A View from the Top with Daniel Hill on creating a £6.5m escape room business

Every budding entrepreneur dreams of coming up with a business concept that delivers rapid and profitable growth. But a couple of episodes of Dragons’ Den is all that’s required to show that such eventualities are, in fact, pretty rare.

One entrepreneur who has managed to land the dream catch is Daniel Hill, managing director of Edinburgh-based Escape. An unassuming and refreshingly laidback individual, Hill has spent the last four and half years building a business that now dominates the UK escape room market and has a growing global presence.

If you are wondering what escape rooms are, think of The Crystal Maze, the 1990s TV programme that set a group of hyperactive adults a series of mental and physical challenges to solve against the clock, or get locked in.

Using the same basic concept, Escape has grown from one operation in Edinburgh, pulling in £400 a month, to an organisation boasting 200 experiences across 60 sites in 11 countries. Escape has a projected revenue of £6.5m this year through a mix of owned sites, franchises and escape room design. A pretty impressive rate of growth by anyone’s estimation.

It all started in early 2014 when Hill’s friend and current business partner sent him a text while on holiday in Germany, raving about an escape room experience he had had out there.

“He said it was just the kind of ‘geeky’ stuff I love, and when he got back, we looked for one in Edinburgh but the closest we could find was in Birmingham. So, we went down to play it,” explains Hill.

He says that while that first escape room was a real buzz, overall it was “quite a low-rent experience”: he and his two fellow players were given a can of Coke to share as their reward for escaping.

But it did give Hill and his partner the confidence that there was something in this and that they could deliver a better experience. So, in May 2014, during a four-month break in his studies for a teaching qualification, they set up their first room.

“The first month was horrific but once we started using Groupon to increase awareness, we went from £400 in that first month to 10 times that in the second and then five times that the following month.

“We had this incredible surge in revenue, but we didn’t take anything out of the business. We put that profit into opening a second room in Glasgow. Four months later we did the same in Newcastle and four months after that, we opened in Dublin.”

He says it was a race against time as there were others who had stumbled upon this young and growing market – escape rooms were popping up around the country. But he says that they were largely operated by enthusiasts of the genre who had no apparent desire to expand their operations.

For Hill and his partner, however, expansion was always on the cards. Hill’s experience of running a McDonald’s franchise when he was younger gave him the grounding to understand how the concept could be exploited in full.

“We adopted the mentality of McDonald’s, which is why I think we were more aggressive than the five or six companies before us. They could have taken over the rest of the UK quite easily, particularly the ones based in London, as they had massive turnovers.”

That domination of the UK market is now in the hands of Escape, a feat achieved in just under five years.

Hill makes the growth of Escape sound almost accidental. He talks about operating by the seat of their pants, how they didn’t think about what they were doing and how growth just seemed to happen organically.

But he is either doing himself a disservice or being deliberately coy as he is obviously a driven person full of ideas and plans for growth.

Escape is already exploring the prospect of not just being the after-meeting entertainment for the corporate world, but also being the location of those meetings. There is a plan to expand the escape room concept into more leisure centres across the country, sitting alongside mainstream entertainment such as cinemas and bowling alleys. And they have even started to build marketing-led escape rooms for business events, providing a unique way for brands to engage potential customers with their products.

“It is quite a creative tool and the big thing about these rooms is that they keep people engaged,” he says.

“The whole ethos of the company is social interaction ... it appeals to different generations and demographics.”

He is tracking the London market following the acquisition of a rival company, while eyeing up expansion in the US, as well as recruiting franchisees globally and diversifying the social interaction aspect with board game cafés. He has even started using the concept as an educational tool in schools.

With so many possibilities for expansion, is there a risk that he could lose touch with the essence of what made the business work in the first place?

Hill admits that as the business has grown and become a more professional operation, some of the fun has gone out of it for him but concedes that this is inevitable if it is going to go as far as he believes it can.

“Alongside all the other ideas, we are looking at doing popups, bringing games to offices and looking at whether we can introduce virtual reality to our games,” he says.

“There is loads of scope. I think escape rooms are just the tip of something much bigger.”

And although he hints that he might not be at the helm of Escape forever, he is clearly not ready to walk away just yet. That original enthusiasm for the escape room experience seems to be morphing into a growing enthusiasm for building businesses, whatever form that might take.