This Business Model is About to Be EVERYWHERE! Don't Miss Out!

The mobile roller skating business is a business I never thought I'd find interesting. I didn't know it existed. I don't like roller skating, but it sounded interesting, so I knew I had to tackle it. Henry launched this business during the COVID pandemic and he had no idea if this was just a fad, was this a TikTok thing, was this going to go away? But then he did 120 grand in his first three months at 30 to 40% margins. And his margins have only gotten better from there. He sets up mobile roller rinks inside malls, online on top of mall parking lots, or anywhere they have a van full of roller skates that they charge five grand for. We went deep, we talked numbers, we talked launch strategy, we talked user generated content marketing and pr. How to sell into malls, how much it costs to get started, and how he achieves 70% net margins. You're going to love it. Please like and subscribe. Share with your friends. We'll see you next time. Okay, so why don't you start by just telling us who you are and what business you own.

Yeah, so my name's Henry o' Brien from Ireland originally, which, which I'm sure the accent will come through, have been L. As I mentioned, I lived in the US for a couple of years straight out of college or university and then moved back to Ireland for a year thinking I was ready to settle down. And a good friend, still a good friend at the time he proposed moving to Canada. So moved to Canada about seven, eight years ago and currently living just north of Toronto. Recently actually just moved outside of the city to a smaller town called Collingwood. But yeah, the business that we own and operate is called Suso Skate Company. Sure, we'll get into it. The name Suso being short for summer solstice. And we are a pop up roller rink. And the newest addition to the, or I guess newest part of the business is our kind of mobile event, friendly roaming roller skate van. But yeah, looking forward to chatting more about it.

Okay, so you've been in Toronto area for seven, eight years. When did you launch the business?

So the business started early on 2001, if my memory serves me correctly. During COVID lockdown.

You said 2001.

Sorry, 2021.

2021, yeah.

Okay, sorry.

Over the year, Canada was locked down for like two years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's a bit of a blur now at this stage. My girlfriend at the time, now my fiance, we, we met pretty much as, as kind of COVID and lockdown. All started, I was looking for a date night activity. Like, truth be told, we don't come from a roller skating background. I mean, I rollerbladed like many kids growing up. But yeah, I was looking for a date night activity. Something fun and something new that we both hadn't done before. At the time, a lot of indoor activities, like most of the world where it was shut down, so options were limited. At the same kind of parallel time, roller skating was just going through a massive surge on TikTok. Maybe that's because it could be done outdoors, maybe because just the aesthetics of it, the nostalgia of it, the Americana of it. But people were flocking to TikTok, posting videos and hashtags like roller skating. Hashtags were in the billions.

Where does everyone go roller skating? If I'm of the age and I see a viral TikTok like that looks fun, like, sure, I could google it, but there's no roller skating rink.

That just comes to mind.

Top of mind. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's exactly it. Like we, again, we kind of stumbled into it. We saw that. So at the time, like I said, we were looking for. I was looking for a date night activity and then quickly realized that there was no roller skating rental companies in an output environment. As I said, indoor spots were closed at the time. And I quickly thought, like, there's such an want and a desire and demand for experiential activities not only across North America, but certainly in Toronto at the time, thought to myself, like, what a great idea it would be to offer roller skate rentals in an outdoor environment under the heat of the sun, which is where the name kind of Suso comes from. So fast forward a couple months and we got our hands on some inventory, which was difficult at the time because there was a worldwide shortage of roller skates. Can I. Yeah.

Can I ask just a couple of questions? What time of year was this? Because obviously it's very seasonal where you are if you're going to do an outdoor business.

Yeah, I think we probably acquired skates in the new year of 2021 and then we were up and running by May of that year.

Okay, so you had the idea end of 2021.

Yeah, I wish I could give you an exact date or month, but it was definitely towards the end of 2020 and it probably into 2021. Then, yeah, lockdown started and then, yeah, just with the popularity of roller skating online on TikTok, there was no availability of rentals in an outdoor environment. There was a kind of a perfect storm of a Few different aspects. We approached the city of Toronto. There's a spot, an outdoor. It's. They host ice skating in the wintertime. It's a perfectly smooth figure eight. It's actually over an expressway, so it's covered come rain or shine. We approached them and said hey, we'd love to like we know that you guys do or offer ice skating in the wintertime. We'd love to use that same infrastructure that you have but would do roller skating in the spring summertime. And they loved the idea. So to our surprise and to our they said yeah. So we rented a 20 foot shipping container for that first summer. I think we grossed about 120k in give or take three or four months. Whoa. Yeah, it was, it was again because there was so many things closed down at the time. Really the only way people could connect and get together, be it at a distance was, was outdoors. So we got, we were very, very lucky in the sense that we got some early local media in Toronto so they shared about us and again the nostalgic factor about it. It's easy to understand and appreciate.

Did you go looking for media?

We did, yeah. We definitely reach out to a few kind of very local media outlets and how like logistically. So I did a small stint in a PR company during my intern for maybe three or four months during university. So the idea of like the value of PR I've always appreciated. So there's a, there's a few local publications blog to, to being short for Toronto being one of the more prominent publications and outlets and just scour whether it's their website, their list of editors, their Twitter.

Like DMs and cold emails.

Exactly, yeah, cold emails, DMs. And again people are pretty receptive and to this day like if we, if we open up a new pop up in a new city or town, the media, especially local media, more difficult to get national. Let's say CNBC or, or like bigger media outlets. But when you say hey, we're bringing a pop up roller rink into town for the most part people are like wow. Like this is, it's, it's cool, it's family friendly, it's easy to understand, it' easy to appreciate and just get rolling. So we've been blessed with really good response overall from a lot of media and even influencers looking to say hey, I'd love to go roller skate with my family or my friends. Can you book us in and we'll shoot a reel and some content. So we try and a lot of marketing efforts, we Try and go. Win, win versus like paid opportunities if possible.

Okay, this is amazing. I think most people don't realize how eager editors are to write about stuff. Right? Like they just want cool stuff. Like and I think people think, oh, they're getting hit up all the time by people. And it's like there aren't a lot of people doing cool stuff. They're kind of not. Yeah, that's why you see so many dumb articles about, you know, the squirrel that got trapped in the tree because no one's emailing them about their mobile roller skating rink business.

