You know usually you should start a post titled "Starting Lock Chicago Escape Rooms" when you actually start the business, but we're just a few months off. Besides, with a touch of retrospect we can guarantee this post will be a lot more interesting than it would have been if we had written it three months ago. For starters, we're not starting off with 'This is our first post, we're so excited to start our business!' Trust us, we're still VERY excited (and we hope it shows in our rooms) but we know the lay of the land a bit better now and take everything with a level head, an even keel, and more than the appropriate amount of stability cliches.
Three Months Ago
Three months ago our lives were phone calls and emails. We had nothing: no website, no legal status, and we hadn't even mapped out our first room yet. All we had was the encouragement of a few friends over at Locked Manhattan and the help of the folks over at SCORE and the Chicago BACP. Talking about and designing an Escape Room is a ton of fun, and it gets the brain working, but complying with federal, state, and city codes, laws, zoning, and licensing is a... let's call it a 'learning experience'. There is a learning curve and there are a lot of lessons, which we'll cover in these blogs, and we hope you learn a little something from them, if not find them interesting. Hopefully if you're starting your own Escape Room, our experiences will help you avoid some of the pits we had to climb out of on our way to the grand opening of Lock Chicago.
Today
It's roughly three weeks before the opening of our first Escape Room here at Lock Chicago (use coupon code GRANDOPENING at checkout for 10% off for a limited time #shamelessplug), and we're deep into beta testing and ironing out our designs. There are few things more powerful than seeing something as personal as your puzzle design (which is your own personal challenge to the world) slowly manifest from idea to physical space. Everything we've done up until now has been absolutely worth it, and we can't wait for our first customers to come give the finished puzzle a go. But we'll go into more detail on that in some later posts.
For now, we're hard at work making our puzzle room as unique and memorable as it can possibly be, and we hope you come check us out.
Bane and Brian