Party Animals History, Direction, and Future 1/25/10
This first blog entry will be about the history of Party Animals, my overall feeling about Party Animals, and what direction we're headed. I've been involved in the Children's Entertainment industry now for over five years. My name is Jason and I am the current owner. Party Animals has been in business for over 25 years. Party Animals was first started about 28 years ago when Helene (Previous Owner) started the company first in San Diego and L.A. She had a lot of success and branched the company into Arizona and eventually Orange County in 2001. She sold most of her branches but she still runs her San Diego Branch. Then I started working for the Orange County branch in 2005 as a performer. I did lots of parties for Helene and was one of her better performers or at least I thought I was. Then in 2007 she offered to sell me her Orange County Branch due to health reasons. I took on the challenge and it has been a great success. We now have over 70 famous look alike characters and we are always adding more. We still have the small office in Tustin that Helene used when she ran the O.C. branch. Although we are in the process of moving to a much larger office in the Corona/Riverside area but we will still be focused on doing most of our parties in the O.C.
I am so glad that we have had some great performers work for us over the last two and a half years such as Mike C., Daisy, Lindsay, Erin, Sean, Amanda, and so many more. Some of them have left usually due to graduating from college or finding a career in their area of expertise. We have had steady growth and we hope to expand and have more offices in the SoCal area and possibly out of state in the near future. Sometimes we have over 15 parties in one weekend and I don't think that we've had a weekend with fewer than two parties. I am so blessed to own and be a part of this awesome company. I love what I do and I look forward to the challenges that the future may bring us.
What I love most about Party Animals is the joy of the children seeing they're favorite character come to life. Some kids go crazy and they have so much fun. It's a very gratifying feeling when you make their day that much more special. I always tell my new recruits in training that they have to love kids to do this job. During the summer of 2009 I spent a few months mastering the art of balloon twisting on my own with books and youtube.com so that I could hone in on my skills and provide them for my clients. I love making balloons even though it's difficult sometimes to remember how to make a specialty balloon that you don't make that often. I have also expanded the types of services that we offer such as Caricatures, Magicians, Full Face Painting, and Specialty Balloons.
There are many challenges that I've faced while running Party Animals such as Time Management which is probably my biggest challenge due to the fact that I'm a handyman during the week. For Party Animals, I answer the phone calls, write invoices, send confirmation letters, charge credit cards, put together costumes, clean costumes, buy costumes, take care of finances, training and hiring employees, do parties as a performer, and many more things all by myself. I have to thank my wife (Vanessa) for doing quickbooks for taxes and being so understanding of me still doing parties on the weekends after all this time. I have to also thank my son (Shane) for being such an inspiration in my life and especially for Party Animals. He gives me ideas all the time on how to deal with certain issues of Party Animals and how to expand and be more creative within the scope of Party Animals. He also loves coming to the office and seeing all the characters and hanging out with his papa for the day from time to time.