The free spirit who declared war on screen time
Ant Morell says his indoor trampoline playground chain BOUNCE is more than just a business. He calls it a ‘movement’.
Ant Morell grew up in suburban Melbourne where one of his most prized possessions was a BMX bike.
Holidays and the odd weekend with his three siblings and many cousins were spent at his grandparents’ picturesque farm on the Victoria/NSW border,
“I had the idyllic childhood growing up. I have a big family with lots of cousins,” he says.
But there is one Aussie backyard essential his family never had.
“We never actually owned a trampoline. There always seemed to be one around the neighbourhood, or in someone else’s garden,” Morell recalls.
“My first experience with one was how to create an adventure by dragging it next to a swimming pool and cartwheeling into the water.”
In 2012, Morell and fellow entrepreneur Simon McNamara founded an indoor trampoline park business they called BOUNCE.
Morell was always fascinated by the acrobatic tumbling afforded by a large piece of strong cloth held by springs in a frame.
“I often don’t think enough about the role of a trampoline. The first time you see someone on one – especially in some of the foreign markets that we have gone into – you see that look of immediate joy on their face,” he says.
The BOUNCE concept borrowed elements from sports like parkour – where people jump from building to building – the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne, and Cirque du Soleil.
“We wanted a backyard-type playground that was more expansive and adrenaline filled than the local park, adaptable to any age or skills set,” Morell says.
“I think of the beach and ski resorts as a parallel; you have every person across the spectrum coming together, a community hub across the generations.
“We wanted to build a brand capable of bringing these three things together, a community hub with our staff as role models at the centre of it.”
Morell now describes the BOUNCE phenomenon as more than just a business generating about $85m in annual revenue. He calls it a “movement”.
“You are better when you are given an invitation to be your free-spirited self,” he says.
“That culture of unleashing free spirits runs right through the business. It is the brand’s DNA captured in just three words.”
A leap into the unknown
Morell was born with a creative, entrepreneurial spirit.
After graduating from Melbourne Grammar in 1990 and studying commerce at university, the first impulse in his career was to be in advertising and marketing, but he found the latter too regimented.
“You were either creative or a suit. I found that very segregated. I’m a creative person with a farsighted imagination,” he says.
“I also have an excitement around strategy and code cracking.”
He long dreamt of working for Mushroom Records and got a job in public relations in London in the mid 1990s.
He then tried his hand at banking where, he quips, “you could be paid quite well for knowing not much”. But life had other plans.
Upon returning from London just before the dot.com bubble, he and some mates founded an online gift registry aggregator they called thebigday.com.au.
“That gave me an exposure to people building companies. It was really exciting being around the entrepreneurial space. We had active and interesting investors,” he says.
“But we eventually got good advice to give the money back to shareholders and get real jobs and real-world skills.”
He spent the next four years at a boutique consulting firm put together by a group of ex-McKinsey staff and former advertising executives, called The Growth Solutions Group, focused on brand expansion strategies for its clients.
“All of the frameworks, tools and methodologies I applied at BOUNCE I learned from that era,” he says.
Everything changed 15 years ago, the day after wife Alice gave birth to their first child.
“Picking up your child for the first time gives you a potent sense of who you are and who you aren’t. That was a big catalyst for me to look at what I was doing,” he says.
“I felt it was the time to harness what I had learned and go and create something myself.”
In 2010 he met chartered accountant-turned-entrepreneur Simon McNamara, a co-founder of food chains such as Viva Juice, Boost and Grill’d,
“I was told he was good at operations and building businesses, but always had a partner who had the brand side covered,” Morell says.
“I understood brands and consumer psychology and how to connect with people through operationalising the ideas of freeing the human spirit. Simon was someone who had something I needed and I had something he might like to have.”
In 2011 they came across a healthy fast-food chain called Spudbar, specialising in gourmet baked potatoes, which they purchased from the founder.
They reimagined the business, improved revenue and customer visitation.
“In the process we built a respect for each other’s skill sets,” Morell says.
They are still owners of Spudbar to this day. But it turned out to be just the start of their entrepreneurial adventure.
One morning McNamara received a call from a former colleague at Deloitte in the US. He had seen a fascinating play concept in San Francisco called “House of Air” where trampolines sat next to each other in a warehouse.
McNamara immediately called Morell.
“I had an immediate goose bump reaction. There was something even about the most basic concept that really excited me and us,” Morell says.
“Without a whole lot of research, we got on a plane to America. If it was good, our plan was to license it and bring it back to Australia.
