Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#288: Scott Cramton (Founder of American Immersion Theatre) (pt. 1 of 2)
Today we released part one of our interview with theatre company founder Scott Cramton. His journey is nothing short of inspiring. Born with a cleft palate, he underwent seven surgeries by fourth grade and overcame speech challenges through dedicated therapy. Embracing his passion for the arts, he pursued his love for theater and film at Grand Valley State University, where his hidden disability became the driving force behind his mission.
Over the years he created a variety of theater companies, including American Immersion Theater (AIT), a multi-million dollar enterprise and the largest immersive theater company in America.
You won't want to miss his entertaining story of bootstrapping and persistence in the theatre space! https://americanimmersiontheater.com/
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise and I'm Andy Heiss.
Nick Petrella:And I'm Nick Petrella. Scott Crampton is on the podcast today. His journey is nothing short of inspiring. Born with a cleft palate, he underwent seven surgeries by fourth grade and overcame speech challenges through dedicated therapy. Embracing his passion for the arts, he pursued his love for theater and film at Grand Valley State University, where his hidden disability became the driving force behind his mission. Over the years, he created a variety of theater companies, including American Immersion Theater, a multi-million dollar enterprise and the largest immersive theater company in America. We'll have Scott's websites in the show notes so you can learn more about him and his companies.
Scott Cramton:Thanks, for being on the podcast. Scott hey, thanks for having me Appreciate it.
Nick Petrella:Before you give us an overview of your businesses and how you got here, would you mind defining immersion theater for those who may not be familiar with the term?
Scott Cramton:Yeah, absolutely. And before I do that, I know that you guys had like a little thing at the beginning here saying like you don't necessarily endorse. That is not true for this particular company, that's for the other people. So Nick and Andy absolutely love what we do. They're huge fans. They say run, don't walk to go get tickets to our new show at Times Square.
Andy Heise:So just letting you guys know that one for all the listeners.
Scott Cramton:We put an edit marker in here. Hang on, I did air quotes but it's only audio story about you. You leave with immersive theater, with a story of something that happened to you, with an event that happened about you, to you, and if you don't have that kind of tangible experience, then it's probably just something that sounds like it's immersive, like Van Gogh, where it's just projectors. But when you talk true immersive stuff, you're going to lead with something that happened to you, not just something you watched.
Andy Heise:Yeah, it's something I came across, kind of looking around at what you're doing, and I noticed there's a difference. Is there a difference between immersion theater and immersive theater, or is it kind of so?
Scott Cramton:we're in this really interesting infancy stage, right. So we started this is my 22nd year doing this and when, about five years in, I'm like, wow, immersive theater is not even on Wikipedia. So we worked our butt off submitting it multiple times and we kept getting back stuff that said not a real thing. Now it's like just slapped on a bunch of different stuff. So we're working hard to define immersive theater and the honest truth is the Wild West right now there is no. We've worked on some voyeuristic.
Scott Cramton:Immersive theater appears to be really kind of trending and catching hold and we really kind of labeled that for things like sleep no more, things where you're putting on a mask and you're not you know. Actually, you know you're watching something. It is definitely immersive, but you're not truly part of it. You're like a ghost and that's kind of voyeuristic. There's also selfie museums. Those are commonly viewed as immersive and in a way, they are because you're playing like a playground. But yeah, true, immersive, true immersive, you know, really involves you being a true, actual part of it, you talking, you engaging in some way. As far as immersion or immersive or experiential, all of those technically are so wild westy that, like the audience doesn't, the customer base doesn't really have an idea of what is and there has been very few defining books on the subject, which is interesting.
Nick Petrella:So you're using them synonymously on the subject, which is interesting.
Scott Cramton:So you're using them synonymously. Well, we do what's called considered true form immersive. True form immersive is essentially the version of immersive where the story takes place through you in some way, and there are quite a few places that do that Immersive. Fort Tokyo does a lot of the story takes place through you. Jubensha, which is the number three form of entertainment in China right now, is definitely true form immersive, debatably even almost Dungeons Dragons styled to some extent and a lot of stuff. What they're doing in London right now is true for immersive and there's a handful of it in America right now, but it's globally huge. But yes, I guess people are using it somewhat synonymously.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, gotcha, and I'm glad you asked that, andy, because as I was reading, as I was doing research, I found both Right, yeah. And then, when you asked that, I was like wait, did I make a mistake? And then I was like nope it's me.
