Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Sherry
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
After graduating from The Ohio State University in 2009, jobs in my field of construction management were pretty difficult to come by due to the 2008 recession so I soon began a career in sales mostly out of necessity. After working for a few businesses that weren’t a good fit, I eventually I found a sales role in home remodeling which fit really well with my education and previous job history doing that kind of work myself as a tradesman and laborer. I sold windows, doors, and bath remodels for a few years before eventually landing in exterior remodeling focusing on roofing, gutters, and siding. After a few years of outside sales I transitioned into project management running the daily schedule, ordering materials, and managing crews, which coincidentally lined up really well with my degree. I was later promoted into operations management for the business as a whole which is where I got my first real look at small business management and what it takes to operate all aspects of a small business.
The exterior remodeling company I worked for decided to open it’s own building material distribution arm and I was asked to start and operate that business by the owner. This is also where Jess Hellmich, my current business partner, and I started working more closely together while creating the brand and marketing plans, his specialty, for the new distribution company. Working directly with the owner and other senior level management provided invaluable experience to help me gain the skills and confidence to eventually want to operate my own business one day. The owner soon sold the distribution business which put me in a position to go out on my own. My business partner, Jess Hellmich, reached out not long after and we soon decided to start Dueling Axes together.
Our first location in Downtown Columbus is a 2500sf space, opened in mid 2018, and it’s early success lead us to our second location in New Albany with about 5000sf and then to our Las Vegas location with 6700sf of space in a multi tenant space called AREA15. We are also currently working on expansion efforts with a planned location in Cincinnati which should open in Q1 of 2025 as well as an even larger location in New Orleans with an undetermined open date.
In addition to the axe throwing venues, Jess and I started a software business called RKd Solutions about a year after opening our first Dueling Axes location. RKd is a reservation based business management platform which serves similar reservation based entertainment businesses like ourselves and we have been growing that over the past 5 years as well.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
While things started off very well for us in the beginning, there have certainly been significant bumps in the road. Jess and I were fortunate enough to be one of early adopters for the axe throwing industry in the US and we enjoyed near immediate success as the concept of axe throwing was really starting to take off. Early struggles mostly revolved around finding an appropriate space to for the business and a landlord who was willing to lease to a brand new concept such as Axe Throwing. Back in the early days, finding insurance for the business was also a challenge as it was assumed to be more dangerous than in reality. Today, both real estate and insurance are readily available now that the concept has matured.
Jess and I both have construction backgrounds which helped enormously to keep start up costs low as we were able to personally build out nearly all of our Downtown location on our own aside from the things we needed licensed contractors to complete for us. My past experience in business management and Jess’ expertise in all things marketing really gave us the foundation that we needed to bootstrap a business in an up and coming entertainment niche. That early success gave us the confidence to start expansion plans into a second location in the Columbus market as well as taking the leap to a Las Vegas opportunity. Everything seemed to be going our way for the first year and half after opening our doors.
Unfortunately, not long after making plans, signing leases, securing financing, and committing to those expansions, COVID threw a pretty huge wrench in the plans. We struggled daily to keep operations going as the public more and more decided to stay home and then eventually we, and many other businesses, were forced to close our doors for a little over 3 months. It was a very stressful time for us and other small business owners who had little to no control over their futures. In the end we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have made it through those years without closing our doors permanently.
Long story short, we decided to stick it out and opened both brand new locations in December of 2020, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Originally, we had planned on opening the 2 new locations about 6 months apart from each other but due to construction delays and labor & material shortages, our Las Vegas location and New Albany location opened about 2 weeks apart from each other which resulted in some unavoidable chaos. Both locations got off to a slow start due to occupancy restrictions imposed by state regulations at the time as well as an uneasiness by the public to venture back out into the world. Eventually, restrictions were lifted, consumer confidence picked up, and we were regularly full from open to close with reservations as people rushed to get back out of the house and release some stress of the past couple years.
Along side our Dueling Axes locations, we were also working on the software business and launched the first version of that product about 5 weeks before the COVID lockdowns began. The long term plan was for the software to be an internal operations tool for the first year or so until it was refined and ready for launching to the public market. With an unexpected amount of free time on our hands thanks to COVID, we sped up our timeline and immediately got to work building version 2 of RKd, a product that we could introduce to the public as soon as possible.
