Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Nate Howard, managing director, Xtreme Action Park
Nate Howard is the managing director of Xtreme Action Park in Fort Lauderdale, a family entertainment center featuring karting, bowling and adventure climbing trails, as well as bar and restaurant space. It’s a job he worked himself into, says Howard, when he began working as a consultant for its investors about three years ago. He was asked to take on the role, as the venue has moved into its 10th straight quarter of growth, evolving from a karting track to the now 240,000-square-foot action venue.
Resume
Experience: U.S. Army at age 17, for the next nine years, leaving as an Infantry Captain. Sales and leadership positions, including as a national sales executive for Indeed.com.
Education: United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., with a degree in general management; graduated from the Army’s Air Assault, Airborne, and Ranger schools. MBA, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
On the job
Challenges: Constructing an indoor family entertainment center around a go-kart track was a professional challenge in project management, requiring working with dozens of vendors, hiring new staff, and integrating new IT, all to open the doors before summer break was over in 2015.
By the numbers: We are a datadriven organization. I am constantly looking to measure employee performance, arcade game popularity, wait times in our kart track, and even if one brand of coffee is outselling another. If there is a way to track what we do, we’ll measure it.
Strategies
What’s new: The experiential and immersive factor of the attraction has become more important. Being on a ride or watching a movie is fun, but living the game or being part of the movie is so much better. There is a growing demand for large group activities like escape rooms, championship style competitive racing, glow-in-the-dark and roller coasterlike shooting games.
Drill-down: Quantify the results. If you changed something, did you make it better and how so? If you sell, where do you rank against your peers and did you grow your sales from one period to the next? Measure, prepare to communicate results.