PaintballX3 Magazine January 2014 | Page 59

59 I’m with my mates gunfighting all day and have a beer in the night then I’m happy and that is why I love paintball so much. It’s in the DNA of my family, my eldest son and daughter play paintball, my wife plays paintball and it obviously provides our living so I’m really lucky that almost by accident we’ve managed to combine our work with the hobby that my entire family loves. “As a company, we all party a lot and like all paintballers, we sit around having a beer in the bar dreaming and fantasizing about cool paintball projects.” Tell us about your events - are they growing, what type of numbers are you getting? The events are doing great. The normal format for paintball events is to cram as many players through the doors as you can, sell as many tickets and as much paint as you can because there are obvious good business reasons to do that. I think it’s this unusual approach that differentiates our events from others. The game comes first every time, we invest heavily to make the games the best and then just trust that the business side will look after itself. To help the events be commercially successful we tend to charge more than anyone else for our tickets and paint which keeps the accountant off my back when he hears we limit the tickets to less than we could be selling. But we take a completely different approach that I’m not sure anyone else does. We cap all our events down to quite low player numbers and they all sell out, sometimes as quickly as 3 or 4 minutes. For example, we ran a game where we sold out 800 tickets in 3 minutes. Most promoters the following year would increase the cap to 1,500 because they’d know they could sell much more tickets – but we did the opposite, we halved the cap down to 400 and they sold out even quicker. We did that because the number of players at our events is determined by what we decide is the optimum number for the best quality game, not how many tickets we can sell. We work on the principle that if the quality of the game is good, then the money will look after itself. So some of our events are 800 players per day for 3 days, others we cap down to 200 or even less – it’s all about what is the correct number of players for the best quality game, not what is the maximum number of tickets we can hawk out. We like to think of our events as quality over quantity. We have some of the best venues in the world, we pay the best wages so get the best Award winning event staff, we invest in technology, we invest heavily in marketing our events and giving players cool stuff to remember and we never ever cut corners. If a game needs a helicopter, then we hire a helicopter. If a game needs several fast attack speedboats then that’s what we get. If a game needs Humvees, UAV’s, mortars, pyrotechnics, film crews or anything really, whatever the game needs we make happen no matter what the cost and that’s why for four years UK players have voted Shoreline events the best in the UK. Whilst most games are about stuffing as many players through the turnstiles as possible and scrimping on wages and costs – we go totally in the opposite direction and limit player numbers and spend massively on our events. More Mercedes. Less Daewoo. WWW.PAINTBALLX3.COM