After spending 20 years in the corporate world, owner Carl Venter exchanged his suit and tie for camouflage gear and coloured paint.
Today, Planet Paintball offers team-building sessions to kiddies parties, along with action-packed fun for both young and old.
According to Venter, good service is the backbone to any business to ensure that customers keep coming back. corporate it into game play.
I love children, I have five kids of my own so it’s great to be able to offer them this kind of game play.
What do you think makes your business unique?
We are quite pedantic about safety. Especially with the kids, we drill it into them that it’s meant to be fun, to be sport.
We do a lot of kids’ parties but corporates also come and have team buildings here.
We try to integrate management and staff. We do something called “the bachelor run” where the boss runs across the field and the employees shoot at him or her.
It’s fun and it kind of breaks down the barriers.
If someone wanted to take one key lesson from your business model, what would it be?
Being in in-house service for most of my life, I enjoy dealing with customers and potential customers. Service plays a very important role in any business and without that your business will die.
When we have a group of 15 children – if you make sure they have a good time and give the parents good service – it means that potentially each one of those kids is another party.
It’s very rustic here but the kids just love it.
What are some of the biggest inhibitors your business faced before even getting off the ground?
Our normal guns we use are for kids from 11-years-old and up. So there was a huge gap in the market for the younger kids.
We then introduce the kiddies’ splatmaster guns which are very low-impact guns used for five- to ten-year-olds. So we can also serve the younger market now. I once had 25 five-year-olds on the field – it was kind of like trying to herd cats.
What are some of your biggest challenges in day-to-day business operations and your particular industry?
The main challenge is that we get quite a bit of wind here, so maintenance of the netting is constant. The netting is important so that we don’t shoot at people in the safe zone.
We need to keep the guns serviced to make sure they don’t break down during play.
From a small business point of view, we get mainly weekend trade during school times. But the main challenge is advertising effectively to attract people during the week.
What is the best advice anyone ever gave you about success?
Work hard and play hard. If you are not making money it’s because you are not working hard enough. The more you focus on your work and on improving marketing and advertising, the better you’ll do.
What kind of advertising do you do?
We do mainly Facebook advertising but our most effective form of advertising is word of mouth.
What are some of your highlights in running your business?
Watching the smiles on the faces of people and the happiness we bring to both kids and parents.
If people have a good time and they want to come back, that is the biggest highlight. How many people do you employ?
Off and on we employ about 10 students (matrics and university students).
How to you motivate your staff?
We pay them relatively well but I think it’s more about passion. Most of them have passion for the actual game. They end up buying their own paintball guns and kit and start going into competitions. So the motivation of being around paintball is good for them.
How did you acquire funding for the business?
I bought the business from what I had saved up from working in corporate. It was a big outlay, but you have got to sacrifice.
Once you had funding, what was the first step in actually launching the business?
We made the offer and after numerous negotiations they accepted. And negotiation is key – never accept the first offer. We bought at a good price.
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from your business journey so far?
You have to break out from thinking straight down the line. When you work for yourself you learn very quickly how to think outside the box. Anything is a potential business opportunity. You just have to learn to adopt a different attitude when it comes to thought.
What do you think is the key trait of a successful entrepreneur?
You just have to love what you do.