Wayne Hickey

An unclear story, and documents that did not agree with each other.

Wayne and his team knew the sector properly. Twenty five years in operations and amusement park R&D on his side, forty years in finance and STEM education on Candy’s, and eighteen years of family entertainment marketing on Tiffany’s. The concept was sound: family entertainment centres are dated, expensive and losing to home entertainment, and there is room for something built around experience rather than machines.

Asking for six million dollars to build a first site is a different matter. There is no trading history to point at, so every number has to be defensible on its own. A market projection, a build cost, a visitor capture rate. When the deck, the plan and the model each tell it slightly differently, an investor stops reading the business and starts checking the arithmetic.

Clear investor story, aligned documents, and confident conversations with investors.