In this episode of Skip the Queue, Andy Povey is joined by Simon Egan, Project Development Fella at CAP.CO, the creative force behind some of the UK’s most exciting and immersive play environments. Simon shares how CAP.CO’s mission to “get kids playing again” has evolved in a digital-first world, and why well-designed play isn’t just good for children, but for business too.
In this episode of Skip the Queue, Andy Povey is joined by Simon Egan, Project Development Fellow at CAPCO, the creative studio behind some of the UK’s most immersive and story-led play environments.
Simon shares his unexpected journey into the attractions industry, from co-creating the much-loved BeWILDerwood to founding CAPCO and championing play as a powerful driver of social connection, wellbeing, and commercial success. Andy and Simon explore why play matters more than ever in a screen-dominated world, how storytelling can transform visitor experiences, and what attractions can learn from farm parks, schools, and international projects.
Show References:
Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey
Simon Egan - Project Development Fella at CAP.CO (Creating Adventurous Places Ltd)
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Merac. We provide attractions with the tools and expertise to create world-class digital interactions. Very simply, we're here to rehumanise commerce. Your host is Andy Povey.
Credits:
Written by Emily Burrows (Plaster)
Edited by Steve Folland
Produced by Emily Burrows and Sammy Entwistle (Plaster), with Wenalyn Dionaldo (Skip the Queue HQ)
Andy Povey: Hello and welcome to Skip the Queue, the podcast that tells the stories of the world's best visitor attractions and the amazing people who work in them. Brought to you by Merac. I'm your host, Andy Povey, and in this week's episode of Skip the Queue, we're joined by Simon Egan. He's the Project development fellow at CAP.CO, the creative force behind some of the UK's most exciting and immersive play environments. Simon shares with us how CAP.CO's mission to get kids playing again, has evolved in a digital first world, and why well designed play isn't just good for children, but good for business too. Simon, can you just introduce yourself in terms about how you got into the industry?
Simon Egan: Our journey in the attractions world came out of the blue and started back in 2004 and five, when I helped a friend of mine develop his estate. So it's a true farm diversification. All those years ago. His estate is in the Norfolk broads, which has 7 million visitors a year, and his idea was to tap into that tourist pound. So with a completely blank canvas, he and I set about creating some kind of attraction. We had no idea what it might be. It might have been a tea room or it could have been anything. Tom didn't know very much about attractions. I'd spent my life avoiding them, so we didn't have to pay for our children to go into them and we had absolutely no experience. Tom's father was terrified.
Simon Egan: He and Tom and I, you know, with a certain amount of money raised off the. The value of the estate in Hofton to create an attraction. And over three years, three or four years from the moment we first sort of got together, we ended up creating a treehouse adventure world in a beautiful bit of Norfolk marshland, which is on the edge of their estate, and it ended up being called Bewilderwood. And rather than failing, which everybody quite rightly expected it to do, we thought maybe we get 30,000 visitors a year, maybe I would be the general manager forever and it would keep Tom so he could stay within his estate. And it got 12,000 people in the second week and was ridiculously successful and still is.
Andy Povey: Wow. So the target of 30,000 and you achieve 12,000 in the second week.
Simon Egan: Yeah, we didn't. Well, we didn't actually have a business plan. That was one of the reasons it was so good, because the money was raised on the asset of an estate. We didn't actually have to have a business plan, which meant we'd never had to go to a bank or a borrower to say, look, this is what we're going to do. And then, you know, because it just carried on evolving from the very first time I met with Tom through to when we opened, you know, and then. And then it carried on being built afterwards with all its success.
Simon Egan: And so there's never one moment in time when we said, this is it, you know, were halfway through the build and it was a year's build and we didn't have a name for the thing halfway through the build and we didn't know were going to have characters, we didn't know there was going to be a story about the characters that might live in this place. So we just. It never stopped evolving and that's really important to its success.
Andy Povey: That's a lovely message and I think that's true even after opening, isn't it? It's continually.
Simon Egan: Yeah. And it's American guy actually called John Bowuca, who came to help a whole lot of attractions in Norfolk through Visit Norfolk. And he was sort of an interpretation specialist and he kind of told people what signage to do. So it's quite a dry subject, but he saw our project, this treehouse adventure world evolving and they were really cool. CGIS and all the images of the treehouse play, Jungle bridges. It looked fantastic. And he actually turned to us and said, this is all well and good, but in three years time they're going to be really tired and look really gray and, you know, tree houses in the woodland look, lose their magic. So you need to create some pixie dust. You need to do something different. So we got over being offended because he said ideas weren't very good.
