What I learnt … about believing it should work

Matt Grech-Smith, 44, and Jeremy Simmonds, 41, are the co-chief executives of Swingers, the mini-golf bar concept they founded in 2014. Their idea — novel at the time — mixed the whimsy of a country club and nostalgia for mini-golf with DJs, cocktails and street food. They started with a 7,000sq ft pop-up venue in Shoreditch, east London, before opening two permanent sites in London, and three in the US, including one in Las Vegas earlier this month. A franchise in Dubai is set to open in December. The business raised £41 million from investors last year, in a deal through which asset manager Cain International increased its majority stake. The company hit annual revenues of £43.3 million in the year to December, with losses of £17 million, including £7 million in restructuring charges. Swingers now employs about 750 people.
Jeremy Simmonds: I can’t tell you how many people who are so-called experts in this space warned us against doing all the things [we did], that it couldn’t work.
We like to think we are pretty humble people and we listen and don’t do things based on ego. But at the same time there comes a moment where you have to have some conviction, and ignore conventional wisdom.
[That said] when I look back we were so naive and knew so little about the hospitality industry. As many entrepreneurs say, it was kind of a superpower as well — if you knew the challenges that would come it would be so daunting that you would never get off the blocks.
For us, it started as a side project, a creative endeavour. We did not have a business plan, there was no spreadsheet or model. Nothing. [We thought] it sounds like a great idea, and broadly speaking we think the [profit] margins will be good. Let’s give it a go.
If you talk to tech entrepreneurs it is very usual for them to create a minimum viable product and get a use case, test it, and iterate and eventually get to scale.
We kind of took the same approach, without thinking about it in that way, because we did a pop-up. Rather than spending the multiple millions it takes to open up a permanent site, we spent a proportion of that and opened a pop-up. We did not have to allocate as much capital, and we also got to test, iterate in a far less risky way.
Matt Grech-Smith: We came from a background where we had built a students event business. So we were attuned to how to create an experience in a venue and give people a really good time, and then how to market that.
That informed the pop-up. We were in this leaky warehouse [in Shoreditch], that wasn’t really fit for purpose and had rats the size of Jack Russells, which would occasionally make an appearance during trading.
But people just thought we can go to Shoreditch, be in a warehouse, play mini-golf and they will bring you cocktails and you can have a patty & bun [burger] after you have done it. Unwittingly it became the hipster trifecta.
We had tested unproven hypotheses: does crazy-golf in a bar venue work? So then we found a permanent site in the City and the big question was would a venue there work? The site we found also did not have planning permission, or an alcohol licence, when we signed the lease, which was quite high risk. [It worked].
Then we did one more in London before going to New York, and history is littered with brands that have gone to New York and not been successful. Lots of people said it was not sensible. But it has proven to be immensely successful. Now we are just getting going in Las Vegas as well.
It is tempting to look at it as a linear process, where it was obvious it was going to work. But you forget all these moments where you are saying “It should work”.
Matt Grech-Smith: Swingers is a very high-volume concept. In a busy week we will have three or four thousand people who pass through the venue, a mix of corporates and social bookers.
We had two locations that straddled central London and we couldn’t quite get comfortable that there were other cities in the UK that offered that same population and corporate density, the after-work drinking culture, facilitated by a public transport network.
We could maybe have gone to Manchester or Glasgow. But at the same time we were looking across at the US and there are so many markets there that meet those Swingers criteria.
The business was “hot” as it was hospitality with a third revenue stream, which is the holy grail, and we did not want someone else to rip us off in the US. It was important that we took the concept there and we had the first mover advantage.
[Running operations in different countries] brings extra complexity and cost, but it enables us to reach this higher volume of guests.
Jeremy Simmonds: There were fewer rats. [The 42,000 sq ft venue] is going amazingly well, based on eight days of data. The scale of Las Vegas blows your mind. It attracts north of 40 million visitors a year. We are partnered [as the landlord] with MGM and they own 50 per cent of the hotel bedrooms on the Las Vegas strip and the strip has more hotel bedrooms than the whole of New York.
It felt similar in some ways. Every time you do something that is new and feels pioneering in your business, it is a mixture of huge excitement, massive amounts of trepidation, and a large dose of disbelief that you are actually there and it is happening.
We have also built this incredible team at Swingers. At previous venue builds, myself and Matt would be on the ground every week, pointing at things. But now we are in the way. We have skilled experts. We designed it and our handprints are all over the venue, but the execution of it was managed by other people.
So we walked in after the 28-week build; it was slightly mind-blowing to have seen the empty shell and then it come together. [On a good week], in the region of 8,000 people will go through there.
Dubai [opening in December] is about the same size as New York, around 22,000 sq ft, and is a phenomenal site on Blue Waters Island.
It is our first franchise, and is an interesting way for us to grow the business. It is challenging every time you open in a new market … the notion of building an entire head office and back office infrastructure. So it is appealing to find excellent operating partners around the world.
Jeremy Simmonds and Matt Grech-Smith were talking to Richard Tyler, editor of the Times Enterprise Nework