We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Sobolewski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.

Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I fell in love with Escape Rooms about 12 years ago. The industry had just started ramping up and I loved the creativity involved with the puzzle solving. As soon as my kids were old enough, I started taking them to escape rooms and found we connected so much more than doing something like the movies or watching TV. I was able to create better bonds with them and watch them learn and succeed. A few years later I found myself in the midst of a divorce and needed a project to take me away from the sadness and keep me close with my kids so I sat them down and came up with a plan to develop a family friendly escape room and they would help me with the themes and puzzles. That’s where we came up with Edge Escape Room. EDGE stands for Everything Done for Gabe and Elaine. I took what we enjoyed from playing other escape rooms and incorporated that in the base plans for each room. All our themes have multiple rooms and puzzles to appeal to different people’s skills. We set up the rooms in my house and had the kids and their friends work through it and provide feedback on what they liked and didn’t like. We made changes to improve the rooms and then quite frankly jumped in to starting up a site. Hindsight I would absolutely tell anyone that going through a divorce is not the time to make major financial decisions and that running a business is so much more than building one. It was great fun working with the kids and having them see ideas come to life. It has been a road of hard lessons but the people I have met through the industry have been great and supportive. We love seeing people experience an Escape Room for the first time. Watching groups play and helping them achieve success is amazing and fun. Seeing other family’s enjoy escape rooms and bond over what we created has been an amazing experience. I’m blessed with a great staff and try to create a family environment for everyone. My kids get excited talking about Edge Escape and we continue to enjoy escape rooms and improving our rooms.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an Engineer by profession who had a passion for Escape Rooms and loved going to them with my kids. I faced some frustration finding Escape Rooms that I felt comfortable taking my kids to. I always wanted to try running my own business and though that a family friendly Escape Room would be great in the tourist area of Orlando. Building the business brought me and my kids closer and was a great adventure.
I am proud that our small family-owned site gets great reviews and provides people a high-tech one-of-a-kind experience. Seeing the guest reviews and talking to the participants has been wonderful and we constantly improve our games based on feedback. We truly do cater to the customer and do everything we can to make sure they have a great time. At Edge Escape Rooms we create a family friendly environment not only for the customers but also for the staff.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

It hasn’t been an easy road. Hindsight is always 20/20 from dealing with contractors to negotiating a lease. I wish I could take what I have learned and go back in time but I can’t, so I have learned to move on and make the best from my mistakes. We can do the best we can then put it in Gods hands. There have been many days where I almost didn’t want to get out of bed because the workload seemed impossible to tackle but it is breaking down huge amounts of work into smaller parts and getting a little done each day. When I’d look at what I needed to get done it was overwhelming but focusing on what I could get done that day or in the next hour it was achievable, and all those achievements added up. Pretty soon I was looking back at what we had done, and it was impressive.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Not sure if this is a lesson I had to unlearn but I’ve never been much into social media and always avoided it in my life. I thought it was a time suck for many working people and more of a distraction to getting work done. I quickly found that I needed it a lot with the escape room. I didn’t even have an active Facebook account and had never touched Tik Tok or Instagram. I quickly found myself having to learn and rely on others to help tech me these skills. Finding marketing agencies to help build a foundation and learning from what they were doing. many of my employees had much more social media knowledge than I did so I turned a lot over to them to help develop and organize how we’d post. It was a huge change in my world but one that has been very interesting to learn from.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://edgeescaperoom.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edgeescaperoom/
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/edgeescaperoom/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EdgeEscapeRoom
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/edge-escape-kissimmee?osq=Edge+Escape
• Other: Linktree https://linktr.ee/edgeescaperoom
  Tik Tok https://tiktok.com/@edge.escape.room