Simon Egan: And went about trying to find some pixie dust to add in, to weave in, to give it some longevity. None of which we expected to do, but made all the difference when we did it.
Andy Povey: So that's a fantastic start. And you launched Capco in 2014, is that correct?
Simon Egan: Yeah, so we stayed, we all helped obviously help create it and then three or four really important characters behind Bewilderwood. You know, Johnny Lyle with his branding, Bob with his financial controls, Jim with his building skills. And we all just started operating Bewildered, of course, all together. And then 2013, '14, we moved away from Bewildered and set up CAP.CO with a design and build. You know, we inherited the design and build team from, from Bewilderwood because the Treehouse company who designed and built Bewilderwood actually went out of business. So everybody just didn't go away. Fortuitously so we started CAP.CO with everybody who made any difference to Bewildered at all rolled into CAP.CO. We just started. We tried to make sense of what the success of Bewildered had been, other than being this beautiful Norfolk marshland. And it was.
Simon Egan: We realised it was the. Actually, it was the story, the narrative that. The layer that we hadn't expected that we put into Bewildered. You know, the characters, the Boggles in the marsh and the Twiggles in the trees, and you saw where they lived. And it was that. That set it apart. It was. It was the narrative of the place. And we didn't, you know, weren't that clever. We didn't. We just. We quietly realised it. And that's how it got recognised internationally. You know, it just. It was judged one of the best experiences in the world. So how could that be? And it was the story of its place, the Twiggles and Boggles who live in that marsh. So we took that sort of premise of finding a story of a place in Takatka and you took the story.
Andy Povey: All the way through. I was reminiscing with someone the other day about Aaron, who was your rather tall graphic designer and had the job title of Lanky Doodles.
Simon Egan: Lanky Doodle. Dandy. Yes, Lanky Doodle because he was tall. Everybody's got a name. And also it's quite apparent who's a Twiddle and who's a Boggle. And you are definitely a Boggle, Andy.
Andy Povey: I think that's a compliment, listeners.
Simon Egan: I'm not sure it's definitely a compliment. Definitely a compliment.
Andy Povey: So part of CAP.CO's mission is really to get kids playing again in a world that's increasingly dominated by screens.
Simon Egan: All the way back. All the way back then in 2007, were actually reacting what we thought was the PlayStation generation, new kids, because everything's evolved since. But it was children just spending more and more time at that stage on their PlayStations and screen time. So it was a thing. What's 2007? It's 18 years ago. So it's been a common narrative just trying to get kids back outside again. And we don't. We're not anti PlayStation or anti computer games, but it's just having some free time away from it. So be Wilderwood. And now everything that CAP.CO does is all about getting children outside and playing in the woods or playing just playing outside. And so the more you can do to encourage it and the more immersive you can make it to encourage them to do it, the better.
Andy Povey: What are you seeing as the biggest obstacles to getting the kids out making that happen?
Simon Egan: Parents.
Andy Povey: Okay, well, imagine.
Simon Egan: You think what stops kids going outside. And I've really noticed now we've got grandchildren, children love being outside. Children love putting their wellies on genuinely or they run through a puddle with no wellies on. And if you notice parents who say don't do this, don't do that, don't splash in the puddle, but you don't have to build anything for children. You just let them splash in a puddle and they would do it all day.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Simon Egan: And what we've learned, the things that we build and this is the one of the intentional things that everything's built for both children and parents. So as a parent, when you're playing, you know, one of our places or other places as well, you have to play with your children, you have to get involved. You know, there's always two slides or the. Everything's big enough for a grown up. So it draws parents into playing with their children, playing as a family. And that's really important. So it's multi generational and that's ultimately.
Andy Povey: Where we're all attractions are trying to get to, isn't it? It's that multi generational experience.
Simon Egan: Yeah. And I think, I mean we just, we struck lucky. We were, you know, entertaining children and families of primary school age, which seems like a gap up to sort of 10 years when you're still at primary school, when you still believe in everything before you go to high school.
Andy Povey: So catch them while they're young. So this is probably more of a psychologist question, but why is play important?