Andy Heise:No, it was just something that I was hoping to get clarification from, and that's interesting, it's fascinating.
Scott Cramton:Well, if you were looking for long-winded clarification, I'm your man.
Andy Heise:Well, it is a podcast. That's why you're here, man.
Nick Petrella:It's great, man. It's great. It's long form, not extra long form. So now that we got that taken care of, why don't you tell us about?
Scott Cramton:how you got here. Yeah, I mean, you know I've loved immersive theater. You know I love the idea of it my whole life. I like doing things, you know. I think, generally, the value of watching things has never been lower. Right, we have the entire world's source of entertainment, like the library of Alexandria is essentially just in our pockets 24-7. Even just science-based people are watching things more than they ever ever have, but we have the same amount of time debatably less, because a lot of people work more and if you have the same amount of time, you're watching more supply and demand. Right, the value of doing things has never been higher. The value of actually having experience or making friends.
Scott Cramton:Remember when you were like under 20 and used to make new friends? Crazy, right, you know, making new friends now is like you like run home and like tell your spouse You're like you won't believe this, I might have a friend, a new one, like what do you mean? A new friend? Like we were talking and you know it just worked out and I think that stuff is, you know, the crutch of life and I think that stuff is, you know, the crutch of life and I've always wanted to be a part of you know, bringing people together, having people work together. You know, in all of our shows our number one comment is always going to be, you know, like, what did you love the most? What did you like the most? And you know, 50% of the comments are always related to like oh, my uncle did this, or I've never seen my grandma do that, or I met some people at my table. You know, it's not even related to the actors, it's about the experience that we put them in.
Scott Cramton:As far as how I started, I got you know I was told by my acting teacher, mr K, that they say acting is such a hard job to get anything from right, so hard. You always just say yes, absolutely. So if they're like you're at a job and they're like, so, scott, do you alligator wrestle, and you haven't gotten it yet, you're like, yes, absolutely, I alligator wrestled on the way over here. In fact, I have a guy alligator named Clyde in the lobby. He might've run away, but anyway, yes. And then if they, if you think you're going to get the job and it's down to you, alligator wrestling, you go home and you either die from being eaten by an alligator or you come to work the next day because you can alligator wrestle and that's how you got a job.
Scott Cramton:So I was literally the whole thing, for Murder Mystery Company, which is the first thing we ever did, was founded by literally a friend of mine from college, running up to me on the street and he was like hey, scott, you do theater, right? I'm like, yes, yes, I do. And he's like hey, I run this bar and we're looking for, like you know, those murder mysteries that they do at bars. And I'm like, yeah, it's like, do you know, like a group that does that? And I'm like, I'm sorry, man, and he's like then he looked at me for a minute and he's like do you think you could do that? And I'm like, yes, yes, I can.
Scott Cramton:In fact I've watched a lot of murder mysteries and was a big fan of Columbo growing up. And then I went back to my roommate, who is also an actor, and I'm like, hey, michael, do you know anything about murder mysteries? And he's like, yes, yes, I do. In fact I'm a big fan of murder mysteries. I would love to help with this project. And then we all learned how to do murder mysteries, you know. And that was, you know, that was probably 2001, 2002 or something like that, where that happened.
Andy Heise:Where was that geographic Grand?
Scott Cramton:Rapids, michigan. Yeah, so you know the home of immersive theater. You know, you think the juggernaut cities. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you got the hand going up right now pointing to where it is. He nailed it. Yeah, so Grand Rapids, michigan, is secretly one of the big hubs of immersive theater. Yeah, I see you pointing to it on your hand. Yeah, you nailed it. I was a Michigander for a while pointing to it on your hand, yet you nailed it.
Scott Cramton:I was a Michigander for a while. Oh nice, a Michigander for a while, okay. But yeah, we have 30,000 square foot building that houses about 50 employees full time. That literally get shows out to people all over America. Wow.
