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

Alright, Joey thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

My parents always supported me in anything I did. In high school I wanted to be an actor and they came to every show. After college, my brother and I wanted to write, direct, and star in our own plays and my parents made the sets and costumes. After that, I got into screenwriting in Hollywood and my parents would read my scripts and give me feedback.

After my mom passed away unexpectedly in 2021, my whole family went through a change. It was especially hard for my dad. My family had just moved to a new state and my dad decided to follow. After being a pediatric nurse for over 20 years, he was looking to change careers. When an opportunity came up to buy an escape room business with him, it was a no-brainer for me. It was a chance for me to support him just as he had always supported me.

Now we run the business together and it’s a lot of fun being creative, serving our customers, and supporting each other’s ideas.

Joey, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My background is theater and performance. I was an actor at Disneyland (and the only actor is Disneyland history to have played BOTH Darth Maul and the Mad Hatter). After pursuing the Hollywood dream for a few years, I met my wife and decided to pursue my second passion of teaching teens. I got my Masters in Education and became a Middle School teacher and counselor.

Coaching teens was really fulfilling and I started my own business. Then, the pandemic started and my business took off. I left teaching, a job that I LOVED, to pursue being a teen Life Coach full time. My wife and I sold our home in California and moved in with her parents. We decided to take the money we made from selling our house and buy a business with it.

About that time my mom had passed away and my dad was looking to make big changes in his life. He sold his house in California and was also looking to buy a business. When I saw that Escapes in Time in Orem, Utah was on the market, I told my dad “If you don’t buy it, I will.” So we went in together.

The owners had another buyer they were talking with but when they heard a father/son team with a background in theater and performance was interested, they took a call from us right away. A few months later we took the keys and set out trying not to run their beloved business into the ground.

We’re doing great!

One thing we started with to set us apart from other escape room business in the area was to focus on what we call holiday overlays and re-puzzles. For Halloween and Christmas we took some of our six escape rooms and changed the stories and decor to make it fit the season. People loved it! We nearly doubled our income in quarter 4 from the previous year.

We continue to use our creativity to try and produce experiences that our customers can’t get anywhere else.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

Buying a business was a first for my dad and me. Luckily, we had a great broker, Ephraim, from Transworld Business Advisors. We worked with both sides and helped us ask the questions we didn’t know we needed to ask and get the documents we needed to get.

There were a LOT of documents to go through.

Lists of assets, profit and loss statement for years, marketing plans and returns… it was exhausting. But after we were confident that the business was a great buy, we went all in.

The thing that made us buy Escapes in Time was first and foremost the industry. With our background in performance and theater, it spoke to us. My dad wanted to get a restaurant but with about 9 years of experience as a server and manager of a restaurant, I talked him out of it.

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

We were lucky enough to sell our homes at the right time. The California real estate market was ripe and both my dad and I bought at a good time and sold only about 2-3 years later and made about $200,000 each.

That was the easy part.

The hardest part was not to just buy another home when we moved to Utah. Becoming renters again had a lot of negative stigma, a sense of going backwards that we had to overcome. I followed the advice from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” a great read for any business owner. My wife and I saw that buying another home at that time would be “murdering the babies” that our money had made from selling our house. We wanted to put our money to work for us rather than just buying a house which at the point would’ve been a liability not an asset.

We invested our money into two separate business. One was Escapes in Time with my dad and the other was into my own coaching business where I hired a professional gaming development team to develop a gamified mindset training app for teens. I’m calling it Sidekick to Hero and it launches this summer. It’s going to revolutionize the way teens build mental and emotional resilience.

Both my dad and I decided to do the hard thing instead of the “safe” thing and invest our profits in ourselves and our business. We couldn’t be happier.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.escapesintime.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/escapesintime/
• Other: www.sidekicktohero.com is the website where my coaching app for teens can be found.