Teddy Cheek is VP of retail operations at Great Big Game Show, the live game show experience built by the team behind The Escape Game. He spent close to a decade running marketing at The Escape Game as it went from five locations to more than 60, and before that he marketed recording artists in Nashville, some of whom he can name and some of whom he can't.
In this episode of Soundstripe Sessions, Jeff Perkins talks to Teddy about drawing roller coasters and hiding them in his closet, the boy band he started at Belmont with a Soundstripe co-founder, the night the backing tracks failed in front of a sold-out arena, how escape rooms actually get designed, going to zero revenue overnight in 2020, and why he would hand back a marketing budget in exchange for five points on one number.
It is the first Sessions episode that is not about music, and it is one of the most useful ones we have recorded, because Teddy is describing the same problem every creative team has: how do you make something good enough that people describe it to someone else?
Key takeaways
- He drew roller coasters as a kid and hid them in his closet, convinced someone would steal them. Then Six Flags built one of his designs (in his telling, at least).
- His boy band, Half Priced Hearts, included Trevor Hinesley, who went on to co-found Soundstripe.
- Their worst gig was a sold-out arena where the backing tracks failed and the tweets started arriving before they had finished playing.
- He decided to go into marketing because of a late-season episode of Full House.
- Escape rooms get prototyped with printed props and no technology, then real people get run through them "like lab rats" until the game works.
- COVID took the company to zero revenue overnight. They kept every general manager on full salary while the founders cut their own pay, made face shields in their warehouse, and built a virtual escape room that thousands of people a day played.
- His actual marketing strategy is the guest experience. "I'd trade a zillion dollar marketing budget for five points on the net promoter score."
Listen to the episode
Roller coasters hidden in a closet
Jeff: Take me back. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and your path to get to where you are today.
Teddy: When I say I'm from the Gump, do you know what that means?
Jeff: I don't.
Teddy: Montgomery, Alabama. I guess people don't say that outside of Montgomery. And I think the origin is probably playing Roller Coaster Tycoon. Did you ever play that game?
Jeff: Not only did I play Roller Coaster Tycoon, I worked at an ad agency where Roller Coaster Tycoon was a Hasbro Interactive game and they were my client. So I did the advertising for it.
Teddy: That's so funny. I've just loved themed entertainment forever and ever, so it is crazy I ended up at The Escape Game. Roller Coaster Tycoon, or just drawing roller coasters all the time, which is kind of a weird hobby for a kid. But I would hide them in my closet, because I thought someone's going to take these.
Teddy: And I drew this roller coaster where the seats were out to the side of the track and could spin independently. I was probably 10 years old. And then I saw Six Flags was doing this, it's called the X2 in LA. And of course I run to my closet and the drawings were gone, which was probably my mom cleaning up. But in my head I was like, someone from Six Flags has broken into my home and made this roller coaster, and I need to be compensated for this.
Teddy: I just loved anything themed. We were always at Disney World growing up, theme parks, heck, Rainforest Cafe, whatever. I've always been into that, or just any expression of creativity in that way.
Belmont, a boy band, and a Soundstripe co-founder
Jeff: You kind of glossed over that you were in a boy band, so I do want to talk about that. Were your parents musicians, or did you just pick it up?
Teddy: My mom, not at all. Her singing, oh my goodness. And my dad played acoustic guitar and was pretty decent, had a nice voice, but we didn't do too much music. My sisters are actually great singers. My little sister ended up winning outstanding choral student for the state of Alabama, so she was super talented.
Teddy: But I was actually never naturally talented at music. I just am creative and I like to write music. So it was really about writing. I'm not the guy that goes to Guitar Center and plugs in and is going to really impress you. I'm going to play something pretty basic. I've always liked writing a great hook. I was in my room in high school crying over piano, writing love songs for girlfriends and stuff like that. And for me it was like, I need to find bandmates that are really good at their instruments so I can write music and we've got a chance.
Jeff: Did you know you wanted to go to Belmont for music? That's a music college in Nashville, so you must have been doing a lot of music in high school.
Teddy: I was the whole leading worship for our youth group thing, and I wanted to be David Crowder, if you know who that is. That was my hero at the time. But it started, I was going to go to Auburn in Alabama. And I was just going through the majors at the application and I was like, you know, I really haven't thought about it until now, but there's not one thing here I have any interest in doing. And that was like a crisis moment. What do I do? And started looking around and saw, hey, Belmont's four hours north and has a really cool creative music and music business program.
