Have your Chick-fila and eat it too, in the paintball business.
First off this blog isn’t about the Cathy family and what Dan Cathy said or meant etc.. What it is about, is what we as paintball business and field owners and people looking to start a paintball business or field can learn from it.
Let’s go back in time and see what the paintball perceptions were in the 80’s at the start of our great sport. Paintball was for Ex Vietnam Vets and people that wanted to play War Games, and it was really, really expensive. I paid $10 for 10 shots at our local field!
Now the 1990’s Paintball was perceived as a obscure sport for reckless thrill seekers, similar to Hang Gliding or Sky Diving. People at my church used to come up to me and say, I heard you were in the Ping Pong business or the Pinball business. Paintball was still an unknown to the masses. And starting a paintball field was unheard of!
In the 2000’s Paintball became a house hold name and mainstream thanks to all the Big Box stores carrying the markers and supplies. In the mid 2000’s Money Turf was used as ESPN covered Paintball and now Paintball became at last a Real Sport. Before the crash, money was easy to get and starting a paintball field was extremely easy.
Present Day, Paintball is played by all races , religions, ages 10 – 100, economic brackets and it’s played in over 60 countries in the world.
Your perception of Chick-fila may have changed over the last week, but aren’t you glad paintball’s perception has changed for the better and is embraced world wide? Just imagine when paintball gets in the Olympics in 2020. More on that in a different blog.