Simon Egan: I don't really know a proper answer to that. But what we learned and what we learn more and more. Actually one of the more shocking things when we first opened Bewildered, watching children, parents actually going into a woodland and. And it was as simple as being able to balance and, you know, actually climb up a high bridge. And it was, you know, were lucky enough to grow up outside doing all that stuff, but it seemed like there'd been a number of generations where they'd forgotten literally how to balance and the confidence that it would bring with it, just playing naturally. And so you would see parents trying to catch up with their children on a wobbly wire or. And they were just learning how to have, you know, that kind of physical activity.
Simon Egan: And that went on much more importantly, we found after our first crazy summer when we started getting school groups and then special needs groups coming into the woodland. And it was astonishing the effect that had.
Andy Povey: And tell us more about the effect. I mean, what was it you were seeing as a result of the.
Simon Egan: I. Well, okay, one story that might. Might illustrate it. There was a. We just had our first crazy summer where were getting two and a half, 3,000 people a day and. And then suddenly all the kids were so. Every day was a new day to us. Every day was a school day. We were brand new to it, we'd never run an attraction. And then we knew it was going to tail off at the end of the summer holidays. But it just went from two and a half thousand people to no people on that next Monday. No one came down the drive. And of course we knew it was going to happen, but it's quite brutal because everyone had gone back to school. And then over the next few weeks and months we just started more and more school strips, started school buses, school trips. But I saw a minibus come down the.
Simon Egan: Into the car park and it had treehouse written on the outside. And I was intrigued. I had no idea who it was. And so I rushed out to see what this. Who this group was. And I took a step back because they will see really, you know, disadvantaged children. There was one little guy and he must have been. He was probably 7 or 8, but he could have been 4 or 5. And he was ashen and pale and it turns out they were from a very sort of special needs school. And he had this particular boy, had two carers. There was nothing physically wrong with him, but he was. He was obviously damaged and quite emotionally. So I took a real step back.
Simon Egan: I hadn't seen it, you know, through the summer with all the families and let this group of about six children and about 10 carers go up into the wood. They get on the boat and they take the journey up into the woodland. And I caught up with them after about an hour and this boy who was ashen and gray as he got out of the minibus was. They were about a third of the way around the park and he was up one of the highest platforms, full of life, elated, and he was waving down to his care on the ground. And I went up to the carer and she just started crying and she said that she'd had this boy in her care for 18 months and they. He'd never spoken to her.
Simon Egan: So, you know, that's the difference of play and being outdoors is remarkable.
Andy Povey: What beautiful story.
Simon Egan: Yeah, but it's real stories about, you know, because we luckily we operate something. We just saw it every day, we saw the effect.
Andy Povey: So moving on to CAP.CO then and losing that connection with those guests and the real life experience must have been quite a difficult change for you.
Simon Egan: Yeah, it really was actually. And I get it. We get it because we're obviously very. CAP.CO is a design and build company. We use a lot of our experience of operation in both the design and build of how it will be with visitor flows and all that normal thing, but also with the clients and the people we build things for. So we get very involved. So yeah, we are of course detached from it because it's not ours to operate, but we do get very involved and there aren't many people who we don't still talk to and we go back to their places. But I really do miss that day to day involvement.
Simon Egan: Especially at the end of a day when you've had a busy day in a particular place, wherever the thing is, and there's an energy in the air which you just can't describe. When you've had two or three thousand people absolutely having fantastic time outside and there is 100% an energy in the air that gets left behind. And I do miss that now.
Andy Povey: I can imagine. I was talking to Doug Douglas from Avon Valley.
Simon Egan: Yeah, he's got his own energy.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he was saying that actually what they're selling is the screams from the teenagers who. This was specifically about Halloween and their fright event. The screams from the teenagers and the experience of the teenagers with their parents because they don't normally at that point when they're. Mum and dad aren't cool anymore, we don't want to be with you.
Simon Egan: Yeah, well they, I mean they do a fantastic experience and it's. They do something, you know, because they do it so very. If you do anything really or as well as you can, so you don't do something really well, it does generate, you know, that enthusiasm, that involvement and that, you know, it just creates a buzz of some sort of.
Andy Povey: So moving on to some of your more recent projects, how do you bring that operator's experience? How do you let people know what you need to do for the pre show? How do you get guests ready to get into the venue?
Simon Egan: I think that what we do like with Bewildered, what we do, we consider the whole journey, you know, when you actually arrive in the car park and find. By finding the story of the place. There's a good example at Warby, a great farm park up in Cumbria. And when I first went up there, actually, Katie picked me up from the train station and drove me across to the Warby Farm park. And as were, she was telling me that her farm, their farm, sits on the Hadrian's Wall. On. It sits on Hadrian's Wall. And that's the first thing she said. So I thought, why, you know, I'm really excited. I'm gonna. I'm gonna get to understand Hadrian's Wall. But when we got there was not a sign of it. It was. There was nothing to tell you that it was on it.
