May 16, 2017

Meet Brian Lee and Bane Srdjevic of Lock Chicago – Escape Games in North Side and Evanston

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Lee and Bane Srdjevic.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Bane was teaching English in Japan when he was introduced to escape rooms by a high school friend. After hearing about them, he stumbled upon Escape Rooms while exploring in Shinjuku, Tokyo. They were extremely innovative and when he returned to the states he suggested to Brian Lee that they open one up in Chicago. Brian was living in Boston at the time and timing worked out where the two were able to self-fund and construct their original space in the Chicagoland area in December of 2015.

Since then Lock Chicago has added an additional escape room to its facilities, “Malfunction”, and have also designed mobile escape room for festivals like Northwestern’s “Dillo Day” as well as participated in advertising campaigns for companies like McDonald’s and several movies. They have also been able to donate $40,000 worth of tickets to various charities in the Chicagoland area, and are currently expanding to a new 4,000 square foot space in Evanston in the summer of 2017.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
This was definitely a learning experience, as we had never attempted something like this before. We originally had a location leased and settled on in Wrigleyville, but due to zoning restrictions that were applied to escape rooms in the time between our consultation with the zoning board and our signing of the lease, we were suddenly unable to run our business out of that location.

Deciding not to go through all of the red tape that Chicago put on running an escape room, which were now essentially being treated as public places of amusement, such as bars or concert halls, we started looking to Evanston for a new location. We were both raised in Wilmette, Evanston’s neighbor, so we knew the area very well and saw the potential with being situated in an area that was still accessible by Chicagoans but allowed access for locals living more north of the city and surrounding areas.

Escape Rooms have been growing at an extremely high rate in the United States and it’s important for us that we create the best possible experience for our customers. With so many options to choose from we want every Escape Room in the country to succeed so that guests playing for the first time have a positive first impression and get hooked as much as we have with the versatility and uniqueness of all the games in the country! We have had players come in who have done over 200 escape rooms and being on the forefront of theme and puzzle ingenuity keeps us excited about the future of this industry.

Please tell us about Lock Chicago – Escape Games.
Lock Chicago – Escape Games specializes in as you can imagine, “Escape Games” and “Escape Rooms”. The focal point of our business revolves around our main escape rooms located at 1601 Sherman in Evanston, IL. While still a fairly new concept in the States, escape rooms have grown explosively in popularity due to their challenging and immersive nature. The idea behind an escape room is simple: you are locked inside of a room and you and a group of friends have 1 hour to solve all the puzzles, find all the clues, and ultimately unlock and escape the room within a 1 hour time frame. We do things a little bit differently by not actually locking our customers in the rooms, but rather creating alternative goals from opening treasure chests to collecting a specific number of items in order to succeed.

While we did start off as just having two escape rooms at our location, we have since expanded the services we offer as a company. Now we also provide team building events for 50+ guests at once by creating a unique escape room experience at their location, whether it’s an office in their building or an offsite location they’re having a conference at. These have included national sales meetings, holiday parties, social mixers, even as part of an interview where interviewees were observed for their problem solving skills while completing the challenges.

What sets us apart the most from other escape rooms is our diversification. We never intended on just operating a couple of onsite escape rooms and calling it a day, we’re always looking for innovative ways to push the escape room industry to new limits. We now also provide mobile escape rooms for festivals, plans and designs for escape rooms to other escape rooms around the world, made-to-order escape rooms for custom advertising campaigns (McDonald’s just recently had a social media campaign that involved three people competing to get the fastest time in an escape room across their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter networks, and we partnered with the advertising company to design those escape rooms for them), and soon we’ll be offering puzzle making classes for all age ranges. These classes will be teaching students how to use more complicated technologies that they can then apply to a variety of projects.

Bane is most proud of Lock Chicago’s impact philanthropically. The uniqueness of our industry has allowed us to donate $40,000 worth of tickets in our first year of business to over 25 different charities. We are in a very special position to help others and doing whatever we can has been a mission of ours since day one.

Brian is most proud of the ability for Lock Chicago to bring people together and partake in an experience that they might have never done before. In addition to our “Private Rooms” we also offer “Public Rooms” for multiple guests to book and play at the same time. It is truly a warming experience seeing strangers come together to tackle a challenge and (hopefully) share in the spoils of victory!

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
To be honest there is nothing major that stands out that we would have done differently. The best advice we would provide is that as first time business owners it is extremely important to take time and get your entire business plan in line before taking the leap. It is extremely exciting to be a part of something you are passionate about but you want to make sure you’re not jumping into something without fully understanding the risks versus rewards.

We could have likely opened additional rooms quicker or pushed up our open date but everything circles back to the customer experience. To create the best possible experience for our guests we wanted to make sure we took our time to get everything in line before opening and that should apply to everything you do as a company.

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