Teddy: So I ended up touring and decided that was for me, and actually signed up for a major they were just starting called entertainment industry studies. And the guy heading it up was like a member of the Turtles. "Happy Together," great song.
Jeff: And that's where you met one of the Soundstripe founders, Trevor Hinesley, who was also in your boy band.
Teddy: Exactly. I said I needed really good musicians. That was Trevor. Everything slightly difficult, he played. I was just jumping in with some rhythm and trying to write songs. He is incredibly talented and taught me a lot. But yeah, we had a blast together.
Jeff: And the band was called Half Priced Hearts. The music's on Spotify, you can Google it and see some videos. And you guys were a bunch of handsome young guys. When you were touring on the mall circuit, you probably had the girls screaming, right?
Teddy: We had a pretty big fan base in Brazil, I think, to my knowledge. And we were very innocent and sweet, so the moms loved us too, bringing their girls to the show.
The night the tracks didn't play
Jeff: At what point did you guys realize it's not happening, we've got to go figure out something for our careers? Tell me about that decision point.
Teddy: At different points. Trevor was one of the first to go, because he called me and he's like, hey look, I got an offer to play in a band that has a record deal. And I was like, I understand, you've got to go. And I wanted to marry my girlfriend, and I was like, I've made like $7 in my music career, you know, that's it. So I went to the ring store and they had a no interest thing, and I put it on layaway and I paid it off a little at a time. And I got it to the point I had $1 left and I just left it. And I was like, when I'm ready I'm going to go pick up this ring and hand them a dollar and take it, and that'll be kind of like a transition moment in my life.
Teddy: A couple of guys moved to LA and kept making music and weren't ready to stop yet. But I don't regret it. The experiences we had, just funny stories of even failure, were some of the best moments.
Teddy: We played family night at Bridgestone Arena for the Predators. So I can say I played a sold-out arena, and the sound check was amazing. I had my wireless, so I'm running around the arena, I'm like, this is a dream. I'm playing my guitar, this is stadium rock, this is so cool. We sound incredible.
Teddy: We played, as most boy bands do, with a lot of tracks, which means we're playing our instruments and we're singing, but there are things, maybe a lot of things, happening in the background that make us sound nice and full. When it came time to actually play, they said, "Turn your attention to the Music City stage for Half-Priced Heroes," which is not our name. So we're a little thrown off. And I look up at the screen and I see my big dumb face on the jumbotron, and it kind of throws you. And then I turn around and our bass player runs the tracks and he's like, "It's not working." We're like, what do you mean it's not working? He's like, "We don't have tracks." And we're like, we're going to sound like a garage band out here. And so we just suffered through.
Teddy: I want to tell you, the tweets we received were so painful. I think they helped me develop my spine and grow as a person, but you know, "don't quit your day job," "you guys are terrible." And unfortunately the tweets were coming in and we still had to play another one of the game breaks later on. So we already knew how people were feeling about it, but we had to go play another two songs.
Jeff: Is that video out there anywhere?
Teddy: I think there are clips of it that our drummer put up at one point. I think it may exist.
Jeff: What year was that?
Teddy: Oh gosh. Probably 15ish years ago.
Jeff: So it was before people just took videos on their phone and posted them everywhere. You're probably a little bit lucky in that sense, because that sounds like it could easily have gone viral as the boy band that just couldn't play.
Teddy: We have to really play our instruments. This is going to be a disaster.
Learning marketing from Full House
Jeff: It's an interesting transition. Did you study a lot of marketing at Belmont?
Teddy: A little bit. We did a little bit of marketing and I just wasn't sure what I was going to do. When I started looking for jobs I didn't really have a lot of direction. And every job you clicked on, you'd be like, this is sales of some kind. And you look a little deeper, you're like, oh, it's selling knives. Every time it's selling knives. Like, where are the, how do I get a job? How's this work? I would just be set if someone would pay me $30,000 to do something. This is 15 years ago. Like, can I just pay the bills and get married?
Teddy: But I remember I was watching Full House one day, and it's the later episodes. Uncle Joey and Uncle Jesse, they started an ad agency and they're writing jingles and storyboarding commercials, and I thought, that's marketing, so I'm going to do marketing. I'm creative. And so I ended up jumping around some marketing jobs and kind of learning as I went, and found out most of the time marketing is not jingles and storyboarding commercials, but still something I really enjoyed.
Jeff: So you didn't have traditional training. You learned by doing.
