The benchmark for social entertainment concepts
Contribute your venue economics. Get the whole category's back.
Seventeen questions · about six minutes · your figures are never published or attributed
The exchange
You cannot buy your way in. The only currency is data — which is what keeps the benchmark honest, and stops it becoming a vendor's marketing asset.
Revenue mix, cost of goods, labour, occupancy, utilisation, margin. The figures that never leave a management pack.
Combined with every other social entertainment operator's, and never published, attributed, or shown to another operator on their own.
Line by line against comparable concepts — so you can see which part of your P&L is out of step, not just that something is.
What comes back
Every cost line benchmarked separately against comparable social entertainment concepts — so you can see exactly which one is out of step.
Your venue against the social entertainment category average
Illustrative figures only. Labour, occupancy and marketing all sit at or better than the category — but food cost runs 5.3 points hot, and that single line accounts for almost the whole 2.9-point gap in four-wall margin. On a $40M business that is roughly $1.2M. Without the category beside you, it reads as a soft year rather than a solvable cost problem.
The gap
Restaurants have same-store sales and published cost benchmarks. Every mature category has numbers that say whether you are winning. Social entertainment has none.
Most social entertainment concepts are under ten years old and privately held. There is no decades-deep dataset the way there is in hotels or restaurants.
Food cost, labour ratio, occupancy, utilisation, four-wall margin — none of it is disclosed anywhere. It exists only inside operators' own management packs.
Down 6% — is that you, or is that everyone? And which line caused it? Today there is no way to know. That is what XPI exists to answer.
What happens to your figures
Written before we asked you for anything, not after. If any of this changes, contributors are told before the next collection round — not in a revised policy nobody reads.
Your figures are combined with other operators' before anything is published. No individual operator's numbers are released, shown to another contributor, or included in any report attributed to a company.
No line is published unless enough operators have contributed to that line that no single one can be reverse-engineered from the result. Where the panel is too thin, the figure is withheld — as it will be at launch.
Contributed data is not sold, licensed to vendors, or shared with third parties for their own use. The exchange is data for data — that is the entire model, and it is the reason there is no subscription tier.
We email you your own submission, so you always hold a record of exactly what you provided. Contributors may withdraw their data from future releases at any time, in writing.
This is a draft statement for a benchmark not yet incorporated. It is a description of intent, not a contract, and will be replaced by the Council's published data policy before the first collection round opens. Nothing entered into this prototype is stored, transmitted or retained.
Get started
Seventeen questions in three short sections. We pre-fill what we can find about your venues so you only answer what we can't.
Draft v0.1 · The contributor panel is not yet open — submissions join the founding cohort.
Contributor access
So you can leave mid-way and come back, keep a record of what you submitted, and withdraw it later if you choose. No password — we use a one-time code.
We never ask for a password. Passwords get reused and leaked. A one-time code to your work address, plus a recovery code you keep, is both simpler and harder to compromise.
Create your account
We'll send a six-digit code to confirm it's you. Use an address at your company's domain.
Confirm it's you
Sent to your address. It expires in ten minutes.
Save this now
This is the only way back into your submission if you lose access to that email address. We cannot regenerate it or look it up — that's what makes it a recovery code.
Store it the way you'd store a shared credential — a password manager, or wherever your team keeps recovery keys. Not in the same inbox as the login email.
Signed in
Picking up where you left off.
Your concept
We'll look up your US venues so you don't have to type it.
Looking up your venues…
Nothing you enter is ever published or attributed. Figures are released in aggregate only, never below the minimum panel threshold, so no operator's numbers can be reverse-engineered.
Scale · 01
Company-operated only — not franchised, licensed or managed.
Scale · 02
Bays, lanes, courts, tables — the fixed unit a guest books. Estate average is fine.
Scale · 03
Hours a venue is open and bookable, before deducting closures. This is what turns fixed capacity into available capacity.
Scale · 04
Interior square footage of a representative venue. Paired with capacity, it shows how efficiently you use space.
Scale · 05
The range across your estate, in square feet. Shows us how uniform your format is.
Demand · 06
Your utilisation rate — booked hours divided by hours available, across a full year.
No operator publishes this. Utilisation is the most requested figure in the category and the reason a benchmark has never existed — it cannot be estimated from the outside.
Demand · 07
Total revenue divided by total visits — your per-capita spend across all revenue lines.
Demand · 08
Typical number of guests per booking. Party size drives both throughput and how spend splits between the activity and F&B.
Demand · 09
How long a typical guest stays, door to door. Dwell time is what separates a drive-to-play format from a hang-and-graze one.
Demand · 10
Guests with a second visit inside a year. Repeat rate is the clearest read on whether the concept itself is working.
Demand · 11
Pre-booked group, party and corporate revenue as a share of total. Pre-booked revenue is the most defensible kind you have.
Economics · 12
Across all company-operated venues.
The remaining questions are P&L lines. They are the reason the benchmark is worth having — and the reason it is aggregate-only, threshold-gated, and never attributed.
Economics · 13
F&B as a percentage of total venue revenue. In this category it commonly runs 40–50%.
Economics · 14
F&B COGS as a percentage of F&B revenue — what the food and drink actually costs you.
Economics · 15
Venue-level wages, benefits and payroll taxes as a percentage of revenue. Exclude corporate overhead.
Economics · 16
Rent, service charge and property taxes. Enter it whichever way you have it to hand.
Economics · 17
Four-wall margin before corporate overhead, as a percentage of revenue. Last one.
Delivery
One address. Not shared, not added to any list.
We email you a copy of your own submission, so you always hold a record of exactly what you gave us.
Review
Nothing is submitted until you confirm.
Received
It takes a few minutes to compute and verify.
Sending to —
There is no category benchmark yet. That's the actual state of social entertainment, not a gap in this form. It fills as operators contribute, and founding contributors shape how each line is defined before it fixes.
This is a prototype. Nothing was submitted, stored or emailed — every figure stayed in your browser.