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I’m with my mates gunfighting all day and
have a beer in the night then I’m happy
and that is why I love paintball so much.
It’s in the DNA of my family, my eldest son
and daughter play paintball, my wife plays
paintball and it obviously provides our living so I’m really lucky that almost by accident we’ve managed to combine our work
with the hobby that my entire family loves.
“As a company, we all party a
lot and like all paintballers, we
sit around having a beer in the
bar dreaming and fantasizing
about cool paintball projects.”
Tell us about your events - are they growing, what type of numbers are you getting?
The events are doing great. The normal
format for paintball events is to cram as
many players through the doors as you
can, sell as many tickets and as much paint
as you can because there are obvious good
business reasons to do that.
I think it’s this unusual approach that
differentiates our events from others. The
game comes first every time, we invest
heavily to make the games the best and
then just trust that the business side will
look after itself. To help the events be commercially successful we tend to charge
more than anyone else for our tickets and
paint which keeps the accountant off my
back when he hears we limit the tickets to
less than we could be selling.
But we take a completely different approach that I’m not sure anyone else does.
We cap all our events down to quite low
player numbers and they all sell out, sometimes as quickly as 3 or 4 minutes. For
example, we ran a game where we sold out
800 tickets in 3 minutes. Most promoters
the following year would increase the cap
to 1,500 because they’d know they could
sell much more tickets – but we did the
opposite, we halved the cap down to 400
and they sold out even quicker. We did
that because the number of players at our
events is determined by what we decide is
the optimum number for the best quality
game, not how many tickets we can sell.
We work on the principle that if the quality
of the game is good, then the money will
look after itself. So some of our events are
800 players per day for 3 days, others we
cap down to 200 or even less – it’s all about
what is the correct number of players for
the best quality game, not what is the maximum number of tickets we can hawk out.
We like to think of our events as quality
over quantity. We have some of the best
venues in the world, we pay the best wages
so get the best Award winning event staff,
we invest in technology, we invest heavily
in marketing our events and giving players
cool stuff to remember and we never ever
cut corners. If a game needs a helicopter,
then we hire a helicopter. If a game needs
several fast attack speedboats then that’s
what we get. If a game needs Humvees,
UAV’s, mortars, pyrotechnics, film crews
or anything really, whatever the game
needs we make happen no matter what the
cost and that’s why for four years UK players have voted Shoreline events the best
in the UK. Whilst most games are about
stuffing as many players through the turnstiles as possible and scrimping on wages
and costs – we go totally in the opposite
direction and limit player numbers and
spend massively on our events. More Mercedes. Less Daewoo.
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