Lessons in brand building from the ups, downs and expansion of BOUNCE

In 2012, Ant Morell and Simon McNamara took $2 million in funding and founded the very first BOUNCE – an indoor adrenaline playground. More than a decade later, BOUNCE has 19 locations Australia-wide and plans to expand to at least 30 venues over the next three years. It has also achieved a predicted revenue of $65 million – almost double its $37 million earnings from 2021/2022.

In a recent interview with SmartCompany Plus, Morrell explains the secrets to BOUNCE’s success, including how to market to the masses and learn what makes your brand special.

The birth of BOUNCE

Morell and McNamara are not new entrepreneurs. Over the years, they’ve helped found iconic hospitality franchises like Boost and Grill’d, as well as Spudbar and a series of cafés. But it was a trip to the US that helped cement the idea for their most recent venture, BOUNCE – an indoor trampolining centre inspired by high-adrenaline sports like parkour.

“We went on a road trip to America to look at licencing for a centre with interconnected trampolines,” Morell explains. “We went there with many ideas around what this concept could be, and we’d already started to pre-imagine it in technicolour. By the time we saw the US concept, the BOUNCE business model and vision were more or less there. So, we decided to start incubating the idea and build it ourselves.”

At the time (2011/2012), Morell and McNamara could see a growing appetite for BOUNCE’s offering. Parents, teachers and healthcare experts were discussing the dangers of childhood obesity and screen time, and the “early freestyle movement, which was once extreme, was becoming mainstream.” 

Morell says, “We got hold of a CSIRO-funded report that explored the megatrends in sport over the next 30 years, and the number one trend was this idea of extreme sport becoming mainstream.” Morell and McNamara hypothesised that a market space existed (and was opening wider) for the mainstream application of sports that would normally only be available to “risk-seeking elite athletes” or to watch as a form of entertainment. And so, they created BOUNCE – a community hub for “anyone of any age or skill level to have the extreme sport experience.”

Creating a brand for the masses

The goal of BOUNCE was to create a space for all. It needed to attract school groups, kids parties and have the “credibility of freestyle legitimacy,” Morell says. “It needed to be a place where circus or X Game athletes would train, but mums would also like it.” And that ability to straddle multiple markets is part of why BOUNCE works so well.

By focusing beyond children’s play, the BOUNCE model and brand story allows for maximum profit because the seven-day-a-week business appeals to multiple segments. Importantly, Morell says the BOUNCE model isn’t just about selling ‘fun’.

“People have a permission-based relationship psychologically with fun,” he says. “Fun is something we do after work at the end of the week. If you want a business that’s busy with repeat customers seven days a week, you have to offer something deeper and richer. You have to offer skill progression and coaching programmes. You want to get busloads of school groups, corporate groups, and kids in after-school training programs. And, ideally, you want transferrable skills – like the people that come to BOUNCE because it improves their aerial skiing, surfing, or cross training.”

It didn’t take long to realise that Morell and McNamara’s hypothesis was valid. After more than a year spent in concept creation, they self-funded with four passive shareholders and took out a “10-year lease on a 1,000 square-metre warehouse in the middle of suburban Melbourne (Glen Iris).” In the first three months, BOUNCE exceeded its revenue expectations for the first year. Morell and McNamara then decided to quit their day jobs to work on BOUNCE full time and expand into other states.

Within a year, the duo had begun a national roll-out of BOUNCE centres, and by 2014, the first BOUNCE opened in Dubai. But the real changes came during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pandemic growth

BOUNCE centres were hit hard when the country shut down because of COVID-19. They had no customers and needed money, but Morell and McNamara had a hunch that the world would change slightly when things returned to normal.

“We figured that after lockdowns, people might prioritise active entertainment and community-based movement and expression,” Morell says. “So we decided to acquire the best of our credible competitors during that period and refit and rebrand them. That way, we were well positioned at the end of Covid.”

They also sought private investors to fund their growth. In the end, the BOUNCE founders secured $20 million from private equity group PGA, which now owns 30% of the company. “We went into the investment process with our eyes wide open,” Morell explains. “We’d all been around for long enough to know how badly it can go. But we picked a really good partner. It sounds cliché, but their values align with ours, and they’re bringing new skills into the business. They’re active investors that see the world of risk and opportunities through the same lens.”

