Meet the Attractions: Little Town Adventures

North Somerset is home to many wonderful and unique businesses and organisations. This month, we’re delighted to introduce Laura Filer from Little Town Adventures – opening 17th May!

How did Little Town Adventures and the Family Adventure Group start and how has it developed?

We first opened Ocean Adventurers in Cheddar back in July 2019 as we had started visiting local children’s attractions with our daughter and realised there was a gap in the market for venues that both children and adults enjoyed visiting. Ocean was set up with both adults and children in mind, focusing on things that matter such as cleanliness, good coffee, wifi, comfy seating, and additional safety measures such as defibrillators and more.

We had to pivot due to the pandemic and being such a new business which led us to diversify and enter into the children’s day nursery market. Our journey from there was one of opportunity where we opened another indoor leisure site which was closing due to Covid and additional nurseries, which were facing closure.

We now have 3 leisure sites and 7 day nurseries across the South-West and Midlands. We recently received private equity funding which will enable us to continue on our growth journey to expand and open more venues over the next few years.  

Why did you decide to base yourself in North Somerset?

We live within North Somerset so it felt like the perfect place to start our journey.

How do you attract talented staff?

We start off by ensuring our current teams are as happy as can be. We ask every member of our team ‘how they were feeling during every shift’ so that we can track happiness and put any changes into place that our teams would like to make their jobs easier.

We also try to make sure we take the time to say thank you and focus heavily on investing in training and developing our people. We try to offer opportunities for development and progression within our teams and offer a lot of other benefits such as birthday day off, reduced cost childcare, free holiday clubs, and lots of other things to support our teams too.

What have been your biggest challenges?

We have had our fair share of challenges since we opened our first venue, Ocean Adventurers, in Cheddar in 2019. The most notable was only being open 9 months before the pandemic as well as electricity rises and the cost of living impact on our business too.

However, we’ve approached each of these challenges as an opportunity to diversify and pivot through staying dynamic in our thinking. It was due to the pandemic and being closed for so long that we decided to move into the childcare sector and put our empty building to use.

These challenges have definitely kept us on our toes and were the reason that despite having the idea and building identified for Little Town Adventures in December 2019, it has taken us over 4 years to get to the position of being able to bring our vision to life and open.

What are your plans for the future?

Earlier this year, we secured private equity funding which will allow us to grow our business across the South-West and Midlands. We’re hoping Little Town Adventures in Weston-super-Mare will be a success and if so, we hope to open more Little Towns over the next few years as well as growing our day nursery operations.

What have been your proudest moments?

The proudest moment for us was receiving the keys to the venue, knowing that we had achieved this independently through our own work. It marked a significant milestone, and the beginning of a new chapter.

Seeing children enjoying themselves and laughing in our different leisure venues is a very proud feeling, everything we have done is designed with children in mind and to give children the best starts in life.

We are very proud every time we see examples of this as well as being multi-award-winning operators across all of our different leisure and nursery venues.

To find out more about Little Town Adventures in Weston, please visit www.littletownadventures.co.uk and be sure to pop in to check them out in person from 17th May!