Hi, I'm Jeff Rea, your host for Economic Outlook.

Welcome to our show, where each week we take a deep dove into the regional economy and the people, the companies, the communities and the projects that are helping our region grow.

The global health crisis caused by covid-19 has had a devastating impact on tourism, hospitality and attractions across our region.

Major adjustments had to be made to navigate mandated shutdowns and capacity limitations.

We'll take a closer look at how some regional attractions navigated the pandemic and what's ahead, coming up on Economic Outlook.

Attractions in our region are an important part of the quality of life in our area, but those attractions depend on people visiting to keep them operating.

The pandemic closed many down for a period of time and capacity limitations have continued to create struggles, but several local attractions have found ways to adapt and to navigate the challenge of the pandemic.

We're going to dove deeper into their stories today, share more about how they've adapted, and look ahead at what might be next.

Please join me in welcoming Todd Van Leeuwen from Waypoint VR Arcade, Theresa Cruthird from Generations of Adventure Plex and Mark Rutherford from CrazeVR Virtual Tours.

Just one other note before we get started here at WNIT.

We're respecting social distancing and as such have both our hosts and our guests joining us today virtually instead of in-person.

Guys, welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having us.

Good.

I apologize.

I hope I didn't butcher any names as I was going through there.

I said, OK, give me maybe a corrected for me real quick as we're going.

Cruthird.

Cruthird.

I'm sorry.

My--my apologies.

I should've touched base with you beforehand.

I'm well thank you.

We're really excited to have you here.

Three terrific entrepreneurial success stories on our show.

To start, we're going to four people who are unfamiliar with your business.

We're going to give each of you an opportunity to talk.

Tell us a little bit about the business.

And so, Theresa, tell us a little bit about what you do.

So Generations Adventureplex is a family entertainment center.

We are designed for every age group in the family.

That's sort of why we call it Generations.

We have something for everyone, from seniors to young children.

Our attractions are multi level, so our upstairs level is focused mainly for the adults.

So we have bowling, boutique-style doubling up there.

Eight lanes, food service on the lanes.

So it's kind of a luxury experience up there.

We have 14 lanes of axe throwing for people that want to try that, which is like a super cool thing now that--you know--in Covid people are enjoying getting a little frustrated out.

We have a beverage wall there.

So self pour beer wall, which is kind of a cool technology upstairs, we have private party rooms and then downstairs we have an arcade area that's kind of multigenerational.

We have games that mostly adults like, but there are things that are for kids, too.

And then we have a laser tag two level arena down there and food service and another party room.

So it's a place where people can come and have group events, team building events or family events, birthday parties, or just come out and hang out for date night, weekends or just to get some stress relief.

Great.

Well, thank you.

We look forward to hearing more about it as we do the show today.

Todd, let me come your way.

And so if somebody is not familiar with Waypoint, what would you tell them about your business?

Well, we are one hundred percent locally owned and operated.

One of its kind, only one of its kind in the entire world, small business.

We are--we were all born and raised here.

We started this company technically back in 2018.

It took over two years to fully develop what is the Waypoint into what it is now.

It took quite a bit of time getting that financing, but once we had the financing that we needed, in addition to everything that we had, we spent our time trying to find all of the best virtual reality experiences on the planet and then bringing all of those virtual reality platforms together, giving them as much of a free roam VR focus as possible.

And now we're the largest free roam focused virtual reality entertainment center in the world for what we do.

And we are the only location in the entire state of Indiana to have free roam virtual reality of any kind, let alone the platforms that we have.

And to the extent that we have, we're the only ones in the state of Indiana or any state that touches Indiana to have the free roam platforms that we have.

And they are the best in the world for what they are.

And of those, we do have the largest of them in the world and the lowest cost per person in the world.

So quite a bit of--of options here.

As far as virtual reality entertainment goes, we have five platforms.

We're working on our sixth.

And we do have a younger person birthday party spaces.

We do have adult party spaces for corporate events, birthday parties, bachelor parties, bachelorette parties.

We've even had gender reveal parties here.

So quite a bit here to offer.

And you've never seen us before and never come out to check us out.

Come by and let us know it's your first time.

We'll give you a tour and show you everything we have.

Great.

Thanks, Todd.

Appreciate it.

And Mark, let me come your way.

You're in a little bit different of the business, but you've evolved.

Tell us a little bit about Craze.

Yeah, so Craze VR came as a idea to have a virtual reality center arcade, which unfortunately we had closed due to Covid.

