Advice needed re opening Paintball Site

[Alex Revolution]

Hey All, (sorry if this is posted in the wrong section!, Mods please feel free to move if so)

My friend and I have decided to open a paintball site in the South of England. We have a site in mind and a serious investor but we would like to be as prepared as possible.

Unfortunately market data in this industry is near impossible to come by! One issue we are finding hard to work out is how many customers we should expect in year one.

We are assuming that the majority of revenue will be earned during the summer and holiday periods. To break even we are looking at the following bookings (obviously all this is hearsay and guess work)

Jan: not running
Feb: Open 2 days, total of 61 customers
Mar: Open 3 days, total of 91 customers
Apr: Open 8 days, total of 408 customers ( jump in numbers due to easter holidays)
May: Open 4 days, total of 122 customers
Jun: Open 4 days, total of 122 customers
Jul: Open 8 days, total of 408 customers (jump again due to holidays)
Aug: Open 10 days, total of 510 customers
Sep: Open 4 days, total of 122 customers
Oct: Open 2 days, total of 61 customers
Nov: Open 2 days, total 61 customer
Dec: not running

So a Total of 47 days open, with a total of 1966 customers....

So what we'd like to know is whether these predictions and numbers are similar to what other site owners have found, especially in their first years without a client base, or if we're miles off

Any help is much appreciated.

Alex

 

[BOD]

From 7 years experience working at a site the summer holidays period was the quietest period of the year. I would say, expect to be making a loss for the first couple of years at least until you've got the site developed and business built up.

 

[Tom]

If you are very serious then contact and join the ukpsf, they have a wealth of information for you.

As mentioned above the summer may not be the boom that you expect - schools are on holiday, but people go off on holiday. There are 'stay away holidays' or whatever they are called to encourage people to do activities in the uk but paintball is not necessarily a 'holiday thing' and people put their cash to spending money. If the weather is good people strip off and run to be beach, not put on overalls and run in the woods.

With December, don't assume you should close down. People may not think of paintball as a winter activity but if you consider options of walkons as an additional customer base then the Christmas period always features. It's still the 'off season' but people spend time with families and want to get away from them and shoot someone, shiney new toys also arrive on the 25th so people get eager to use them.

Are you looking at taking on an existing site or starting up a new one? There are a few sites around the south so you may be putting yourself for a struggle to attract the customers.

If it's a new site then consider the layout. A safe zone and car park in the centre means people have less distance to walk to any zone, but a car park close to the road increases your chances of a decent access road.
Determined paintballers seem to be happy with driving up country tracks, but the punters, or their parents in shiney bmws and with deep pockets don't like long rough tracks or gravel & scratching against bushes.

Old or new you have to compete with the other sites - delta force have the lions share of casual players and the big corporate safety net, but it is possible to compete - with a lot of work.

 

[Dusty]

I've run a site for 6 years, it's unpredictable and you will spend as much time doing admin and maintenance as you will serving customers.

You need to find out how much you NEED each month to cover your bills, not how many customers you think you will get. You don't know if each customer will spend £10 or £50 or £80. We've had entire groups of people not using more than 200 balls each, equally we've had entire groups not using less than 1000 each. It's completely unpredictable. You need to be better and cheaper than the people you're competing with and you need to make customers want to come back with more of their friends.

I wouldn't say don't do it, I would say get a lot of experience working at sites before you do it. I don't mean turning up and standing marshalling for a day,I mean getting there at 7am to open the gates and staying until whatever time to close them again. I mean setting up guns, filling air, maintaining guns and compressors, dealing with bills and payments, awkward customers, people who refuse to follow rules (and you will get them, more than you think and people you wouldn't think would be like that either), people who arrive drunk/stoned, people who sneak off to get drink at half time, people who turn up so hung over they stay in their cars, injuries, damage caused by severe weather the night before which can render safe zones very suddenly unsafe and playing zones very suddenly unplayable.

 

[deaallen]

The site is new, 10 mins from the city station. Access shouldn't be a problem, its just off a motorway junction where an A road meets, with a council built turn in, and the drive is tarmacked all the way to the car park which is also tarmac and concrete so punters shouldn't mind that. The site in my mind ideal, its36 acres of woodland area and 1 acre which would make a perfect urban field.

We will join the Ukpsf once we have the company formed in the next few weeks.

The main thing we're worried about is we need to book at least 18 people a day for 47 days to meet our annual fixed costs and break even (and that's not paying back the loan either!) unfortunately i have no experience in running a paintball site so I'm not sure if those numbers are easy, hard, or impossible in the first year, my gut tells me we would hit that number easily but that's going off what I've seen other sites pull in, who have been established etc.

Edit: today I've had some help from someone who used to run a site very local to ours and he said they easily managed to book 150 people every day over the weekends and he said their average paint usage was a lot more then what we had budgeted for, so things are looking up.

I know a lot of this must seem pointless as its mostly "unpredictable" until we're up and running but from my experience in other businesses I've started and run we need to be as prepared as possible

 

[Tony Harrison]

@Missy-Q

 

[Dusty]

@Missy-Q

will have a field day with this one...... pun intended.

 

[Missy-Q]

So you have no planning permission, huh?
That's why you want to use the land for a limited number of days, as you can run that many days without planning, right?
It doesn't work. I have lost count of the people that have tried and failed to do this. If you're going to open a business. Do it right & secure a proper venue from which to operate. If your venue is shaky and can be compromised, then your entire business is constantly at risk.

My advice is - if you have a serious investor, get him to spend the money on getting a change-of-use for the property, and get your land zoned properly so you can open a real business and make real money (failing that - look for other land). You can't run for 47 days per year bro, it's just not practical. Busiest times are spring and autumn. if you've been told its summer and holidays, then fire the guy that told you, and go ask someone that knows what they're talking about.

If I'm wrong, and you do have planning permission for entertainment, then why limit your math to 47 days?

 

[deaallen]

So you have no planning permission, huh?
If I'm wrong, and you do have planning permission for entertainment, then why limit your math to 47 days?

Sorry I've explained myself poorly. The purchase of the site is subject to change of use being permitted - the 18 people 47 days a year was our worse case scenario if we cant get enough bookings to open up every Saturday and Sunday. From what we've since heard bookings shouldn't be as much of a problem as I originally thought, we're now working off the assumption of 74 days minimum, although again that's me trying to be conservative

Just going through this on a spread sheet shows how difficult a paintball business is to predict, there's so many variables which you cant know until you actually open and run the business for a while!

Thanks for your help though guys, its given us more of an understanding of what we're getting into

 

[Missy-Q]

So long as you get your planning/change of use, your business will be open about 360 days of the year, meaning that if you get a booking for a group on any day other than a major holiday, you're going to take it. That's why I don't understand the # of day thing, unless you don't have planning.