Retired Owner Manager
Moved to Hawke’s Bay with my family in 2002, and wanted to do something that would be fun, completely different (to my UK background in shipping), sustainable, and should find a market with both local residents and visitors. I did it with Laserforce - not a franchise, but operates with laser tag equipment purchased from Laserforce International in Australia, using their software under licence. Finding a suitable building turned out to be the biggest hiccup, but we eventually opened to the public on Saturday 25 October 2003. Not the first business I’ve started, but previous ones had started with nothing and required a lot of marketing to get going. Laserforce was very different - busy in the first few months, as word spread and the novelty value bit, but has required constant sustained marketing since then to maintain return business and growth. Ten years later, it’s still great fun - and terrific to see kids here for birthday parties who weren’t even born when we opened!