In a small town like this is hard to keep something like that going when you lose one hundred percent of your clientele.

So we pivoted and we started doing 360 virtual tours and using photography and also HTML website editing.

So imagine yourself being in any building, but you can also add videos or links to the products that were in there.

So that's kind of where we pivoted to, along with doing tech services, website worship consulting for churches and things like that as well.

Great, we'll look forward to talking more a little bit about this evolution.

So Todd, I want to come back your way for a second.

So you had a successful launch.

You--you worked to fill an important need in the community.

You had identified, you know, kind of this area as a place that was prime.

Your--my guess is your business was starting to hum.

And then come March, something unexpected happens and you sort of get the word that that everybody is closing down.

And even when we open back up, you're going to be limited.

So talk a little bit about, you know, kind of what's going on in your head and some of the steps you have to take as a business owner at that step to help navigate.

Oh, that's a very good question.

Obviously, having the Waypoint take over two years to develop and and having over 70 financial institutions originally tell us 'No', during our second round of of finding funding, that we are no strangers to adversity.

We've had a difficult time from day one.

But to be 100 percent honest, opening on February 28th of 2020, being open for two weeks, seeing that it was a viable business model, seeing that it was a value add to the community and then instantly being forcibly shut down for almost four months.

That was a level of adversity that I was not in any way, shape or form emotionally prepared for.

It was a thousand miles an hour, you know, and then we went to nothing, absolutely nothing.

And realistically, I did take a few days where I screamed in a pillow and just kind of wasn't sure how we were going to move forward.

But I--you know, you get back up.

When you're knocked down, you figure it out.

And actually, a previous guest on one of your shows mentioned something about that.

And there was Alison Levine said that even when you don't think you can keep going, you can always take one more step.

And success in business isn't about necessarily being the strongest or fastest, but being the most relentless.

And we have that in spades.

We we wanted to remain an active, relevant, positive and contributing organization to this community even when we were shut down.

And that's when I stepped back up.

I got back up and I started working on our hand sanitizer was something that we could provide the community that wasn't available that could help people stay healthy, reduce the spread.

And we designed it with first responders in mind from the ground up.

We, even while we were shut down, we were struggling and we didn't have a great cash reserve because we didn't have time to develop that.

We were still with every bottle that we sold donating a bottle to a first responder in this community.

So doing that kind of help pivot us into a way that--that we were still relevant, we were still helping and still being a valued member of the community.

And from there, we've--we've had to adapt in ways I never thought that we were going to have to.

And we've started developing PCs.

So I create PC for individuals as well as for businesses such as the one behind us.

We have five PCs we're working on right now.

We've started doing individual headset sales for home use and VR, and that's helped us quite a bit.

There were times where PC sales and headset sales, installation and training of those headsets that helped keep us open.

We've partnered with small businesses in the community like Craze VR, Mark.

Mark's an excellent guy.

I--I'm so fortunate to have Mark in my life not only as a business partner, but also a friend.

We were able to use some of our incomplete assets to develop a mutually beneficial partnership where we had extra space and he had extra equipment.

And now we have a wonderful partnership as well as what very quickly turned out to be a good, good friendship, too.

Yeah, we've incorporated our employees to a lot of the decisions we're making to give them a bit more equity and ownership in their future here.

And we've continued to also financially assist Waypoint, my wife and I.

Despite the fact that I have yet to have a paycheck and--since last March.

So it's a handful of things, but it it takes a village and the right people in that village.

And I think we're there so.

Well, thank you to that's a terrific story.

And Theresa, I want to come your way because I think maybe a lot of what Todd was saying probably resonates with you as well as you had this--this idea of creating this family entertainment option.

You're sort of getting--.

So tell us a little about your journey there and kind of this what happens come March, where you're at in that journey and how you've adapted?

Yeah, I-- I totally, totally relate, Todd.

I think many of you who don't know our business, we are a Christian based business.

We started with really no resources and it's a really good idea, we thought.

And we have had to rely on God's provision every little step of the way, and that's been financial and resource and with people.

So we've always kind of understood our limitations and that we really didn't have what we needed to do any of this.

So when covid hit, we were in the middle of construction and we had a construction team that was kind of a faith--faith team, too.

They're like, we're going to get through this.

We're going to keep moving because we know that this is a God idea and He's not surprised by this.

So we don't know where this is going, but we're just going to keep taking steps.

And in the midst of this, I'm a physician, anesthesiologist, so I didn't really have the time, in a sense, to sort of panic because I was taking care of people with Covid.