Well, especially. No, I totally agree. And especially what we've learned and what I've definitely learned is if you can localize it as much as possible, like let's say a journalist in, in Toronto. If you say, hey, I'm launching a new roller skate business in Texas, you know they're going to be less interested. But if you could say, hey, we're opening for three months, we are family friendly, kid friendly and we're opening in downtown Toronto. That journalist, all of a sudden there's a bit of a hook in the. It's applicable to me because it's in my, in my hometown. I write about experiences in Toronto. So that's two ticks straight away. And then yeah, I think if you can finesse a good email, keep it concise, keep it short. There's like we noticed too that like direct correlation to if an article goes live, instant jump in bookings. Like yeah, that first summer we were sold out more weekends than not. We only operated Wednesday through Sunday because we were juggling our full time jobs. But yeah, we were nearly at capacity more times than not.

Can you speak a little more about that first venue and why they were so willing to work with you and like, like just set the scene for us. Like what did it look like in.

Terms of like the, the location in which we set up? It's, it's an interesting and unique scenario or case study if you will. So it's city property. So the city of Toronto owned this property. It's underneath the, the Gardiner Expressway. However, it is operated by a non for profit. That non for profit is in place to really ensure that there is programming going on throughout the year. That it is, it's really kind of used the location and the venue is used to its full potential. So you'll have brand activations throughout the year. You'll have ice skating in the wintertime, you might have Easter egg hunts come Easter. So they really in place to enhance the community and to Ensure that there's a kind of consistent and fun and appealing programming throughout the year. So when we went to them and said, hey, like you already have the infrastructure in place. You rent ice skates from this 20 foot shipping container. You have a perfectly smooth figure eight trail. Even as things as small as they had the cubbies or the shelvings in the container, that was just like it was turnkey for us. So as soon as we got inventory, as soon as we got protective gear and we figured out a WIX website at the time and we figured out, okay, we need to plug into, allow bookings online, we were off to the races.

What's the name of this place so I could look it up? Ben?

B E N T B N T W A Y. Super unique. Yeah, it's, it's, it's improved over the years and we've had different point of contacts and like very easy to work with, good to work with. If there was a location like this in every city, I mean I think it would be not only great for the local ecosystem and the community itself, but it's, it made our entry into the market super straightforward. It's since become a little bit more tricky finding similar type of setups or even working now that we work with malls which, which we'll get into. I'm sure it's a little bit more cumbersome, but this has made navigating, working with a city a lot easier.

Okay, so if I'm looking at the Bentway, I see like a bunch of apartments on one side of the freeway. Are you on the north side or the south side of the freeway?

We are right underneath that freeway. So yeah, you'll see like a greenery and parkside on the north side. On the south side you have a bunch of apartments a little bit out than that. You have, you have the water in the lake. So we are directly.

Baseball field.

Exactly. Yeah, we are directly underneath that freeway. So even if it did rain, you're pretty much for the most part 80% covered by the expressway itself.

Interesting. So you're like right amongst all these apartments.

Yeah, yeah, right downtown. Like you couldn't get more downtown. Like if you were to walk, I'm going to say 15 to 20 minutes east and a little bit north of the Bentway, you would be in like the, what we call, what's called Bay Street. So to give you like a US equivalent, it would be like the Wall street of Toronto. So super central for people flocking to the city for a weekend activity. It was like, oh yeah, we'll go roller skating, and then we'll go for a meal, or we'll go for a meal and then go roller skating. And, like, I've touched on, like, it really appeals to people young and old, the older demographics that, oh, I used to do this when I was your age or when I was 20 or 30 years old. And then you have the youngsters and the kids coming through now who are seeing roller skating and actively participating in roller skating for the first time. So this is like a net new activity for them. And now as we've kind of transitioned into a kind of more of a fully fledged business, a big focus for us is like, how can we get kids off their devices? How can we give them that 45 minutes to an hour to have fun with friends, to go skating with their parents and just get away from screens?

I just love everything about this business. Like, sometimes you come across business ideas where it's like, the market is just begging for it and they're craving it, and, like, the Bentway is willing to do it. It's in the perfect location. Like, it's blowing up on TikTok. Like, this is product market fit. I always like to describe product market fit as this. Like, normally you launch a business and it's like pushing a boulder uphill. And that's not a bad thing. You push it uphill, it comes down a little bit. Push it uphill, it comes down a little bit, and it's a grind. And that doesn't mean you should quit. That's usually how it goes. But, you know, 10% of the times the boulder's chasing you, and you can't even sleep because you have so many customers beating down your door. Is that kind of what it felt like?

That's. That's exactly it. And, like, to your point, about, like, it working, maybe. I think you said 10% of time. Like, after this first season, we. We sold all of our inventory at the last day. We sold every single pair of skates that we'd bought. Let's say, six months prior, we'd sold through all of our inventory thinking it was kind of like a summer passion project. It was a one. And. And then with just pure, like, feedback from the community demand, like, hey, like, we want to see you next year. We want to see you in other locations. We quickly realized, hey, we could be onto something here. So we had to buy all of our inventory again. We made some tweaks. We got better protective gear. And that's when we were like, okay, like, this. This could be this could be something like we gotta try and get back to the Bentway again next season. Which we did and we just wrapped up in end of September with our fourth season and we've since gone into working, working with malls.

Okay, all right, so I have like a lot of questions before we get to malls, but I can't wait to talk about malls. I'm just all over the place here. So what did the unit economics look like with the Bentway? How did you approach them? Like how do you pay them? Is it, I'm curious about that.

Yeah, so we had a pretty straightforward, let's say negotiation at the time. As I said, they had the infrastructure in place. They had the perfectly smooth outdoor figure eight trail, they had the shipping container. I think if remember correctly, like we paid them 4,000amonth in kind of base rent that has since hasn't changed all that much. Depending on location people might say hey, if you hit a certain threshold there might be a certain kickback. So if you do good, we do good. We're all for that. You know, if we, if we find a new location. But the Bentway at the time it was like a flat base rent. You guys are going to be up and running for let's say June 1st. You're going to run until really the weather gets a little bit chillier here in Toronto which is typically the end of September. So we, yeah, four grand flat per month. We would make that back. Jesus. On any, any busy Saturday at the time. We operated Wednesday through Sunday juggling full time jobs. We, we worked, we worked it ourselves, we manned ourselves, myself and my now fiance. So it meant that we were running from our apartment which was luckily only 10 minutes away and we were opening up and we'd operate Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 4 to 9pm and then give or take all day Saturday, Sunday. And then we kept, and our goal at the time too is we'd rather have fewer sessions per week, but those sessions to be busier than open seven days a week, eight hours a day and have two people at one in one session and five people in another. So it meant that people's options were limited, but it meant, it meant that there was a, a little bit more of a better experience.