“In the process of flying there, we drew a pretty vivid picture of what this concept would look like – an incredible game-changing, category defining offering.”
Upon returning home they found a CSIRO-funded report that explored the megatrends in sport over the next 30 years. And the number-one trend was the idea of extreme sport becoming mainstream.
So on the back of napkins they drew up the concept for BOUNCE, an indoor trampoline playground that would be a community hub for anyone of any age or skill level to have an extreme-sport experience.
“We were in a sweet spot of skills, passion, energy and contacts. There was definitely a recipe and formula that if we threaded it together, we could create something extraordinary and create something that hadn’t been there ever before,” Morell says.
“You had childhood obesity issues, growing concerns about social media impact on kids, difficulties in relationships at school and cyber bullying.
“There was a melting point of social challenges that were on the agenda of parents and schools around physical and social activity. At the same time society was waking up to the concept of the dormant, urban athlete.”
With $2m in funding, they started the first BOUNCE in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. Today the global headquarters of the company is next door.
Morell describes his friendship with McNamara as an “incredible relationship with all the twists and turns of the best marriage”.
“I play the typical founder role of architecting our brand into a whole-of-business working ecosystem and ensuring this comes to life in every cell of the BOUNCE living organism,” he says.
“Simon plays the typical founder-CEO role that leads and drives building the business system and team, and driving ongoing growth and expansion.”
Elevated by private equity
In April 2022 PGA Group, a family office established by transport and property magnate Peter Gunn with assets of $1.5bn across property and investment, bought a 30 per cent stake in BOUNCE.
The firm’s first external capital has so far been used for expansion, including the growth of its offering for toddlers called “MINI BOUNCE”.
PGA was already well known to Morell and McNamara through Gunn’s daughter Jackie and her husband, Mike Haintz.
“We were wary of all the issues with private equity, such as giving away control, etc. We went through a pretty rigorous courtship with a few parties,” Morell says.
“PGA came in at the end and immediately felt right for us. In all of the discussions, all of the sticky points, they understood and had a real intuitive affinity for the brand.
“There is a real values alignment. There hasn’t been a single moment of regret.”
He says PGA is different to a traditional private equity firm.
“Because they are private equity out of a family office, they are happy to hold a really good business,” he says.
“They were also pretty fussy about what they put their money into in the first place.”
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Morell and McNamara mapped out a major growth strategy for BOUNCE. It purchased two rival leisure activities operators – Latitude and SupaWorld – adding new venues in Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth.
“During Covid we shut every venue, but we did form the view that everything would come out the other side,” Morell says.
“So we wanted to use the window expansively, to buy out our competitors and to enrich the offer.
“The focus now is to continue to lead and define the category, navigate the next-step change in growth and make sure we keep investing in the health of the brand. If we do that, we will always have good options.”
There have been questions raised about the safety of the BOUNCE product facilities, although Morell claims it is rare to have a significant injury at BOUNCE, compared with widely adopted sports which people embrace every weekend.
Late last year Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital released a landmark study that analysed reported injuries and exposure from 18 trampoline parks in Australia and the Middle East, from 2017 to 2019.
It found that trampoline park injury risk was lower than other common sports.
“We couldn’t have millions of customers flooding into our venues year after year unless thousands of parents, schools and community groups were satisfied that we provide a safe and supervised environment,” Morell says.
His vision for the future of the firm is ambitious, both locally and on the global stage.
“One of the things we identified during the capital raising with PGA was that there is a space for up to 50 locations in Australia and we just opened venue number 23 at Cromer in Sydney’s northern beaches last month,” he says.
“BOUNCE has appeal across any culture and in any country if the fundamentals are there. So there is untapped international potential.
“So far our focus has been on domestic growth which has much less execution risk. We are allowing international growth to be driven by our existing licensed partners at this stage.”
BOUNCE has 20 venues worldwide, including in the UAE, Italy, Thailand and Saudi Arabia.
Morell, his wife and their two children now live at Red Hill on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, from where he commutes to the group’s city headquarters.
They still don’t own a trampoline.
But his children are regular visitors to the BOUNCE at Blackburn in Melbourne’s outer east. Their favourite apparatus is the trapeze.
“Everything I have experienced in my life I have loaded into BOUNCE,” their father says proudly.
“Parents tell me so many times that it is the only place they see their kids with a red face, beads of sweat on their forehead, and a big, wide smile.
“They often don’t see it anywhere else. It is a lead indicator of good stuff.”
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