A View from the Top with Daniel Hill on creating a £6.5m escape room business

The entrepreneur tells Martin Friel how adopting a ‘McDonald’s mentality’ helped him grow from one branch in Scotland to a UK-wide presence with plans for expansion overseas

Every budding entrepreneur dreams of coming up with a business concept that delivers rapid and profitable growth. But a couple of episodes of Dragons’ Den is all that’s required to show that such eventualities are, in fact, pretty rare.

One entrepreneur who has managed to land the dream catch is Daniel Hill, managing director of Edinburgh-based Escape. An unassuming and refreshingly laidback individual, Hill has spent the last four and half years building a business that now dominates the UK escape room market and has a growing global presence.

If you are wondering what escape rooms are, think of The Crystal Maze, the 1990s TV programme that set a group of hyperactive adults a series of mental and physical challenges to solve against the clock, or get locked in.