The whole point of this is that it's cool and it's only cool if it stays cool and it only stays cool if a bunch of people are always there at the same time. You don't want to be, you know, one of four people. Like you might think, people will think, oh this is awesome. There's there's so much space. Well, no, this is a party. They want to party. They want to feel like they're in on the secret. Is that kind of what you tapped into?

100%. It was just, it was lucky timing. It was people looking to be, look, looking to be active outdoors. The again, it was blowing up on TikTok. There was shortages. There was articles in Vogue and every like household media outlet that you can think of at the time, they had written an article about roller skating. And you know, roller skating as a, as an industry, I would say, or as a, as a pastime hasn't really been modernized all too much. I mean if you look at roller rinks throughout the US for the most part, the majority of them are still your mom and pop with that like really outdated carpet. They're, they, they may or may not be taking bookings online. But yeah, just with, with the, the appetite for experiences in Toronto, it worked out well.

Did you notice like a huge multiplier effect when people started showing up and posting about it? Because this is something you have to post, you have to post about to Instagram. And so I'm picturing like the first week, the first day or whatever, like it's busy because you're new. But then it's just like, man, we're really busy.

Yeah, we didn't get into doing like paid ads up until maybe, I'm going to say 18 months ago. And we've been doing it now, this is our fourth season. So we were 100% reliant on user generated content. So much so that people would come put on skates, take a few selfies, pictures, videos, TikToks and they'd take the skates off. They wouldn't even go skating. So I mean for us we'd hate to see it. And we felt guilty at the time, working behind in the container. We said, oh geez, we kind of want to refund you. You had skates on for five minutes. So you came and you kind of got what you wanted in terms of the content. But yeah, you'd see especially when we started reaching out to like micro and local influencers, we'd say, hey, would love to invite you to come down. Skating's on us. Bring a plus one, bring to bring a second plus one. It's on us. And for the most part like people would just eat that up. They're like, yeah, I have, I have 50,000 people followers. Yeah, they capture their content, they shoot their reel, their TikTok and we'd see instant spikes in bookings, the odd time you'd have a person saying, hey, like my rate is this for one video. And we kind of, we dabbled in that a little bit at the time, but we kind of geared our focus towards people who are open to kind of doing an in kind partnership, if you will.

Yeah, because you didn't need it. Right? Like the, I mean, what was an average rate for someone that did charge?

That's a good question. Anywhere from 150 to 250. Which again, I'm not gonna break the bank. These, these might have been people with 15,000 followers, but like super engaged, super local, a lot of foodie folks. Toronto being very much a city of food and multicultural. So like, yeah, we tapped into a lot of the mom influencers and local influencers. It's funny, like, speaking of like mom influencers, like, I listened to the interview you did with the pumpkin porch lady and it's just like, yeah, if you reach out to the right F Word does organically spread pretty fast.

What did it cost to rent your shipping container? Was it a 20 or a 40 foot?

So the shipping container was already on site at the Bent Way at the time. So we.

Oh, you said that.

Yeah. So we paid like a. I think it was a flat 4k per month. Again, it was turnkey for us. And I don't think you could plan for a better beginning to a business. And if we tried to replicate that or find a similar location with like a fabricated turnkey container, we wouldn't be able to find it today.

Back to the 4k a month. Like how do you arrive at that? Who did you say it first? Did they say it first? Because there's no precedent for this.

There's not, No, I, truth be told, I have no idea. I can't remember who came to it. We did a bit of math, quick math, and probably a napkin at the time, and we said, okay, well if we limit our capacity to about, let's say 35 to 50 people per session and we have X amount of sessions per week, really, we only need like a busy Saturday in order to make that money. We did open up, like going back to the journalists and the local media. We'd reached out maybe months in advance. So like the hype train had already kind of left the station. People were already talking about it and one article would influence another article or publication. So by the time that we opened bookings, which might have been a month or two out, we were already like bringing in money before we'd paid any rent.

Now, did the 4,000 scare you in the beginning or were you so optimistic that it would crush that you didn't care?

Yeah, we were scared. Even like the initial. I think overall our initial investment at the time was probably give or take 35k. So that got us the skate inventory, the protective gear, got our insurance. We made the WIX website at the time we used the plugin to capture online bookings. So we were, yeah, every dollar mattered back then, as it still does today. But it was kind of our neck on the line. We fully staffed it the entire summer ourselves, which looking back, I had just met my, my now fiance. I was like, this girl is willing to give up her Wednesday, her Thursday, her Friday, and she's the all day Saturday and Sunday. So I was like, she's a keeper.

Yeah. Did you pay her?

We didn't pay ourselves. Logistically we did not pay ourselves until we've only just fully both paid ourselves back in the last 12 months. And then yeah, we were kind of just very focused on like, right, is this something that we see a future in? If it is, there's really no point in paying ourselves until we need a paycheck because you want to take money out of the business when we could just reinvest it. So we kept a lot of, we reinvested a lot of any surplus money in cash up until again 12 months ago when we paid ourselves back. And now we take a very modest kind of paycheck from the business. We both still have our full time jobs which is something that we would love to transition away from. It's a little bit of that kind of golden handcuffs we want to jump in. But you know, you got a mortgage now and life is expensive so we don't want to make.

It's seasonal too, right?

Yeah, yeah, especially. And even now with the indoor locations we choose not to be year round. We model ourselves off of Spirit Halloween. We want to create that fomo, that urgency. We're in town for six to eight months. Come by while, while we're in town before we roll to the next town.

What types of jobs do you two have and how? Like how much time does it take?

