Starting a Paintball Business
STEP 1. DECIDE WHAT KIND OF FIELD YOU WANT TO BE
Starting a paintball field can be very easy, or very difficult depending on the type of field you are trying to establish.
The first step to building a successful paintball field is to decide what kind of field you want to be. This is
extremely important and has far reaching effects on your equipment purchases, overhead, staffing, zoning, customer base, and more.
Unfortunately, this is the place where many field owners stumble, because they
misjudge the type of field that they are, or they misjudge the local
community's potential player base.
Basic Paintball Field Types:
Type 1: Large outdoor wooded
fields:
In the late 80s and early 90s, most fields were type one. They were
basically large forests that were not suitable for building on, or were very
remote from large cities, making the land lease very
affordable. This is still true today, however this is
changing dramatically, and very soon this type of field will become the
minority, not the majority. This change is occurring
now. A new field owner today has to look forward to the future
when fields will become mainly woods+speedball, speedball only, or hyperball
only.
To die-hard purists and uneducated paintball newbies, it is a bad thing that I am predicting that woods fields are becoming the minority. But they are. And to you, the new field owner, this is NOT a bad thing. It is a good thing, for many reasons. For instance, some newbies will want to come to your field and "play war". This sounds like fun this will cost you a lot more money and your revenues will be a lot less if you cater to this type of group. Why your ask?
It is still possible to have a "type one" field and be successful, as long as your fields are located radially around your staging area, and they are kept small. Or, if you spend a lot of money on marketing (like Skirmish), then you can run many games simultaneously. This requires remote paint sales and air filling stations, which you could do with trailers or box vans. Are you starting to see the extra expense if a large wooded field yet? If you are hell-bent on starting a wooded field, you could also find other ways to make money such as selling food, group photos and merchandising.
Field Types 3 through 5: Speedball and Hyperball
Like it or not, this is the future of paintball. National paintball events are moving into large arenas like the Skydome, Astrodome, and others. This helps get paintball into the mainstream because this format is much more friendly for TV. As a field owner, YOU WANT paintball on TV. As kids and adults see tournament paintball guns on TV, they will be mesmerized and want to play.
As a field owner, you can potentially make a lot more money in a lot less time running speedball and woods field combinations. The biggest challenge of course is to make the speedball fields large enough and challenging enough that your newbie players WILL NOT WANT TO PLAY IN THE WOODS. In this respect, paintball is still in a transition. Newbies DO want to play hide and seek in the woods, and most paintball owners are too cheap to do speedball fields correctly. So your challenge is to make your speedball fields fun enough and sporting enough that your players will prefer them. There is a tremendous opportunity here to outshine the other paintball fields in your area if you built a stellar speedball complex.
Designing a good, safe speedball field:
Selling the idea of speedball to
newbies:
As I said before, newbies WILL first want to play in the woods because
they are basically scared of being hit by a paintball, and they want to hide. What
I found that works well is to take groups to a very small wooded field for
their first game. Make sure that all of the heavy brush is cleared
on the field, and that the bunkers are medium sized and made of
logs. Keep the bunkers fairly far from the home
base. The small size of the field and lack of big places to hide
ensures that almost every player will get shot. This is a
good thing, because the sooner the newbies overcome their fear of getting shot, the
sooner they become aggressive and start shooting more. The more
they shoot, the more money you make. After this preliminary
game, you can then take them to your LARGEST speedball arena. The
bunkers will be bigger, the field will be perfectly balanced, and with
speedball there is more chaos, so the weaker team will have a better chance to
win. Then as the day moves on and they run out of paint, you can
progressively move them to smaller and smaller speedball fields.
If you only have one speedball field, and you have a large group of players, you should split them up into small teams (less than 10 people per team) and have them play against each other. Usually a large group has more than one person that likes to be in charge, so this lets them have an opportunity to have "captains" that can lead their own team. Then you can offer a trophy to the winning team of the day. The competitive nature of co-workers coming out to play will cause them to jump all over this idea as well. That cheap little $5 trophy will go a long way to making your customers forget that they are not playing in the woods, and they will appreciate the competitive nature of speedball a lot more. This works well. Also, when they go back to the office, that trophy will be a reminder of the fun that they had at your field, and they will want to come back again later.
| HOT
TIP FOR ALL FIELDS
As a general rule, you should ALWAYS give your customers something to take home with them to remember the days play. At the very least, you should take a picture of each and every group that comes out to play. Mail the group leader a dozen copies of the picture after the event, and have a sticker on the back of the photo with your field's name, phone number, and web address on it. |
Field Types 6 and 7: Indoor Fields
By "indoor fields" I
am describing the type of paintball field that is typically run in a warehouse
or other large building.
