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.”