Yeah, so my partner is a copywriter. I work in advertising sales. We both at the time like it was definitely a juggle between the skates and the full time job now that we've hired out, like we have an on site manager working in the business less, working on the business more. But yeah, that first summer was definitely taking a couple half days and a Friday and running down to the Bentway to make sure that we could open up in time for people to arrive at 5pm or 4:30, whatever it was. So it was, it was a juggle. But you know, like the endorphins are flowing, the excitement is there. It was our first business. We were a new couple together. And then yes. Seeing this organic reach from local media at the time and just seeing back to back sessions booked out, we were like, this is like. It was, it was thrilling.

Okay, so what were you charging that first year versus what do you charge today? And let's talk a little bit about margins and what that looks like.

Yeah, pricing hasn't really changed all that much. So we charge $18 for the first hour. So sessions typically 4 to 5, 5 to 6pm hour long. If you skate for two hours, it's kind of, it's $25. So a small jump. If you rent skates for three hours, which few people do, they normally tap out after about an hour or two. It's $30 if you have your own skates. At the time, because the Bentway was a public space, we didn't charge for people to bring their own skates. So that was something that we do charge for. Now that we have a kind of a private unit ourselves. And then protective gear was an add on. We'd always include risk guards with any rentals just because if somebody's falling, they're more than likely going to fall on their wrists. And then knee pads, elbow pads and helmet could be rented for two dollars each or I think we did a bundle for five bucks. Let's say the average ticket was probably give or take $26 per person. It's one of those activities too that 90% of people are going to do with another person. They're going to go on a date night or they're going to go with a group of friends. So all of a sudden like that, that $26 multiplied by four could be closer to, yeah, 100 plus dollars per group.

Wow. Yeah. I mean if a middle aged dude shows up by himself to skate, he's probably a serial killer.

Yeah, well, and we had a few of them, you know, and we had people back religiously and we knew people by name. And again I think it was just the idea of like wow, it's so cool seeing this back in vogue, back on trend. Like I remember this when I was XYZ age and then yeah, people just telling other people and bringing their kids and coming on date nights. It was, it was very cool to see.

So if you're looking at like 25 bucks a person, give or take, what does a busy day look like as far as revenue and number of customers?

We've always kind of benchmarked ourselves. Like a good day would be between 2 and 3K.

Okay, so 100 people.

Yeah, yeah. I'm bad at doing math off the top of my head. So in terms of the number of people, unsure, but definitely if we're hitting 2k plus that would be like a pretty good day on a weekend because we were open those extra hours that could increase to anywhere from 3 to 4K. We had private bookings, we had people interested in, we had brands approach us and looking to do branded events. Yeah, as I said, we were off to the races with the organic local media to start. And then just because of the user generated content, word got out fast. And it's probably two of the big reasons why we're still doing it today is because it's. People do typically want to post about it.

Yeah. I mean even if you don't have the local media, you're freaking in the middle of downtown a bunch of people roller skating, like it draws the eye.

Oh yeah. A lot of organic footfall at the time too. So even if people did walk by and didn't want to skate right there and then, chances are they would, they could come back a week later or a month later.

Now is it common for people to bring their own skates or no?

It is common. Yeah. It's surprisingly not as niche as one might think. Like for a lot of your listeners now, they're like roller skating, like, I get it, I used to do it. I've done it once or twice. But they're like, it is a sizable niche. You know, people especially now with kind of the. Since COVID and lockdowns and mental health, like it's as much. For a lot of people and a lot of the community that we are now ingrained with, it is as much for them about mental health as it is physical health. The idea of getting outdoors, being active, like, and it's a good workout. Like we have people, like, they'll be like talking about their quads and their calves and they'll be like dripping sweat. So. And then as people get older too, it's, it's, it's low impact. So you'll like, we have 8 year olds and we have 80 year olds. There's not very many other recreational activities that I can see. You see that kind of lifespan, which maybe why is pickleball is so popular.

Now I was just gonna say that.

Yeah, but it's yeah, super social. And then people too, like when, when there's a more experienced skater and they're skating next to a more novice skater, a lot of times people are very open to giving instructions and feedback and tips and tricks. And as a novice skater, like you're very willing to take that, that advice and the tips and tricks because it's gonna be like, hey, I'm gonna be on my knees or on my wrists or I'm gonna take this feedback. And so it's a, it's a. You see people learning and picking it up very quick.

Now where are you getting the equipment from? Are you from China? Is there like a big vendor?

Yeah, so we actually get it through a wholesaler in the US Old Ruby skates. We the skates themselves are a German company called Kaya or Chaya depending on your pronunciation and they are manufactured in Asia, but they are premium top of the line retail skates. So that was one thing that we wanted to be a differentiator from the get go. We didn't want your kind of traditional orange toe stop like outdated skates that looked like they'd been 200 years old. We wanted to get premium skates with titanium trucks and ones that had a pop of color so that if people are posting videos, photos, reels, whatever that might be, that instantly they see, wow, like those skates, that's a vibe. And so like that first season we had like turquoise, we had pink, we had yellow, we had blue. Now our colorways are more kind of teal green and red. But to this day we still use the same skate brand.

I was just going to ask. You didn't start with something cheap and then upgrade after you're learning that?

No. And we could like, geez, we probably buy our skates for 80 US a unit or per pair. So they're certainly not cheap. But they've lasted. I mean we've probably gone through quite a few broken skates over the course of three or four years now. But they've stood the test of time. And I think it doesn't go unnoticed. You know, when people are putting on a premium skate, there's extra ankle support. People don't mind spending the $18 plus change if they know they're getting top of the line skates as well as premium protective gear.

Do you sell the skates at all?

We haven't. That was, that's always been on our radar, especially with the, I guess the upward trajectory of E comm and shopify during COVID But it's just, it's another beast, you know, with the operations of the, the pop ups and then you want to throw in sales and fulfillment. Definitely doable. And we actually had, we've had a number of samples made in China with our own colorways and our own brand. None of them have ever been as high quality as the skates we currently use in our rental program. And it's always taken a little bit more time to find these factories in China or elsewhere in Asia, get the samples delivered, and then you have feedback. Like it's a lengthy process. So we haven't gone down that rabbit hole just yet.

Okay, well, while we're talking about the quality of this case, let's talk about insurance and how you went about finding that for something so random and what your costs are like.

