Continual innovation is at the heart of family entertainment and gaming company Playnation’s success, CEO Adam Hodges tells Simon Liddle.
IT is just two years since Playnation, the family entertainment and gaming solutions company, was formed through a management buy out from Inspired Gaming. Its progress in that time has been remarkable.
Under the stewardship of CEO Adam Hodges, Playnation’s interests have come to cover the breadth of the amusement sector and include ticket redemption, video games, pushers, cranes and prize vending machines, as well as a burgeoning adult gaming and server-based games business. Among its list of clients are Bourne Leisure, Park Resorts, Parkdean, the fast growing bowling centre operator MFA Bowl, motorway service station chains Welcome Break, Moto and Roadchef, and the UK’s largest operator of adult gaming centres, Talarius.
Has the speed with which the company has established itself and is now growing within this competitive marketplace come as a surprise? “No,” joked Hodges, “it’s all going according to plan!”
He admitted, however, that the business structure as it is today is different to how he imagined it would be at the beginning. The reality is that in only a short space of time Playnation, which is majority owned by Palatine Private Equity, has emerged as a major force within the UK leisure industry, operating around 20,000 amusement machines across more than 1,700 sites. From holiday parks and motorway service stations, to family pubs and bowling alleys – even major airports – the Runcorn-based company is raising the bar for the amusement sector.
“It’s been two years of establishing ourselves as a new, independent company,” explained Hodges when InterGame caught up with him during January’s EAG International expo in London. “It’s been a two-year process of putting good, strong foundations in place, both from a systems and business structure perspective.”
Forming part of that process was last year’s acquisition of Birmingham-based Funhouse Leisure, a specialist within prize and vending equipment operating over 1,600 machines in the hospitality and leisure sector. Alongside that, Hodges estimates that the company has invested half-a-million pounds in new staff in the last 18 months.
Read the full article in the March issue of InterGame
