HEATHER EWING: The CRE RUNdown
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HEATHER EWING: The CRE RUNdown
Reimagining Family Entertainment: Wayne Hickey's Interactive Adventure
Welcome to Heather Ewing, the CRE Rundown. I am your host, heather Ewing, and today I have a wonderful guest out of lovely Myrtle Beach. It is Wayne Hickey. He is the owner of Hickey's Interactive Adventures, wayne, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:My pleasure. So we've known each other through LinkedIn. I think, I don't know, is it around six months a year, somewhere in that time frame?
Speaker 2:Yes, in that time frame. Yes, you have been following me.
Speaker 1:It's always a joy learning more about you and the others in our community, but if you could share with our guests a little bit more about you and what you're doing guess a little bit more about you and what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, a little bit more about me takes me back probably 30 years when I started an entrepreneurial career creating my own niche fishing magazine in Connecticut we published a monthly fishing magazine, 10,000 copies a month. We did that for about three and a half years, moved in and out of corporate a little bit and then, I'd say about 16 years ago, I started working on this interactive family experience a 16-room walkthrough attraction shooting at 250 scattered laser targets, different themed rooms, four people at a time having a good time in there, over 100 animatronics morphed it into more family-friendly attractions where all families and kids are interactive interactive play. So we're taking the old business model of, let's say, dave and Buster's and we're now we're morphing it, turning it into a family entertainment experience in a 30 to 40,000 square foot Disney-like setting.
Speaker 1:That's great. And what are you projecting as far as because I know this is a new project for you, which it's been exciting following you and seeing some of the imagery and things like that. Do you have a target date of when someone might be able to experience one of these interactive adventures?
Speaker 2:More than likely. We're probably looking at the beginning of 2027. Once everything is found and finalized, with all funding and everything, it's going to take about nine months to 12 months to do a build out, find the location, organize everything and get it all set up.
Speaker 1:Definitely, and construction lead times are definitely extensive these days and I know just even in Madison and throughout the country, the retail experiences are something that people are really craving and I think that's one of the things that drew me to you on LinkedIn is really boosting the family time together. The experiences and I know for myself playing around in the yard and different things with my siblings and neighbors was always really heartfelt for me.
Speaker 2:Yes, I have five other brothers and sisters, so I know what it's like being around family growing up in and out of fights, but just mostly bonding and doing all that stuff. And I have three kids growing up at the same time and with the phones and everything. Today I noticed just a disconnect Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. And how would you see this rolling out within families too, right? So, if you think about it, they're coming to the Hickeys Interactive Experience. How do you see it affecting families after they visit, or is this something that you think they would visit once a month? Is it quarterly?
Speaker 2:What do you?
Speaker 2:anticipate it quarterly. What do you anticipate when we design this? Especially putting it in Myrtle Beach with 19 million tourists, they come down for a week-long visit. So when I set out to do this, I try to make it totally more attractive, and it is also an ever-changing attraction. So by that I mean, if you come in on a Monday, we have a set schedule where we're going to turn things around and we're going to change sets, we're going to change some themes so that you might want to come in on a Friday before you go back and get and do different experience.
Speaker 2:No two visits are ever going to be the same, so we built that into it and what we're just trying to do is bring in. We bring in STEM, we bring in interactivity, we bring in the education part of it and we bring in a bunch of things, whether it's augmented reality, virtual reality, live reality or just throughout our experience. There's different attractions for people to see and do, and a lot of that exterior stuff on the inside just doesn't cost any money. It just enhances the experience, and families will be doing this together. Most of the games that we have can be done either by grandparents and grandkids or parents and kids, and they're designed to bring parents and kids together to play these games. They're just fun and they're low key, but they're fun for the whole family.
Speaker 1:That's terrific. And so when you take a step back, planning anything big like this 30,000 plus square feet, right Changing sets, all of that, what has helped you from a mindset perspective? You know how I love talking about mindset. Yes, what has really helped you to kind of keep all the pieces moving and also staying fresh when you do encounter those different hurdles?
Speaker 2:What helped me with where I'm at now. We had one where we were doing a build out. So everything that was up here kind of went down on some paper and then, as we were ordering things and I was ordering all of the sets and all of the pieces everywhere, from flowers to rocks, to scenery, to animatronics and then as it all got put together, it all started morphing and coming together. So what was in my head was coming out and it was going on. Two or three key people that were doing the build out, they followed my vision. We all were building it all out together. So it all came out. And now that we we did this one, um as a, as a test piece, and and tested it out with families, um, we're much more in tune on what I need to do to do our flagship.
Speaker 1:That's exciting, and do you have a vision, maybe, of how many you might want throughout the South? Or the Sun Belt in general.
Speaker 2:No, I do, we have. I would like to see six or eight of these. After we did the first one and it was open, the plan is to either owner operate it or, after a few years, franchise it. And we want to have six or eight of these and each one, by its internal design, is going to be different from every other one. So you'll you'll kind of like, let's say, a baseball park. No, two stadiums are the same. So if you have this and one or two of the many attractions are in one location, not in another location, then it's going to be worth your while if you're going to another city or another state to come and visit us over there, because they're not the same.
Speaker 1:Right, that's a great idea, and I think too, I see each of those kind of like the wrong canvas, right, you always have the canvas, but then you paint different layers on it to give it a different effect and experience.