Yeah, insurance, probably the most important part of the whole thing. How do we go about it? We approach a number of brokers at the time. The brokers, like many other brokers, they flood the market with their knowledge and they come back to you with offers. I think ultimately the insurance broker that we went with was, was a friend of a friend, or if I remember correctly, it was a friend of ours, brother in law. He was in the insurance game. Long story short, they had all their, their due diligence. Their questions. Are you providing protective gear? Are you ensuring. Are you making helmets mandatory? Is there risk guards? Yes, we're providing risk guards for free. Everything else is kind of an add on. What's the surface like the insurance again? If I remember correctly, it was probably 7,000 for the duration of that first year.

Pop up.

Not extraordinarily like didn't break the bank. Yeah, most we had waivers. To this day, we obviously have waivers. The hope is that no accidents happen. Let's call a spade a spade. People do have the waiver, which is it's compulsory to be signed before anyone gets on skates. So thankfully that hasn't been too much of an issue or too cumbersome so far.

All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkopod.com also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. What does your setup look like? Like your point of sale for the Bentway anyway. Like what kind of hardware do you use? You have like a tent.

Yeah. So we up. So the shipping container itself had had like a flip out counter and awning. So we, we operated out of the shipping container if you can imagine like a, as a, an ice cream truck. He would operate out of the, the window of the ice cream van or the truck.

Okay.

So same for us, we had two iPads at the time. The iPads ran on data because we were outside, there was no wi fi and we had Square as our kind of payment processor. So for any in person bookings we would through square two iPads trying to think Peak Pro which was our third party online booking provider. 95% of our bookings to this day and even back then come from online. Probably a little bit less now now that we're in busier footfall malls. There's more of a balance between in person bookings and online. But at the time definitely there was probably upwards of 90% of our bookings were made pretty prepaid made online. Reminder emails, confirmation emails sent. People would sign their waiver digitally so that when they arrived we would Recommend, hey, arrive 5, 10 minutes before your skate time. We check you in, we take your shoes, put them in the cubby where your skates are being taken from and yeah, they were good to go.

What about lessons? Is that a sizable portion of your business?

I wouldn't say sizable. It's definitely something that has been requested from day one and something that we do offer for us we see it almost as a marketing program if you will. Our thinking is that hey, if someone comes for a lesson, the chances are they're going to come back and they're going to put that knowledge into practice. So we don't make a huge amount of money off of our lessons, but we do offer them in the hope that someone will take them. We do offer memberships now which is kind of relatively new and still figuring out and toying with memberships. But yeah, the hope is that people will come back again and again and, and skate for as long as possible.

Obviously like in the beginning when this like you knew it was blowing up on TikTok and everywhere, I'm sure one of like that your concerns were like is this a fad? Like is this going to be around in a year? How have you been surprised or not by that initial concern, I think that.

The kind of rhetoric around is that a fad can be applied, in my opinion, to virtually anything. So whether it's spinning and soul cycle, whether it's Barry's bootcamp, whether it's people cycling or skiing, in our opinion, getting a young person or an old person, a child or an adult or a parent away from their digital device, I think that's always going to be popular.

Yeah.

And I think it's only getting more popular. So if you offer, whether it's a pumpkin patch or a maze or a world of Barbie experience, I think anything that gets people pickable, anything that gets people off the couch, off the sofa, away from their digital devices, and active with friends and family, I think it has the opportunity to be a business for the long run. Now, whether it goes through ebbs and flows, which roller skating has and which most recreational activities do, I think that's natural. But I do think the big difference, there's two big difference. Well, the biggest difference now versus when roller skating was really popular in the 50s, 60s, 70s, is that we now have TikTok and Instagram. We now have people sharing and reposting and liking all of their visuals. And the aesthetic of roller skating, we didn't have that in the past. And it is something that's super visual. Being from Ireland, I didn't really grow up with quad roller skating, but if you asked me five or ten years ago, what comes to mind when you think of roller skating? I think of palm trees, I think of California. I think of nostalgic good vibes. I think of the sun shining. And I think all those things just evoke a happy feeling in people to this day.

Yeah, I agreed. It's just a good brand. Like, it's just the activity itself is just so wholesome. So I think that alone means that it has staying power. A framework that I like to use for something that could be seen as a fad, especially in retail, is like, let's say, like frozen yogurt shops. Right. Fifteen years ago, they were everywhere. Now there's less of them. But the best locations survive. Yep. Right. They got. It's got to taste good. But really, at the end of the day, if you had to choose between taste and, like, an amazing location, the location wins. And so it sounds like you're. You're doing that.

Yeah. And. And I think nothing is. Is. Is forever, you know, like what we're doing at the Bentway or what we did at the Bentway has changed somewhat to what we're doing. Today and what we're doing in, in two and five years from now, maybe slightly different than what we're doing today. So with, with anything, I think there will be a natural evolution to the, not only to the activity, but to also the business.

What does staffing look like on it? Like a really busy Saturday versus a really slow day. How many people do you need to have there?

Yeah, it's a good question. I would say on a really slow day, you could get away with two staff. Especially like the fact that we started the business and there was just the two of us. We know that, hey, if it is a slower Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, you can definitely manage with two people. It's a little bit hectic and you might want that. Third, just for comfort reasons, on a busier day, you're definitely looking closer to five. We still model ourselves with our indoor locations and malls. We keep it pretty streamlined. We don't really have a snack program. We offer drinks and beverages for a few dollars just as refreshments, but we don't go into outfitting the space and bathrooms. We typically redirect people to the public washrooms in the mall because we're taking over these 40, 50, 60,000 square feet units that may not have been occupied in the last five or ten years. So it's. We keep it trying. We try and keep it streamlined, and with that we're able to reduce the staff numbers.