Teddy: That's the life of a project manager at a digital marketing agency. There are other project managers and account managers and you're learning from them. What are you doing for your artist? How's this working? Show me some case studies. But you're kind of just going for it.
Teddy: When I landed at CrowdSurf, the agency I mentioned, that was most of my marketing education, just kind of being thrown in the deep end with some really high-profile artists and having to figure it out. I'd come home and my wife's like, "What'd you do today?" And I'm like, I brainstormed with Steven Tyler for like four hours, and it was pretty cool.
Marketing artists versus marketing a store
Jeff: What's the approach for artist marketing? How do you think about marketing a person as opposed to a brand, or maybe the person is the brand?
Teddy: It so depends on the artist and the point in their career they are. But artists are passion driven brands, meaning people care about them and they latch on to them. So it's really fan cultivation, and deepening that engagement was kind of the core idea behind CrowdSurf. We're going to build these raving fan communities. A lot of the agencies out there are like, hey, we're going to buy followers and views and just try to get that number up. And the one I was at, and I'm glad I was, was more about, let's try to build, even if it's one-on-one at first, a group of super fans, and that's ultimately going to launch the career and give you the ability to go tour and have a decent following in a bunch of different cities.
Teddy: For the larger artist, it's how do we maximize the exposure we're going to get through their partnerships? A lot of them had brands they worked with, or hey, we're going to do a live stream on Yahoo at the time, like a homepage takeover. How do we get the most mileage out of that?
Teddy: I think they changed the algorithm after I discovered you could do something. We had this huge international release, like mega artist, as big as it gets, and this one I can't say. But basically I took their release that they wrote, like they actually posted, and I translated it to like 80 languages and I geotargeted every individual country. And when you do that, you get an outsized amount of impressions in that specific area, because I posted like 200 times. And the amount of impressions we got was just bananas.
Teddy: When I switched to The Escape Game, I thought I was kind of a big shot for working with all these cool artists on my resume and major brands. We were doing social posts for Disney and different stuff. And I realized I knew nothing. I was trying to order something from a print shop and we were just speaking a different language. They're like, "Hey, you need to put some bleed on this file." And I'm like, I literally don't know what that is. Or local SEO, I knew nothing about local SEO. So I just kind of had to start the process over again.
The hot chocolate that got him the job
Teddy: This thing was happening in town. Escape rooms were brand new and I was hearing about them everywhere. The word of mouth was going crazy. And when you win, you get this little sticker that says "I escaped." And I was seeing those all over, and I'm like, what the heck is this? This is pretty neat.
Teddy: So I reach out and I have a coffee with one of the co-founders, and there's a word, serendipity. It was perfect timing. They were like, we're going to start a corporate office, we have four locations, we're going to take this everywhere, and we're looking for someone to build a marketing function. So just right place, right outreach, right time.
Teddy: Side note, we went to a coffee to talk and it's the middle of summer, and Johnny, who's one of the co-founders and just like the ultimate creative and innovator, he ordered a hot chocolate. And I just thought that was such a boss move. Like 2 p.m., it's July in Nashville, he's ordering a hot chocolate, and I was like, I want to work with this guy.
Jeff: How many locations did The Escape Game have when you joined?
Teddy: Five. Just about to open number six in Chicago.
Jeff: And now you're up to 60 for The Escape Game, plus 24 for the game show.
Teddy: Yes, exactly. And the degree of difficulty is a little, like, our growth the way we do it is we own all of them. So we're not franchising. Our little team here is from picking the real estate to building out all the games to marketing them. It's all happening here. So we're growing fast, but we could have grown a lot faster. We did this intentionally.
Teddy: If you look up The Escape Game Atlanta or Great Big Game Show Atlanta, you'll see every single one has a 5.0 on Google, which is tens of thousands of reviews. And every single general manager around the country, the people actually running the store day to day, they all started as game guide, like level one, and then grew careers. All of them. We're really a hospitality company that happens to do game shows and happens to do escape games. We could do other products too. It's about how we treat the guest.
Jeff: That's big growth. A lot of new location openings, securing the locations, building out the space, the staffing. Talk to me about that journey and the challenges you've experienced building this to almost 100 locations nationwide.
Teddy: We've changed corporate offices. I've worked in so many different offices as we've grown, and brought on new and great people. And there's been bumps, like COVID, as you can imagine, was a huge challenge, where your concept is to go in a room sometimes with strangers and touch everything. So that was a crazy time for us.
