February 2019

During one of our recent management meetings, our Director of Operations was describing to our team a recent thread she was following on a Facebook forum.  The thread centered around a small business owner that was asking everyone and anyone for marketing ideas.  One responder posted many ideas and was immediately attacked by a flood of requests to be contacted privately by other small business owners. 

What stuck out to our Director of Operations noticed was that these ideas, while good, were not novel or overly creative.  She mentioned that Monkey Bizness should think about starting up a consulting agency in addition to franchising since many of these ideas and much more, we are executing right now.  While we aren’t seriously contemplating starting a new marketing consulting practice, it did inspire some of this blog post!

This experience is not uncommon and illustrates what has been a consistent issue for small businesses.  In a time where marketing tools are more prevalent and powerful than ever before, small businesses continue to struggle with their marketing.  This is not just a personal observation, but something that is shown to be true based on countless surveys and studies.   The InfusionSoft 2018 “Small Business Marketing Report”, found that the owners who do their marketing themselves are the least satisfied with their results.  The most satisfied? The owners who outsource their marketing.  Almost all owners who do their own marketing believe they are actually losing money on their marketing activities.

While I believe there are many reasons, inspiring small business owners should think about franchising, one of the biggest is because many of them don’t particularly like doing marketing or have a lot of experience with it.  Along with customer service, there is not a bigger determinant of business success than marketing. 

While reading a book, a blog post, or taking a marketing class can be a good start, there are two keys steps that every small business owner must do to successfully market their business.  One of these keys, your franchisor can help you with, the other, your own your own.

Key #1 – Effort

Without effort, any plan you put together will fail.  We all know what effort truly does and doesn’t look like (if you have kids, this is especially true).  Many small business owners trick themselves into thinking they are putting forth the effort needed to market successfully.  However, when you look down your priority list for the week, how many of those tasks will truly drive customers into your business and are marketing focused?  9 times out of 10, daily operations of your business get in the way  In order for the second key to matter, you must start with effort.

Key #2 – Have a Plan for Your Business

Any marketing consultant can tell you to market on Facebook.  However, what should you say and who should you say it to?  These, along with many other questions are much more important than merely determining that you should market on Facebook.  The fact most small business marketing books don’t tell you is there is no cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to marketing.  Each business must determine the best methods to market their business.  There is no silver bullet to figure this out.  There will be some trial and error and along with that comes failure at certain points.  However, the small business that perseveres through this failure is the one most likely to succeed over the long haul. 

I am proud of the Monkey Bizness marketing team because they took these two keys and began to unlock the door to successfully marketing our brand and business.  We have had failures and successes along the way, but the marketing methods we are employing have seen real results in the stores who use both keys above in executing them. 

If you have any interest in owning your own Monkey Bizness, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more about the opportunities we have available.

Bill Gates didn’t make many mistakes.  However, like all of us, there were some.  For instance, he got beat by a small startup with a funny name called Google.  In his quest to protect Microsoft near monopoly at the time on the operating system market, he did pay much attention to the power of the internet much less a tool for people to search it.  In 1992 while being interviewed, Gates said, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lesson of failure”. 

When working with a franchise system are you get the advantage of benefiting from their past mistakes.  The best franchise systems not only learn from their mistakes, but they also are able to look around the market and learn from the mistakes of others.

In the kids play space, there has been a lot of past mistakes made.  In an industry that is still relatively young, there is a lot that those involved in the space are learning about their customers and concepts.  At Monkey Bizness, we have been in the lucky position to learn from others mistakes as well as the unfortunate spot of learning from our own.  Like a few fortunate others, we have survived the mistakes and thrived with the lessons learned.  Here are 4 common mistakes we see competitors make in their kids’ business.

1. Confusing their customer with too many offerings

We see a lot of concepts that try to do it all.  Recently a new competitor opened that offered classes, parties, therapy sessions, open play, and even has a retail area. From what we have seen, that confuses the guest.  One thing our guests like about Monkey Bizness is that it is easy…parents can merely bring their kids and have fun.  While offering it all to your customers sounds good, it also takes effort to do marketing, train your staff, and manage all the systems that come with each of those offerings. 

2. Build Centers with “Home” Equipment

This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we see is businesses that open up with equipment that quite frankly is in many kids’ basements.  One reason our guests come to Monkey Bizness is because of the unique equipment we have.  The equipment we have is not found in most kid’s basements.  We have even branched out and started to design our own equipment. 

3. Age Confusion

At Monkey Bizness, we build our stores geared for kids ages 1-8 years old.  This is a unique age group that likes certain activities.  Parents of kids this age have different expectations than parents of older kids.  And lastly, the marketing for kids and parents this age is vastly different then other age groups.  As a result, we are able to truly serve the needs of our target guests.  We see a lot of kids businesses built to try to serve kids from ages 1-18.  The needs for those kids (and safety) is vastly different.  Pick a niche group and stick with it.

4. Too Big of a Facility

Whether you are building or leasing, every extra square foot you occupy costs money.  We see so many places that don’t think out their design or try to put their business into a space that is way too large.  We are in an industry that requires square footage, so it is necessary to have spaces of some size.  However, you must think out your space and have a game plan for how to drive sales per square foot. 