Simon Egan: Literally, Hadrian's all went through the middle of the farmyard. And then, of course, they aren't allowed to sort of uncover any of it. Because they're not allowed. It was so. So protected any elements of it. They thought they couldn't tell the story. So the story was never told other than her telling me in the car. So, of course, we. The story of the barbarians, you know, the two. The two sides on the. On the Scottish border, was absolutely intrinsic to the play. So by designing around a story, by making it immersive, so rich is actually, you know, on arrival and all through the whole. The time you spend at a place, you. You have a. You weave a story through it all, which kind of makes it an immersive experience.
Simon Egan: And then all the practical things about where you have the F and B and where you. You know, there are always only one way in and one way out. And all the things that we would. We learned from, all the fantastic kind of consultants, experts that we learned from. But then by doing it, we've got to know what's right and wrong.
Andy Povey: There's no better way of learning other than by doing, is there?
Simon Egan: Yeah, that's right. And I think then people maybe believe a little more what we think and how we design things, because we've done it before and we've done it ourselves, which is really important. We would never do anything that we wouldn't do ourselves. We would never recommend or design anything that we didn't think was right through our experience.
Andy Povey: So does every venue that you work with have to have the story, or are you pulling out those stories when you get to see them?
Simon Egan: Probably not, but there is a narrative. There's something that we've. So we love working with schools, so that you're going back to that story about the guy who came off the minibus. So some of our strongest work is actually in schools, and it's sometimes harder to find a narrative in the school because it's on a playground or. But we. We've just recently done a school in Rakhi, so very close to where we are in Norfolk and Rakheath. There were in. During the war, there were a whole load of Italians, like there across Norfolk who were based in and around Rakeath.
Simon Egan: And it turns out some of the retired Italian, they were in the RAF and they have an association with this small primary school and they actually have a building that they meet in this club of X Italian kind of soldiers and people who. Who. And it turns out that they. They. Their group, they call themselves the Bombers. And it turns out that they were actually funding the small playground to about. About 5,000 pounds of their own money and they actually meet at school. So of course we turned this playground, which normally would have just been, you know, maybe, you know, less of a narrative, but anyway, we created a bomb shelter and so it has a reason for being there.
Simon Egan: And there's something about when it's not just something out of a catalogue that you might see somewhere else, if you can just make it feel truly custom and bespoke. And that's. Bespoke, I think, is an overused word, bespoke. Sometimes if you just put a slide on a certain face or a different kind of roof on it, that's called bespoke. But to us, bespoke is actually a story with a sense of pace. So even in a school playground with some play, that has a sense of place, just. It changes it. So the bomb shelter in Rakhi School.
Andy Povey: I'm going to have to make sure my kids don't listen to this one, otherwise we're going to be doing a project in West London very shortly.
Simon Egan: Yeah, you know, we mustn't overplay this sense of place, but it does make a difference and we will find it somewhere, just even if it's not apparent. But it helps us to create something that is different to the last thing we did.
Andy Povey: Yeah, absolutely. So you've obviously been jetting around the world quite a lot recently. What are you picking up about different cultures around the world and how they're approaching play?
Simon Egan: Well, I wouldn't say that we've worked in too many different cultures because we've done a project over in France and we are working in North America now in the agritourism business, actually. So there's farm park diversification and they are very similar associations, but equally very different. And in North America, agritourism business or farm parks have a huge number of people visiting them. You know, unfeasibly large. We probably went to seven or eight farm parks on a Nafan, in fact a Nafan pumpkin patch tour. And 50 of us sat on a bus and drove around for three or four days to different agritourism businesses around Chicago. So we can't have been more than an hour and a half from each one over our three days. And each one had between 8 and 10,000 people a day going to it during. Yeah. So and why.
Simon Egan: And farms over there and we're finding out truly are. They're growers. They're still growers, they're still farmers who grow things on their farms. But. And then why do so many Americans, North Americans, both, you know, north and USA and Canada, why do they all want to go to experience that outdoor growing thing and talking to a lot of them and talking amongst ourselves and we. I think it's because it's. They're only two generations from actually being farmers themselves. So there's a much closer association with being outside and being on the land. And whereas in the UK and maybe, you know, other Western countries, most people don't even know what ham is. You know, kids don't know where food comes from. So yeah, that's different. That's definitely different over in North America.
