PlayMore Entertainment is a collection of mobile rental activity brands which offer active, unique, and fun events for parties, fundraisers, community events, and team-buildings. Parents are looking for new and exciting things to do for birthday parties. Companies want interactive ideas for team-buildings. Fundraisers and group leaders need something that appeals to a wide audience and attracts attention. Parents and organizations dedicate entire budgets to these activities. PlayMore’s activities appeal to all these customers and gets them to rent multiple brands within the same company.
PlayMore currently consists of three brands. BubbleBall MD, our most popular, is the biggest full‐service operator of bubble soccer in the mid‐Atlantic region. Bubble soccer is soccer where players wear inflatable bubbles over their bodies, which allow them to bump, knock, and roll into each other without getting hurt. It’s a combination ofbumper cars and soccer. Weuse our full‐time staff, large inventory, and ability to travelalmost anywhere in Maryland, DC, northern Virginia, and southern Pennsylvania as an advantage to increaseavailability and offerings. Additionally, through our almost three years of trial and error, we have found thelightest and most durable bubbles on the market which positively affect our play. We have also now added giant hamster balls as an additional service within this brand.
Dare Theory is a public and private event that puts a twist on your typical scavenger hunt. Teams must conquer a list of crazy and silly dares by capturing themselves completing them with photos and videos. We offer public events around Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia, and Ocean City which attract hundreds of loyal followers. We also do private team-building events.
Finally, PlayMore is introducing Crossfire Archery in May. Crossfire Archery is a mixture of paintball and archery. Players fire foam-tipped arrows at their opponents while avoiding getting shot themselves. We’ll be the only mobile operator of this game in the state.
These three brands all appeal to the same demographics which helps us retain customers and simplify our branding and marketing message. Ideally situated within three major markets (Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington DC) and near nine of the nation’s top twenty five richest counties, PlayMore benefits from its geographical location. Our target markets are families that can afford birthday partyactivities for their kids, young professionals looking to spend money on experiences, schoolsand universities, church and youth groups, and businesses interested in company parties andretreats.
We use four marketing strategies to capture awareness and convert customers. Using social media, like Facebook and Instagram, we build a following. Through social media, potential customers can link and share us with their social networks, expanding brand awareness. Kids and young professionals, a target market, are among the highest social media users. We reach out to these markets by using targeted ad postings and inbound marketing such as creating video and photo content that potential customers seek. We receive a large amount of business from referrals and word of mouth. This is a brag‐worthy activity where participants want to share their experience and photos with others. We’ve also created a referral program to incentivize past customers to help recruit future ones. Through directmarketing, we reach out to HR departments of local companies, youth organizations, churches, and different university departments including Greek life to increase our awareness. Finally, we seek strategic partnerships to enhance awareness and availability. We’ve partnered with a prominent Washington DC social sports league. We also work to create exclusive deals with indoor sports facilities around the state to offer bubble soccer for birthday packages and leagues.
To date, PlayMorehas booked and serviced over 750 events with over 50,000 players. Sales come directly through our phone and website. Using an emphasis on quick response time and customer service, we aim to make planning an event as easy as telling us where to play and showing up with the players. Customers appreciate the ease of planning with us and the fact that we bring event coordinators to every party so that the hosts don’t have to work. This, combined with our unique offerings and follow up contact, has built loyal and repeat customers, who actively tell their networks and rate us 5 out of 5 stars on Google and Yelp.
The direct competition in the region is small and underwhelming. Three companies currently exist as competition for BubbleBall MD. One is restricted to only operating in a facility that they own. The other twohave limited equipment, staffing, and online presence. BubbleBall MD has the majority of the market share in Maryland, DC, and northern Virginia. We keep our market share by focusing on search engine optimization and social media presence. When an interested customer tries tolook up bubble soccer options in the area, we are the first thing they see. Our large collection of media, postings of reviews, and companies we’ve worked with present an established company to the consumer that our competition cannot match.
Currently there is no other company in Maryland offering a safe archery game, which means we will be first-movers and capture the market. The only competition we have for our scavenger hunt brand are one or two traveling companies who host events. But none are situated or consistently work in the mid-Atlantic.
Our company has been profitable and cash flow positive since a few months into our existence. Ourrevenue stream comes primarily from rentals. In our first full year of operations, we totaled gross sales of $135,000. In year 2, we grossed$312,000, a 130% increase in sales from the previous year.By the end of 2017, we project grossing $450,000 by having more equipment available for customers to rent, expanding our operations, refining and adding to our marketing budget, creating partnerships with indoor facilities, servicing an abundance of committed repeat customers, expanding existing operations in DC, northern Virginia, and Philadelphia, and capitalizing on improved awareness of the sports and brands.
We could benefit greatly from the cash prizes afforded in Rise to the Challenge to help us purchase additional equipment to expand sales potentials and work towards franchising.