Teddy: But I think we've been able to manage the growth because of the company culture we have. And when I say culture, I don't mean like we go go-karting all the time or there's always pizza in the break room. If culture were a cake, that's sprinkles on top. But when you cut into the cake, what is it? It's alignment around mission, vision and values. What are we doing and why? And we've been able to find people because we're really out there. We make it clear what the mission, vision, values are. We talk about it all the time. Our tenures at corporate are insane. We're a 12-year-old company and I've been here 10 years.
Jeff: I'd imagine the profile of most people who work at your company is probably like you. You're really into experiences, games, amusement parks. Places where you're not just a passive spectator. It's not a movie theater, you're actually an active participant.
Teddy: Absolutely. And a lot of times people that come to our brand as guests end up working on the front line and then they end up at corporate HQ here in Nashville.
Inside the Adventure Factory
Teddy: We're like the best kept secret in Nashville. People don't know there's a headquarters here, and our manufacturing facility is here. It's where we fabricate and dream up and make all these games. Think like Disney Imagineering. It's the coolest place.
Jeff: Having done several experiences at The Escape Game, talk to me about the creative process that goes into creating one of the games.
Teddy: We usually start with, what theme are we going to make? What do our guests want? And we always take it from not, hey, what do we think is cool? Because we're doing this for the masses. This is mainstream. I think our brand kind of took escape rooms and made them mainstream. So we're like, what do people want, and how can we do it in just the most absolutely creative way?
Teddy: Our game designers will start outlining a story and main plot points and main puzzles. And at that point we'll set up a prototype at the Adventure Factory. That's what we call our warehouse, out in Smyrna, Tennessee. We have a huge team of carpenters and architects and engineers and tech experts and scenic artists, and we'll build a prototype of the game. And at first we're printing stuff and putting it on the wall and trying to solve the puzzles. There's no tech, there's nothing. The props are printed for the most part. And then that's where we start running people through the game.
Teddy: We bring in the tech guys, like, is this even possible? Because most of our tech in our games is hidden. If we're building an ancient ruin, there's a ton of technology in it, but you want it to seem like there's no technology in it. Like these booby traps that are going off are just happening. And so we've got this incredible team and we're running people in like lab rats and watching and tweaking and watching and tweaking.
Teddy: We just put out this murder mystery game in Nashville. It's the first one we've done, and we were about ready to launch in the space, and then we were watching games and said it's just not ready. This has to be an 11 out of 10 every time. Our mission statement is to design and deliver epic interactive experiences for every single guest. And we take the "every single guest" part very seriously, like obsessively. And so we paused this release, which is obviously expensive, for another month or six weeks to keep making tweaks to the game and running free demos and just calibrating it until it's right.
Jeff: How often are you switching out games? As I've gone to a few of these, I'm not seeing the same game every single time.
Teddy: There's definitely a lot of variety at each location. In the escape room industry, someone will put like a hundred thousand bucks into a game, and so they're changing it out maybe once or twice a year. For us the investment is 10x plus. So they're meant to live there for five to 10 years. We do switch them out eventually, but a lot of times we'll buy real estate and it's like, hey, we're launching with four or five games, and then we'll have a spot empty and we're like, hey, the murder mystery is ready to go to Atlanta, let's put it in an empty spot.
The hottest job in the company
Jeff: I want to learn about these game designers, because this seems like the most fun job you could ever have. Who are these people? Where do they get the skill set?
Teddy: Big nerds and the coolest people you'll ever meet. You can go through that department and be like, how many escape rooms have you played before? And they'll be like, 412. And they'll know. And they'll open a notebook and be like, here's my success rate on the games I've played and how long it took me and ones I want to go play. And they've done every experiential concept anywhere. And they're like, oh good, something opened, we get to do a research trip and charge it to the card, let's go to New York and do this new concept. And yes, we want to do research, but really they just eat and breathe and sleep this stuff.
Teddy: I think the hottest job in the world is our game designers. When they post a game design position there's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications for them to go through, and a lot of the applications are really creative. People build little games or websites, just the most amazing stuff.
Teddy: Some of them started on our front line and just loved it, and they fit nicely into our system because they're creative and they show they can dream up these puzzles and concepts. We don't need to look for someone that's like, I can think it up, write it, build it, wire it. We have a team that can come around and support. So the true game designers are project managing the builds and leading the puzzle and game flow.
Why they put pictures of the rooms on the website
Jeff: These guys have done every game room everywhere. Where did this concept even come from? You obviously didn't invent it, but you took something and really scaled it.
