Dreams of Haunting!
By Leonard Pickel, Hauntrepreneurs.com Themed Attraction Design and Consulting
Throughout the year I am contacted by people asking how they can get open a Halloween event. Passionate dreamers these people have long lists of things the "pro haunters" are doing wrong and loads of ideas on how to make a truly scary fright experience. All they need to make their haunting dreams come true is money and they want me to tell them where to get it.
So I thought I would write this article describing what I tell these haunt dreamers, just in case there are many more of you out there who are afraid to ask or don't know my email address.
Not As Easy As It Looks: Passion is great, but profit is how you survive. A Halloween event is a business like any other, and you have to treat it like a business to make it successful. 60% of ALL businesses fail, and I know too many well intentioned people who have lost their life savings, their house and their spouse because their passion for haunting drove them into acting before they were prepared.
Funding and location are the two biggest road blocks to opening a Halloween attraction. All the scare ideas, room designs, graphics and proposed floor plans are useless without the money to make them reality and a place to put the thing so the public can pay you to attend. Unfortunately, both of these pieces of the haunting puzzle are extremely difficult to obtain.
There is no haunt investment stash of cash for want to be haunters to tap into, and unless you have collateral, like equity in your home to leverage against (which I don't recommend), there is no bank that will be willing to loan you money for such a business. Finding someone with money to invest in your venture, is possible, but you may have to give up control and even ownership of the event in the process; so why bother.
Acquiring a location that is suitable for your event can be
even harder than procuring funding. Few property
owners are willing to short term lease land or a building,
for fear that they would miss out on a larger long term
tenant while you are in the space. Haunts also have bad
reputations due to fly by night Halloween event
operators leaving the rented Space in poor condition
with unpaid bills, making property owners wary of
leasing for a haunt.