We recently caught up with Sam Wai from Immersif to explore how data-driven thinking can transform the way we approach business decisions. In this guest blog, he unpacks the surprising lessons the escape room industry has taught him about decision-making and why the answers you’re looking for might already be hiding in plain sight.
Data Drives Decisions: What Escape Rooms Taught Me About Business
In my lifetime, there have been several fundamental shifts in how I look at life and work.
Learning to code at university was one of them. It trained my brain to think logically, to break messy problems into smaller parts, and to see everything as just “if this, then that”. Oddly, it also revealed I was quite good at poker! Not because I suddenly became a master of bluffing, but because I stopped guessing and started thinking in probabilities. “There’s a 16% chance he’s got this… therefore I’m all in.” A surprisingly rewarding life lesson.
Then came project management. It reframed how I lived my life as much as how I worked. Personal goals became projects. Chores became subtasks. When something wasn’t going to plan, I stopped and analysed whether something had gone wrong earlier in the sequence. I kid you not, but I told my family I thought I was turning into a robot because I didn’t know anyone else who thought like me. I stripped emotion out of decision-making. Slightly worrying… but it did wonders for my poker face!
But one of the most profound shifts came later, through something far more playful. Of course it’s escape rooms! After playing many of them, and eventually launching my own, something clicked in my artificial brain. Probably a 12V relay. I had a Matrix moment and I saw the code. Life is just data and decisions. That’s it. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsaw it.
Clues before conclusions
In a good escape room, you never solve a puzzle by guessing. Note the keyword: good. You explore first. You search drawers. You flip things over. You gather clues. Then, with a bit of mental cog-turning, the solution reveals itself. That was my aha moment. Business decisions work exactly the same way.
When an escape room owner tells me they’re uncertain or stuck, it’s rarely because they’re bad at business. It’s usually because they’re trying to decide without enough information. It’s like attempting to solve a puzzle without a single clue. So they guess.
Dropping prices because it feels right. Building more rooms without knowing what it’ll cost. Doubling down on marketing with a “let’s try it”. Running the business like other escape rooms because that’s the norm.
Basing big financial decisions purely on feeling isn’t business savvy. I know because I learnt that lesson the hard way. Creative decisions? Sure. Financial or potentially life-changing ones? Best not to guess.
“But Sam, intuition and lived experience are still data, right?” Yes, 100%. No decision is ever truly random or perfect. But if you’re stuck, or you want to make a better decision, look for more clues. To make an informed decision, you first need to be informed. And the best place to look is usually your own data. No brute forcing required.
You’re sitting on a goldmine
Here’s the part many owners don’t realise. You already have loads of data. Years of booking history. Customer reviews. Room performance. Pricing changes. Seasonal trends. All of it quietly piling up while you’re busy running the business. You’re sitting on a goldmine and probably don’t even know it.
Raw data, though, is like ore. A lump of dirt and not very helpful on its own. But refine it, and suddenly you’ve got gold. Insights that reveal leaks, inefficiencies, and opportunities you didn’t even know were there, along with mistakes you didn’t realise were costing you.
I regularly see businesses searching for answers they already have, simply because no one has taken the time to dig. You probably have several golden opportunities still waiting to be unearthed.
Data, direction, decisions
This only works if the data itself is good. There’s a phrase in computing that I love: garbage in, garbage out. If you rely on poor, incomplete, or red herring data, you don’t get better decisions, you just get trash.
Direction is an important part of decision making. In escape rooms, you don’t need every clue to solve every puzzle. You need the right ones, in the right order. Direction is the criteria you set to filter what actually matters. It’s especially critical when deciding as a group. If you can’t agree on a decision, it’s often because you’re not aligned on direction. Solve that first.
If you ever feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure what to do next, don’t ask yourself what decision you should make. Ask yourself what information you’re missing. Because chances are, the solution is already in the room.
