues in a way where, I mean, literally at the end, the best thing that I think can happen is, one, you have cheering and then they get out and they're like, man, we didn't need any clues in the game master's like, man, I told you 20 things, but that's a win, right? So they didn't feel like you really, so the hint is not, here's what, here's the code. It's like you ask a question and then they're like, oh yeah, and so they feel like they still figured it out. So it's a very fine line. And then you don't want people to get out with a ton of time left. You want people to get out with just enough time because that's the rush.
Rachael Nemeth 16:54
Oh, interesting, it really is an art.
Jason Thompson 16:57
Yeah, it really is. And we want everybody, like some of our competitors are puzzle people and they're like, our games are so hard, only 10% get out. And we're like, why? Why would you want to do that? We want everybody to get out. We want everybody to win. But if it's too easy, then it feels like it wasn't a challenge enough. And there's nothing better than the screams that come at the very end, one second left, and they got out and they're just screaming.
Rachael Nemeth 17:23
It's amazing. Well, now I think I really understand what good service looks like and the sort of subtleties that's almost like great services. I don't know, there's some quote around great service is what happens when no one's watching or something like that, but you are constantly pushing new game updates. It sounds like equipment, all of these things across 60 locations. So at what point did you realize you needed to invest in a training platform and what weren't you able to do before?
Jason Thompson 18:02
We had used a training platform pretty early on. At the beginning, it's always, it's a hodgepodge. So it's Google forms. And at one point, I think probably about three years in, we expanded really rapidly. Within three years, we had close to that 40 locations from when we started. I mean, we had five versions of the intro. We had five, I mean, 10 versions of onboarding. It was all over the place. And it was at that point, I was like, we have to clean this up. And so we used a company and it was good. It was not very robust. And so it helped us at least put everything in one place. But then it became evident that we had outgrown that. It was really good for a smaller company, but we had outgrown it. And especially when we started, when we added Activate and we were growing and still continue to grow, we needed something that was robust that everybody could use. And it was easy and something that we're, we are always first adopters. So something that had AI,
Rachael Nemeth 19:08
a capability was big for us as well. So then what, I'll kind of put you on the spot here, but I'm curious, like what's been the biggest win or change that you've seen since you've been, since you moved training into Opus?
Jason Thompson 19:24
I think it has been immediate communication with every single person. The hardest thing is from, I'm in Lexington and I've got employees all over the country and it's really hard for messages and rollouts to go all the way down to the bottom person, right? And so, but I mean, you want everybody to know what promos you're running, but you run so many different things. So now we're able to, with a, you know, an easy click of the button to be able to disseminate that information to every single employee that's like part-time, that's not there all the time, but now they know every single thing that's going on. And I think for us, that's been the biggest win across the company.
Rachael Nemeth 20:09
That whole notion of knowing the right thing in the right moment, which is really hard to get when you have a distributed workforce. In your case, Jason, you know, you have 50 locations in the pipeline. At this point in the company, you have a playbook, but what is it that keeps you up at night? And I think on the flip side, what did you get right early on that's paying off now?
Jason Thompson 20:42
Let me answer the first, the second one first. I think we always thought of ourselves as not necessarily just doing one-off locations or businesses. So we always thought of ourselves as being able to grow units. And because of that, from the very beginning, we made decisions that would scale. And I think this is a hard thing to do and think about when you're first getting started because you're making decisions just for like the Lexington location. But when we made decisions for that location, we would start thinking, does this work everywhere? So for instance, if I'm gonna do a casino room and I have a slot machine in there and I'm getting it from dude down the street, does that scale? Maybe for a couple, but not long-term. So we need to think about how that scales. You know, how employees are working or how they're getting set up, how the schedule's working. We may be able to do that on a spreadsheet really easy for one location, but that's not gonna scale. So for us, we started with making decisions and putting things in place to scale from the very beginning. And I think that really helped us. And then your first question reminded me what it was.