So I couldn't think about the consequences to myself, 'Oh, maybe I'm going to exposed.

Maybe I'm going to--'.

So I was kind of more on the 'We are in a pandemic.

We have to it's all hands on deck and we're going to keep taking the steps, the next open door that's available'.

So similar to Todd's story, we didn't have funding really at the beginning of this and we really didn't get funding until we were probably two months into construction.

To be honest, our construction team sort of believed with us that this is going to work and you're going to get your money.

And so we finally did get funding in February right before the banks stopped releasing funds.

And we were probably a couple of months into construction by then.

So it was kind of a no turning back point for us also.

And then we just had to do what He's saying.

You play the hand that you're dealt, you learn from other people.

We were in the hospital setting, so we sort of understood--we were germophobes anyway.

So it was sort of like, 'Oh, covid, OK, we know what to do now', like all the things that we we do in the hospital.

So we were able to adapt that to the way we operated and people really embraced it.

And it was helpful to have other businesses who had opened before us sort of acclimating the community to how to play safely, work safely and live safely together.

So thank you all out there who went ahead of me.

It made life a lot easier.

And Mark, let me come your way, too, because--because you're going through this thought process, too, much like Todd and Theresa were, where you've got--you've got a business and you've got big plans and you've got a niche that you think you're going to fill.

And then all of a sudden things have changed.

I don't know if you're like me, I'm not sure I ever knew the word pandemic until--till March.

So talk to us a little bit about your thought processes come March and and then your decision to--to pivot what some of those things were that drove that decision.

Yeah.

So in March, we had actually been rented out as a VR.

Our virtual reality had been rented out.

We took it to Vegas because we made everything mobile.

For the leading real estate, RE company, which does international real estate, luxury sales and covid hit right when we were there, it was everything shut down the other people.

It's like we've never seen anything like this before.

This isn't Vegas.

Vegas is usually busy.

There was no one on the street.

I mean, it was--it was surreal.

So we got a flight home and suddenly, you know, we weren't allowed to open our business.

And the next month we weren't allowed to open our business.

And we got--heard stories of other people not able to open their business.

And someone said, hey, can you do a virtual tour of--do you do that kind of thing?

I was like, yeah, we have 360 cameras and we can do that.

So I did a virtual tour of Tim's two restaurant, Union Pier, so that he could show all the changes and the sanitary things he was doing to open his restaurant and get it ready for opening and show it to the public so they could actually literally walk through the restaurant without leaving their smartphone or their computer.

We took that idea and expanded it to actually do an entire city.

So we did all of St. Joseph downtown and opting all the businesses to opt in to do their virtual reality tour and bring it in.

So you didn't have to go into a headset to look at it.

You could actually just do it from your phone and look through the--look--walk downtown.

I saw it look like and also see what businesses were there, what their hours were.

Click on their business and open their website.

The--what we can do for people as far as virtual tours, it just keeps going.

And so we just kept running with this idea of how can we help others by doing this, the newest technology out there.

We found that in Europe this has exploded.

Every real estate is doing 360 tours and Americans just getting on board.

So we wanted to be on the cutting edge of that.

And we didn't know what to do with all this extra equipment because obviously the arcade, we lost one hundred percent of clientele.

No one can come in.

We were forced to close.

Todd came to me.

We talked.

Todd had come in for a bunch of times just to play in our arcade, which is cool, before he opened.

So we had a great conversation and created this friendship relationship.

And he's like, 'Hey, man, can we work out something?'

We're like 'Sure, absolutely'.

This is a great fit for us.

So we were able to keep our VR arcade dreams alive thanks to Todd and Waypoint VR.

So I love going down there and playing myself.

So it's so much fun.

It's such a blast.

But yeah, it's been great to see how a business like ours can actually turn around and do something totally out of the normal and help other people that way too.

I think a great example there, Mark, of many across our region that have adapted and maybe come out of covid even stronger, having identified maybe sort of a critical need.

Todd, let me come back your way for a second.

So--so let's fast forward a little bit.

And in our last about six minutes here, talk more about--things are opening back up.

People have been inside.

They've got cabin fever.

They're ready to gather again.

You know, there's some space limitations and other things.

But--but talk now about the recovery and so how we're as we're beginning to come out of the pandemic, how are things going?

The recovery is slow.

We are a really large organization.

As far as the size that we have, the maximum capacity is pretty close to three hundred people.

So we can house quite a few people and still maintain social distancing.

But the biggest issue is then awareness.