So let's talk about the mall strategy. What got you thinking about that? You were just tapped out at the Bent Way. You need a second location across town. How did you find the mall manager? What does that look like?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's kind of a funny story. So at the time, during the Bentway, my girlfriend and I were going to workout classes. But the workout classes, because all the gyms were closed, they were hosted on the rooftop parking deck of a downtown mall. A nearby mall had struck up a deal with the, with the mall and said, hey, like, we can't, we can't operate our classes indoors. Can we use your vacant rooftop parking garage? So we were going to these workout classes all summer long. And it kind of dawned on us at the time, like, hey, like this mall, Cadillac Fairview is the name of the owner and operator of this mall. And they own tens of malls, if not hundreds across Canada and the U.S. we said, hey, if these guys have vacant retail space here in downtown, in the downtown core of Toronto, maybe they have vacant either retail or parking garage space elsewhere. So fast forward a couple of Weeks we find out that Cadillac Fairview is the owner operator of the mall. We reach out to them, we say, hey, we've done this successfully at the Bentway for the last three months. We'd love to discuss maybe just turning any vacant space you have into a pop up roller rink. They came back and they pitched us, they came back and said, hey, we have X amount of malls throughout Ontario. Please, please take our malls, which is the province that Toronto that we're located in. And they said, yeah, we have all of these malls. We have indoor vacant space, we have outdoor vacant space, we have parking garages, we have parking lots. So it was almost like again, as we were very lucky with the Bentway, we also got very lucky with our second location. Ultimately we landed on a rooftop location garage. The rooftop parking garage was closed at the time, so it wasn't even open. There was, yeah, it was P4. So there was three levels underneath including the ground floor. And they said, hey, like do you want to come do a site visit and see if the surface is smooth enough? We did that. We checked out the surface. It was not smooth enough. So we're like racking our brains trying to figure out okay, like how can we, how can we make this work? Because like if you can put roller skating on a rooftop and capture the sunsets, like that's, that's going to be.

A vibe even better.

So yeah, we looked into sports tiles, which is kind of like the same type of material, plastic material tile that a basketball court or a pickleball court might be made out of. We invested in probably 20,000 square feet of those. And then that was season two. We returned to the Bentway and we had our second location on a rooftop.

Those tiles are expensive because I've looked into building a pickleball court in my backyard. Did you get them from China or from like.

We got them from a local distributor here in Canada. I believe we probably paid about $4 per square foot. Maybe it wasn't 20,000 square foot. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe it was closer to like 8 or 10,000 square feet. I think all in. We spent about 30k on tiles, which was a huge investment at the time. But again, we weren't paying ourselves from the first season. Any money that we profited we put right back into obtaining a container, getting that container outfitted, getting it craned up to the rooftop. We wanted to operate just like we did the previous year out of a reef refurbished shipping container. And then the only other aspect was getting, getting a Smooth surface. It probably wasn't as smooth as we would have liked, but the novelty of having a pop up roller rink on a rooftop was definitely novel and new. And again, yeah, we were off to the races. And it proved super popular that first summer.

And what did you have to pay the management company in rent for that?

I think because we had paid the bentway, give or take 4k per month, we kind of had that in our mind. What we've since learned with working with malls, which is probably the most interesting aspect of the business and working with malls in general, is that it can be really case by case in terms of the price point that you pay. If you're talking to a specialty leasing person within a mall, it's their job to bring in revenue for that mall. Whereas if you get contacted or if you get introduced to the marketing manager, all of a sudden they are the ones with the budget. So we've had cases where we've worked with malls and our, our direct point of contact has been the marketing director or marketing person and they've paid us to be there for a month pop up. And we've had other very similar scenarios whereby our point of contact has been specialty leasing and it's their job to make use of any unused space. So I think at the time, to answer your question, it was probably in around 4,500, 5,000 per month. And then I think if there was anything over 30k per month or 35k in revenue, they might get a small.

Kickback, which is common for malls.

Which is, yeah, super common for malls. And then you'd have to disclose your sales on a monthly basis. But yeah, that opened up our eyes. Like, wow. Like these malls, they have vacant space. Like if there's one thing that there is a lot of in North America, it's parking lots. So it was just a matter of presenting it to them in a sexy PDF and a presentation deck and say, hey, we can utilize your space, we can bring extra footfall to your other retailers, we can increase the dwell time, we can even collaborate with local, local restaurants on date nights. So like for the, for the mall marketing manager or the specialty leasing manager, we were essentially making their job super easy. There was like what these guys, they seem to know what they're doing. They're going to activate a space and they're going to drive young teens and 20 and 30 year olds, which was kind of like our core demographic to our properties, which is what everyone wants.

Yeah. Then, then go shop at Anthropology. What an interesting framework. I've Never thought of this or heard of this. And it's not like you did it intentionally, but you, you learned it and it's like, like don't sell into the profit centers of another company because they're in the business of generating profit for their company. Sell into the cost centers, the centers looking to spend money to grow their business. That was the big unlock there, right?

That's kind of what's, what's what launched our, our now mobile version of what we do with the van. Because we were seeing these mall marketing managers and they would spend, pull a figure from the sky. They might have spent 5 or 10k over Christmas getting Santa there. They might have spent another a.m. over Easter to do an Easter egg hunt in the mall. It's their job to ensure that there's high foot traffic in their properties. If they can get high foot traffic, they can get big retailers, they can get the Apple, they can get the Anthropologie, they can get the Lululemons and the Aritzia of the world. So like they have budget there. For us it was like, right, we want to be receiving this budget, we don't want to be spending into their accounts. So yeah, very organic. We had never worked with malls before. We didn't have any kind of retail background. But yeah, it's been super interesting navigating our way through the retail mall landscape and just seeing the commonalities between each different property and how a lot of them now are migrating from your traditional mall to mixed use developments somewhere where you can go and you can do your spin class, you can do your grocery shopping, but you can also live there. So I think over the coming five or ten years it's going to be interesting to see a lot of the traditional malls be kind of these community epicenters.

I interviewed a guy on this podcast months ago who teaches kids how to use heavy equipment in a mall parking lot.

Yeah, yeah, we see that our current pop up right now. There is, and I had never seen it before, but there's a company utilizing maybe 200 parking spaces and they are teaching people how to ride motorcycles. Again, they're operating from a 40 foot shipping container. But seeing a business like that, which would be perfect for the podcast, I can't help but like get the gears turning in my head. But like, wow, there's like, if there's one thing there's so much of, it's, it's parking lot spaces. So whether it's some like a maze, I've toyed with the idea of like a turning A parking lot into a maze just around Halloween or whatever it may be.

But funny you say that. I thought of making. It was my friend's idea. I don't want to steal it. But. But he thought of making like a maze in a parking lot outside a spirit Halloween, like a Halloween maze and then just convert it to a Christmas maze.

Yeah, genius. And you know what? And you could charge 5 bucks a piece, even like at least 10 bucks for the whole family. 15 bucks. And like you break it down, put.

