In March 2020, Steve Wilson and his partners at Escape Manor were riding high. Founded six years earlier, the Ottawa-based entertainment company was operating escape rooms at 10 locations in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Brisbane, Australia. It had set a goal of doubling that number to 20 by 2025, and its founders saw no reason why […]
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In March 2020, Steve Wilson and his partners at Escape Manor were riding high.
Founded six years earlier, the Ottawa-based entertainment company was operating escape rooms at 10 locations in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Brisbane, Australia. It had set a goal of doubling that number to 20 by 2025, and its founders saw no reason why they couldn’t hit that target.
“That was the plan in 2019,” Escape Manor co-owner and chief marketing officer Steve Wilson says. “Obviously, that came to a grinding halt in 2020.”
Like everyone else whose world was upended five years ago this month, Wilson wasn’t counting on an international health crisis. But almost from the moment the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, things changed dramatically for Escape Manor and its industry.
When governments imposed measures to curb the spread of the virus, Escape Manor was forced to shut its doors and slash 90 per cent of its workforce. It was the beginning of a tumultuous stretch of on-again, off-again lockdowns that disrupted the company’s operations for much of the following two years.
“We were first to close and last to (re)open,” says Wilson, who, along with his co-founders, did not draw a paycheque for long stretches of the pandemic. “And we did not possess the ability to do takeout, so our business was just decimated overnight. But scrappy we got.”
In an instant, Escape Manor’s leaders tore up their existing strategic plan and got to work reinventing the business. One of the buzzwords of 2020 – “pivot” – applied to Wilson and his partners in spades.
With no revenue flowing from its on-premise escape rooms, the company launched a virtual escape experience that April. That summer, it took the concept outdoors at the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum.
“We didn’t know whether we’d be allowed to have people in location or out of location one week to the next,” Wilson says. “We just created a large outdoor experience that sort of satisfied all of that.”
Meanwhile, the company made other changes that turned out to be much more far-reaching than it ever expected.
Gone, for example, was Escape Manor’s “sprawling” head office above an LCBO store across from its escape room on Wellington Street West. Ditching the space – which boasted a “test kitchen” for experimenting with new game concepts as well as its own axe-throwing lane – saved the company $20,000 a month.
“To this day, we haven’t gone back and gotten a headquarters,” Wilson notes. “We’re now nomads. We work out of our locations and home offices and have laptop, will travel type of thing. We learned how to do things very lean, and that has carried on.”
Looking back, Wilson says the experience made him a better entrepreneur.
“I like to try and be an optimist,” he explains. “So when challenges arise, it invigorates us to get nimble and get scrappy and find out how we can, a, survive and, b, get through it (and) create new opportunities and look at new ways of how we do our work and how we offer things to folks. As much as it was frustrating and it was scary, it really energized us to be resilient and be resourceful. Not that I would ever want to repeat it again.”
New location on Elgin Street
In late 2022, with the lockdowns finally over, Escape Manor opened its new 11,600-square-foot flagship location on Elgin Street with help from a $100,000 grant from Ottawa Tourism.
The space can accommodate up to 300 guests and features seven unique escape experiences, as well as an entire floor dedicated to food, drink and games, including a bocce ball court, gamified darts and giant Jenga.
Its debut ushered in what Wilson refers to as the “honeymoon year” of 2023 for Escape Manor.
“Folks had a ton of money stored up in their wallets and they had a ton of pent-up desire to go out and socialize,” he says. “That got us back on track.”
Unfortunately for Escape Manor, the good times were short-lived. Wilson says the “honeymoon wore off” by the following year as rising inflation ate into discretionary spending and consumers who’d gotten used to ordering in dinner and watching Netflix during the pandemic stopped socializing as much.
“It’s just that much harder to get people to come out and spend and stay longer and come more frequently,” he says. “We had to hustle harder for every dollar to get year-over-year parity with 2023.”
Now, it appears 2025 is bringing a whole new set of challenges for the business.
The escalating trade war with the United States has led to “economic fearmongering and unpredictability,” as Wilson puts it, and that’s rarely good for any business.
“I’m having a challenge trying to see the same opportunities with our current economic woes, but we’re working on it,” he adds.
While uncertainty is the watchword of the day, Escape Manor is banking on a brighter future.
The company, which shuttered two locations during the pandemic, is set to open a new escape room in Ottawa this summer. Wilson is coy about the details, saying only it’s part of a “really cool partnership” that will be revealed soon.
“It’s going to be a huge, huge announcement,” he says. “It should garner international media (attention), and it’s something we’ve been working on for the better part of two years.”
Escape Manor also plans to expand further in the Greater Toronto Area with an escape room aimed at kids that is modelled after its successful “Ottawa junior” location on Greenbank Road.
That will bring its total number of locations to 12, a far cry from the 20 that Escape Manor’s founders envisioned they would own by the end of 2025 when they crafted their long-term blueprint for the company six years ago.
Still, Wilson remains undaunted.
Escape Manor’s head count is now about 230, higher than before the pandemic began. In an effort to tap into new revenue streams, the company has diversified its offerings with trivia nights and other events at its Elgin Street location, including performances by acts like Dueling Pianos.
Wilson says he truly believes Escape Manor is a stronger, more resilient organization for having gone through the COVID-19 crisis.
“If you look at our 10 years of operation, we’ve had a bit of a roller coaster, not of our own doing. It’s not the glory years of 2019, 2018, 2017. But we’re still here,” he says.
“We’ve literally got something going on every day of the week in addition to our regular, traditional offerings. The good thing is that we know that when times get better, when interest rates drop and people are not fearful of what’s going on south of the border and they are ready to come out and spend more and stay longer and come more frequently, we have all this in place and then we’re back to solid growth. We’re excited for that.”