Andy Povey: So they're much closer to it. But there's still a need for people like CAP.CO to drive the innovative play and get the kids away from the PlayStations.
Simon Egan: Yeah, I think even more. And I think we found, you know, you think America's ahead of us on many things and maybe Silicon Valley. But in a lot of ways North America is quite far behind Europe. You've probably found it with ticketing and systems and I think they're only properly now like were talking and everyone seemed the Zeitgeist about 15 years ago and the dangerous book for boys was the Christmas number one's, you know, best selling book at Christmas the year we opened Bewildered. So were lucky. We hit a zeitgeist. We were wanting to get children outside when that was the best selling book. So. And there's a sense that Americans are only now really talking about that same thing and realising that they do need to go outside more. They do go outside.
Simon Egan: But there's a statistic we heard the other day and it was backed up by some science that I'm not going to say 95 because it seems unrealistic, but it is. It's somewhere between 80 and 90% of children don't Go outside. They go from their car to their school bus to their school building, back to their gym to their. To their ice hockey to their. But they don't spend much real quality time outside. 80 or 90% of children there. So, you know, we all live in houses where it's very contained and you hardly got a garden. And so. And I think that Americans and North Americans are thinking about that more and more.
Andy Povey: Interesting. You mentioned France. How's that different? Again.
Simon Egan: I think it's much more difficult to work in France with French people. We had a great guy called Pierre Godwelski who. But there's some. There's something between the English and the French. And he really didn't want to use us, but Pierre was insistent. Pierre, he consults the French farm parks and animal parks, and he really wanted to use us on a particular project somewhere, and this was the one. And it took us a while for Laurent, the owner of St. Croix, to, I think, really engage with us. And I think when he saw how we were actually telling his story for him, because there was a really strong reason for his park and what he'd been doing for two or three generations. But it took him a while to get over our Englishness, I think. But.
Simon Egan: But other than that, I don't think really it's the same children want. You know, were all outside once, a lot more. So I. I don't think there's that much difference.
Andy Povey: No. Childhood is universal, isn't it?
Simon Egan: I think so, yeah. And play is universal. I think it is. I think. I really think it is.
Andy Povey: See how quickly a bunch of kids make friends and get together to form games, all that kind of stuff.
Simon Egan: Well, socialising, that's the thing that we've learned, you know, with schools and not just school. You can see it with schools when it's just a big group of kids together. The only other time that one, you know, one of our projects actually made somebody cry in a good way, you know, the Care of the Boy. One of our first schools in Norfolk that we did. One of our first schools. And it wasn't a very big play area because it's in the school, but it was really well considered. And it was built in over a pond and there was bridges, and it was very engaging. It was sort of using the space properly that was almost. You couldn't use it. So we found a clever way of using it.
Simon Egan: And in that instance, I went to the school one lunchtime, soon after it opened in early September, and the teacher was looking after the kids in the playground. And I went up and said, how's it going? Has it had much of an effect? The player and the kids were swarming all over this area. And she looked at me, said, I've never known anything like it. I've never known these children play like they are socialising with one another. Said up until this playground, it was, you know, the boys were playing football, the girls were tended to be in gaggles and chattering and trying to keep out of the way of the boys. And all the kids were slightly disadvantaged or definitely autism was the thing, you know, in the corner, not really engaging. And it had gone. They haven't played football at that school since.
Simon Egan: They all just engaged in this player that's built into the environment. And so it does 100% encourage socialising and building on social skills and interacting and. And I don't know why that is.
Andy Povey: But for sure it does interesting stuff. We've just come on, we're a week after the NFAN show here in the UK. Simon, I didn't get a chance to meet up there, unfortunately.
Simon Egan: Nearly. We nearly did.
Andy Povey: Nearly. Yeah. So, Simon, tips for farm parks in the UK, possibly someone that doesn't have the budget to implement a big. What would your advice be to me if I was running a farm diversification project here?
Simon Egan: Yeah. And because we always think if we did it ourselves, what we would do. And I think it's not necessarily the play. I think they should grow more. I think they should remember they're a farm. I think they should. Food is really important if you are a farm that grows food, even if it doesn't directly go into the production of what you sell. Maybe like, you know, Clover Mead in Ontario, they have something like a million bees and they're all about honey. I know, I know Farmer Copleys does that well up in Yorkshire, doesn't it? So I would build. I would really think about the core experience and why people go, come to your park. So, and of course then companies like Capco can use that as the hook to develop the play experience.