Teddy: There's debate over Eastern Europe and Asia of where the first were. It kind of happened around the same time. And our founder played them in London and was like, oh, this is great. But they're a slightly different style. In Asia they're really math heavy. And in Europe, not so much, but less on the storyline. And so the version that we brought here is way more based on plot and immersion and scenic design.
Teddy: When I started, the category here was all about mystery. Don't show any pictures of the games, and everybody's website looked the same. It was "can you escape" in red letters on a black website and no spoilers. And I was like, guys, the rooms look so cool. We can take pictures of these and we're going to be the top brand in this category. I'm like, we built a spaceship and we're not showing it on the website. That's crazy to me.
Teddy: And so we started using that as we started doing our national rollout. And I think that was part of the early success, that people could see. Maybe they went and played one they found on Groupon and then they saw our pictures and were like, this is a different species. I want to try that.
Jeff: Is that how you differentiate yourself? The design, and an elevated experience over what other escape rooms are?
Teddy: There are some really good well-designed rooms out there, so many that we love, and that's good for the category. We like that. If someone makes a great room and you play it and you're like, I love escape rooms, awesome, welcome to the category, the fandom, that's good. There are a lot of people that just jumped on the trend because it got big and they made games that weren't very good, and then unfortunately if you play that, now you're kind of out on escape rooms until maybe a buddy drags you along and you get another shot at it.
Teddy: The main things that are different are, yes, the game design. I think we do it unlike anyone else with the Adventure Factory. Kind of like Imagineers, making these really high production value games. The second piece is the hospitality piece, we're guest obsessed, that's our main thing, we want everybody to leave happy. The third is the company culture. And then, because we're doing these high production value games that attract a lot of visitors, we're able to pick really great real estate like the Battery in Atlanta or Mall of America or Caesars Palace, these kinds of places that draw a lot of foot traffic and introduce new people to the brand.
Jeff: And I'm sure they want you in there, because you're an interesting tenant for these high traffic locations. You're not just another retail outlet selling clothes or food. You're getting people in there for a more immersive experience that's going to make their overall experience at that venue better.
Teddy: We're increasing the dwell time for sure. Like 90 percent of people grab some fast casual or sit down before or after. So we're bringing a lot of people out to these centers.
Zero revenue overnight
Jeff: Your business is all about going to a location, in-person experiences, solving puzzles together as a team. And then 2020 hits and you basically can't participate anymore. That had to be incredibly challenging for your entire company.
Teddy: We started getting some calls, I think it was in February, people cancelling. We're like, what's going on? We're like, oh, we're not going to hit our targets. Goodness, did we know what was coming? We're talking about missing our revenue targets or whatever. And then the calls just started more and more and more, and refunds and cancellations, and then all at once it's like lockdown and we're like, we're not allowed to be open. What do we do? We have employees around the country. We've built this corporate office, this headquarters, and we never in our wildest dreams thought we'd go to zero revenue overnight. Like, what are the chances of that?
Teddy: We did keep our general managers on the whole time. We thought that was a huge advantage, we wanted to take care of them. They'd already grown through our ranks to general manager and we're like, they're so valuable, they're staying on full salary. Even though the founders cut their pay to like nothing, they're like, the general managers are staying on at full pay and we'll just figure it out. And then a couple of us at headquarters stayed on to keep the lights on at reduced pay.
Teddy: Our CEO's there, and Mark is so measured, so wise. He is not a hype man. He's not that CEO. If you've read the book Good to Great, that's him. Very measured. And he said, hey, someone in this room is going to have an idea, and we're not going to survive this year, we're going to thrive in this moment. And we're all inspired, because that's not really Mark just going to say that to rah rah.
Teddy: A couple weeks go by and the first thing we do is Johnny, who I mentioned before with the hot chocolate, he's like, we have this warehouse, let's put it to use, we're going to make face shields. And so that team started making face shields so we could bring a lot of them back to work. And we were getting orders for just hundreds of thousands of face shields at once. So we're like, okay, we've got something coming in and some of our team's getting to work.
Teddy: At about that time I noticed people were searching on Google for online escape rooms, virtual escape rooms, and there were point and click types of games out there, but I'm like, we could prototype something really unique. And so we put a game guide in a room in Nashville and put a camera on their head and we streamed the escape room and directed that person what to do. And we're like, okay, maybe this could be fun if we built some software to accompany it.