Andy Heise:And so when did the inception of American Immersion Theater come into play?
Scott Cramton:You know, right around the same time, because one of the big things is we didn't want to, you know. So we had a parent company before it even made sense to have one Gotcha. Essentially we wanted to make sure that we were deep into immersive theater, you know, and that we were doing that. So we tried to think of what, like, what would you call the first company of immersive theater? And I'm not saying we were, but we were just thinking like what would you call it. And then we kind of came up with American Immersion Theater and that was, you know, that's what housed the Murder Mystery Company and then eventually housed all the ideas that we did, because we were doing other things at that time too, you know, we were doing.
Scott Cramton:Once we started getting Murder Mysteries, we'd do other things at that bar We'd do, you know, and then that kind of begot some private shows where we were doing like long form immersive or we were doing, you know, just simple improv comedy nights and stuff like that, whatever we could do. And then I also always have believed that if I could, like, if I was in a town, right then they had no restaurant, I would just call it restaurant. I always want things to be called like the best, most obvious version of what they could be called, which is why I run like the Princess Party Company, the Murder Mystery Company. I mean, god bless people who are like I own Gadzooks or something. I'm like what does that do? And they're like oh well, I can spend $10 billion explaining to you what Gadzooks does.
Nick Petrella:We feel the same way with arts entrepreneurs.
Scott Cramton:That's fair. Yeah, making art work? Yeah, if you're like, let's just name it exactly what it is, everyone will know. We cannot afford explanations, because I grew up very poor.
Andy Heise:Yeah, exactly.
Scott Cramton:Call it what it is.
Andy Heise:And amazingly to your point. I think people try to get a little too clever on naming things. That's not the most important part, but it's interesting. So you kind of started out with this. You know broader vision for where you wanted to take this. Yeah, absolutely. So that was your thinking behind it. You were like this works here in Grand Rapids. I bet this could work anywhere. So let's start thinking that way.
Scott Cramton:I'll be honest as far as. As far as, like you know, it's a little bit in between because it's such a long story, right, it's like 22 years. Of course, you know how it works, right, sometimes you're doing your podcast and you're like this could be the world's biggest podcast, and other days you're like I hope we have a listener. You know, you have these different dreams and takes. You know, a lot of times my goal was just to make it till tomorrow. Right, I just wanted to make sure that we had, you know, enough money to be able to survive. We had actors to survive, so that's always part of it.
Scott Cramton:You know, people always talk about these grand visions and they don't talk about like, I hope I can eat, so I want to make sure that gets in there. So, if you're at home and you're thinking about doing this, you know, and you're just you're thinking about doing something in this kind of field the arts yeah, some of it's just. I hope I have a sandwich today, but yeah, I always felt like as a person with a cleft palate and as a person who sat out a lot, a person that watched. I think that actors forget how much people just want to be part of something you know, people like you. You go, people watch. They did some studies, some brain studies, and they found that people a lot of times at rock concerts are mirror neuroning themselves up on stage. They're literally imagining themselves as, sometimes subconsciously, up on stage. Um, and I think that's the most valuable thing to kind of think about is like can't we satisfy people's real desires? You know we have a. Do you mind if I tell you about the Aerosmith rule?
Scott Cramton:Please it's not part of the question. Okay, so this is the first rule. We teach people any directors in immersive theater and I'll simplify it. But for just a second, if you're listening at home, just pretend for a moment that you're a huge Aerosmith fan, like the biggest Aerosmith fan. Okay, and I take you and pay for 10 concerts in a row. Okay, and the first nine we go to are amazing. Right, you have the best seats. I got you the best snacks, right, they sound better than they do in your car. They sound better than your home stereo. You know they are. They're playing all the hits that you love. You're singing along. They're classic, the best of aerosmith.
Scott Cramton:Then, on the 10th show, right, there's like a guy that's kind of tall in front of you and he's like wearing a hat which, like guy, if you're tall, don't wear a hat. You know you're wearing a taller hat, so you have a hard time seeing. It seems like Steven Tyler's a little bit hoarse. You know they're playing a lot of stuff from the new album and you like the new album, but like, are you really not going to play Dream on here? I mean, what, what, what's happening? And you know somebody's walking past you and they do that thing where they spill some beer on your shoe and they don't even apologize. Right, and then, for the encore, steven Tyler comes out and gently take you by the hand on stage and you get to drum just a little bit for a walk this way.