Morell says that the process of getting investor-ready is valuable. “You have to bring a huge amount of discipline and focus on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you’re doing it. You’ve got to get clear on what’s special about you, how the business will improve over time and what you need the money for,” he says. “That’s an extremely beneficial process.”

They also decided to break into the preschool market in 2021 with the launch of miniBOUNCE. “We were originally weary of what it would mean for our customers to have pre-schoolers running around,” Morell says. “But we added a miniBOUNCE zones to a couple of venues and built a dedicated miniBOUNCE in Brisbane, and everyone liked it.”

Instead of detracting from the edginess of a BOUNCE centre, Morell likens the environment to a ski resort. “At a ski resort, you don’t look at the little kids and think, ‘Maybe this place isn’t cool.’ You actually feel inspired by them and then go off and do your double black diamond course,” he says.

Based on the success of miniBOUNCE over the past two years, Morell and McNamara plan to expand further into the preschool market. But Morell is hasty to add that he believes their success in this market was because they got the foundations right first.

“We’ve got a strong brand that can navigate, appeal, respect and get love from these really contrasting customer segments,” Morell says. “And because of that, we can play with the preschool category. I think it’d be risk otherwise.”

International expansion and the decision not to franchise

Despite having BOUNCE locations across the country and the world, Morell says they won’t offer mass franchise opportunities soon. “The BOUNCE model is very nuanced – much more than it might look from the outside,” he explains. “There are multiple segments, different propositions, and a big food and beverage business living inside it. You’re also dealing with intangibles like confidence, self-esteem, joy and happiness. The staff need to radiate a certain energy.”

Instead, they choose to expand nationally based on predictors like population density, proximity to schools and age demographic. Originally, Morell says the process was quite “simple and unsophisticated”. But a decade later, their method has been fine tuned.

“We’ve got a model that can predict revenue to about 10% accuracy,” Morell says. “We give it a set of site attributes that are overlaid with our existing venues, add data inputs around population density, socio-economic variables and those sorts of things. Then, we can plot the next 50 locations in Australia.”

The model has allowed BOUNCE to expand into areas it hadn’t considered initially and take on more locations within the same city, like Melbourne, where it has six centres “and originally thought of only having one.”

In contrast, international growth has been fuelled by individual investors. Morell says most of those people were visting Australia, went to a BOUNCE centre, and decided to take the concept back home to countries like Dubai. They’re people that have “already had a successful career, have capital and some great skill sets that they wanted to use.” But going global wasn’t easy. 

“Expanding internationally forced us to systemise all of the tangible and intangible elements of the customer experience,” Morell says. “It’s hugely complicated to open any business, but taking it overseas adds another layer. It was really hard. We made a bunch of mistakes, but what’s important is we learnt from our success as well as our failures. And you’ve got to spend as much time learning about what’s working and what’s special. It can be hard to spot the true essence of your success formula while navigating growth. But, we used that period to distil what we need to own and how to build systems around it.”

Overall, Morell says that creating BOUNCE has been rewarding. “I think we would all agree – the staff and the partners – that it’s inherently positive to see individuals and communities expressing themselves, moving their bodies and connecting with each other worldwide. This strange experiment we did in one venue has clicked with millions of people, and now they’re doing something positive and feeling incredible. That’s a great feeling.”

Advice for other entrepreneurs

• Learn to evaluate your proposition and understand whether it’s truly good
  Recognising if you have a clear vision can almost feel like a premonition – it’s a knowing, a belief, or a commitment that feels more powerful than you. And entrepreneurs need to learn to listen to that. As long as the model around the idea is pure and works, any issues can be navigated.
• Find the spark of differentiating magic in your idea
  And, ideally, find meaning, purpose and substance that will sustain you. Then, wrap it into a narrative that’s really easy to tell with catchphrases and visual clues, and tell it 24/7. And, if you’re not the right person to tell that story, find somebody with the talent and make sure someone is telling it. That way, everybody in the workplace – whether it’s one employee or 1,000 – knows that story, and how their job contributes to it.
• Choose your team carefully
  The shared energy and flow state comes from working with the right people. Be careful when choosing the people you work with and ensure they have the right outset.