I am personally not a fan of operating indoor paintball field business for many reasons.
I have seen many indoor paintball fields come and go over the years. Usually because of the massive overhead involved. And no one has really built a nice indoor field because of the limitations that the building presents. "The Splathouse" in Virginia is a perfect example. The building was built decades ago as a dairy, so there are many doorways and ramps that cows actually walked up and down in the building. The play area is tiny and unbalanced, the field is dirty, and the noise level is high. Players used to flock to this field in February and put up with these problems for their annual winter tournament because it was simply the only place to play in February. Large stadium events like Skyball have changed all that. What makes this field continue to operate is the fact that it is located within a college campus, and wooded paintball fields are far away.
There seems to be a business model for a successful indoor paintball field, but it would involve a tremendous initial investment to do it properly. It would require constant local marketing and additional revenue streams (like an arcade or laser tag) to make a go of it. The better indoor fields are very large and the owner of the field also owns the building. All in all, this would be my last choice for running a paintball field. Attendance at indoor fields is VERY inconsistant for regular players as well. It would be much simpler to lease a vacant grassy lot and erect a speedball field next to a busy highway.
How I found the perfect land for my paintball field
Now that you have decided what KIND of field you want to be, this can help you enormously to pick the right location. Finding just the right spot to build a paintball field is a difficult task. Large wooded areas are especially difficult to find. This is another reason that speedball is taking off, because all you need is a grass lot next to a highway. When I was searching for land back in 1994, I worked at a civil engineering firm that had aerial photos of my entire state. I already had a field started, but the land was terrible, and my landlord was kicking me out because we were "scaring away the deer" that he wanted to hunt.
| HOT
TIP
Make sure that the landowner does not allow hunting on the land. I know this is obvious, but you had better ask and get it signed in a contract. |
So in using the aerial maps and local tax maps (tax maps are freely available at your local county office), I was able to find out who owned what. When I saw a large wooded area on the aerial maps, I would use the tax map to find out who owned it and I would call them. Tax maps also include a phone number, so this was an easy process. Many times you could tell from the name of the owner what the land was being used for. Sometimes the owner would be listed as "XYZ Development Corporation". I did not even bother with a parcel of land when I saw this because it was obvious that there would be a housing development on the land at some point. Through this process, I looked at 14 separate parcels of land. The reaction from landowners ranged from skeptical to excited. Many people still do not understand paintball, so I would give the landowner a copy of the APL video on paintball, which does a great job of explaining what paintball is.
|
To help find land, I offered a $500 reward to anyone that found land for me that led to a signed lease.... |
Even with all of this effort (this process took three months), I was still not able to find suitable land. At this point I was thirty days away from losing my current land, and I gave myself an ultimatum: either I would find land in the next 30 days, or I would close my field down. To help find land, I offered a $500 reward to anyone that found land for me that led to a signed lease. I posted this ad on my web site, and I also sent copies of the reward poster to my local distributors and paintball stores. I even sent copies of the reward poster to my list of group leaders. Within one week, I had several leads. One of them happened to be the most perfect spot I could have ever hoped for. It was zoned commercial, had electrictricity, a gravel parking lot, 60 acres of awesome woods, a picnic pavilion, and indoor restrooms. I happily handed over a check for $500, and wrote it off as a marketing expense. If I were looking for land again today, I would use this approach. You will NEVER be able to scour your area this effectively on your own looking for land. I had great resources at the civil firm, but even that did not match the power of networking with people.
Another major concern with your new location is how far it is from players. Is there a city nearby? A college? A highway? Large businesses that hire a lot of people in their twenties and thirties who have disposable income (your target market) are a natural target as well. Large banks are a perfect example. I will talk more about marketing in a later article.
Negotiating the Lease:
Once I had the location picked out, it was time to negotiate the lease. I negotiated a great deal for both the landowner and myself. Basically, I paid the landowner a flat $5 per head fee for each player that came through the field. That way I did not have to pay when I did not have games, and I did not have to pay in the off seasons (February and August). The busier I was, the more money he made. This is the only way to go. Psychologically, it also seemed better to Land Owner to be getting a check after every play day, instead of once a month. That way he is getting checks from you all the time. If you can negotiate a per-head fee, this is the only way to go. Other field owners have marveled at the arrangement I had because some fields owners have to pay leases in the THOUSANDS every month, regardless of whether or not they have games.
I hope that you found this article
useful. If you would like to send in comments or an article of
your own, simply
All
rights reserved. No material, images, code, or content may be copied,
printed, distributed, downloaded,
or borrowed from this Internet site without the express written consent of
Paintcheck.com