This version of RKd turned out to be a huge hit among axe throwing businesses and we onboarded clients in the Axe Throwing industry as we quickly learned that other business owners were also unsatisfied with the existing software options available to them. It was, in a way, almost too successful and about a year after launching version 2 we needed to start work on version 3 of the platform which would be able to scale significantly faster in order to accommodate the demand of onboarding new clients and expanding outside of the axe throwing industry.
Since then, we have added features to the platform that can accommodate nearly all reservation based business models, not just axe throwing, and we handle the customer journey from online reservations, to waivers, gift cards. payment processing, on-site reservation management, food & beverage point of sale, membership management, league scheduling, reporting, marketing, and automated communication throughout. Even though COVID very much pushed us to the limit, we very likely would not be where we are today without having gone through that difficult time and learned how to handle and cope with the ups and downs (whether we liked it or not).
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Dueling Axes & RKd Solutions?
Dueling Axes is one of the first elevated axe throwing business models introduced to the US market in mid 2018. While we are certainly not the first axe throwing business, we believe that we are one of the first to elevate the experience and helped to raise the bar in the industry. The early adopters of axe throwing were largely small business owners who operated escape room businesses and they brought portions of that business model to their axe throwing offering.
For example, before COVID made it nearly impossible, most axe throwing business paired up small groups in order to achieve higher occupancy of their target lanes. If you we’re on a date night, you would participate as part of a larger group with strangers and we felt that was not the right experience for our customers. As such, since day 1, everyone of our reservations has been given a private target or multiple if needed for the group size, similar to what you would expect if you were to go bowling. Today, private reservations are the standard in the industry.
Additionally, nearly all original axe throwing business models allowed for BYOB and outside food friendly, including our own first location in Downtown Columbus. This was largely driven by the newness of the axe throwing activity while landlords and insurance companies were both understandably apprehensive to allow alcohol and axe throwing to be combined. Now that the industry has quite a few more years under its belt, axe throwing has proven to be an extremely safe activity, even more so than bowling or driving ranges. Today, all of our locations include a full service bar and future locations are being planned to include full kitchens capable of providing small bites menus all the way up to catering services for large parties.
Regarding RKd Solutions, we built the first reservation software created specifically for the axe throwing industry and at the time we seriously underestimated the demand the industry would have for such a platform. Much of the industry was using software built for the tourism industry such as bus tours, walking tours, boat rentals, etc. Others were using software built for salons and could be more accurately described as appointment softwares rather than reservation management. What we do best is accommodate the reservation based entertainment niche specifically and build our product to service clients with those specific needs. Needs that other softwares simply were not intended for.
Over time, we realized that axe throwing business owners were not the only ones needing a refined platform for resource based reservation management and our current product has been designed in such a way to accommodate nearly any reservation based business model such as escape rooms, driving ranges, indoor golf, virtual reality experiences, bowling and countless others.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up I was pretty reserved and spent my time with my brothers and a small group of friends and playing video games as much baseball as I could find. Once I was old enough to start working, I always had a job and sometimes 2 or more during the summers where I had my first experiences in the construction industry finishing basements. I am the oldest of 4 boys and proud to have helped my brothers find their footing in a similar career path to my own in the exterior remodeling industry.
My unplanned leap into a sales career many years ago was what really broke me out of my shell as I was forced to confront a more introverted personality. Had I not gone into sales and gotten used to all of the many “no’s” it takes before getting a “yes”, I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to eventually start my own business which which brings daily struggles and failures in order to eventually find long term successes.
Today, I am a father to 3 beautiful girls (Jenny-5, June-3, Jordan-8 months) and husband to an amazing wife, Maggie. Without her support and encouragement, none of this would have been possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theduelingaxes.com and www.poweredbyrkd.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duelingaxes/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DuelingAxes/
- Twitter: https://x.com/Dueling_Axes
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKKE3Ch0T5fYy3G_THHZCjA
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/dueling-axes
