Reinventing The Family Entertainment Dining Experience

Are you disappointed in your dining revenue? If you have a park or FEC, a large part of your profits should be in food and beverage sales. If your profits are low in this department, you may want to reinvent your dining experience from top to bottom.?

An Honest Assessment

It's time to get real about the service that you are providing your guests. You can assess your offerings in a few different ways.? A feedback system is really important. Whether you do a survey on social media to get the thoughts and ideas of your target audience or if you directly ask your loyal guests how to improve, both are effective means of identifying problem areas. Regardless of how you choose to identify your family entertainment facility weaknesses, it should really be your first step.

Your leadership team should also have meetings to discuss ideas for recreating the dining area. For instance, your team should be able to contribute tips for creating a better visual and interactive dining experience.?

Topics to discuss:

Is the dining area clean?? During this assessment process look at the walls and the carpet/flooring, are there visible stains?? Look at things from a guest's point of view. If you have a soda fountain and it hasn't been cleaned in a while, your guest is going to notice. If there are large stains on the floors and walls, your guests are going to notice. If the paint is peeling, the guest is going to notice. All of these things contribute to your dining atmosphere. Each one is important. You want to have a clean, healthy environment for your guests to feel comfortable eating in.?

Colors and themes are eye-catching! Try to incorporate all of the colors in your logo on your walls or even your tables and chairs to complement your overall business brand. The decor and ambiance should reflect your business personality.?

People use the restroom in your dining area often when they eat there. Most people wash their hands before and after a meal. Make sure your bathrooms are clean, well stocked, and don't have any noticeable blights such as rust stains or peeling paint.

Do you have a TV screen playing popular sports games? Throughout the year there are various sports that people enjoy watching. Having one or two available can help keep some guests? eating and drinking while watching their favorite sport.

Customer Service

If you have a bar or a restaurant with wait staff, you need to make sure that your bartenders and servers are providing the best customer service possible. If you want to provide the best service, your staff should be highly attentive to the customer's needs. Having friendly employees that encourage your guests to spend more is a tremendous asset to your business!?

No one wants to go out to eat and have unprofessional service. Staff should not be standing around on their phones while guests are waiting, and guests should never feel like they are a burden for asking for more food and drinks. Even if the food is great and the atmosphere is clean and inviting, a bad customer service experience can ruin the reputation of your family entertainment facility.?

Let’s Talk Food!

There are many things that can contribute to the atmosphere of your dining area. But, the bottom line is good food! If your food isn't delicious and crave-able the customers most likely won't return. This is a highly competitive industry and it's important to offer the best that you can within your budget.

In order to stay within a reasonable budget it's a smart move to buy locally sourced items and ingredients when you can. This will help keep your food cost down because you won't have a lot of extra fees like high transportation costs. It also helps when you advertise the fact that you are buying local to show that your business is a community supporter. Believe it or not, this will make most of your local guests very happy.??

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is offer the same great tasting food each and every time it is cooked for your guests. When your guests love the food and they come back to eat that same menu item, they expect it to be just as they remembered it. If you have trouble keeping cooks on the same page or each person feels the need to be creative and do their own thing, you might think about a franchise opportunity.?

Let's take Boomers for example. We have the same great-tasting food all the time and our guests love it! We will soon be providing franchise opportunities to other family entertainment businesses. If you find it difficult to come up with some unique menu items and make sure that they are cooked the same every time, you might want to become a franchisee to get a reputation for great food.

If you are going to create your own unique menu items, that's wonderful! But be sure that you are purchasing quality ingredients, and then advertise that quality. Guests are willing to pay more for quality! They don't want to spend their hard-earned money on poorly prepared food. They want a superior dining experience and it is up to you to provide it in order to be successful in the restaurant business.?

Have you read an article I’ve published here on LinkedIn and want to talk about the topic a little more? If you’d like to book a call with me regarding the Family Entertainment Industry or Private Equity, please feel free. I enjoy connecting & collaborating with others in the same professional space.

Tim Murphy is CEO of APX Operating Company, dba Boomers Parks, under the ownership of Cerberus private equity ($60B assets). Boomers Parks owns six family entertainment centers and two water parks with locations in California, Florida, and New Jersey.

As CEO of Boomers Parks since 2020, Tim took these eight parks from bankruptcy to profitability in just a year – in the middle of a global pandemic. When Boomers acquired these parks, they were operating at a $10 million loss. Tim transformed the customer experience and added new revenue streams to generate a 180% increase in revenue in 2021 and on a similar trajectory in 2022.

Tim launched his 35+ year career at Walt Disney World and has since served more than 150 entertainment, restaurant, and food & beverage brands across more than 10,000 locations in C-suite and senior positions.

Additionally, Tim is a Board Director with Coney Park & Happy City - Family Entertainment & Amusement Parks, part of The Carlyle Group ($276B assets), a private equity firm that operates 150+ family entertainment centers and amusement parks in Latin America.?

Tim has worked with top-tier entertainment and restaurant brands including Disney, Rebounderz Trampoline Parks, Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, etc.), Red Lobster, Jimmy John’s, Applebee’s, Sonny’s Bar-B-Q, Denny’s, El Pollo Loco, Hardee’s, Golden Corral, and Firehouse Subs.

Tim has overseen more than 35 purchase transactions involving over 1,200 restaurants, stores, and park locations.? With extensive experience in buying and selling businesses, handling negotiations with buyers and sellers, and creating strategic partnerships to build strong brands, Tim has facilitated deals ranging from $11 million to $350 million+.

Tim is a member of International Association of Amusement Parks & Attractions (IAAPA), California Attractions and Parks Association (CAPA), Florida Attractions Association (FAA), American Amusement Machine Association (AAMA), National Restaurant Association (NRA), California Restaurant Association (CRA), World Waterpark Association (WWA) and International Franchising Association (IFA). He is a licensed commercial real estate broker in the State of Florida. Tim earned a BS/BA in Accounting from the University of Central Florida and an MBA in Finance from Orlando College.