It in a, put it in a storage unit for the eight months.

Yeah. And it would be popular.

Build it again.

Yeah, 100%.

Okay. So what happens with rain? Do you offer like rain checks? And how often is that a factor?

Yeah, it is, It's a factor. And it's why we've away from outdoor locations. Because there are just too many variables. Especially with the rooftop, with the wind, the rain, there was no coverage versus the Bentway was 80, 90% covered. If it rains, we would typically keep a close eye on the weather forecast, the radar. We try our very best to send out advanced notification saying hey, we've got to cancel due to bad weather. In that notification email, there would be a link for the skater or the guest to rebook their own skate. Let's say out of every 100 skaters, you might get three to, I don't know, five to 10 skaters that say, hey, like I was just in town for the weekend, like rescheduling is not really going to be possible for me. And in that case we just issue a refund. And we still do like to say we're non refundable. We would rather just keep the customer service on point and say, hey, if it means you'll come back in the future and you want a refund now, now, absolutely, we'll share a refund now.

Are you still on that same mall parking lot roof today or did you move away from that?

So this past season was our last season there. That was a decision. We were toying with the idea of not going back this past summer just for that reason. Really it was just so many variables as wind, there's rain. We learned too that you really have to be activating and programming around the skates. So like we toyed with having food vendors up there and again, very cumbersome. You're nearly spending more time managing the, the food vendors than you are focused on your core business. So this past season we wrapped up, if my memory serves me, end of September, maybe mid September, and we won't be returning There. So we're actually in the process now of selling these sports tiles and focusing on indoor locations in the wintertime.

A lot of people building pickleball courts that would buy those.

Yeah, we actually sold of The, I think 8 or 10,000 square feet. We've sold, give or take half, but yeah, yeah, basketball courts, tennis courts, unpickable courts.

Now how did that first season go at the roof? Like your first season with two locations? Were there any like breaking points? How did it go?

It went well. It went, yeah, it was, it was profitable. Again, overheads were low. We had the investment of the tiles. We had. We had to buy additional inventory, protective gear. We found a secondhand shipping container again, 20 foot shipping container. We retrofitted that on a modest budget. It wasn't. Excuse me, it wasn't too sexy by any means.

Do you like paint it or wrap it or make it look.

It was, it was, it was a funny story. So the mall had actually already half retrofitted two shipping containers and they were sitting in a yard somewhere in Toronto and they said they connected us with the person who was holding the containers in their yard. So we essentially, on behalf of the mall, moved the shipping containers and organized for a crane to crane it up to P4 of the rooftop. But the mall had already painted. They were black, but they were like a matte black, freshly painted. The mall had already painted and organized that prior to us being in the picture. So all we had to do was put shelving units, just standard plywall or plywood wooden shelving units in the container. Trying to think back. Yeah, big learnings from that year. Don't underestimate the wind on a rooftop, because that is real weather is obviously a big indicator of how successful you are. If you have a rainy June and you're relying on a busy July, August, September, all of a sudden you're kind of cutting yourself short of a full season. A lot of that has led to again just us focusing on investing in, on indoor locations where there's just less variables and it's, it's just more predictive. Predictive Foot. Footfall.

You were mentioning you. You were probably using around 10,000 square feet up there. And my gut reaction was, man, is that enough? And then I used to rent a warehouse that was 10,000 square feet and that's, that's pretty dang big. Like it, it would probably be bigger than your average like roller skating rink. So what is like the square footage that you need or prefer for or any concept, whether it's mobile from A van or rooftop or the Bentway?

Yeah, I think for the van. Now, now that we're doing a lot more mobile events and we come to you type of events, our rule of thumb is the minimum is the size of a basketball court or a tennis court. So I'm actually unsure what the exact square footage of that is. But if you have a space that is away from vehicles, that's safe, that's cordoned off in some capacity, and that has a super smooth surface, we can get you skating. We've done smaller, we've. We did the Pinterest holiday party last December in their office on the sixth floor of a downtown office building. Not ideal, but I mean, you kind of make do, you know, it's. I think for the most part, whether you're the event organizer managing the event and the logistics, or you're the attendee of the holiday party or in this case the Pinterest staff, there's a certain appreciation. But like, all right, we're kind of working with what we have. It's not as big or as maybe smooth as a traditional roller rink, but the idea, yeah, I think people are just more understanding the fact that it's a novel kind of pop up.

And what are the unit economics of your mobile concept? Do you charge anything differently? What do you pay the parking lot, et cetera?

Yeah, good questions. So for the mobile iteration of what we do now, what we like to coin our roaming roller van, we have a few different pricing tiers depending on who, who's booking. So if we're doing a school event, we want to try, which is we've decided to discount because again, we're kind of still, we've only had the van since May and we're still tweaking the price point. The feedback from a lot of teachers, educators, principals is that we want to make this as accessible to all students from of all backgrounds. So we try and get it to as close to 15, 18, $20 per student. But then we'll put in a minimum. Hey, we'll come to your school, but we have to do a minimum of 60 students. And then of those 60 students, we'll break it into three 45 minute sessions or three hour long sessions. Our sweet spot in terms of the quantity of skates that we can fit in the back of the van, our sweet spot is around 25 skaters per session. So whether those sessions are 45 minutes long or an hour long, if we can get 60 students skating, we're in the clear, we're making money, we're Paying two staff at the logistics, travel time, the setup, all covered. Now, if we're doing a corporate event like the Pinterest holiday party, for example, rewind a little bit. For a school event, it would typically be that a three hour session. So three 45 minute sessions, three hours in total. If we're doing a corporate event or a community event, we work with a lot of municipalities to get their communities rolling. We will have a longer event time, so we'll have a five hour skate period. So we might have, instead of it being three 45 minute sessions, we'll have five 45 minute sessions and we'll get between 125 and 150 skaters skating in that duration. So for something like that, we charge 4950. And again, that's an all inclusive turnkey price, including staff logistic, travel time, skate rentals, protective gear, public liability insurance waivers. So again, if you're the office manager booking the holiday party or you are working in the recreational department for the city of Dallas, Texas, and you want to offer this as a free activity to the community, we roll up, no pun intended. And it is just. Yeah, turnkey.

What is your average profit for a job like that, like a mobile job?

