Today we’d like to introduce you to Heidi Neufeld.
Hi Heidi, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My story with Amazing Escape Room began in August of 2015, just weeks after the doors first opened. My longtime friend of 30 years, Howard Klotzkin, asked me to join him in creating something fun that he could enjoy with his children and that would give everyone an opportunity to have a great experience together.
The first Amazing Escape Room opened in July of 2015 in a 100-year-old house on Main Street in Freehold, New Jersey. At the time, escape rooms were still a relatively new concept, and we had no idea just how much the business would grow. Howard is the visionary, and I’m the implementer. We have very different strengths, but that has always been part of what makes us such a good team. Together, we built the business from that first location into what it is today.
From Freehold, we expanded into Philadelphia and then Princeton, Staten Island, Montclair, Cherry Hill, and other communities. Along the way, we learned that growing a business isn’t simply about opening more locations. It’s about understanding each market, recognizing what works, knowing what needs to change, and sometimes making difficult decisions about where to focus our resources. We’ve strategically kept the locations that work for us while adjusting the business as markets and customer preferences have changed.
Today, we have nine Amazing Escape Room locations, eight Bury the Hatchet locations, and a Game Show Challenge. Bury the Hatchet became part of our story as we continued looking for new and different ways to create experiences that bring people together.
My own role has evolved tremendously over the years. What started as helping Howard build his vision has grown into being deeply involved in the operations, people, systems, problem-solving, and day-to-day decisions that keep the company moving forward. I’ve experienced virtually every stage of the journey — the excitement of opening new locations, the challenges of staffing and managing growth, navigating COVID, making difficult decisions about locations, and continually figuring out how to adapt to what customers want.
The entertainment and recreation industry has changed significantly since COVID, and we’ve had to change with it. People are spending their free time differently, and we’ve learned that staying relevant means listening to our customers and giving them the experiences they are actually looking for.
Today, that means creating experiences for all kinds of occasions — birthday parties, family days out, bachelor and bachelorette parties, baby reveals, corporate team building, league nights, and groups of friends simply looking for something different to do.
We also work hard to keep the experiences fresh. We celebrate holidays and update our escape rooms, and our mobile axe throwing unit allows us to bring the experience directly to our customers — whether that’s at their home, a festival, a corporate event, or a community gathering.
When I look back, it’s pretty amazing to think that this all started with a 100-year-old house on Main Street in Freehold and a conversation between two longtime friends. Howard had the vision, I helped turn that vision into reality, and together we built something much bigger than either of us probably imagined in 2015.
There have certainly been challenges and plenty of lessons along the way, but I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come and, most importantly, of the experiences we continue to create for the people who walk through our doors.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Definitely not. There have been plenty of challenges along the way, but I think that is part of growing any business.
One of our biggest challenges has always been finding the right locations. We need an area that has enough population and the right demographics to support us, but we also have to find a rent that makes sense for our business. Those two things don’t always go hand in hand. We’ve opened locations that worked very well and others that didn’t, and we’ve learned from both.
Staffing is another challenge. With the exception of our General Managers, most of our employees are part-time, and many of them have full-time jobs or other commitments. So we have to build a business around a very different type of workforce. Finding good people, training them, and keeping them engaged is something we work on constantly.
Our industry also has a lot of factors that are completely out of our control. Weather is a perfect example. A rainy or cold weekend can be great for us because people are looking for something to do indoors. Give us a beautiful summer day when everyone wants to go to the beach, and that’s a very different story. Holidays and school days off can be great for business too, but you have to understand each market and promote at the right time. You can’t just put up a post and expect people to show up.
We’ve also had to rethink how we market the business. For a while, everything was about Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Those are still important, but we’ve gone back to some grassroots marketing as well — in-house mailers, billboards, movie theater screens, local events, and getting out into the communities where our locations are. Sometimes the old-fashioned ways of reaching people still work.
And, of course, COVID was a huge challenge for our industry. We had to figure out how to come back from something that none of us had ever experienced before and then adjust to the way people’s habits changed afterward.
But honestly, I look at all of these things as part of building a business. Not everything works, and not every decision turns out exactly the way you thought it would. You learn, you adjust, and you keep moving.
We’ve now been doing this for more than a decade and are going into our 12th year. So while it certainly hasn’t been a smooth road, I look at that as a positive. We’ve learned a tremendous amount, we’ve continued to grow, and we’re still excited about what we’re doing. That’s what matters to me
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Believe it or not, my educational background is in political science and speech communication, so I didn’t exactly have a traditional path into the creative side of the entertainment business.