Rachael Nemeth 21:59
The opposite, which is what keeps you up at night right now as you think about what's next
Jason Thompson 22:04
and doubling the business. It feels like for us, especially with Activate, we have hit a point where in any scaling business, you go through phases and you're iterating and you're like, whoa, there's something that's changed from 10 to 15 or 15 to 25. And you're not necessarily able to put your finger on it, but something has changed, something has shifted. And we're there now and you don't sometimes see it until it happens. We're like, we're bigger than we realized. And so right now we've got, we have worked so well organically with all of our teams at headquarters and everyone is doing an amazing job, but we have not done a great job at consolidating things and workflow. And so what's keeping me up now is we have a bunch of softwares, a lot of platforms and everything from maintenance to keeping track of when a regional director goes for a visit and what those look like. And so at night I'm always like, I don't know how to see all this. And so right now we're working on how do we see all of this in one place and how do we keep track of this? Not just for accountability, but so that we can make good decisions for revenue streams, for future, for what do the customers really want? What's working? What's not working? And so at night I think about that a lot and I think we're starting to solve that.
Rachael Nemeth 23:33
I think most businesses are saying that now. You know, the kind of oversaturation of tech tools, your team is using too much, but you have all of this data. How do you aggregate it? Do you buy another piece of tech to aggregate it? Or do you slim down? And I think that's sort of the question of the year. Regardless of industry, your point earlier about what went right really made me start to think about the difference between scale and extensibility. And I think a lot of what you were speaking about is actually something that I think has to come before you even talk about scale, which is, you know, scale is the combination of like do the unit economics work and is the real estate market right? But extensibility is just like, is the model something that I could plop down somewhere else? And I feel like we don't talk about that enough in multi-unit. And I think that gets some operators in trouble as a result. So it's interesting to think that you were, you had figured that out early.
Jason Thompson 24:41
Yeah, I think for us, I think we were kind of the opposite. We thought we'll figure this out from a real estate perspective. We think we can figure this out, especially with escape rooms. And then once we did that, activate became it's a different animal because you need 12,000 square feet instead of 4,500 square feet. And you're not looking for an old dentist office with a bunch of rooms. You're looking for a big space. So that became like, okay, we've got to change the way we're looking at real estate. So we need to pull in some professionals. We need to pull in some different tech that's gonna help us be better. But the one thing we knew is if we don't have a product and we don't have a team and we don't have ability to do anything in that space, it doesn't matter. So for us, we wanted to build the scaling part from the very beginning so that we're ready when we do figure that out.
Rachael Nemeth 25:38
So I want to dive in with you a little bit on people development, but I'm so curious about your perspective on the entertainment space and the entertainment industry. What do you see, where do you think this space is headed? And what shifts are you preparing for? What sort of innovation are you guys talking about and thinking about?
Jason Thompson 26:02
I mean, there's so much going on. We talk about this all the time and there's not one source of truth. It's like, hey, this is everything that's happening. There is a lot. One thing we learned from COVID is that you would look at our company and say, well, this is not something people need. So what's gonna come first whenever there's not disposable income? It's gonna, they're gonna quit going out. They're gonna quit being entertained. And I don't know if that's totally true because people still need some outlet to do things.
Rachael Nemeth 26:35
Joy, yeah.
Jason Thompson 26:36
And they wanna go have fun, right? And that is the American way. We seem to still make that a huge priority. And so from the last five years, there's been all kinds of things that have really just, you have part of the industry that are taking old games like putt putt or bowling or whatever and making them cool darts. And there's some really cool concepts out there. You have more athletic things happening with like chicken and pickle, with pickle ball, you know, those type of things. You have a lot. Escape rooms are still really strong. You have major companies getting involved with location-based entertainment now too. Netflix just opened something in Philadelphia. I don't know about that. Yeah, Sony's got something. You know, we make Hasbro games into escape rooms. So I think larger companies even that are not necessarily in that space are going, hey, this is important. This is something that we see a future in. And so for us, we see this as something that has a very bright future. And I think it has to do with the way the younger generation is moving. People, it seems, are putting their phones away more and more and wanting in-person connection. We're not trusting AI. And so we're wanting to be brought together. I mean, think about concerts right now. Concert tickets are crazy and yet they sell out. People are craving something that's in person, that's real, that's authentic. And so that is what's happening. People are being brought together. They're wanting to be in a place where they can go have fun, be with people and have community. And so for us, that's what we're trying to build is anything that we have, we want that space to be a place of flourishing, a place of community. For our team and for the people that are coming in. So we think that the trend is headed in the direction where we are riding on target for our plans to continue to grow.
