Jump XL Lille off to a flying start

Start your own trampoline park

French sports management student Rémi Boldoduc worked at ELI Play as an intern in 2015, helping develop a new Jump XL in a former church in Eindhoven. In 2016, he opened his own trampoline park in France, Jump XL Lille, which he now runs together with his girlfriend Inès Beajot-Corsini. A day in the life of two young, successful entrepreneurs.

08:30am

"Time to jump out of bed. We live about 15 minutes away from trampoline park. In the morning we get the place ready for the rest of the day: cleaning, preparing goodies ready, confirming reservations. Afterwards, I go to the shop to stock up on drink, sweets and snacks. On weekdays, we open at 4pm, but we don't close until late in the evening. On Saturday we are open from 10am until 10pm.

3:30pm

Calm before the storm... We start the music. In the early days, I always used this time to get a few jumps in myself. No spectacular stunts, but I can do frontflips and backflips. By now it's gotten so busy, though... It's been a few months since I was last on a trampoline myself.

4pm

Reinforcements have arrived: in addition to our three fixed employees, we have three temporary employees in today. During the holiday periods, we need a bigger team: on our busiest days, we need up to ten people. It can be very useful to work with temporary employees, but French labour laws are strict, so we have to be very careful about how we organise the schedules, so you don't have to offer temporary employees a fixed contract. Fortunately, Inès is a lawyer, which makes things easier. When we were just starting up our company, her legal knowledge was a great advantage. We're really doing this together and that feels good. When I suggested the idea of opening our own trampoline park, she helped and encouraged me straight away. Her support means the world to me, I don't know whether I would have done it if she hadn't been behind the idea.

5pm

The jumping arena is completely full. A class of schoolkids has booked it for an hour. The students organised the whole things themselves to celebrate that the school year is almost over. We get this kind of reservations all the time, partly because we advertise it on Facebook. We've also been uploading frequent videos to Facebook since the end of 2015. At the time, we hadn't even finished our trampoline park yet, but we used videos of Dutch Jump XLs, so that people knew what to expect.

We knew we had to have a good marketing strategy: we had radio commercials, put adverts in local newspapers and got a huge 3x4-meter billboard.

Rémi Boldoduc

We also got a lot of free publicity, because we were the first trampoline park in the Lille area. The national news even came by with a camera crew, which was a huge boost for us, of course.

8pm

Trampo Fitness! Every Tuesday night, we have an instructor who teaches an hour-long class in the jumping arena. As always, a large number of the trampolines are also taken tonight. We're thinking about organising more of these activities, such as an instructor who can come in to teach customers new stunts, for example.

9.30pm

As closing time approaches, it gets a little less busy. I've opened my laptop to answer some emails and take care of some admin work. We often use this time to finish this kind of work. All in all, it takes a lot more time than I had ever thought it would. Of course, it's difficult to get a good idea of what it's like to run a trampoline park in advance. We are open seven days a week, which is pretty intense. Every now and then, we go on a break for a few days, or go on a longer holiday, but even then we regularly check up on how things are going. We put up cameras, so we can see how busy it is on our phone. We also can't seem to stop answering lots of mails when we're on holiday. Letting go isn't easy.

10pm

We lock the doors and check the tills. Financially, everything is going very well, even better than predicted. The first year, we even managed to recoup our investments. We are still the only trampoline park in the Lille area, but there are now over 35 other locations in France where you can trampoline. It's gone really fast: when we started early last year, there were only five, maybe six trampoline parks in the whole country. The growth rate is no real surprise for me: I first came across a Jump Park in the US in 2015 and knew immediately that the trend would also blow over to Europe.

11pm

We take all the money we've earned to the bank, before we head home. We usually have a bite before we go to bed, and after a good night's sleep, we're ready for a new day in our park."