Speaker 2:Yes, so each one is probably going to. Each one will probably be different in size and different width and different lengths, so it will all have to be reset and relayed out anyway. So it'll be fun. That's the fun part for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'd be very interesting from a franchising standpoint too. Yes, but how would you say AI, right? We hear about AI all the time. It's affecting every industry and I say, if you're not including it and utilizing it, it's going to be a grim future for people. How are you utilizing AI now, in the planning phases, and are there any hints of what you can share for the future, of what?
Speaker 2:you can share for the future In the planning stage, through that interactive walkthrough journey. There's a storyline that goes into each one and we're utilizing AI telling the story in each room. So you're only in the room for a minute and a half, but each one has to have its own story, so we're using the AI to do that Throughout the whole attraction. Where we have tablets and we have dinosaurs and animatronics that are moving, we're going to use AI to have these things perform and react to customers' reactions and different things as well as educational. There'll be an AI-generated computer where you can plug in a variety of 200, 300 different questions and get different answers and different feedback. So there'll be AI running through a lot of it.
Speaker 1:That's terrific. It definitely makes it easier, right, and you have to embrace it. It's not going to exit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's incredible, yeah, and we're starting to get into it deeper and deeper because, you know, just having it write a story is on the simple part, but we're trying to move to the next level when we move to building our first one. There is some IP stuff that is going into this with what we want to do with these animatronics. They're going to be unique and different from anything that's out there now.
Speaker 1:Nice. I don't know why this popped into my head, so of course I have to ask I'm a curious person what type of ceiling heights are you going to have floor to deck?
Speaker 2:We would love to have a 22-foot ceiling height. That would be ideal. Just a simple truss grid on the top would allow us that little bit of high extra ceiling to throw things. It's a five-dimensional thing, so we want to utilize everything from the ceiling to the floor and in between.
Speaker 1:That's great. And then are you having food, food drink.
Speaker 2:Our concept on this is to also do food, but we're going to do it strictly by vending machines. We have been on the search. We found a pizza oven. If you will, it's not a microwave, but it's an oven. You can do pizzas in about two to three minutes, um, fully automated. So we're going to, you know, offer hot pizza cooked into an oven, as well as hot foods, cold foods, snacks, drinks, coffee machines, that'll coffee machine that'll come up with anywhere from espresso to orange juice, all fully automated, kind of like the way they do in China where food is all prepackaged and all set to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely quick, right, definitely quick, but good quality food. The other avenue to our food service is we're going to utilize local vendors. We're not going to use a Cisco or a other food service type one where the food is already frozen or prepackaged. We want to go to the local people that in that local city already produce great baked goods or great pizzas and great foods for everybody to have.
Speaker 1:And then was the convenience then for it from a time perspective, versus going with a local fast casual or restaurant or walk me, walk me on that path.
Speaker 2:In this particular one, where we were starting it off, we're keeping it family orientated. We did want to have a beer and wine. We don't need to get as extensive as a Dave and Buster's for food, because we're not trying to classify ourself as a restaurant. So we want to get people to come in and experience the attraction for their two and a half to three and a half hours, have a snack if they want to have a snack, and then go out and go have dinner.
Speaker 1:OK, perfect, yeah, that is exciting. So what do you see as next steps?
Speaker 2:for you, then in this process.
Speaker 1:You've got this great idea. You have a lot of, just a lot of plans with it. What are your next steps?
Speaker 2:I continue morphing the plan a little bit, working on it, making sure that it stays current. I stay up on top of new equipment that's coming out. Every November I go to an IAPRA show, which is an amusement show in Orlando, florida, looking for new things, new family-orientated stuff. So staying on top of the business plan and modifying it constantly and getting it investor ready. It has to have the pitch deck, the business plan. Everything has to be investor ready. So once we start moving towards that and we get the right momentum moving forward on investors, everything is already in place, so we'll be more shovel ready. Everything is already in place, so we will be more shovel ready. I don't want to. We don't want to lose time during the build out. We want to get it done in that nine months, not closer to the year, year and a half.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Well, this is really exciting, so I so appreciate you sharing this new idea. I love how you're breaking it down between vision and the tactical planning, and I'll have to have you on again next year to see where you're at in the process with everything. But before we go, wayne, my last question is always the big one and what does living fully mean to you?
Speaker 2:Living fully to me is building where I'm at is building the legacy, um, of having this established, having multiple locations out there doing well and seeing the people's reactions. So seeing the people's reactions and having the fun of this vision is what I'm looking for. We had the same type of thing when I did my fishing magazine. As simple as it was, it did focus on individual. It was all on connecticut but individual lakes and individual field reporting. So in that mode we received a lot of good feedback.
Speaker 2:I received a lot of letters, a lot of positive feedback on what we were doing, and that's the satisfying part. So once this is out there and we get people that are the parents is what I really want to see being happy. I can make the kids happy in a Dave and Buster Sure, you just keep throwing the money. They'll just keep throwing dollars into a machine. But if you can get the parents working with the kids and creating those same type of memory that you get at a Disneyland for a whole lot less money, then that's what the ultimate goal is.
Speaker 1:That's terrific. Well, Wayne, thank you so much for joining us today and I will be reaching out in about a year from now to give a good recap and see how we can help you as well. And, before we go, what is the best way for people to connect with you?
Speaker 2:The best way for people to connect with me is through LinkedIn. That is the best way to drop me a DM. I'm always available on there. Most of my information is right on there. Wayne Hickey, on LinkedIn, it's very simple and straightforward. There's no sense of giving you out a phone number here or an email. It's just that's where you'd want to go and then you can see the whole vision and you can follow up on what we're trying to do and what we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thanks so much, wayne, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye.
Speaker 2:Bye.