And we had a great marketing and advertising plan scheduled, but being open for two weeks and then shut for four months almost, it really threw all of our marketing and advertising efforts into a tailspin.

And nothing really worked the way it was supposed to in 2020.

As far as marketing and advertising go, anything really.

2020 was--doesn't really count anymore.

I would say that the recovery for us has been harder than the overall economy, I think.

Just because a lot of the public's assistance, the language in government grants and loans, they use a very specific language revolving around 2019 operations, which has hurt a lot of businesses like ours that weren't given the opportunity or the time to develop larger cash reserves through operational cash flows.

And, of all of the government funding that was available out there, we didn't get anything until the second round of PPP funding and even then the max we ever got was around four thousand dollars.

And that's in total.

And I'm sure you can imagine how quickly that went, considering we had 14 employees when we started and we pay our people well.

We are starting to see more people come out, which is good.

We actually have a corporate event here today.

We had a private party yesterday.

And, you know, we--we've had to be efficient.

We've kind of taken the Taco Bell approach to adding additional efficiencies and our hourly operations where we have additional games starting at the time of closing and the hour after closing.

And if those get booked, we'll stay open.

So if people are out looking to play games and looking to be out and actually do something, we stay open.

But if they're not, we aren't forced to stay open, which has allowed us to effectively eliminate some of that unnecessary fixed and variable over head.

Theresa, let me come your way and just build on that.

So Todd talked about kind of the--the recovery period.

But obviously, I think you're all looking forward to the next month or couple of months.

More people are getting vaccinated.

A lot's going back to normal.

Mask mandates are going to go away.

Give us a sense in our last three minutes or so about the summer and what's on the horizon and what has you excited?

Oh, well, tons have you have me excited the summer.

Just the fact that people are getting comfortable coming out, that people with cabin fever, as you said, have started to explore and discover businesses like mine and Todd's and Mark's and have embraced the safety implementations and aren't really--I think in the beginning it was harder because people didn't want to wear masks and people didn't want to do various things.

But now people are sort of like, you know, we're going to do what's necessary to participate in activities outside of our home and whether we agree with them or not.

So I think that helps.

And I think that now with the campuses, Notre Dame and all the students coming back, we're starting to see sort of the revitalization of our community.

You know, it was kind of a ghost town before, but now we have people who are going to be here and who are going to be looking for entertainment.

And we all have something I think that's pretty innovative and God breathed for our community so that we can start to return to normalcy.

But I also think things are going to be better because we can appreciate each other a little bit more now that we've been away for--for almost a year.

So I'm excited about just the community building that I see coming from all of this.

Great.

Mark, in our last minute or so.

Advice to entrepreneurs, people who are thinking about doing what each of you have done, like Todd or Teresa starting a business or you starting and then pivoting.

What advice would you leave with folks who might be watching today?

I like I like the word Theresa used; embracing.

I think that's great.

Embrace the technology, embrace the changes and roll with the punches.

And don't be afraid to take that baby step to make the next step forward.

That's really important.

If you don't take a chance, you don't know what's going to happen.

And call people and get advice from people who are older than you that have done things like this.

They're not afraid to help you out.

They're not afraid to talk to you.

And it's OK. You don't have to have the money in order to do something.

Right.

Last couple of seconds for each of you, Teresa.

If people want to know more about generations, where do they go and where and where you're located?

We'll do that for all three of you.

OK, so our website is Generations-Adventureplex.com.

We're also on Facebook under the same name.

We're located next to the movie Sportin Cinemark at the corner of Hickory and Addison Road, Mishawaka.

Great.

Todd?

Our website is Waypoint VR dot com.

You can find us at Facebook and on Google under the Waypoint VRcade.

You--you can find our actual location in the plaza with the Bonefish Grill and Coldstone Creamery right there on Edison Road in Mishawaka.

Great.

And Mark, you can find me at CrazeVr.com.

C-R-A-Z-E-V-R.com.

You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Discord.

We're all over the place so you can definitely find us.

Guys, thank you so much for joining me today with some great success stories.

Appreciate you sharing that with our viewers.

Best of luck as as we recover and you continue to grow your businesses.

Thanks for the risk that you're taking and the jobs that you're doing here in our community.

We're glad to have you here.

That's our show today.

Thank you for watching on WNIT or listening to our podcast.

To watch this episode again of our past episodes, you can find Economic Outlook at WNIT.org orr find our podcast on most major podcast platforms that encourage you to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

I'm Jeff Rea.

I'll see you next week.

This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.