You’re probably wondering what “money secrets” can Disneyland harbor 30 years after it first opened its doors. Everything will be revealed soon enough, so bear with us until the end.
If you grew up poor, you probably never went to Disneyland – or maybe that’s just us.
It wasn’t even something our parents knew was a thing, so when we became adults, we decided it was time to change that.
Earlier this week, it was the first time we went to Disneyland Paris and since our entrepreneurial brains are wired that way, we found a lot of valuable lessons in the “happiest place on earth.”
This is NOT a paid partnership or sponsorship.
Skip whatever business seminar you plan to go to and take your kids or yourself to Disneyland; you’ll learn more than you would expect. These are 15 Money Secrets You Learn at Disneyland.
Don’t worry if you don’t feel like reading, you can enjoy the video below or watch it on YouTube:
1
The value of a brand
A lot of people talk about the power of a brand, but few are able to quantify it.
Take a plain white T-shirt. It costs less than $1 to manufacture and distribute when you do it at scale.
The moment you put the Mickey ears on it, the same t-shirt sells for $35.
That’s the power of a brand. It increases perceived value by double digits.
Disney has such a powerful brand that the meaning behind the logo alone will have the same effect on any kind of merchandise. It’s incredible.
2
It’s all about people, and not all people are the same
Can you imagine someone walking into an investor pitch, like Shark Tank, and pitching the development of almost 5,000 acres with facilities ready to accommodate around 50,000 people per day and a total of 15,000 employees, all based on cartoons from your childhood?!
Not to mention that the entire thing costs $5 billion to build.
They’d laugh you out of the room, but Disney did it, and it’s massively profitable.
Disneyland Paris brought in 2.6 billion dollars in revenue last year alone, and despite opening a new Marvel-themed park, they still made over 50 million dollars in profit.
And this is one park alone – there are six parks around the world. The secret that allows Disney to generate so much money comes from a simple fact:
The sheer size of Disney as a company shows you that you’re thinking too small.
3
Intellectual Property is S-tier – Acquire it if you can’t build it
This entire empire was built on top of applying new technology, which was moving pictures: the animation of a mouse.
And we’ll talk about that towards the end of the article.
The emotional connection we humans build to stories is deep into who we are. The company that owns that connection is beyond valuable.
Only now has Disney doubled down on this strategy since its inception.
They quickly realized how big of a gold mine this was and their limitations in churning out as much of it as possible, so they looked around and went shopping.
This is a map of everything Disney owns.
You can’t even read it because it’s just too much stuff.
Star Wars, everything Marvel, X-men, Avatar, 20th-century Fox, ESPN, ABC, and the list is really, really long.
The money secret we discovered at Disneyland is eye-opening: Owning rights to a symbol that carries value for people can become priceless.
The only other company that we know of that had this realization and doubled down on it is LVMH, where Bernard Arnault realized just how valuable heritage can be.
Disney and LVHM are more similar than most people realize.
4
Optimization is the name of the game
Just under 20 million people go to a Disney park per year.
Take a moment to think about the logistics of 50,000 people every day, consistently throughout the year, and all of them having a great experience that they can take back home and talk about.
Parking needs to be optimized; access; food; emergency care; everyone needs to feel special, because you know it took a lot of effort for most of them to get there, not to mention it ain’t cheap.
By the way, if you’re not from a country with a park, flights, accommodation, food, and everything else will set you back 2-4 grand.
Disney hotels are $600 per night alone. In spite of the large number of people, everything runs smoothly.
Easy to get in, easy to navigate, the app works really well, and you get your food fast beyond extraordinary.
We wanted to go to Disneyland Paris now because they were celebrating 30 years since the park opened. That means they’ve had 30 years of optimization to get to where they are today.
To wrap your mind around this secret and how Disney makes money, just think about your business and all the things that you could be doing better or that need fixing.
What if you had 30 years of these fixes in play? How efficiently would your business run?
5
The price does not matter if the experience is worth it
If you’ve been an Aluxer for a while, you know that:
A transaction takes place when the perceived value of what you’re getting is higher than the cost you’re paying!
Here’s another insight: The value of every memory you make goes up with time!
So seeing your child meet his childhood here is a core memory that you don’t care how much it costs because it is so valuable.
Sure, Disneyland costs $350 at a minimum for one day, but people gladly pay it because you’re getting the opportunity to play around in a $5-billion-dollar playground.