Teddy: So we built some software. You get online and anything you find shows up in your dashboard, and you can click around a 360 of the room while directing your game guide that's in the room. And we just kept iterating and it got really fun. We called them remote adventures, or virtual escape rooms. And in my marketing career I've never been a part of something where it was the right product at the right time. Like, just explosion. I mean explosion. Thousands of players a day from all over the world. Australia's doing team building, India's doing team building, the UK is doing team building. Everybody needed to do team building.
Teddy: We're doing corporate groups that are three, four, 500 people. You join one Zoom call at the beginning and then we hit this button to put you in breakout rooms, and all of a sudden you and eight people from your company are in a room and you're playing an actual escape room that's in Jacksonville, and these other eight are playing an actual escape room that's in New York City, and another eight are playing in Cincinnati.
Teddy: Major media companies saw we were doing it, and so we did partnerships with Nickelodeon and Amazon, and we built a Rugrats virtual escape room. It was really neat. And then when cities opened up, we had our team ready to go. Most competitors were like, oh, we need to hire a team, maybe a manager, start over, have reduced hours. And we were just in a position like, hey, we have the team. Just open the door. We're ready to go.
Jeff: It's an inspiring lesson in pivoting when things go bad, and you can never plan for a pandemic. Is that virtual game still going? Can people still do it for remote teams?
Teddy: Yeah, you can still play that and people do.
Jeff: How long was it from shutdown to when it started to come back in your business?
Teddy: The face shields happened, I mean, we were doing that in March. It was immediate. And then I want to say we launched the virtual escape rooms maybe in May, and then by December everybody wanted a holiday get together for their team. Just the amount of players we were doing every day, thousands a day.
Teddy: When you got on, you had the person in the room, and we also had someone that was a host, like me sitting here in a room, so that you weren't just seeing out of the game guide's camera. It's a little claustrophobic. You'd have someone as a liaison, like, hey, what do you guys want to do next, do you need a clue? And in Las Vegas we had extra space. We'd just opened the Las Vegas store, but we had this extra space we hadn't built out. And we set up a few stations and we had hosts working there full-time. And it just grew and grew to the point we had this operation of like 40 people hosting virtual games in little stations every day.
Why a game show
Jeff: You've created a successful business in The Escape Game, but then you decided to roll out an extension of it in the game show that you lead. Why did you branch out?
Teddy: The branching out really started with COVID, because we also started doing an online game show for team building. And so the obvious next step for us was, people really love this, let's do this in a retail environment. We know how to do immersion. We know how to do hosted experiences. That's what this is. And so we put one in Nashville kind of as a prototype and it just killed it. We're like, okay, we need to look for a second location, this is great. And from there it's just obvious, the signals are all there. Now we've hit two three-pointers. We're like, okay, eventually we'll have to take a third and see if we're on fire.
Jeff: I think it's a smart move. You have a core competency in creating these experiences. And the thing with escape rooms is they're not for everybody. Personally I like them a lot, but some people are like, I'm just going to sit in the back and let everyone else do the work, I don't like puzzles. But who doesn't like a game show? You're competing against another team, it's a family feud, price is right kind of vibe. It probably opens up a whole other audience.
Teddy: It does. My family just played, my parents and siblings and our kids, and it was the best time. And my mom, I don't know if my mom would enjoy an escape room as much, but she loved this and was like, this is the most fun I can remember having in a very long time.
Teddy: Everybody is involved in the game show equally. Everybody's got a buzzer, everybody's participating. There's a bunch of different rounds in the game and each game is totally different. So there's some trivia elements and there's some challenges that are more speed challenges, like minute to win it. There's a luck element, there's strategy. So there's something you're going to be good at and really love in there.
Teddy: We have like 18 games and we're adding more and more. So when you go it's randomized, and we can customize to your preference. If you're like, on the website I saw you have this game, can we play it? Yes, you can. It helps with repeat, where for a single escape room you're going to play one time. You'll play through all our games, but you'll play an escape game one time. With Great Big Game Show, you can play as many times as you want. It's a different experience every time.
Jeff: Is it more challenging to find the right team to manage the game show versus the escape room? In the escape room your team's kind of in the background giving clues. The thing I noticed when I did the game show is the host was a big personality. He had jokes, he kept everyone engaged. He seemed like he was probably a stand-up comic on the side.
Teddy: We definitely have some comics on the team. People find the job listing and it says game show host and it just sounds like that can't be real. Every team member across the country, I ask, what drew you? And they're like, your listing said game show host. Now, that being said, we don't need a super experienced performer. If there's someone that can bring energy and has a great attitude, we can probably make them a game show host in our system. And we have a lot of great training for anybody before they're in front of our guests. People are like, if I'm going to, I can stand over fries or I can host a game show. Like, I'm going to pick that all day.
