On Aire Ep. 6 w/ Matt Baysinger

In the sixth episode of On Air with Team Jensen: The Art of Industrial Real Estate, the team sits down with Matt Baysinger, the creative force and CEO behind Swell Spark. As the parent company of wildly popular experiential entertainment brands like Breakout KC, Blade & Timber, and Sinkers Lounge, Swell Spark is redefining how people gather for fun. Matt shares his entrepreneurial journey—from his roots in education to building a national “small box” entertainment empire right out of Kansas City.

💡 From Ideas to Experiential Reality

Matt didn’t start out as a corporate CEO; he was a high school guidance counselor who quickly realized that having summers off just wasn’t for him. His foray into customer-facing business began in 2014 with Mass Street Soda in Lawrence. Just a year later, after trying a brand-new concept on a trip to Tennessee, he and a partner opened Breakout KC—Kansas City’s first escape room.

“I started this business not with the intention of growing it… I started because I thought it’d be fun to do an escape room.”

🪓 The Birth of Swell Spark

By 2017, after launching the axe-throwing bar Blade & Timber, Matt found himself known as “the Breakout guy” or “the Blade & Timber guy”. To unify these rapidly growing brands under one mission—gathering people for extraordinary shared experiences—Swell Spark was born. Today, Swell Spark acts as a “perpetual startup engine,” even utilizing a 36,000-square-foot industrial headquarters in the West Bottoms to pre-fabricate custom mini-golf holes and escape room props in-house.

“My role is to see concepts and take them and try to make them better.”

🧴 Pivoting Through the Pandemic

The entertainment industry, which relies entirely on gathering people together, was hit brutally hard by COVID-19. Swell Spark survived by thinking fast. By partnering with a local distillery, they pivoted their online booking platform to sell and safely distribute massive quantities of hand sanitizer when the supply chain failed. That scrappy, zero-to-one startup mentality literally kept the lights on and the rent paid.

🏙️ Betting Big on Kansas City’s Future

Matt is incredibly bullish on the future of Kansas City, particularly the prospect of a downtown stadium. Growing up in Denver and watching what Coors Field did for their downtown, he knows the power of centralized, destination-driven real estate. As Swell Spark continues to scale, they are looking beyond standard leases and eyeing real estate ownership to secure their future—starting with a multi-concept building on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence.

“Kansas City is changing, I think in a really good way… the next 10 years in KC are going to be incredible.”

🚀 Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

When asked what advice he has for aspiring business owners, Matt keeps it remarkably simple. You don’t necessarily need a mountain of venture capital or a perfect business plan to get started.

“You have time or money, and if you don’t have a lot of time, then you need a lot of money… just freaking do it.”