My Buzz

My buzz is hearing teams that come through our doors have a great time and seeing the great reviews building up on TripAdvisor and Facebook. We're here to provide an amazing experience for everyone, no matter what you're age, so my buzz comes from hearing and seeing people enjoy themselves - it means we know we've done a great job!

My Bio

Can You Escape is a live escape game based in Edinburgh, we opened our doors to the public in December 2014 and have had a bit of a whirlwind year to date. An escape room is a room where teams have 60 minutes to solve a range of puzzles, riddles and clues in order to escape - think crystal maze combined with cluedo. We opened in December with one room, Operation Bald Eagle, and in April we opened our second room, Operation Odyssey.

In Mid-April we won Scotland's Best Family Day Out at the Entertainment and Hospitality Awards - we had some very stiff competition including large companies so it was a big shock to win! In August we saw our busiest month with the Edinburgh Fringe and had some famous visitors including Alex Horne and Ed Byrne. We held our first one off event in October which sold out in less than a week and was a great success! So much so that we're now planning on events for the future and making it part of our standard offering.

We changed our first room to a new mission in October to enable us to take bigger teams as we saw the demand in the market for this. We have are now looking to expand to a second city and have started the production of a mobile escape game which will enable us to go to corporate venues, festivals and events which we expect to be available from Spring 2016.

In all it's been a busy year! Alastair, the Founder, has continued to work a 4-day a week job while running the business. We now have an excellent team of eight staff who run the business day to day and have received excellent feedback on TripAdvisor and Facebook, most of which mention our fab staff!

My Business Tips

At one point we had a motto that was 'if it can go wrong it will' which may seem a little defeatist but there are points when you will hit a low! What's important is that you come out the other side and learn from your mistakes - as an escape game we learn that everything will break so we have an endless supply of backups! You'll learn as you go along, but learning is the most important thing, even if whatever the problem is feels like a disaster at the time!

On a more positive note - we've mentioned our staff a lot in our bio and this is because they're great! As a small business we can't afford to pay them lots but treating them well, being flexible and giving them access to PerkBox hopefully means we will keep a fantastic team around us!

And finally build relationships with other local businesses, we have a great relationship with a local pub which offers a discount on food who successfully escape our room and give us a deal for corporate teams that we can offer. We also work closely with another escape game so that if we get enquiries for large teams we can work together and if we can't accommodate team we can direct them to an alternative. But that's not it, we have great relationship with a range of other local businesses that we work with and happily co-promote.

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