From doing it all to leading it
Jeff: You've gone from joining the company doing everything yourself as an individual contributor to managing a team with employees all over the place. What's been your journey from doer to manager and leader?
Teddy: When it came to The Escape Game it was to build a team out as we grew, but there wasn't a need immediately. We had five locations. So it was running all the Facebook ads at that time. It was finding a sign company to put signs on the new locations. That was marketing. Printing the material, SEO. It was all actually doing everything, hands on keyboard.
Teddy: And then over time I've been able to build The Escape Game's marketing team. There's eight or 10 of them now. Great team, everybody's been here a super long time. To now, marketing is a piece of my role. I lead the marketing function for Great Big Game Show, but operations is a much larger piece. We've got to grow leaders to launch all these new stores. We manage the day to day of the stores. So I spend the majority of my time with the operations team that's running and launching these Great Big Game Show stores.
Trading the marketing budget for the score
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the marketing of each location. How do you launch a store so you're giving yourself high odds it's going to be successful?
Teddy: It really depends on the brand. For The Escape Game, the category's developed. There's so many people every day searching "escape room near me." We have a long track record and a lot of reviews between our locations, so usually we come to the top of the pile pretty fast, and Google sees there's people on our site and they're converting and we're sending all those great signals to Google. So we have a built-in audience just by opening, and we've had over 12 million players, 13 million players.
Teddy: We're a word of mouth company. The experience leads to more people coming back with different people and telling their friends. But obviously there's the advertising, whether it's Meta or TikTok, the local influencers, that piece.
Teddy: With Great Big Game Show it's way more about discoverability. There is not a huge category. There aren't a ton of people searching "game show Houston" every day, so that SEO element's a little bit less important, but the social media part's huge, the local influencers, the promotions you're running, and just making sure the experience is amazing and you're driving a lot of word of mouth.
Jeff: So how do you handle reviews? You said you're all five star, but obviously someone had a bad experience somewhere along the way. What's your approach?
Teddy: That "every single guest" part of our mission is the main thing, because our team is trained that no one leaves unhappy. We call it an SFR, service failure recovery. Something went wrong, technology glitches or something with the booking system. Our team is all motivated and knows they can go above and beyond to do whatever it takes to make the guest happy.
Teddy: A lot of companies, you're like, I gave away a t-shirt or a ticket because they didn't seem like they had the best time, and they're going to get slapped on the wrist by management. We tell the team in orientation, you shouldn't kill an ant with a cannon. But if you just empty the merch display because a guest is unhappy and give them thousands of dollars of merch, we're not going to be mad at you. We're going to explain, hey, that probably wasn't the route there, but go above and beyond. Part of the strategy we say is do more. Listen to them, empathize, apologize if there's something we did, or apologize either way, and then do more than whatever they expect.
Teddy: So typically if there is somebody that had a tech glitch or something didn't go right, we'll still get an amazing five star, because they're like, this is what happened, but I'm a huge fan of this brand because X, Y and Z.
Jeff: But are you operationalizing that? Are you asking for reviews, doing email follow-up?
Teddy: We do ask, but there's a lot, and I'm glad, because I don't want people to game it. Google's really smart. You can't say, use my name. People do this in business all the time. You can't say leave us a five star. You can't gate it where if I feel like you didn't have as much fun as someone else, I don't ask you. You've got to ask everybody if you ask. There are some different rules and things to make sure it's fair, but we've done emails, we've done text, we've done asking in person as well.
Jeff: It sounds like you have a real focus organizationally, from a mission and values perspective. You want the customers to be very happy.
Teddy: You can give me a zillion dollar marketing budget and I will trade it for five points on the net promoter score. Our scores are, it's juggernaut, they're like mid to high 80s. It's scored negative 100 to 100. Cable companies are like negatives. And then you have restaurants that are good, 30 or 40. So like 80 is kind of off the charts. And so that's what we're measuring. I don't care how much money you give me for marketing. I want that score, because that's the marketing.
Jeff: Your customers become your best source of marketing.
Teddy: Sustainable, way cheaper.
Which games to play
Jeff: Of all the games in The Escape Game portfolio, if you have just one chance to go play a game, what's the best one?
Teddy: My favorite is called Ruins: Forbidden Treasure. I love the jungle, ancient ruins motif and theme, and the videos that you watch in it, the characters that you interact with are really fun and funny. So I just think it's a really unique and creative game.