This got us thinking about our own Alux app and how we priced it at $99 per year, even though you’re getting over 1 million dollars of coaching.
At this kind of discrepancy, if we can provide you guys with over 10 million dollars worth of value, we could charge $99 per month, and it would still be a steal.
So we’re doubling down on our investment.
Download the Alux app right now and wait for the next update coming this week. The entire catalog of coaching will be unlocked.
Get yourself a yearly subscription while the prices are still low.
6
You can buy time
One of the things we loved the most was the ability to purchase time if you wanted. Premier Access allows you to skip the line on all the rides.
With Disneyland being a popular destination, the wait time for most rides is between 20 and 40 minutes, and these are rides that last between 2 and 15 minutes each.
Disneyland ride duration
The more you think about it, the more you realize just how big of a portion of your day will just be you waiting in line. At least a couple of hours.
Premiere access costs $100-$150 per person. That’s on top of the $120-200 you’re paying for the park tickets.
The beauty of this pricing is that everyone knows how much an hour of their life is worth, so you can make a choice about how much you want to get done in a single day.
7
Have a magical moment in the customer experience
Disney does this through their parades. Basically, actors dressed as your favorite characters parade through the center of the park every couple of hours.
On their way, they engage with the park attendees.
Imagine you’re a little girl obsessed with Elsa from Frozen. You’ve traveled to this magical place where Elsa lives, and during the parade, she comes to you and gives you a hug.
At that moment, the world stops. For a 6-7-8-year-old, you know the age where you still believe magic can be real – meeting your hero in flesh and blood is the ultimate WOW moment.
Ever since we uncovered some of Disney’s money secrets, we’ve noticed that we’ve been obsessing over how we can add more WOW moments to your journey.
For example, if you’re not watching this in full screen, it would really help a lot if you hit the like button under this video.
Hopefully, when we hit the like button, YouTube will do its thing and show you a cool animation. – Let us know in the comments if it worked or not.
8
Points of sale are everywhere in the customer journey
Disney mastered the art of merchandising.
They’re selling you before you enter the park, while you’re entering the park, and everywhere you turn. Also, they’re high-appeal products.
They’re flashy, they’re next to your favorite heroes, and everywhere you turn, there’s something you don’t necessarily need but definitely want.
You know how you buy gum at the supermarket counter just because it’s there?!
Disney did this with its entire park. It’s all just an impulse buy.
Most businesses take your money at the end of the customer journey. Disney doesn’t waste time; they’ll gladly accept your money anytime you want to give it to them.
For us, we used social media, like Instagram or Twitter, just to add more value to the community without asking for anything in return.
In retrospect, this is a mistake.
You don’t need to be pushy with it, but a checkout button should be available next to your customer at all times.
9
Set everything up for success and ease of use
The day is set up before you begin.
Everything is set up via the Disney app, even before you enter the park. They know how many people will show up.
Their predictive models tell them how much food is probably going to be consumed at the fast food spots.
If you want to eat at a sit-down restaurant, you make a reservation through the app, so they know who’s coming and not.
Once the set-up is done, you just go through it every single day.
Over and over again, giving people memories and making money out of it. The big takeaway here is:
If you have something that works, don’t try to be new about it; do it over and over again until it no longer works or you find things you can perfect.
Too many people find one thing that works, and instead of doing it 1000 times over, they move on and try to do something else.
10
Going 100% even when you’re not profitable
This was a big realization about reputation and how to maintain a brand.
The park is huge, and the costs of running it are also huge. We went mid-week in order to have less of a crowd than during the weekends, and the place was still packed. But there must be days when the park isn’t profitable.
The cost of running the entire thing is just too high.
This means there are days where, although they know they won’t be profitable, they still put on everything and give 100% to the guests who came. Why?
If they were to start cutting corners and instead of doing four parades per day, they’d do just one—if they didn’t do the drone show or the fireworks show or some of the main rides were closed that day, the experience would go down.
All the people who showed up that day would go home and call Disneyland: MID. The brand would suffer. L’s in the chat.
The power of word-of-mouth is crucial, especially if it’s an experience-centered business.
So you go 100%, even if that day you’re not profitable.
Doing so allows you to build goodwill, and as long as the good days outpace the bad ones, it’s just a matter of keeping it going until you can cash in on the goodwill you’re building.