It's a good question. When it comes to margins, I'm not the wisest. I know our profit margins typically with the traditional pop ups, are anywhere between 30 and 40%. They're a lot healthier with our mobile van event friendly format. The reason being is our overheads. They were already low with the shipping container and the pop ups. But with our new event friendly format, we have our van lease, we have our two staff, which we're only paying if we're booked for the van too. We already had the inventory, so we just decided, hey, we might as well put this to use instead of it being in a storage locker in a public storage. Let's put it on racks, roll the racks up the ramp into the back of the van. I'd say our margins are probably closer to 60, 70%, man.

I mean, you can't even really count, like you said, the van into the margins because you already owned it.

We already owned the inventory. Yeah, we leased the van.

So any monthly fee to anyone for those jobs, right? Yeah, I think same amount of employees.

Same amount of. Yeah. And we've been blessed with employee employees sticking around. So like our manager, our manager who manages a lot of our van events or our mobile events, has been with us since that second location, our first rooftop location that we talked about. He knows skating Inside out. Now he's become a skater. Typically two staff, one van. We'll have four racks with up to 85 pairs of skates in the back. We have protective gear. Our newest addition is a 10 by 10 fully branded beautiful tent. The van is branded the very same as the tent. But the idea is, yeah, we get to to an event an hour before the event kicks off. We'll be set up in no more than 25 to 35 minutes. The staff might go grab a coffee, keep hydrated, get some water. They're kind of at the check in tent desk area. Fifteen minutes before skaters arrive. And then. Yeah, the events will typically run either two, three or five hours. Get as many skaters kind of through the door because we're paid in advance up front from the event organizer or the host and then pack up the van. Another 35 minutes and we're out of there.

Beautiful. I mean, you're paid up front. It seems like you're leaning into the right model.

I think so. Yeah, we did. I'm not sure if we haven't really posted much about this because the outcome wasn't the best, but we were on the Canadian version of Shark Tank called Dragon's Den. So we did that last summer. We didn't get a deal. And the feedback that we got was it was interesting, especially because a lot of the judges or the Dragons at the time came from a retail background. Their feedback was like, but how long is this vacant retail space and mall space going to be around? You know, malls will bounce back. Yeah, retail will bounce back. But I think there was some merit in that. And it opened our eyes to the fact that if we can get paid up front, if we can work with some of these, like we've worked with Crest, Fujifilm, Neutrogena, we've worked with the Four Seasons, Pinterest. If we can get work with these type of brands and we can get paid up front and our margins are lower because we're just super efficient with this van. And it's a lot more scalable too. Like we can. If somebody in Texas said, hey, and that's kind of where we're at right now. We want to open this up to maybe a franchise, maybe even just a license, maybe to say, hey, like we're going to sell the blueprint, you can call it like Roll Tide Skates.

That's a good one.

Yeah.

Roll Time Roller for Western Central Alabama. That would crash.

I think that is the next step for us is like we could do the franchise and we could have more Control over the brand and expand the brand. And we are looking into that avenue. But we're also open to the idea of like, let's just package our information, our knowledge over the last four years and instead of selling it to 500 franchisees or 1,000 franchisees, maybe 5,000 people will license the business plan.

I would license it if I were you, just because I just know how expensive franchising is and how long it takes. You could force people to go through your point of sale, take a percentage there. You could force them to buy your gear. Now, people will go around you, of course, but on the whole they won't because they want it to work.

It's not rocket science too, you know, we bought a Ford Transit van, we wrapped it in sexy branding. We have skates on shelves, we have protective gear like anyone else can do it. And for any listener that wants to do it. Yeah, reach out, we'll tell you how it's done. So, yeah, us, I think the license model and like, again, we are, if we could see an iteration of what we've done with our van in a different geography, whether it be Texas, Florida, California, like that's super cool.

Yeah, that is cool. Now, have you seen many competitors pop up at least around you?

No. So there's been one big permanent rink which was opened in the last two years. A lot of money went into it. I wouldn't even be able to fast how much money and investment it took. The big thing that we've learned is the seasonality of it. People want to be outdoors in the summertime and they want to be indoors in the wintertime, at least up in Canada. So if you have an outdoor rink in the summertime, you can't operate in the, in the winter. And if you have an indoor rink in the wintertime, you don't really want to be operating in the summer months because it's dead. People want to be outdoors, which is why we've kind of fine tuned our current pop up model to be very, very similar to a Spirit Halloween. We want to be in around August. We want to be set up in time for back to school September time frame. We want to ride through the full Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, midterm break, and we want to be out of a particular location by end of May, end of April, early May, once the weather starts turning and people want to be outdoors again. So that's, that's kind of the, the most recent iteration of the pop up model.

Smart. I'm sure you've had this Thought a dozen times. But it's like, why would you build a rink? Yeah. Like you want to get into this business? Why? I had an interview with another guy that was in the swim business and like you've got swim franchises spending a million dollars to put an indoor pool in, like next to a hobby lobby. When he just like borrows pool and is wildly profitable. Like.

Well, it goes back to one of the big reasons why I think we will go down the route of licensing versus franchising. Like when I see some of these other brands, not anything to do with roller skating. Like it might be window cleaning. And I'm sure you've come across the pinks and it's like charging 50 grand franchise fee. Like that's not accessible to the average person, let alone like a Starbucks or a McDonald's franchise fee, which is probably sets you back a million, two million plus. We want to create something that the average 20 to 40 year old can be like, you know what? What? All I need is 50k all in, assuming they'd lease the van, but we want to make it as affordable to as many as possible.

That's amazing. This was so, so good. They don't usually go this long, but.

What are we on now?

I could talk over an hour.

Nice hour.

Yeah. This is good. So thank you for your time. Is there any. Anything you'd like to leave us with or how can we contact you or both.

The website is suso s u s o scapeco. Same handle on Instagram and TikTok. TikTok. We're not as active as I'd like to be, but still figuring out the algorithm and the platform itself and yeah, I think the next step for us is to put all of this knowledge into an E course or some kind of digital product whereby if you are somebody in Texas, Chicago, Illinois, Florida, anywhere and you want to get open road, pun intended this time. Yeah, reach out. Happy to chat. And yeah, thanks again, Chris, for having us on.

Okay, thank you. All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.