We recently connected with Valerii Titushyn and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Valerii thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

Being in entertainment niche always brings fun and crazy stories. We had plenty of positive and negative situations, and most of them we encountered so often that we don’t even pay attention to anymore. One day stands out the most though, it had the biggest contrast of good and bad and almost made us cry. We had a large party that was running late for their booking. They have arrived half an hour before their 1 hour session was supposed to end, didn’t listen to our staff, under influence, broke all rules possible, and somehow even managed to fall asleep in the process, some of them. The next group had to wait for us to prepare their room since we were pushed back. They were a group of guys with a bachelorette party, and the groom to be was handicapped. Since their experience involved stairs the entire group carried him upstairs so he can participate. Lastly, when there was another set of stairs involved, the groom send out his team upstairs and they face timed him so he can see the puzzles and make his input towards team effort. It melted our hearts, and turned our day around from nightmare to joy.

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?

The Tower Escapes was established in 2018 with 3 unique escape rooms. All of our rooms are traditional escape rooms, but fully designed and build in the house. Additionally, all of our rooms are based on true stories, one of them is about our building, one is about a famous historical place on Fayetville st., and one is from France. Building an escape room is a unique trade and there is no degree that can fully help with it. Personally i have had experience in many fields. My official education is political science, masters degree, along with associate degrees in arts and education. I had a chance to be an instructor in community college, chef, construction worker, electrician, sales person, photographer. At some point I learned that my friends opened an escape room and it seamed a fun and entertaining adventure. After some time i took on endeavor and try to build puzzles myself, it does require a wide range of skills from design to practical implementation with wide knowledge of plumbing, construction, electrical work, programming, photo video editing etc. As a result we came up with Tower Escapes, where we specialize in team building and bonding experience. All of our rooms are made around the building that is a national historic site, and are based on true stories that helps bring awareness about Raleigh history especially among younger generation. Additionally, all of our rooms are kids friendly, good for newbies and experience players, coworkers or families of any size.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

There are very few items available for sale for escape rooms, there is also a second hand market that still needs remake or installation. All of our items have to be purposefully built and installed in a specific way. As a result we needed to learn on how to do it ourselves. We also seek for help and assistance and found it all over the world. As a result we still need to do a lot of work, there was never an item to be plug and play. We even ask every single group that goes through our rooms about how it went and what they think about our props, what they would like to change. After we have a few consistent suggestions we adapt and change our props.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Listen to your customers! We need to listen to them to know what needs to be changed. By now we have changed almost 100% of all contains of our rooms, we also have changed rooms all together to have new product for our customers. It is crucial to listen to everyone but we learned quickly that we should not make changes right away. If there are concerns raised, we watch it more closely, we make daily reports on progress from staff, we collect more feedback about those issues, then we make adjustments, and collect data again to see if it works better. There are many ways on conducting a survey on possible changes, but it must have a margin of error, large pool of opinions, and a group of observers that is typically your employees.

Contact Info:

• Website: thetowerescapes.com
• Instagram: @thetowerescapes
• Facebook: TheTowerEscapes
• Linkedin: thetowerescapes