We recently connected with Grant Vermeer and have shared our conversation below.

Grant, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

We ended up with one of those “hobby turns into a business” story. In 2004 I (Grant) was in high school and found an arcade game on Craigslist. I bought it thinking it would be an easy fix and a fun addition to the family rec room. I was wrong; I had no idea what I was doing. I left for college and the game sat.

My brother Drew was determined to get it working, and after spending countless hours viewing online arcade repair forums, eventually, it was repaired and sold for a small profit.

Realizing he enjoyed the project and his profit was more than he made mowing lawns in the neighborhood, Drew started looking for more broken games. Using the money he made from the first game, he bought two broken games, fixed them, and sold them. Two games turned into four, four turned into eight, etc.

Drew used some of his profits to have a hitch put on the family minivan and the roadtrips began. Many weekends would consist of driving somewhere in Michigan or the midwest to buy a game or a trailer full of games to fix and sell. The basement filled up fast as did

the garage. The hobby continued as Drew entered college with the entire family helping out on some of the bigger loads of games. We scoured Craigslist and jumped on any deals we could find, no matter what time of day or night, or the length of the drive.

The flipping of games continued at a fast pace as a side hustle post college. In 2015 we got a call from a bar asking if they could long term lease 20 games. Knowing this would need to be a project we did as an official business, we joined forces and established 616 Amusements.

Along with game placement, we thought people might enjoy having some of our games at their events. We put out a few ads advertising event rentals; the response was overwhelming! We started booking events like crazy and used those profits to continue buying games to place at bars, restaurants, and family fun centers.

We continued to experience rapid growth for the next few years. After many late nights and a few all- nighters, we realized we were running on fumes trying to balance our business and other jobs. In the fall of 2018, we decided to take the jump and dive full time into 616 Amusements. We quit our other jobs and haven’t looked back!

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?

We are brothers from Grand Rapids, Michigan; born, raised and educated (thanks Calvin University!) in the 616 area code.

We supply bars, restaurants, and family entertainment centers with machines that produce fun! Think arcade games, skeeball machines, air hockey, pinball, massage chairs, pool tables, golden tees, photo-booths, candy machines, etc. Machines are placed on location at no-charge; we cover repairs, and share a percentage of the machines’ revenue with the business owner.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The pandemic really threw us a curveball. The stay-at-home order canceled every last penny of revenue we were taking in. We stopped paying ourselves, but were still losing money with continued expenses. We decided we wanted to hang on to the business and waited out the first few months using our time to redesign our website, clean up our workshop, and complete games that needed to be refurbished. The world started to open back up a bit; however, bars, restaurants, and family entertainment centers were closed most of 2020 and even part of 2021. When they did open, many sent back the equipment as they were worried about people gathering to play games and touching non-sanitized surfaces. We scrambled to find extra storage space for some of the equipment and then started selling some of it to homeowners to free up storage space and fund the business.

It occurred to us that if we were taking back equipment from our locations, our competitors were probably in the same boat. We connected up with one of the largest national operators of equipment and learned that they were also taking home a lot of equipment without places to store it. We started buying their equipment at a fraction of retail value and driving it back from one of their main warehouses in Chicago. We bought more than we needed for our business and then sold some games to local competitors or homeowners which would pay for the rest of our load. We used many of these games to replace the older games on our route in hopes that when the world opened up, we’d have a leg up on our competitors with all our new equipment. We repeated this process over and over and over!

This national operator not only had a warehouse full in Chicago, but because of the new covid protocols to space games 6 feet apart, they had excess games in hundreds of mall locations nationwide.

We offered to coordinate shipping and take a lot of these games off their hands, in return we were offered them at crazy low prices. For a number of months, we looked for willing shippers all over the country who would pick up games for us. This put our logistic skills to the test: mapping routes to specific locations, connecting with mall managers regarding removal and timing procedures, figuring the maximum loads for each trailer size, and helping shippers understand how to break down larger games. Shipments came in from New York, Texas, California and everywhere in between.

One of the areas hit very hard during the pandemic was Las Vegas. The national operator we were working with was hauling games to the dump because they had no more storage space. We wanted a lot of these games, but we were told the items would only be held for a few more days. So we quickly arranged for a semi, booked tickets and flew to Las Vegas. Once there, we rented a box truck and drove all over picking up games from malls, casinos, and storage units. Then we drove to a random parking lot a number of times to offload our full box truck into the semi, completely filling it for the trip back to Michigan.

This pivot helped us come out of the pandemic so much stronger than we were pre-pandemic.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We started the business thinking it would be a very part-time, very small side hustle. We each put in just $1,500. We used that initial $3,000 very frugally.

Since we were working other jobs, every dime the company made went back into the business to buy more games. We had grand dreams but needed more capital, so to help fund the business, we started to buy various items from a local on-line auction to flip. Most of what we bought were store returns of furniture that needed to be assembled. Each Tuesday night we’d bid and buy what we thought could be sold for a profit. Then, the following nights were spent assembling the furniture and posting it for sale on Craigslist. We did this weekly for over a year and were able to help the business snowball bigger and bigger.

To keep costs down in those early days, every game we bought for the business was either not working, in terrible cosmetic shape, or both. We fixed and refurbished them to place on our route and enjoyed a quick ROI, because they were bought at a fraction of retail value.

Using the flip money and revenue from business, not buying new equipment, and not paying ourselves for the first few years is how we organically grew this side hustle into our full time, debt-free operation that we are extremely proud of!

Contact Info:

• Website: 616amusements.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/616Amusements