Simon Egan: But food is really important, both the growing of the food, the production of the food and then. And what you eat when you're there. Some of the bigger, not bigger, the more successful places, I think Johnny and I have realised and found out, and especially again with this, our North American experience, is that food is what you eat at lunchtime and that you might even put a brunch on your menu, but make it really good quality and local and that's what we did with Bewildered all the way back then. We had a very simple kind of menu and it was always the very best. Norfolk sausage from Archers and very localised cream and that seems to have come around.
Simon Egan: So I think local and good quality food and if you can actually be seen to be growing it as well, then that's a big tick.
Andy Povey: So that's really all about embedding yourself in the local community, isn't it? Which again is key to a lot of storage.
Simon Egan: Exactly. It's key to everything. Yeah. And then tell your story, whatever it is, as well as you can.
Andy Povey: Obviously, for those of you bet me you can tell that I quite like food and it's been one of my continual bugbears, particularly around soft play. Is that the quality of the cup of coffee you get when you're there supervising your kids is quite often dire.
Simon Egan: Yeah. I think more and more people have got good coffee. You know, that is getting. That's one thing that's probably ahead of food. But if you actually the food that you serve is as good as your best coffee and then you raise the quality of both. And the best example of that, and maybe without going on about this too much, but a more recent project of ours in. It's just north of Wolverhampton, it's Hocker Hill Adventure Barn. Yes. It's got quite a lot of CAP.CO stuff and there's 100 strong narrative about. There's an oak tree that one of the kings of England hid in to stop being. Anyway, so the play's got a story but separate to that the way that Tessa and Charlie do their food. And it's ticketed, it's a two hour dwell time.
Simon Egan: But Tessa is passionate about good locally sourced and locally cooked. They've got a chef, you know, it's not glamorous. They actually won the best food offer at NFAN was last week. So deservedly. But so they're doing it really well. It's been awarded last year. Last. Last week as the best food in a farm attraction. And a two hour dwell time and they get north of more than 8 pounds person average spend person.
Andy Povey: Wow.
Simon Egan: So that. Doesn't that tell the story?
Andy Povey: Yeah.
Simon Egan: You know, we'll normally suggest 3 or 4 pounds average spend per visitor when you're building the business case. But to have achieved eight pounds plus for a two hour indoor play experience. It's indoor and outdoor, but for not predominantly indoor. And that just says what we've just been talking about. Do food well.
Andy Povey: Yeah. So you mentioned earlier when we were talking about your first park down in Norfolk. The play has to be for adults as well, but we're seeing more and more play spaces opening up specifically for adults, so treetop bars, giant swings, even going into some of the more competitive socialising areas. The swingers golf, that kind of stuff.
Simon Egan: Yeah.
Andy Povey: Is this a trend or is it. Is it a bigger movement?
Simon Egan: No, it's a bigger movement. I think people engaging in. I think in a world is more and more traumatic. I think it's an expression. You can climb out of it, you can have fun, you can engage, you can socialise around play. And it's good to make it competitive. You know, even the kids, you know, we will always do 100, have two zip wires running together or two big slides and. And you're trying to chase your dad. And of course, we'll sneakily make the longest sit wire longer. So the kids will pick it up, they'll realise and get on the shorter one and. But yeah, it's. It's the same thing exactly that, you know, you go out and you. You play golf against the screen or. And it's. It's competitive. And children's play is competitive too, but it can be done in a fun way.
Simon Egan: So I absolutely see a similarity. Parents love to go outside and play as well with their children, but so many. You've probably heard it yourself. I wish I could go there without children. So why don't you make a place where you can go without children? That's what everyone's doing more and more.
Andy Povey: So what are you seeing that's coming up that's surprising and more creative? What are the top recommendations from Simon about places, farm parks to go to?
Simon Egan: Go to Ontario. They are just fantastic. Honestly, they're very authentic. Just because they're so close to that core experience of growing and farming and. And I think that's. There are some in the uk. The. One of the biggest inspirations to us early on was the Crocky Trail. Have you been to the Crocky Trail?
Andy Povey: I haven't, but I was just talking to someone about it earlier.