But creativity has always been a big part of my life. For 18 years, I worked at a sleepaway camp, where I ran the arts and crafts department. A big part of my job was working with teenagers and helping them learn more about themselves through creative projects. We did everything from art journaling to recycled art and all kinds of hands-on projects. I learned a lot during those years about creativity, but probably even more about people, empathy, and helping someone see what they are capable of.
I brought a lot of that with me when I joined Amazing Escape Room. I really enjoy helping people grow, both personally and professionally. We have a lot of women running our locations, and I love being able to support them as they develop their confidence and their careers. Of course, that applies to our guys too. One of the things we try to do is develop employees who can eventually train someone else to do their job so they can move up themselves. I think that’s one of the best ways to build a strong company.
The creative part of my job has probably been the most fun for me. I have always loved collecting vintage and unusual game boards, especially games like Monopoly. Over the years, I’ve hunted for them on eBay, at flea markets, through outreach and just wherever I can find them. We have turned that collection into a signature part of our escape rooms. Depending on the location and the lobby, you can find hundreds of different game boards displayed throughout our spaces. It’s become something people recognize as part of our personality.
Early on, I was also much more involved in designing the look and feel of our rooms. I loved finding unusual furniture and props at flea markets, Salvation Army and other places and figuring out how to give them a new life inside an escape room. Today, I have a great team that handles much more of that, which is wonderful — although I’ll admit that sometimes I miss doing it myself!
I still get involved when we’re building new rooms and love putting my own ideas into the design. I recently built a Lego Birkin bag that went into our Freehold room, Dirty Money, which has a pawn shop theme. So I still get to sneak a little bit of myself into the rooms.
I also think my creative side is connected to a bigger part of who I am. When I turned 50, I went back to school and earned my K-7 teaching certificate. I’ve always enjoyed learning, teaching and helping people find what they are capable of.
Giving back has also become a very important part of my life. After my mom passed away in 2020, I started participating in the Susan G. Komen 60-mile breast cancer walk, and I’ve done it every year since. I’ve personally raised more than $100,000 through fundraising. I joke that exercise and fundraising must be part of my genetics because neither one seems to have left me!
I’ve also been married for 40 years, have three successful children and, so far, one grandson. My family, my work, creativity, teaching and giving back are all very different parts of my life, but they really do overlap. I think they have all taught me to be curious, to keep moving forward, and to look for ways to help other people grow.
I don’t think of myself as an artist in the traditional sense. For me, creativity is more about taking something ordinary and looking at it differently — whether that’s an old game board, a piece of furniture from a flea market, a pile of Legos, or even an employee who just needs someone to see their potential.
That’s probably what I’m most proud of. I’ve been able to bring that creative side of myself into a business while also helping other people find their own strengths and grow along the way.
Any big plans?
Right now, we’re continuing to grow the escape room side of the business because that continues to be one of our most popular experiences. We’re actually in the middle of a pretty exciting project in Edison. We took over the entire building, and we’re expanding the location and building out additional space. It’s a big project, but it’s also exciting to see what we can create with the additional room.
I think the future for us is going to be about continuing to grow, but doing it strategically. We’ve learned over the years that bigger isn’t always better. We want to be in the right markets, have the right people, and create experiences that people actually want to come back to.
We’ll continue to look at new ways to expand the experiences we offer, whether that’s new escape room themes, axe throwing, Game Show Challenge, mobile events or new ideas we haven’t even thought of yet. I don’t think we’re ever going to stop looking for the next thing.
Personally, I’m looking forward to continuing to grow the company while also developing the people who work here. We’ve created a lot of opportunities for employees to move up over the years, and I really enjoy seeing someone who started in an entry-level position become a manager or take on a bigger role.
After everything we’ve experienced since we opened our first location in 2015, I’m excited about the next chapter. We’re still learning, we’re still creating, and we’re still having fun — and as long as that’s the case, I think we have a lot more ahead of us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.amazingescaperoom.com www.burythehatchet.comm www.gameshowchallengenj.com
- Instagram: amazingescaperoom burythehatchet gameshowchallengeNJ
- Facebook: each location has their own face book so by location amazing escape room Freehold bury the hatchet Freehold ect
- LinkedIn: bury the hatchet amazing escape room
- Other: tic toc amazingescape room burythehatchet
