Thanks Neil, but it's EAS that has done all the hard work so far.
The submission on Cyclone is awaiting a decision now, but the application was excellent, and if it doesn't happen, then it has nothing to do with the quality, effort or research done by EAS.
Touch wood indeed that Cyclone can get it's listing, and can then survive a counter attack from Plesh Ltd.
Bob, I know you are an expert in business, so I was surprised to see your very naive view of getting an operation like this off the ground.
I could put together a full business plan, and I could show that it could be profitable. However, you need to pay back your initial investment, and that wouldn't happen quickly.
To set this up would absolutely cost millions. The pay back on an investment would take many years. There are very few people willing to invest millions (in an unknown) and expect such a slow payback.
This isn't the Dragon's Den, with people asking for 50 grand to get their chip-shop off the ground. A chip shop would be one of dozens of essentially individual businesses runnig as part of the whole. Imagine the cost of setting up a single, small business, then multiplying it a hundred times. Even then I'm sure that you're underestimating the cost of running such a place. The plesh makes a couple of million a year profit on revenues of around £44 million pounds a year. Even a small museum costs hundreds of thousands a year to run. This idea is a mix of museum and park, so you'd soon find (especially after requiring investment to set it up as the development would need to be done pretty much from scratch) the first year costs would be in the millions, and returns in the thousands.
There's just no way anyone but those with a lot of money sitting around could invest in this kind of project. I love the idea, I loved Pleasureland, but I'm a realist and understand how impossible this is for your average Joe.
Oh, and my numbers didn't come up, sorry