Simon Egan: Unbelievable. And he. He was going before we did, bewildered, and he. And luckily I fell upon it. And he's a dairy farmer. He is a dairy farmer. He still has his two or 300 cattle that he milks twice a day. But he has created. It's called the Crocky Trail. And it's just on his farm. Mostly. Mostly built by himself. Very Heath Robinson, but absolute play at its rawest. You know, yes to swings and. Yeah. But and there's actually a massive sort of playful mud kitchen but very traditional and you get really muddy. And kids who know it and they get two or three hundred thousand people here, people who engage in it aren't afraid of it. It is the most fantastic experience they'll get.
Simon Egan: The whole family will get dressed in onesies and waterproofs and know what they're going to get when they get there. That is in Cheshire, so it's just south of Chester. In the north west. All families should go and challenge themselves at the Crocky Trail.
Andy Povey: Northwest.
Simon Egan: Just turn left when you leave London and then go up a bit.
Andy Povey: Keep going until you find the mud and you'll be at the Crockett Trail.
Simon Egan: That's right, yeah.
Andy Povey: So if I'm imagine. Put your bob hat on for a moment and let's talk about revenue. So how can play areas add revenue to a farm attraction? How do you make the numbers stack up?
Simon Egan: The way you do it is dwell time. Surely you keep people there longer. You, you make sure that people are there for you know, two eating time. So you know, try and spread yourself before and after lunch. So create an experience that you stay at longer. That's the key one, I guess. And I know we're talking about capco, so I, I'll say. But you know our play has huge amounts of play value. So what you, every time you play on those or even a smaller area will have numbers of layers and it'll be like a maze and every time you do it something different. So we rabbited on about, about story and narrative. But actually play value is probably even more important because it keeps people playing for longer.
Simon Egan: And you know, every time they do it in a different way because they're built into their environment and they're not just, you know, out of a catalog put in a prompt on a place. They're. The play value is really important. So you know, if you get another hour and a half or an hour. I think we worked out that an attraction only gets about 150 hours. You know, a truly children's attraction. So very seasonal to holiday school holidays. It's something about 150 hours a year to give to sell somebody something at lunchtime. So make sure as many people as possible are in there at lunchtime.
Andy Povey: I've heard that stat banded around in days. So you've got.
Simon Egan: Yeah, I think it's probably, I think it's actually less. I think it's 100 days and it's not very many. If you imagine how many school holiday days there are and then you imagine that people eat definitely between 12 and 2. Not many people eat after that. They're very ready. You have your food and it's. You very quickly get to the number of hours and it's not very many.
Andy Povey: That number is really quite telling, isn't it?
Simon Egan: It's interesting. It makes you focus and that's why you've got to do it really well. You've got to do it efficiently. You know, if people have to queue 45 minutes and they want something at half one, they'll go, well, never mind, maybe we'll get something when we get home or. So make sure you actually have an offer that's very deliverable and, you know, grab and go, or it doesn't take too much preparation or. Or is efficient.
Andy Povey: Simon, I feel I've learned something again, just from this conversation. That's rude.
Simon Egan: That was. That was a bubblet. That was a bubble. That was a bubblet number. Because we.
Andy Povey: I've written that down in your pen.
Simon Egan: It's interesting. It really. I mean, it's focusing our mind. It's focusing our mind. Imagine if you're actually an operator. It can really focus your mind.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Simon Egan: We also came up with. Can I give you one other one that we learned?
Andy Povey: Please do. Please.
Simon Egan: So we learned. And this is Bob. So you've mentioned Bob. We could talk all day because Bob is absolutely the most. He does all our money, he does our forecasting. He came and sorted Tom and I out financially.
Andy Povey: Everyone needs a Bob.
Simon Egan: Everybody needs a Bob. Our Bob's called Bobblet and so it.
Andy Povey: Helps that he's really quite small.
Simon Egan: He's very small. He's carried the weight of us around and he's sort of dragged him down. He is fantastic. So when we first opened our park in Norfolk, were inundated, were overwhelmed with people. Can you imagine? We thought we'd get 900 people on four days of the year and that would be it. And were getting two and a half, 3,000 people every day. And we ran out of food by 11 o'clock.
Simon Egan: Absolutely. We just ran out of food. We. We couldn't make it fast enough. And. And then Norfolk people don't like waste, so if you put those two things together, they would never make enough sandwiches, just in case there were some leftover. So even though we knew we're going to have a busy day, they would still not make enough. And they'll just make you know, just in time, just make a few more. So then the queues got too much. So I think this was Bob, but I just loved watching him doing it. And we got. We engaged in it big time. So we opened at 10 o' clock and at 11 o' clock there would be a number of people in the park.
