Airdrie kids and their parents are going to have to find somewhere else to spend their playtime after a business that catered to them was forced to close its doors on Friday (August 31).  

Citing an increase in competition, the pending minimum wage hike, carbon taxes, increased remittance taxes, changes to how stat holidays are paid, and nice weather, Yeehaw Play shut down one month short of two years in business.  

Airdrie residents, co-owners and husband and wife Colin Clark and Leigha Blackwood said in a Facebook post that the news leaves them heartbroken.  

Clark explains they opened their doors to the public on October 1st, 2016 after a year of planning, branding and finding a location.  He says as a family with two young children they wanted to provide a place for Airdrie families to go that was close to home.  At the time, there were no such facilities within 30 kilometres of Airdrie.  Blackwood says that's now changed, which factored into their decision to close.

"When we decided to open in Airdrie there was nothing within 30 kilometres of Airdrie, give or take.  Now the market's quite glutted, if you will.  There's three other places and another one's scheduled to open in Airdrie as well, so that was a factor for us.   Obviously, the market's saturated."

On October 1st, Alberta's minimum wage is slated to rise to $15 an hour, something many small business owners in the area have decried.  Blackwood says that level of minimum wage is a far cry from the one she did her business plan with.

"When you design a business around providing people with going back to work after being a stay at home mom for a long time or as a first time job, and you design it around that $10 minimum wage when you're writing your business plans and all of a sudden that's changed by $5, 50 percent by the time you're in your third year of operation, that's crippling."

Clark expressed his frustration over the large, and often unexpected, costs of keeping a business running.  "Utilities, when you're talking a space that's 8,000 to 10,000 square feet or 20 or 30,000 square feet, as some of the places are, the utilities alone, just for keeping it cool in the summer and warm in the winter, start to become thousands of dollars all on their own.  Keeping the parking lot cleared of snow takes many thousands of dollars in the winter."

Clark and Blackwood tried almost everything they could think of to keep the business alive, including turning it into a hybrid of a public business and incorporating before and after school care and Kinder-Care.  Clark says they found out quickly that plan wouldn't work.

"After going through the whole program design and then approaching licensing, we were given the option of having to operate the two as completely separate entities, right down to having separate insurance for them, having separate staff for them.  We looked at the financial outlook on that one and we realized that was just insanity.  There was no way we could carry both as a single entity in the same space that was designed just as a wide-open playground.  Separating out the kids between before and after care and the public would be near to impossible."

As the pair grapple to come to terms with the closure, Clark says it's hard to assign blame to their predicament.  He does point to one issue that he, Blackwood and no one else has any control over.  The weather.

"I think the biggest single mitigating factor was, honestly, probably the weather.  We had more nice days than we had bad days and we were definitely busier on worse weather days than on nice weather days.  We're both cursed and blessed.  In this industry we're cursed to have nice weather in this part of Canada.  On a personal level we obviously like the sun, we like nice weather and we like chinooks, but from a business point of view we got to learn to dislike nice weather, which is kind of funny."

Blackwood says the clients they've heard from since their closure have, for the most part, been extremely supportive.  "We had amazing clients.  We received some personal messages from some of them, and it's been really great.  When we put out that post on social media we disconnected immediately because we know there were going to be some very upset people and there's nothing we can do about that.  The feedback has been sending us a lot of love and support."

As for their future plans, Clark says it's too early to really make any.  "It's almost like burying a family member, where to everybody else around you, you've got the funeral and that's the end of it.  But you've still got the estate to close and a whole bunch of details to wrap up.  We're basically slogging through that mess right now and we're just trying to come out of it on the other side.  It's definitely devastating on an emotional as well as a financial level."

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