We were lucky to catch up with Mark Krokos recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Mark thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
To be successful you first need to decide what success is to you. Is success personal growth, happiness, money, peer recognition, or something else? Success is defined differently by every person. However, no matter how you define it, you need have strong desire and motivation. There will always be people who tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t, but you need to see your idea through for yourself. By all means listen to everyone’s advice and opinions but use your personal desire to be a success to propel you to do the necessary research and planning to make the risk you are taking as minimal as possible. Is there a chance your road to success could be bumpy or even hit a detour? Absolutely! But if you don’t take the first step in your journey you will never know what could have happened.
Once you are set on what you want to do, you need to look at your motivation. If your motivation only includes extrinsic motivators, such as money, you might be setting yourself up to lose your motivation more easily when times are tough. If your motivation contains more intrinsic motivators, like personal enjoyment, growth, or satisfaction, you will always achieve some level of success.
I consider That Foam Party Guy to be a success both personally and financially! If the whole business collapsed tomorrow, I would still consider it successful. In its current form, my business is not main source of income. To have thrown everything into That Foam Party Guy would have been a foolish business strategy and put an insane amount of pressure and stress on myself and family. I started the business small to test the market and experience what it takes to run a business. The business does have the potential for large growth, and I am currently at a crossroad of which direction I would like it to go. For the moment I am thrilled at seeing the happiness I bring to people by putting on parties and events, I enjoy the excitement of having my phone alert me when bookings comes in, and of course earning extra income for my family is wonderful. So however you define your success, I wish you nothing but the best!
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?
I have always dreamed of owning a business and finally made that dream a reality. As a dedicated school teacher deciding whether or not I wanted to start my own business was a tough decision. Ultimately, I went for it and the results have been tremendous! To start at the beginning, I always liked bubbles and my daughter and I started doing little bubble shows for fun at our house. We would make all kinds of bubbles big and small, and played music while we did it. We even performed our little bubble show for local libraries, a birthday party or two, and at my school for covid drive through graduation parades. Throughout that time, I always thought foam machines were exciting but also very expensive. During the pandemic I saw a commercial foam machine at a big box store, but it did not look very impressive for the price, so I decided to build my own. Without much to do and nowhere to go, I did some research online and was able to build my own machine to use in our neighborhood. Everyone loved it, and it was a blast to use! At my neighbors request I did a foam party for their daughter’s birthday. Someone took notice of pictures on Facebook and asked if I would make foam at their daycare locations. Sure enough it was a huge success! After going back and forth between taking on starting my own business or not, I decided that I would create an official business making foam. I made some contacts in the industry and networked with other people around the country that have foam party companies. After researching the up-and-coming foam industry and using my technological background, I then created my logo and designed a company website myself. I also upgraded from my DIY machine to a foam cannon, and also switched to a commercial foam solution that is hypoallergenic, pet safe, dye free, and ecofriendly. Lastly, I researched different business types and chose to set my business up as an LLC. I completed the whole process online with having to hire anyone. That Foam Party Guy was officially born! With foam season in Northeastern Pennsylvania fitting perfectly into my teaching schedule and my love of children, That Foam Party Guy has become more successful than I ever would have thought it would be with more exciting plans for the future.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
One of my favorite books that I have read about becoming an entrepreneur would be Target Success by Don Dwyer. It is an older book, but it lit a fire in me to want to start a business of my own. One of the most important lessons that the book taught me, which translated into a life philosophy, was the idea of focusing on developing “targets” for yourself and not just setting a goal. The reason being is that if you set a goal for yourself, you set yourself up to be a success by reaching the goal or failure for not making it. The mindset of a target is that there are different degrees of success and no failures. If you think of an archery target you can get a bullseye or score points at each ring. Now compare that to a soccer goal, where you take a shot and you either miss or get the point. The idea of a target has a huge positive psychological impact, especially when you are venturing into starting your own business.
To translate the idea of a target into my current business, if I were to set a goal of reaching 100 foam events in my first season, and I didn’t reach it, would I be a failure? Absolutely not! If I only did 50 events that is huge success from not having ever even trying to start a business, and only dreaming of what could have been. That 50 parties translated into dollars, 50 invaluable experiences, and 50+ potential new and repeating customer contacts for the next season. Hardly a failure at all!
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
For that Foam Party Guy social media is critical to marketing. Many people do not even know what a backyard foam party is, and social media is perfect for visual story telling. I have been to so many parties where the host unenergetically tells me where to setup and really has no idea about what is going to happen. But by the end of the party or event we are like best friends! The host is beyond amazed, wants to know how everything works, wants to know my back story and on and on.
My suggestion is once you have your business name, or even while you are choosing it search it on social media sites and make sure that you can get the username that matches your brand. Even If you are not a fan of some social media sites you need learn how they work and have a presence on them. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to name a few will get you exposure. Also, people love to show off on social media and my events getting tagged @thatfoampartyguy or #thatfoampartyguy just generates more and more exposure.
At this stage of my business. social media and word of mouth alone pack my schedule, and That Foam Party Guy has had to invest very little capital in marketing. Should I choose to expand with employees, widen my service area, or competition setups in, then perhaps I would need to investigate additional paid marketing strategies like Google Ads, Yelp, Local publications, etc.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thatfoampartyguy.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatfoampartyguy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thatfoampartyguy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-krokos-That-Foam-Party-Guy
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThatFoamGuy
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThatFoamPartyGuy
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/that-foam-party-guy-wilkes-barre