Rachael Nemeth 28:45
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think younger generations are, there has been a shift from like the millennial generation glued to their phones to people who were saying I want experiences, they're reading more. Right, some are reading more, yeah. Some are reading more. Some are reading more, this is not everyone. One area that I wanted to spend a little bit of time with you on before we wrap up is the fact that speaking of different generations, Sounds Fun Entertainment has young hourly workers who are these game masters, facilitators across all your locations. The company's really dedicated training leads and a director of operation who drives that accountability through metrics, which I love. And you're building out this like comprehensive, it sounds like facilitator training programs and standardizing game manuals across all of your locations. So that brings me to that question. You've gone from founding a single concept to overseeing 60 units across multiple brands. How has your job changed? I can see how it's, all of the standardization is happening, but how has your job actually changed? What do you spend your time on now versus five to seven years ago?
Jason Thompson 30:05
Well, I'll say in the beginning of 2015, New Year's Eve, I was at breakout by myself running games because I drew this short stick. I was there at midnight running games for people for New Year's Eve. So yeah, it's changed drastically because we originally were doing, you're doing all the things. You're making the salads. You are running the games. You're very, very in it. Now I have five layers before I get to a store from headquarters down. And so now my challenge is to stay in the weeds as much as possible, not micromanaging, but understanding and having visibility. And I think it goes back to what keeps me up at night, just having visibility. And if we're gonna have a location-based entertainment company, then all of our emphasis has to be on the locations. It can't be in this office that I'm sitting in on the sixth floor in Lexington. It has to be, we can come up with all kinds of ideas, but our frontline workers are the most valuable people. The only people we did not lay off during COVID were the GMs, which immediately said, who's the most important people in our company? The people that run the stores. And so I think it's, you have to be vigilant and constant and be very intentional with making sure that you are still connected with what's happening in the store, because it's so easy to not really understand how the workflow's happening, how the customers are interacting, if you're not there, and you just have to like put yourself there. So I spend a balance of travel being with people present in the stores, and then spending a lot of time helping everyone understand that if we can't measure something, we can't manage it. And so looking at metrics and making decisions based on our data, rather than just what feels right or what we've done in the past. Like when you're opening stores and you're just going and blowing, you're just like, I don't know if it works, but we're doing this right now. We're to the point now where we shouldn't do that anymore. We should make some good decisions. And so I'm trying to help our team do that.
Rachael Nemeth 32:22
Well, you said something earlier, you're just now about visibility and how like the further up you go, the more you lose that, but it sounds like you're maintaining that by trying to get out into the locations. So as a founder then, what has been the hardest thing to let go of as the company's grown?
Jason Thompson 32:44
Breakout was probably the one where it became most evident because we got to a point where we're like, we can't keep expanding, activate and spend this much time on breakout. And so we promoted to people that were our partners to co-presidents of breakout and they have their own ways. And I love them. They're dear friends. They're really close friends. But I had built most, all of them, like, you know, all the values, all the training stuff, like I literally spent my own, like I have very strong, passionate feelings about how we say things in our shared language. And they're not necessarily striking all that or getting, you know, getting rid of it. But that was a hard one for me. Like I need to like let them go and let them have their own personality with their autonomy and make it kind of what they think it should be. So that one, that one was a little bit hard. It was easier because I knew them and they're really close friends. If it was an outsider, I don't know. That would have been harder. That would have been tough.
Rachael Nemeth 33:46
I feel that though, that feeling of letting go and delegating and trusting, there's five different ways to yes. And so they might be running it differently, but if you're hitting the metric, you're hitting the metric. 100%. And you know, yeah, yeah. So with that in mind, just talking a little bit more about you and sort of what brought you here, who in your mind has been the most influential person in your career and what did they teach you that you're still using today, either in the business or personally?
Jason Thompson 34:21
You know what's amazing is I, for one year in my life, I think I was 20 years old. I was in Birmingham, Alabama at the time. And I was, I got hired as the manager of the cafe, the Barnes and Noble cafe. It's not a Starbucks. It's a Barnes and Noble cafe. I was there for one year. The GM there has had the most impact on me on how to run a team with the customer in focus. I was a very justice driven person before her. And we had lots of customers that would come in and I would just be, I write like, I can't believe they're coming. This guy came in every day with his used cup and wanted a refill. I mean, that is not the spirit of the refill, right? Every day, every day I'm like, oh, I hate this. And she really taught me how to love those people. She forced me to buy them all, all these people Christmas gifts. And I was like, are you kidding me? She's like, I'm giving you a budget. You gotta go to them and you gotta tell them how much you like them. And I was like, oh no. But her approach to people, I think helped me understand that it is all about the humans, whether it be on your team or the people that you're serving. And if we lose sight of that, then we've lost sight of the whole big picture and the point of our existence and why we're doing what we're doing.
Rachael Nemeth 35:45
Well said. And so profound that it was so early in your career. I think we, I can even think of a couple of managers that I had early days. And I still remember some of the things they did or some of the things they told me I was good at that I didn't really know I was good at yet. And those are really formative moments which I think speaks to why you're, what you were saying just now around how during COVID like the people you kept around with the GMs, those are the ones who are forming your team and forming the culture. So Jason, before we get into the lightning round and finish up, what is one thing that you would tell an operator who's about to go from 10 to 50 units? What advice would you give them?
Jason Thompson 36:31
Don't be stuck in the way you've done things. Be ready to iterate. And I think by any founder is gonna be open to change and ready to do things. But I do think it's easy to say, well, we've done this for 10 units, surely it'll work for the next 10. And it often doesn't. And so be looking for ways to iterate and grow and don't wait, but be proactive in doing that.
Rachael Nemeth 36:59
Jason, this has been amazing. I learned so much about the entertainment industry. By the way, I've been saying entertainment industry and I don't even know if that's how you would, is that how you guys call it? I would say entertainment industry.
Jason Thompson 37:11
Everything kind of goes in the entertainment industry.
Rachael Nemeth 37:13
Yeah, it's for, it's everything, yeah. Well, we're gonna finish up with the lightning round, everyone's favorite part. I'm gonna ask you some questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can. No need for justification. So first question, what was your first job?
Jason Thompson 37:29
Holiday world in Santa Claus, Indiana, where I grew up. I ran rides. Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth 37:35
There's a theme here. That is true. What is an entertainment trend that you're completely over?
Jason Thompson 37:46
That I'm over?
Rachael Nemeth 37:47
Yeah.
Jason Thompson 37:49
Oh man, that might be a tough one. I think pickleball. I think that's a trend.
Rachael Nemeth 37:56
What's a food trend that you're completely over?
Jason Thompson 38:03
Ooh, I might pass on that one.
Rachael Nemeth 38:06
All right, breakout or activate? Which one are you playing on a Friday night?
Jason Thompson 38:12
Activate.
Rachael Nemeth 38:14
What's the last book you read or podcast you listen to?
Jason Thompson 38:18
The last book I read is Withering Heights. Oh really? And the movie's about to come out this weekend, so I'm pretty excited about that, yeah.
Rachael Nemeth 38:25
Cool. What's something that you personally are going back to basics on these days?
Jason Thompson 38:34
I think metrics. Just data and metrics.
Rachael Nemeth 38:40
The last question, if you could give your 25-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be?
Jason Thompson 38:49
Love is the center of everything. Love, humans.
Rachael Nemeth 38:53
Yeah, well said. Jason, it's been a total pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. I also cannot wait to go to breakout or activate, so you have inspired me to make a trip. I'm gonna do it.
Jason Thompson 39:09
Yes, you have to, yeah, definitely.
Rachael Nemeth 39:12
Awesome, thank you so much.
Jason Thompson 39:13
Awesome, yeah, thank you.
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