At Monkey Bizness, we strongly believe we have addressed most of these issues and many others we see.  We know that many that open a business working with kids do it out of a passion and that is great!  We also believe that we can help them take their passion and turn it into a successful business.

If you are interested in franchising with Monkey Bizness, please reach out to us for more information.     

Odds are if you are reading this, you have at least considered whether this or another franchise is right for you.  In 2018, we spoke to just over 150 people about whether franchising was the right fit for them.  Many of them remind me of my journey 5-6 years ago in discovering what type of business I wanted to start or buy.  For very few on the journey do they know what the destination is exactly.  That is OK.  For most others, the journey starts with trying to decide what is the best fit for you. 

Based on my discussions with those aspiring entrepreneurs and my own journey, here are a few helpful hints to finding the right opportunity for you.  

Remember the Lead Person in this Story….YOU

When I start thinking about right fit, there is a quote from Dawn Abraham I always remember….”Don’t compare yourself to others, you have no idea what their journey is about.”

When you start down the path to entrepreneurship, inevitably you find yourself reading articles, blogs, and books telling you all kinds of advice on finding the perfect opportunity.  I was there, I have read most of them too.  What most won’t tell you is that the person you need to satisfy the most is yourself.  You need to balance the financial, work-life balance, and personal fulfillment pieces and everyone’s will be different. 

Its Not All a Math Exercise

Here is a secret of ours….we can’t stand talking to people about finances right off the bat.  In our business and most others, if someone begins with the bottom line in mind, they are going to struggle being successful.  You better like what you are doing because the peaks and valleys of owning a business are more dramatic than most anything else you have experienced.  If you don’t start with a base of believing and enjoying what you are doing, those valleys will be unbearable.

It is a Math Exercise

Yes, there is number crunching that needs to be done.  Ultimately, no matter how much information a franchisor gives you, it is up to you to figure out of the business makes financial success.  We often get questions about return on investment (we have a whole other blog on that topic), and that is important.  However, you must realize that return on investment is just one factor that must be taken into consideration with everything we talked about above.

Franchises: One Size Does Not Fit All

While on the surface franchises might seem to be very similar, the more you dig the more you will find they are vastly different from each other.  Every franchise will have different fees and level of support.  You should be looking for one that offers a level of support that compliments your skills.  Do you have a background in operations?  Than it might be a good idea to look for a franchise that has support geared more towards marketing. 

Match Your Value with the Franchisors

At Monkey Bizness, our mission is to help children and families be happier and healthier in our communities.  This mission is something that permeates everything we do.  We design our marketing and community partnerships with this in mind.  It would be hard to be a franchisee with us if this is not a mission that you are aligned with.  All franchises have missions, whether stated or not.  Most of the time, they use these missions to drive their strategic goals.  If you are not aligned with the mission, then you may have a tough time operating within their system. 

At Monkey Bizness, we love talking with entrepreneurs about their goals.  If you have interest in possibly starting your own Monkey Bizness, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more.

At Monkey Bizness, we get to do a lot of fun things that other businesses might not get to do.  When your business is built around providing fun, we are inherently responsible for thinking about fun a lot of the time.  Many businesses talk about innovation and our form of the topic is how to create more fun for our guests.

Being the father of 3, I am well versed in kids’ books.  By far, one of my favorites is If Kids Ruled the World by Linda Bailey.  Being somewhat biased, one of my favorite parts is “If kids ruled the world, every day would be your birthday!”.  They say putting yourself in your customer’s shoes is a helpful way to improve your business, so I sometimes ask, “what if kids ruled the world?”. 

I like to believe that Monkey Bizness would be close to the world that kids would build if they ruled the world.  One year ago, we were stuck looking at the same equipment from the same vendors and quite frankly we were bored.  Our Director of Marketing, Ashley, had stumbled upon a company that made cool tree houses on Pinterest.  We reached out to them and started designing our own custom piece of equipment.  As part of the design process, Ashley would ask her son Grant and I would ask my son, Alex, what they thought.  At one point, one of them said, “a foam pit would be awesome!”.  The next iteration of the drawing had a foam pit…..From a simple sketch and a random vendor, we built a brand new custom piece of equipment that our guests at our Parker location love! 

We are now contemplating the redesign of one of our corporate stores.  This process began with Ashley, our Director of Operations Dacia, and myself thinking about what our kids like to do.  If they could rule Monkey Bizness, what would the do?  While we aren’t ready yet to reveal what is coming, we do believe we have a couple of cool ideas in our pipeline.  We are again leaning strongly towards developing custom equipment that our customers can only play with at Monkey Bizness. 

At one of our locations, we will soon be unveiling a simple, healthy kids’ menu with some low-priced lunch options.  We went back to our main audience and asked what they wanted.  Once we got past Alex and Grant’s initial answer of cake, we were able to come up with some ideas we think parents will really appreciate.

While we probably won’t ever know for sure what would happen if kids ruled the world, inside a Monkey Bizness might provide a little peek. 

If you are interested in helping continue our mission of helping families be happy and healthy in your community by starting your own Monkey Bizness, contact us now.