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

Alright, Mike thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

My wife and I made the decision to start a business at the end of 2017. It’s something we had both considered for some time and finally felt ready to pursue. I was a mortgage banker at the time and felt that working in a commission-based sales job was the final experience I needed to have an inkling of what I might be getting myself into as an entrepreneur. We started planning early in 2018 and opened the doors to our escape room business in November of that year.

Wondering whether I could/should have started earlier or later could easily become maddening. There are many great reasons to support either position. Starting earlier, we’d have had less startup capital but also less life and business experience. I think that there is never a perfect time to start a business. There are so many factors that influence entrepreneurial success: the idea, the market, timing, capital, the team, etc. The best you can do is prepare yourself as much as possible, make a plan, execute and then adjust as needed (and it will definitely be needed!). You can find many reasons not to start a business. Once you do start, you’ll think of many reasons why you should perhaps have started sooner, waited longer or done things differently. Bottom line: there is no way to know, for certain, that you’re starting at the perfect time.

Mike, 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 wife and I played our first escape room game in Dec 2016 as a family activity over the holidays. We failed miserably but had a great time and it became a tradition each time my extended family got together on holidays around the country. Eventually, my wife and I began playing them on our own. Around that time we had begun discussing starting a business and then the conversations increasingly gravitated toward opening an escape room venue. We started speaking to owners following games we’d play and things quickly became less hypothetical.

What really solidified our decision was a trip in 2017 to Eastern Europe. My wife is from Bulgaria and while visiting, we played a lot of escape room games there. It was like we were discovering escape room games for the first time. The games were so much more advanced than what we had experienced in the US, with more tech, multiple rooms, fewer locks (but a much more interactive environment), more immersion, and sometimes there were story-based goals aside from simply “escaping.”

We didn’t know it at the time, but the escape room industry was more mature in Europe and the games we were playing were the next “generation” of escape games. We were amazed and never had so much fun! We knew instantly that we wanted to introduce the same type of gameplay and experience to our local market.

My undergrad is in electrical engineering so the use of electronics and electrical controls felt like a natural fit for me. We searched around the globe for companies that create escape room props and equipment for people to partner with. Collaborating with some very talented partners, we’ve introduced some of the most technologically-enhanced games on the market. Our goal was to provide a more immersive experience where you are not required to move from lock to lock, looking for keys or combinations, but rather you interact in a more natural way with your environment. We combined this with a very strong emphasis on storylines and multi-room gameplay to provide a variety of compelling themes and a strong sense of purpose in each of our games.

The end result is what we believe to be the most exciting and immersive games in our market. We’ve also made our games family-friendly, with all ages welcome, because we always viewed escape room games as a fantastic opportunity for family fun!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In the midst of starting our business, my wife became pregnant with twins. We experienced multiple delays with the construction of our game rooms and with each delay, our potential opening date more closely approached my wife’s due date. We planned to open three games initially. With the time available to me following construction, I was only able to complete two of the games. We opened the doors to the business and three days later, my wife delivered our twins.

As we are located in an indoor shopping mall, we are required to be open and staffed 7 days a week. As a new business, we did not have the cash flow to hire additional employees for several months after opening. I worked at the business 7 days a week and then stayed after closing to continue work on the third game several days per week. My wife, meanwhile, was taking care of two newborns by herself, since we didn’t have any family or friends close by at the time.

Needless to say, this was a very tiring and stressful situation. We persevered and to this day still wonder how we survived! Being an entrepreneur can be a difficult journey and there will always be hurdles to overcome. Our commitment to keep moving forward has paid off and five years later, the business is doing better than ever! We are both blessed with an extra-large helping of tenacity, which I think is essential for entrepreneurship.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Very simply, by believing in what we do. Our goal was to provide high-quality entertainment. We also wanted to introduce our market to the latest generation of escape room games and show people some of the amazing possibilities the games can offer. Our passion and enthusiasm naturally come across as we interact with our customers.

With the mindset that we are providing a service (in the form of group entertainment) and a goal for that service to be superb through every interaction we have with customers, from checking out our website to walking through our doors, playing a game and then walking back out, we have built a very positive reputation. Our games were built with a lot of thought toward providing the types of elements we found most enjoyable when playing escape games around the world. This attention to the customers and to the games is recognized when people visit.

Another extremely important element is our employees. We are very selective in who we hire and how we train them. We have employees that understand and share our passion for providing the very best experience and games we can offer. We value our employees and do what we can to take care of them and retain them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mindtrixescape.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/walkermichaeljohn/