Scott Cramton:Now my question is of those 10 concerts, which one is your favorite? Which one are you always going to remember? Yeah, and it's always the 10th one. Right, and the reason is, it is so simple Interaction trumps perfection, and that's the course of immersion. Theater, what is theater? Broadway, all these amazing art forms which are amazing. That, if not the pursuit of perfection. So, if you can't do perfection which frankly I'm'm not great at, um, I choose trumpet with interaction and make you part of it.
Nick Petrella:That's a really good point. I mean, it's engaging, it's stickier. I think that's why in music concerts, when, when classical music concerts, when the performers speak with the audience, it just makes it much stickier, and what you're doing with the participation is can't get much more engaging than that. I wouldn't imagine.
Scott Cramton:Exactly.
Nick Petrella:So, as you said, you've been doing this for a long time, roughly 25 years. So in my research I noticed that around 2008 or so, for about a year, you worked at a local furniture company. When did your companies become self-sustaining that you could devote full time in those?
Scott Cramton:Oh yeah, absolutely. So I was doing haunted houses for a while. That was, it's weird. That was like the thing I was known for. I would design haunted houses and then, uh, we had that huge, horrible like Michigan Well, I mean not just Michigan, but like the housing market crash and stuff and, um, a lot of the art jobs and the things I was doing, uh, they went away. Uh, but I was always, you know, from 2002 to 2008, I was always doing like five or six different jobs. You know, I was doing everything I could just to just to survive and, um, all of a sudden, just like that, a lot of my stuff just went away because of the crash. So I found myself working in a furniture store on a full commission job. You made $10, not an hour but per day, $10 per day and then just straight commission. But here's a fun fact If people lose their house, they buy less furniture. It's a true statement, it's a strong correlation.
Scott Cramton:Yes, I'm not an economist professionally, but I've made that assumption so I would have time in there. God I would have time. I'd get there an hour before the store opened so I could put my name first on the books so I could get the first customer. Then I would often have a customer around 10 am, have four hours of downtime before my next customer, get one at two, one at six, and if I stayed until closing I'd have like a 50% chance of getting one at nine. So four chances, four bites of the apple if I stayed, if I got there first and left last.
Scott Cramton:And some of those times people were like I might be looking for a lamp, you know, or they're just literally like they just wanted the free popcorn or whatever. And but the neat part about that, the opportunity in there was I had infinite free time and I was with a group of like 30 people that also had infinite free time. So all I had left was this you know, the American immersion theater, this murder mystery thing, and I at this time started getting all these calls for like private events and I always thought it was how people told me it was right. It was like, oh, where did you find this out? Oh well, from word of mouth. And I was always like thank you, god of word of mouth, for this amazing offering you have bestowed upon me. And then I realized, oh and, when I started quizzing people, they're like we found you online and I'm like we have a website and apparently one of our actor's daughters put it together and it was like purple yeah, it was like black website with like purple text, because she wanted it to be different and like pink highlights and one page for like a class project. But it was ranking and so I had to, you know, basically Urge her to allow me to revamp it some and then, basically, for the next year and a half, I explored one big possibility, which was if I'm getting all of this, if I'm getting all of this right now from a, if I'm getting all of this right now from ranking third in Grand Rapids, then what would it be if I ranked first in Chicago?
Scott Cramton:So I went on HubSpot and I just self-taught myself an SEO degree, not an official one, but, like you know, enough to really really do it. You know, I was listening to three hours to four hours of search engine optimization a day, learning, you know coding web design anything I possibly could. I'm not a good coder for reference, but I really knew SEO at the time, so much so that after like three years, I became so successful at it HubSpot asked me to speak at their conference. Wow yeah, as one of their. I wasn't their most successful person, but I was definitely their wackiest, most successful person at the time and that was that had a lot of weight.
