Beyond Activities: Building Youth Experiences That Shape Who Kids Become

For many families, the weekly calendar is overflowing. Practices, games, lessons, birthday parties, school events, and the logistics that come with all of it. The last thing most parents want is “one more activity.”

What they do want is something much harder to find. They want experiences that help their kids become more confident, more connected, and more grounded in who they are. They want environments where their children are not just entertained for an hour, but slowly shaped by community, challenge, and care.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Michael Browning Jr., CEO and Founder of Unleashed Brands, a platform of youth enrichment companies that help kids learn, play, and grow. From a single trampoline park in Texas to a portfolio that now serves around twenty million kids a year, Michael has spent his career designing spaces where kids and families feel seen, safe, and inspired. His story offers a powerful playbook for any leader who wants to move beyond transactions and build real community.

Community Is Not A Slogan

In many brands, “community” shows up as a hashtag, a tagline, or a campaign theme. For Michael, community is not a marketing word. It is something you can see, hear, and feel in the way a location operates.

He talks about the smallest moments as the real foundation. How a child is greeted at check in. Whether staff members know names and remember faces. Whether parents feel like the business is a lighthouse for families in that neighborhood, not just a venue that processes payments.

Community, in this view, is built by repetition and reliability. Families come back because they trust that every time they walk in, their kids will be seen, encouraged, and invited to stretch beyond their comfort zone. It is not the attractions alone that build loyalty. It is the pattern of being welcomed and cared for.

Parents Are Not Buying More Activity

One of Michael’s most honest observations is that parents are not out shopping for more things to put on the calendar.

He describes his own life as a father of three. Most nights feel like driving for a ride share service, shuttling kids between commitments. Weekends are filled with sports and events. Time is already stretched thin.

What families are actually buying is the outcome of who their kids become in those environments. They want to see anxiety turn into confidence. They want their children to build social skills, resilience, and a sense of belonging.

That shift changes how you design an experience. Safety becomes table stakes. From there, the focus moves to growth and joy. Are kids walking out taller than when they walked in. Are they building friendships, not just burning energy. Are parents seeing character traits develop, not just skills.

When a business organizes around outcomes instead of activities, it starts making different decisions about staffing, training, and program design.

Systems That Make Community Repeatable

It is one thing to create a special experience in a single location. It is another to repeat that experience across hundreds or thousands of sites.

Michael is blunt about this. Community does not scale on good intentions. It scales through systems that make the right behaviors the default.

That means investing seriously in:

• Training that covers everything from how to call a parent before a party, to how to greet an anxious child, to how to end a session on a high note.

• Clear brand standards for safety, cleanliness, staffing, and service.

• Playbooks for handling upset guests in ways that protect dignity while making things right.

He uses a simple metaphor to keep the team focused. In bowling, if you hit the lead pin correctly, the rest tend to fall. In his world, the lead pin is the customer. When the customer wins, operators win. When operators win, the platform wins. Systems are designed to keep everyone focused on that lead pin.

Using Data Without Losing The Human Story

In a system that serves millions of families, instinct alone is not enough. Michael leans heavily on data and feedback loops, but he refuses to let numbers become the whole story.

Every visit is an opportunity to ask structured questions. How did the check in feel. Was the environment clean. Did the curriculum or service deliver on expectations. Would you refer us to a friend. Those responses feed into daily dashboards that show revenue, satisfaction scores, and patterns across brands.

This is where he sees value in modern tools. AI can help sift through hundreds of thousands of comments, find themes, and surface sentiment that might not be obvious from raw scores. Calls can be transcribed and analyzed to understand what guests are really saying.

But data is always in service of a deeper goal. It is there to sharpen coaching, refine training, and improve experiences, not to reduce people to metrics. The team gathers weekly to “review the film” of how they played last week and decide how to improve. Activity is not confused with achievement. Only progress on the true lead pins counts as a win.

Scaling Empathy Across A Franchise

A core question in any growing organization is whether empathy can truly scale. It is relatively easy to care deeply about a small group of customers you know personally. It is much harder when you are working across fifteen hundred locations and a billion dollars in systemwide revenue.

Michael’s answer is clear. Empathy can scale, but never by accident.

First, you hire for heart. If someone does not enjoy working with kids and young adults, they are not a fit, no matter how strong their resume looks. The business exists to steward today’s kids, who will become tomorrow’s leaders. That is not a neutral responsibility.

Second, you tell stories relentlessly. Every kid has a name, and every name carries a story. A divorced parent trying to rebuild connection. A family new to town. A child celebrating straight As. A shy kid who climbs to the top of the wall for the first time.

Leaders at Unleashed Brands ask staff to share these stories at the end of shifts. They surface moments where an anxious child left with a new sense of courage, or where a parent was moved to tears by what their child accomplished. Those stories circulate across the system, making empathy contagious and reminding everyone why the details matter.

Empathy, in that context, becomes a discipline. It is reinforced by rituals, language, and recognition, not left to personal preference.

Why In-Person Experiences Will Matter More In An AI World

Michael also pays close attention to the broader cultural context. Technology is not going away. Kids are growing up with more screens, more digital connections, and more information than any previous generation.

At the same time, he points to a growing phenomenon often described as connected loneliness. People are linked to more contacts online than ever, yet many feel more isolated, not less. Followership and true community are not the same thing.

In that environment, in-person youth enrichment becomes even more critical.

The role of technology, in his view, is to remove friction, not replace human experience. Seamless booking, faster check in, smarter staffing, and personalized progression can all be enhanced by tech. But goggles and algorithms cannot replace the feeling of being known by name, cheered on by a coach, or welcomed into a group of peers.

Human beings are wired for embodied connection. The brands that will stand out in an AI driven world are those that use technology as a tool while fiercely protecting the moments where people move, play, and grow together.

Key Takeaways

• Community Requires Design, Not Slogans
  Real community emerges from consistent behaviors, thoughtful environments, and leaders who treat every visit as an opportunity to build trust.

• Parents Buy Outcomes, Not Activities
  Families are not looking for more busyness. They invest in places that help their kids become more confident, connected, and resilient.

• Systems Are The Backbone Of Belonging
  Training, standards, and playbooks are what make care repeatable across locations. Without them, community collapses under the weight of scale.

• Data Works Best When It Serves Stories
  Numbers and sentiment analysis can guide improvements, but they should always point back to human stories, not replace them.

• Empathy Can Scale, But Only Intentionally
  Hiring for heart, sharing real stories, and reinforcing purpose in daily rituals are essential to keeping empathy alive in large systems.

• Physical Spaces Are The Antidote To Connected Loneliness
  In a world of constant digital connection, kids and families hunger for real places where they can move, be known, and belong.

Final Thoughts

Building youth enrichment businesses is not just about filling time slots or stacking revenue. It is about shaping the environments where kids discover who they are, where parents find support, and where communities quietly take root around shared experiences.

Michael Browning Jr.’s work with Unleashed Brands is a reminder that even at significant scale, it is still possible to center human connection, empathy, and purpose. In fact, those elements might be the only true differentiators that last.

Check out our full conversation with Michael Browning Jr. on The Bliss Business Podcast.