What Will It Take to Grow Your Business?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” It’s an old adage that applies to any business, but especially to our constantly changing and evolving aerial adventure world. To improve revenues and profits from year to year, you need to measure what is getting better and what isn’t. As more operators enter the industry and competition for customers heats up, good data becomes even more important.
That’s where our annual State of the Industry Survey comes in. It gathers information from across the industry to provide a snapshot of business as a whole. And that helps you understand how you compare, and can highlight areas where you can improve—and become more successful.
To help you in this quest, business consultant Paul Cummings has written two articles, “The Metrics that Matter” (online at adventureparkinsider.com/online-exclusives), which describes what metrics you should track, and “Mind Your Metrics” (page 30), which describes how to track them.
Further, ACCT and Adventure Park Insider have joined forces to increase participation in our survey. As Shawn Tierney, ACCT executive director, says, “Greater participation will increase the value and precision of the data and present a clearer overview of the entire industry. Please take a moment to fill out the survey—and then sit back and reap the benefits of great knowledge when the results are in!”
To make this third annual survey easier and less time-consuming to complete, we worked with the ACCT research committee to better address the different sectors of the industry–aerial parks, zip lines and tours, experiential and educational programs, college programs and kids camps among them. If you read Paul’s articles and arm yourself with the type of data he describes, you’ll be able to complete the survey both accurately and quickly.
Adventure Park Insider will present preliminary results in a session at the upcoming ACCT conference in Denver, Feb. 7-10, 2019, and in the Winter edition of Adventure Park Insider. All survey participants will receive the final report in the spring.
This year’s data, combined with that from the previous two years, helps build a record of historical performance so operators can evaluate their progress and inform decisions in several important areas, including capital improvements, staffing, salaries, services, marketing, and more.
So get your data tallied and on hand, and fill out the survey at www.adventureparkinsider.com/survey. You’ll find it’s well worth the effort. —The Editors
