{
  "slug": "thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4",
  "company": "Thirteenth Floor",
  "headline": "Haunted house brand scaled from strip mall to 4,500 seasonal staff.",
  "topic": "{Stash Edge — Event & Experiential}",
  "source_name": "Entrepreneur",
  "source_url": "https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/this-former-banker-opened-a-terrifying-haunted-house-in-a-strip-mall-as-a-side-hustle-its-a-multimillion-dollar-empire",
  "landing": "https://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/articles/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4",
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    "linkedin": {
      "label": "LinkedIn · Jenny",
      "body": "{Stash Edge — Event & Experiential}\n◆ SILVER · Experiential expansion and seasonal labor scaling · Thirteenth Floor\n\nHaunted house brand scaled from strip mall to 4,500 seasonal staff.\n\nThis is unglamorous scaling: Thirteenth Floor didn't invent haunted houses, didn't create a better scary experience, didn't even go direct-to-consumer. They just built a repeatable location model, trained people quickly on standard scares, and opened the same venue in different strip malls. The secret is seasonal. Once you prove you can fill seats in one city on Halloween, you've got a playbook: replicate it in 10 cities with minimal capex, hire seasonal labor, and rotate the whole thing every October. They're now testing Christmas—same locations, different set dressing, same labor pool. That's how you get to multimillion-dollar without becoming a hospitality behemoth.\n\nMy Stash Take on what it means for the rest of us →\nhttps://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/t/li/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4\n→ Your Stash Room — your logo, live pricing, ships blind: https://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/r/li/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4\n→ Proper imprints, done right at POPS4: https://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/s/li/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4",
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      "alt_label": "HakoShikin agency",
      "alt_body": "{Stash Edge — Event & Experiential}\n◆ SILVER · Experiential expansion and seasonal labor scaling · Thirteenth Floor\n\nHaunted house brand scaled from strip mall to 4,500 seasonal staff.\n\nThis is unglamorous scaling: Thirteenth Floor didn't invent haunted houses, didn't create a better scary experience, didn't even go direct-to-consumer. They just built a repeatable location model, trained people quickly on standard scares, and opened the same venue in different strip malls. The secret is seasonal. Once you prove you can fill seats in one city on Halloween, you've got a playbook: replicate it in 10 cities with minimal capex, hire seasonal labor, and rotate the whole thing every October. They're now testing Christmas—same locations, different set dressing, same labor pool. That's how you get to multimillion-dollar without becoming a hospitality behemoth.\n\nMy Stash Take on what it means for the rest of us →\nhttps://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/t/lh/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4\n→ Your Stash Room — your logo, live pricing, ships blind: https://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/r/lh/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4\n→ Proper imprints, done right at POPS4: https://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/s/lh/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4",
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      "body": "{Stash Edge — Event & Experiential}\n◆ SILVER · Experiential expansion and seasonal labor scaling · Thirteenth Floor\n\nHaunted house brand scaled from strip mall to 4,500 seasonal staff.\n\nMy Stash Take →\nhttps://pops4-stash-edge.billing-010.workers.dev/l/t/bs/thirteenth-floor-2026-10-22t15-4",
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    "substack": {
      "label": "Substack · Fending",
      "title": "Haunted house brand scaled from strip mall to 4,500 seasonal staff.",
      "body": "✍️ YOUR NOTE — write 2–3 lines to ONE person so they feel: \"this is about me… I could actually do this… I could make money from this.\" Energize them, make it yours. (This is the part that gets the opens.)\n[ your take… ]\n———\nHere is a real one you can run this week 👇\nPer Entrepreneur, Chris Stafford launched Thirteenth Floor as a side project in a strip mall 24 years ago; the brand now employs 4,500 seasonal workers every Halloween and is expanding into Christmas experiences.\nHere's the cool part — the lever almost everyone misses (and you don't have to): if your product model works in one location during a peak season, don't build a year-round business; build a network of seasonal replicas. Thirteenth Floor proved this with Halloween—same experience, multiple cities, 4,500 workers hired for 6-8 weeks. Now test the same model on Christmas (which they're doing). Don't hire permanent staff for a seasonal product; hire contract labor in bulk per location, train on a script, and rotate. Build SOPs so rigid that a new hire at location five operates identically to location one. Your margins come from labor arbitrage (seasonal pay is 30-40% lower) and density (fill seats across 10 cities, not one).\nWhat that means for you: This is unglamorous scaling: Thirteenth Floor didn't invent haunted houses, didn't create a better scary experience, didn't even go direct-to-consumer. They just built a repeatable location model, trained people quickly on standard scares, and opened the same venue in different strip malls. The secret is seasonal. Once you prove you can fill seats in one city on Halloween, you've got a playbook: replicate it in 10 cities with minimal capex, hire seasonal labor, and rotate the whole thing every October. They're now testing Christmas—same locations, different set dressing, same labor pool. That's how you get to multimillion-dollar without becoming a hospitality behemoth.\nIf you make, sell, or gift anything with your name on it — this is yours to run. You can do this.\n(Real, not theory — Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/this-former-banker-opened-a-terrifying-haunted-house-in-a-strip-mall-as-a-side-hustle-its-a-multimillion-dollar-empire.)\n———\nOr — want it built FOR you? Your logo, your products, your own private room, priced and ready, in about five minutes. That's literally what we do →\nhttps://www.pops4.com/vip?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=stash",
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}