We admit we learned this money secret before going out to Disneyland because this has been the strategy we applied with the Alux app as well.
We’re paying these experts more money than we’re making from the in-app purchases, but those who do buy them see just how much value they’re getting and the kind of impact they have, so we’ll keep adding more value even if they’re not always profitable.
11
Have a cash cow that allows you to take some risk
The studio was the thing that paid the bills, and they started it almost 100 years ago.
Just think about it, Snow White was released in 1940, and it’s been cashflowing for them ever since.
Pinocchio, Bambi, Fantasia, Peter Pan, and all these other iconic pieces were also released around then.
60 or 70 years ago, and they’re still printing money.
They’ve been stacking them ever since. Lion King was 1994, by the way. They acquired Pixar and brought all that value over.
You may not know about this secret, but in order for Walt to raise the money needed to open the first Disneyland, he basically mortgaged everything he owned, including his own life insurance, and it worked out.
Disneyland’s money secrets show us just how much value you can extract from one great piece of work and how you can funnel it into creating more and more until you become the largest media corporation in the world.
12
Intelligent and simple pricing
Another thing we loved was just how straightforward everything was in terms of pricing.
- Parking was $30 for the day.
- A pizza is $15.
- A bowl of spaghetti with a drink is $17.
Is it the best pizza you’ve ever had? Of course not, but it’s got mickey ears and it’s good enough, so you don’t care.
You pay with your phone or watch, and things just keep moving. If you’re staying at a Disney hotel, you get a “magic band,” and everything you buy gets charged to your room.
The more frictionless things get, the more money you’re going to make. And Disneyland sure gets this money secret right.
Stop making things so complicated.
13
Maintain relevance
Honestly, it came as a surprise that the new generation even knew who Pinocchio or Dumbo was.
Although these are great pieces of IP, you never want to rest on your laurels. Frozen is a big hit for Disney.
And so was the acquisition of the entire Marvel portfolio, skyrocketing with the success of the phase 1 release until Endgame.
The entire thing was a masterclass in business in itself, but let’s stick to the parks for now.
You not only need to bring in fresh new characters and expand the universe you’ve created but there needs to be a real effort to keep your old IP relevant, which is why they’re making live-action movies after every one of their hits.
14
Adopt new technology
The fireworks show is now accompanied by a 500 drone show that’s pretty cool, but that’s not really what blew us away.
Instead, it was their investment in animatronics that’s at the forefront of where we think this is going.
If we ever get to a Westworld type of reality, Disney is most likely to get there first. Here’s probably the most well-known humanoid robot to date: Sophia – the robot.
This is just one of the animatronic robots Disney has on display at Disney World. Moreover, there’s another secret here on how they plan to make money with Disneyland:
Two years ago, they were working on free-roaming robots for their parks. Check out the toddler Groot.
It doesn’t take that much of a leap forward to see how this might eventually lead to a Westworld reality.
15
Fully dominate the space you’re in through volume, money, and effort
At this stage, nobody can compete with Disney just because of the volume they do and the years of compounding they’ve had working for them.
The takeaway for us was to just stop being in such a damn hurry and embrace that this might turn out to be a life-long journey.
Things get bigger if you keep working on them, things get bigger if you keep expanding them, you get bigger when you start buying out your competition… It’s a different, bigger game that some choose to play.
There are very few companies that will probably be around 100 years from now, and after spending two full days in their parks—after looking at how the entire company is structured, how they are innovating, and keeping themselves at the forefront of things—we genuinely believe Disney might be one of these companies that will one day absorb everything.
And because you’ve stuck with us until the end, we have a bonus for you:
Bonus
What will the world remember you by?
There’s this quote by Macklemore that we really love that goes like this:
They say you die twice, first when they bury you in the grave.
And the second time is the last time that somebody mentions your name.
We thought about it, and Walt Disney achieved his dream of immortality through what he built.
He failed to do it in a literal sense – he actually tried and even said he’d give everything he’s ever built to start from scratch and live forever – but the work lives on.
Be careful what you put your name on. Pick it carefully. Make sure the legacy you leave behind lives up to some ideals worth following.
Walt literally taught us to dream bigger than even people like us think it’s reasonable. And that’s saying something.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look into the money secrets that make Disneyland a money-printing machine. See you next time!