Scott Cramton:I was the only one who was like. Most of them were like laying brick or like doing cleaning or something like that, and I'm like I could bring silly hats and we can talk about fake murder and they're like beyond the show. And then what's crazy about that is, if you guys don't know how, it's not publicly traded. So there's dudes I was hanging out with. Now like both of them are billionaires, yeah, with a b, and they were just like chilling at a restaurant with me in like 2010 or something that's awesome so, but yeah, that's that's what I.
Scott Cramton:I made the most of my opportunity and eventually, around 2010, I was able to just leave 2009, something like that, because I was getting so many incoming leads, and that's what it was.
Andy Heise:Yeah, yeah, and so sort of regionally at that point, Grand Rapids into Chicago.
Scott Cramton:So yeah, I was doing like, oh God, I was doing like every show for a while, yeah, so we had two major catalysts. One was the SEO, right, yeah, and I would, you know, drive in my car and for a while I was doing all the shows with like a team of like five or six people. And then eventually I just got so overwhelmed in Chicago I had like breaking points of like I can't keep doing this. I'd be like taking calls driving to shows, like there'd be a break in Act Two, and I'd like answer calls like respond to voice. I like selling well on like in a detective coat. I mean, no, I swear it's good to hear these people like it. You know, like literally hold the phone up.
Scott Cramton:But so I, one of my better friends, justin Issa, who I went to high school with, I talked to him. He lived in Chicago and he was working in a bank and I told him hey, man, you could, you could, absolutely, you know, run the Chicago branch. You might do two shows a week maybe. And he's like that sounds great. And then, like the next call I got from him, he's like I quit my job at the bank and I'm like whoa, whoa, you did not need to quit your job at the bank and he's like, no man, this is going to work, this is absolutely going to work. And he just celebrated his 15th year with us. Oh, amazing. And yeah, yeah, he can make his. It's like his full-time thing. You know he hustles with it, he. You know he does some stuff for fun because he has some free time. But, yeah, he, full-time gig for him, 15 years.
Scott Cramton:And I would just do that. I would go into, I would sleep in my car and I would run auditions because I couldn't afford an audition space and a hotel room, and I would go around. So I did, you know, chicago, ohio, um, charlotte, sometimes I would just get calls from places and if I got enough calls from a place, I would just drive down and open it and that's what I would do. Um, and then the big thing happened, which was, um, we grew a Groupon was a small place in Chicago that Justin hooked us up with and at the time they're one deal one day, and we convinced them, after months of working really hard, of them saying, look, it's not going to work, to be like, look, you should try doing an event on Groupon.
Scott Cramton:And we were the first event ever on Groupon. They've only done restaurants, nothing but restaurants. And they were the first event ever on Groupon. They'd only done restaurants, nothing but restaurants, and they were just blowing up and then Groupon, it became huge. It was one of their best-selling things they had ever had on Groupon. And you know, I remember thinking I was at this like ballet recital or something like that and I couldn't stop refreshing my phone because every time we did we sold six more tickets, seven more tickets. The first time we were on Groupon they sold us out for seven months in 24 hours.
Andy Heise:Oh my gosh, what year was this?
Scott Cramton:Oh God, I should have brought my timeline with me. I'm bad at this. Let's say 2013-ish, 2014-ish, and they would call us and they would be like hey, we're, uh, we're like thinking about launching in Denver. Do you guys want to come? And then we would like be like yup, and then we would like, you know, have like open in Denver, and then they would sell us out for quite a bit. So they became like kind of our parachute but our.
Scott Cramton:The big reason we did well with Groupon is we never bought the idea of exposure, which sunk a lot of businesses. They're like, if you just sell your cookies for like one penny, then other people will always want to buy them for $10 later, and I never bought that, so we made it. So, basically, we're always making some amount of money on Groupon not a lot, but some and then we funnel a lot of money through credit cards through Groupon, and for one year of my life this is completely true I wasn't making enough money for me to live off and pay employees and stuff. So I created this crazy funnel through all these different credit cards that would pay off like literally every day every day, I'm not joking every day, and I would then trade them for Target gift cards and then eat off the Target gift card money. Wow, because we were funneling an insane amount of money, but most of it was going to the restaurants.
