BOUNCE Wodonga to seek out franchisee as business continues rapid growth

BOUNCE Wodonga is currently managed through headquarters in Melbourne, but over the coming months will introduce North East ownership.

Co-founder Ant Morell said it won't change anything from a customer's perspective.

"What we find is any form of localised ownership allows the customer experience and the staff experience to be optimised with the input of someone who really understands the local nuances," he said.

"Even if that's just what's popular in town at the moment, or what the weather's doing. What we always find with any of our franchised operations is they get the best of both worlds.

"It's great for the business, it's great for that partner and there's often a natural fit when someone has an existing business interest in a town, or they have an affinity with the local community, but they'd benefit from being part of a larger operation business system.

"We have regional managers for each state and local venue managers at every venue.

"Those venue managers and staff always have a pretty close relationship with local customers, local sporting groups and things like that, but this just adds an extra layer of skill and senior leadership that happens to be an owner or a part-owner.

"Localised ownership results in a venue getting a greater degree of focus than it sometimes does when the business is in a huge growth trajectory."

Mr Morell said the popularity of Albury's Flying Fruit Fly Circus, the ease of access to Wodonga and population growth would make it an appealing opportunity.

"There would be potential to grow the business (in Wodonga), definitely. That's something we would work with a new owner to identify and support," he said.

"With the mainstream appeal of freestyle sport growing significantly, we find we have a lot of skiers, a lot of snow sports people, and even wake boarders tend to use the venues to practice their aerial moves in a safe and supervised environment.

"Our core customer group is basically everyday people of any age, at any skill level, coming into the space and getting a taste of those sorts of experiences.

"The combination of mainstream appeal and niche sport elite athlete training is underscoring what I think has been a significant global growth window for our business across the world.

"If we can create spaces that allow people to experience the things that they are usually just consuming in adrenaline sport and extreme sport content, and make those experiences available to any age at any skill level, then the spread of customers, depending on the venue size, ranges from walking age preschoolers all the way through to X Games and Olympic athletes."

On July 27, BOUNCE opened new site in Sydney, a 3200 square-metre site with 14 metre ceilings, to take its stable to 19 in Australia, along with international venues across Asia.

BOUNCE Wodonga launched in March 2021 after taking over from Supaworld and employs more than 40 staff.

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