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

Jesse , appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Most of our guests are visiting us to celebrate something special in their lives, whether it’s a birthday, engagement, Over the course of a weekend we’ll host a mix of bachelor / bachelorette parties, kids / adult birthday parties, corporate team building events, etc. Since we see so many of these, it can be easy in our industry to let these all blend together and forget that for that person/group it’s a really special moment in their lives and they’ve chosen to celebrate it at Archery Games Denver. So we really try to pause and remind ourselves that even though it might be the 10th bachelor party we’ve hosted that weekend, for the group it’s a once-in-a-lifetime gathering.

We’ve been really fortunate to see a lot of repeat visitors over the years. Some are celebrating different occasions, and others come back year after year for their birthday. I think that really shows we were able to make their last celebration something memorable.

Jesse , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re an indoor event center focused on a unique activity called Archery Dodgeball. It’s basically exactly as it sounds… the rules of dodgeball but played with bows and specially-engineered foam-tipped arrows, all in an indoor arena. We started the business in 2018 after a friend played the game on a bachelor party in Montreal. When he came back he couldn’t stop talking about it. After a trip up to Canada to experience it together, we decided it was the type of activity people in Denver would love.

In 2020 we also started offering Nerf Wars, where guests use the Nerf Rival series of blasters to have a battle royale in our arena. We were super slow during covid, obviously, so we were trying to add activities that families and small groups of friends could get out of the house and experience together. Groups loved it, so we’ve continued offering it on Sundays.

We have public sessions on the weekends that individuals can join, but are still very “special event” focused, with a mix of birthday parties, bachelor / bachelorette parties, and corporate team building events. We even had a marriage proposal in the midst of one of our sessions!

We’ve been fortunate to be able to build a really amazing team of people, some of whom have been with us from pretty much the beginning.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

About a year into operation, we were able to buy a very similar business in Cincinnati. I’d been talking to the owner for a few months to share marketing ideas, and one day he called up to tell me he’d decided to sell the business and move on to a different idea. He was much more of the “start up” type and wasn’t as excited about the day-to-day management. He was very open with financials and information, so we were able to agree on a structure pretty quickly. It helped that I already understood the business, but we were still able to close the transaction about 2 and a half months from that initial phone call.

He had a really awesome manager who stayed with us for close to five years before wanting to get more involved with his church on a full-time basis. Having him and the rest of the team remain in place made for a really smooth ownership transition.

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

It may sound cliche since we’re in the team building industry, but we’re actually big believers in doing fun activities with co-workers. We try to do an activity once a month, so if someone misses one it isn’t a huge deal. We usually alternate between something at our facility like a board game night and pizza, and something external with a bit more of a budget. We’ve done escape rooms, visited the Wild Animal Sanctuary twice, and gone to Elitch Gardens to name a few. This week we have someone coming in to lead a sushi making class! There isn’t too much of a focus on “team building”, it’s just about having fun and enjoying being with the team in a non-work setting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://archerygamesdenver.com/
• Instagram: archerygamesdenver
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@archerygamesdenver9472