Jeff: Indiana Jones kind of vibe.
Teddy: You're going to feel like that for sure. You start on a plane and there's an emergency landing, or crash, depends who you ask, and you make your way into an ancient ruin and the temple's got booby traps and stuff. Also Timeliner: Train Through Time. It's a time traveling train. Really fun, and you get to visit a couple different times in history.
Jeff: Is there one that's your most challenging game? The one people just struggle with?
Teddy: Prison Break is really, really hard, and I think part of it is you start with the teams split up into two different cells and you have to work together between the cells. Hey, what do you have over here, what do you have over there, to get out of the cells. And then all of our games have multiple rooms, so you escape the cells and you end up in the utility hall and the warden's office.
Teddy: But a lot of it has to do with how many people you bring. We have a game called Playground, which fits up to 12, it's our biggest game, great for team building. If you have 12 people it's definitely not our hardest game, it's more of an intro game. But if you try to play that game with four people, it's probably harder than Prison Break. It's doable, but there's so many things, because we built interactions for up to 12 people to be doing and all feel involved. And so doing it with four is very, very, very hard.
Advice to his younger self
Jeff: What's one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?
Teddy: Oh, just enjoy the ride. Have fun. No spoilers, you know, I can't tell myself back then the band's not going to work out. So I'd just say, hey, have fun, it's all going to turn out. Have a good time.
Teddy: The other thing I'd say, though, if I was in a band, is I would give myself some hints on how to use Spotify to market ourselves, because it was right at the beginning. You can message any playlister directly through the Spotify app. There were no limits on that and people weren't doing that a ton at the time. So I would probably give myself that hint. But otherwise I'd say it's going to be full of surprises and a lot of fun. Just enjoy it.
Jeff: Just like an escape room.
Teddy: Exactly.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Teddy Cheek?
Teddy Cheek is VP of retail operations at Great Big Game Show, the live game show experience built by the team behind The Escape Game. He joined The Escape Game when it had five locations and spent close to a decade building and leading its marketing function as it grew past 60. Before that he marketed recording artists at the Nashville agency CrowdSurf, and he studied entertainment industry studies at Belmont University, where he started the band Half Priced Hearts with Soundstripe co-founder Trevor Hinesley.
How many locations does The Escape Game have?
Teddy says they have just crossed 60 locations for The Escape Game, plus a growing set of Great Big Game Show venues. Every location is company-owned rather than franchised, which is why the growth has been slower than it could have been. The team handles everything from picking the real estate to fabricating the games to marketing each opening.
Where are The Escape Game's rooms designed and built?
At a facility the company calls the Adventure Factory, in Smyrna, Tennessee, near their Nashville headquarters. It houses carpenters, architects, engineers, tech experts and scenic artists. Games start as prototypes with printed props and no technology at all, get tested with real players, and only then get the hidden technology that makes an ancient ruin's booby traps feel like they are just happening.
What is Great Big Game Show?
Great Big Game Show is a live game show experience from the team behind The Escape Game, where teams compete through rounds of trivia, speed challenges, luck and strategy in front of a live host. It grew out of an online game show the company built for corporate team building during COVID. Teddy says there are around 18 games and more being added, and the lineup is randomized, so unlike a single escape room it is built to be replayed.
What did The Escape Game do during COVID?
They went to zero revenue overnight when lockdowns hit. They furloughed much of the field team but kept every general manager on full salary while the founders cut their own pay to almost nothing. Their warehouse team started manufacturing face shields, filling orders in the hundreds of thousands. Then they built virtual escape rooms, called remote adventures, where players direct a live game guide wearing a head-mounted camera through a real room, with thousands of players a day and branded versions built with Nickelodeon and Amazon.
Which Escape Game room is the hardest?
Teddy names Prison Break, where teams start split between two cells and have to coordinate across them before they can move through the rest of the rooms. But he adds that difficulty depends heavily on group size. Playground fits up to 12 and plays as an intro game with a full group, and if you attempt it with four people it is probably harder than Prison Break, because the interactions were designed for 12 people to share.
How does The Escape Game keep 5.0 ratings on Google?
Through what they internally call SFR, service failure recovery. Front-line team members are trained and authorized to do whatever it takes so that nobody leaves unhappy, and the guidance is to do more than the guest expects rather than to protect the merch shelf. They ask for reviews by email, text and in person, but never selectively and never with instructions about what to write. Teddy's framing is that the guest experience is the marketing: he would trade a marketing budget for five points on the net promoter score.