Simon Egan: Let's say it's 750 and whatever that number at 11 o' clock, when we'd been open for an hour, as long as the queues were running, you know, smoothly. And we knew that was about 28% of the number of people that would be in the park by lunchtime, by 1 o'. Clock. So it was called the 11 o' clock forecast. And we. So let's say 750 people in 11, Bob would phone the munch bar and say, right, this is going to be. Can you do the math for me? 2,250 people at lunchtime will be in our park. And we knew that 12% of those people ate a ham sandwich, let's say. So please, would you make whatever 12% of 2250? So maybe. I don't know what that is.
Simon Egan: But anyway, it was all formulaic and we knew how many coffees they'd have and we knew how many ice creams they'd take. And so first of all, we never ran out and our wastage was second to none because there was a pattern, like there's a pattern to everything that was. And so that forecasting, you know, the forecasting can go through absolutely everything to do with the business. If you, if you analyse it, either weekly, daily, monthly, annually, there will be a pattern. And that was one. A third of the people. And then 2009, after, you know, with the financial crisis, it changed. It got up to, I think, 31% because people came earlier and stayed longer to get more value.
Simon Egan: So it doesn't matter if it shifts, but as long as you see, you know, we could pick up a trend, we could see it changing. That's the greatest learning from Bob. Understand the numbers, look at your data, but actually look at it. No, but look at. Really look at it. Look at it in a way that you can use it. Oh, absolutely, look at it. But if you don't do anything with it, then you can look at it for as long as you like.
Andy Povey: Yeah, there's no point staring at your belly button, is there? You need to make it actionable and.
Yeah.
Andy Povey: Valuable and in. In the right time. Yeah, very interesting. So the final question, Simon, bringing things to a close Because I've taken up far too much of your time already. What are you looking forward to most in 2026? Is there a big project? Have you got a big holiday coming up? What's in your appetite?
Simon Egan: Actually, you know, when were at Nafan last week and everyone there was a pass the parcel around each table. If you didn't go to the gala ward, even there was a pass the parcel and we passed the parcel around the table, terrified. It's like, what was your favorite thing this year? And what was. And this is like that question because every time you took a layer off whoever had, there was a little piece of paper and it was a question that you had to answer. What was the funniest thing you said last year? Just a nightmare. And my little piece of paper dropped out and it said, what's the proudest thing of last year? This last year for you? And luckily I got that bit of paper and it's pretty easy because it was. It was the fact that we got the raw.
Simon Egan: I'm not saying it because we did it, but it made me very proud that were actually awarded the Royal Warrant and it made, you know, for our play, which is extraordinary. We're a play design and build company. We. We've been granted the Royal Warrant and it made me proud. Not just for my parents, you know, for my dad. He would have been so proud of me. Sadly, he's not alive to witness it. But that was my proudest moment. Luckily, that was the piece of paper that fell out of my. Because it was something I can so easily say. But as for next year, this coming year, 2026, we have got some really interesting projects.
Simon Egan: A lot of them are sort of in planning, so it's difficult to talk about them and I think probably again, I'm going to bang on about it, but actually, working in North America, in Ontario is really exciting for me. My godmother lives in Toronto and I've wanted to work in North America for 15 years and it's fantastic. People are so receptive and it's a real opportunity.
Andy Povey: Excellent, Simon, thank you so much. I really enjoyed spending time with you.
Simon Egan: Well, you've been inspiration for me through the years, all your experience, you've been fantastic in the years that we've learned everything that we know.
Andy Povey: Well, what can I say? Thank you, Simon, for joining me today. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and every day with you is all day. I learned something every time.
Andy Povey: If you want to know more about the great work that Simon and the rest of the CAPCO team get up to head over to we are capco.com we can put a link in the show notes for this episode was written by Emily Burrows, edited by Steve Holland and produced by Emily Burrows and Sami Entwistle from Plasto as well as Wenalyn Dinaldo from Skip the Queue HQ.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, share and comment on the episode in your podcast app. It really helps to spread the word about us and the amazing attractions we work with.
Be sure to visit SkipTheQueue.fm for this episode's transcriptions and to listen to the rest of the seasons over. Additionally, MERAC has just launched the fourth edition of the Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report. If you want to find out how attractions can improve their websites in 2026 and where the real opportunities are lie according to the latest data, then download the results from merac.co.uk. Once again, thank you for listening. I've been your host Andy Povey. See you next time.