Nick Petrella:Right, so you're talking credit card points and things.
Scott Cramton:I lived off credit card points. Yeah, yeah I'm, I'm very lucky and successful now but, like you know, for anybody listening at home, you know there's like four or five different times in this journey where I was doing insane things to survive. You know, it wasn't all like, let's just do it. It sounds fun.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, like I get to do now, but you believed it. And then, how long did that take? So about till 2013,. You say 2014.
Scott Cramton:Um, I mean, we were with Groupon for a long time, um, obviously, but like, until I like started making enough money to survive off of.
Scott Cramton:I would say that was just under a year where I was living off target gift cards and then, you know, sometimes I was, you know there was a little bit of money and I'd be like, okay, yeah, I think, I think I could pull out this $300 so that I can have water in the house and the indoor plumbing, kind you know, like all the like, all the fancy people, that's amazing.
Andy Heise:But yeah, kind you know, like all the fancy people, that's amazing, but yeah yeah, yeah, the you know the Airbnb has a similar type of story where they had, I think those you know baseball trading cards binders that they used to have you put your cards in there and they had credit. Yeah yeah, that's where they kept their credit cards. We have that.
Scott Cramton:We still have that now because we do a credit card for every single type of thing just for accounting purposes. It makes it a little easier. So we have like ridiculous credit cards, like fun budget credit card for the accounting department. American Express lets you do like 30 or 40 deep without any charge, gotcha, and we have like three accounts, so I think we have like 120 or something like that?
Andy Heise:That's amazing.
Scott Cramton:Wow.
Andy Heise:They also sold. Did you ever resort to selling cereal? They sold the Obama O's and the Captain McCain's cereal to fund their startup.
Scott Cramton:You know honestly did I ever do like a completely random thing Just to come in for some cash? I was selling furniture. I want to really stress that.
Scott Cramton:That's true, I was building this company while selling furniture. All right, here's the most ridiculous thing I did out of all the ridiculous stories, stories. So I had almost the entire company of art van working for me for fun, for free, because they all had such downtime. So I was like there's like 30 people and the like. The regional manager had to come in once and be like hey, scott, you're, we don't mind what you're doing because there's a lot of free time and we kind of respect it, but they're missing customers too, because they're so focused on working for you guys and stuff.
Scott Cramton:But as things got progressive because everybody was really in on it, everybody wanted to be a part and I did actually hire a few people, a couple of them, a couple of people, in fact, this is true to be a part, and I did actually hire a few people, a couple of them, a couple of people, in fact, this is true. Right now my original store manager, tom Podkle, works in our home office for our company. My art van store manager, the guy who hired me, works in my home office right now, crushing sales there, and he's the one who taught me how to do sales. Crushing sales there, and he's the one who taught me how to do sales. But there was a chair that I noticed that was in a crate in the back of the furniture place, right. And I asked one of the warehouse guys I'm like what's with that? It's been here since I've been here, right, and it's always been in this crate. I'm like when is it getting shipped out? He's like, oh, it's a manufacturer, but they won't pick it up.
Scott Cramton:So what I did was I built, I put like this other like piece of wood in front of it, like a, and I built a cove and I would hide in that cove with that chair and that was my secret office.
Scott Cramton:And if anybody got, if I got a page for me from returning customer, I would have certain text messages to people that worked with me, or one of them, erica Childs. She was one of our actresses who worked at Art Van too, so she would cover for me. So the managers thought I was taking that customer, but in reality we are splitting the commission. Uh, for the return customer for me, because I needed to stay on the. If I needed to stay on the phone, so she would have like a signal that would she'd have on her phone from me, knowing that I needed that kind of coverage, and then she would cover for me and, believe it or not, beyond her I had one other person in case she was busy, so I had two people deep covering for me and I worked in a secret office that I built for myself in the back of an art van warehouse.
Nick Petrella:And, for all you know, your office and that chair is still there.
Scott Cramton:It probably is.
Announcer:Thanks for listening. If you like this podcast, please subscribe. Visit artsentrepreneurshippodcastcom to learn more about our guest and how you can help support artists, the arts and this podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon.
