We recently connected with Joseph Thompson and have shared our conversation below.

Joseph, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

In our industry, it is imperative that quality is constantly improved. People only see a bad movie once and it is especially no different when it comes to the haunted attraction industry. At Madworld, we have continually increased attendance, which can present big challenges in making sure that each guest still has a high quality experience. Through-put from queue line to entrance to attraction has to be balanced very delicately. You can’t push groups through too close together or it will ruin their experience and not give enough time for reset with actors. However, you also cannot keep customers waiting in line too long either. Because of this, we have had to continually evolve and adapt the inside of the attraction to accommodate a faster influx of people where reset happens more efficiently and the quality of the show not only doesn’t deteriorate, but gets even better. We have been able to do this with more immersive set designs, design of direction of walkthrough, props, animatronics, and better technology for the actors to utilize. It has always been our goal at Madworld to create a better performance each year for our guests and always be at the forefront of the haunted attraction experience.

Joseph, 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 brother Tim and I started Madworld in 2011. As Halloween lovers, we were big haunted house goers ourselves and decided to build an attraction that was much more immersive, elaborate, and longer than others we have experienced. We had no idea what it took to run a haunted house and had a lot to learn along the way. Each year has presented a new set of challenges that we have to overcome and evolve from. There has been many times we have wanted to quit, but we believe nothing good ever comes easy and sow e take the challenges and use them to improve our attraction for the best guest experience possible. We are very proud of our team and what we have accomplished in our 12 years so far. We will always continue to go upwards and create something new, different, exciting, and of course SCARY for our guests each and every year!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Madworld was definitely a side hustle for my brother Tim and I. We owned other businesses at the time and still do. We both put $20K each into the business to start it up. The first year was a success when we made a little bit over that. We paid ourselves back and put the rest back into the business. We didn’t pay ourselves a dime for many years because our goal was to continually put back into the business to build it better and bigger. We our passionate about what we do and we have so many ideas of what we want to come to life for our guests to experience. We eventually were able to start paying ourselves, but we still thrive on our other businesses and putting back into the attraction each year to create the best haunted attraction around!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Marketing and word of mouth has been the best source of gaining new customers for Madworld. We believe in pushing our brand out there in the community. The more times you can see or hear about us, the more likely you are to come when you think about horror, Halloween, or going to a haunted house. But you can’t stop there. You have to make sure that you deliver on the quality of the product when people arrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.madworldattractions.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/madworld_haunted_attraction
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/madworldhaunt/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjljnuHCURziANPjiBoXXdg