We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Armando Dirienzo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Armando, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the toughest things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?

our biggest problem was we timed our opening almost exactly with the COVID shutdown. It doesn’t get more unexpected than that. Our Grand Opening was March 1st of 2020, 2 weeks later we had to shut down for four months. we thought for sure we were going to be closed before we really even had a chance to show anyone our product. We were running on fumes financially and we didn’t qualify for any government money because you had to be opened before February 1st of 2020 in order to get anything. Basically we hanging on by a thread. Our landlord worked with us and we knew what we had so we were running games for 2 people in an 8k sq ft arena. it was weird but it turned out that it worked out because people didn’t want to share space with strangers during all of that, from there we just gradually got busier until November of that year when we started booking up. A year later we opened our second location

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My team and I are all financial advisors, we dabbled in the entertainment world about 9 years ago with an escape room because it was a fun project, then we opened an axe-throwing facility, from there it was all about what we could do next. We wanted something that allowed us to be a little more creative so we started exploring how we could make “theme park-like” sets and what we could do with them. Building the places is a lot of hard work but it’s also a lot of fun. We also believe that customer service is dying, so we try to make sure that everyone who comes to our place feels appreciated and we want our brand to be known for that.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I think the most important thing to us is that staff is happy because that will be reflected in pride in their work. We listen to everything that our staff has to say and we try many of their ideas, some we implement some we don’t but they all get heard. I love that they are all friends in each location and they became good friends by working at Tac ops. No one ever gets yelled at, if they screw up it is a simple “here is why we can’t do it that way” and “next time do this”. This has its challenges, sometimes it can cause complacency and forgetting that they are there to do a job but if you have chosen the right people, they will always understand criticism and take it in stride.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

providing a great product and being attentive to customers has caused organic growth that we didn’t expect. We don’t do it for that reason, it just kind of happened. if everyone has fun then everyone in their party is likely to come back, then everyone at that party is likely to come back and so on and so forth, its exponential growth really, its just not quick. We offer a premium experience and we want to be known for that, we want people to pass that along to their friends

Contact Info:

• Website: tacops.com
• Instagram: tacopslt
• Twitter: tacopslt