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John Wilkinson isn't in the Guiness Book of World
Records, but he is a good salesman. He rents and
sells sumo wrestling suits. If you weren't born
in bulk, but you want to wrestle like you were,
Wilkinson's company gives you the chance.
Laugh if you want, but the 42-year old's San Francisco
Company, Total Rebound, made $3.5 million in 1998
and expects to make $4 million this year. Well,
okay, to collect that cash, Total Rebound does
more than the sumo wrestling thing. Wilkinson's
company also rents and sells supplies for playing
human shuffleboard, an inflatable mountain for
people to climb and "Off With Their Heads," a
game in which people get to behead each other and
live to tell about it.
Not your average, everyday forms of entertainment.
Making it a tougher sell, these games are prohibitively
expensive for most people to purchase but not too
expensive for a company to purchaser rent out for
a day or a weekend for a company picnic, seminar
or party. Suddenly Wilkinson's surreal ideas make
sense. After all, in this computer age, says Wilkinson, "There's
so much less social interaction. People crave it.
And we're a solution to that. So it isn't that
hard of a sell once you explain to them, 'Here's
your problem,' and 'Here's how we can help.' "
But in 1992, when Total Rebound started renting
out its wacky interactive games, human resources
departments were confused. It wasn't yet a Dilbert
world, the Internet didn't exist as far as the
general public was concerned, and the idea that
employees might need more stimulation than wieners
and Kool-Aid at the company picnic was only beginning
to be explored. But Wilkinson already knew that
people loved the games because he had unwittingly
done his own market research during Total Rebound's
early days as a bungee jumping company, the first
one in the country to receive approval from the
OSHA.
You'd think bungee jumping would be a hard sell
and that those customers could definitely be called
suckers: Here, you take this rope and plunge from
a great height and hurtle toward what will seem
to be certain death. But Wilkinson reports there
was always a steady stream of customers - so many,
in fact, he began offering diversions, like sumo
wrestling, for those waiting in line.
So during the fall and winter off season ("Somebody
decided bungee jumping had a season," says
a perplexed Wilkinson), he aimed for the corporate
market. He teamed up with caterers and event planners,
contacting them through their associations. Now
Total Rebound's clients included Microsoft and
Cisco Systems
But there is a downside to owning a business that
features such zany games as human bowling (a person
climbs into a life-size bowling ball, and, well,
you get the idea): Because so few people know these
games exist, Wilkinson has to do a lot of advertising-
at least $100,000 worth each year. The upside of
selling something so bizarre? Observes Wilkinson: "Truly,
with what we do, we don't have much competition."
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