Rinksider: July - September 2022

Rink Highlight on Aloha Roller Rink with Owner, Elizabeth Ruiz

By Lori Lovely

Some people have goals for themselves. Liz Ruiz has a goal for her community of San Jose, California: to preserve skating. Although she says she’s “not there yet,” the evidence would suggest otherwise because people in San Jose have a place to skate.

That wasn’t always the case. In 2014, San Jose Skate (known as Aloha Roller Rink when it opened in the 1970s), closed. For five years, there was no rink building. “People missed it,” Ruiz firmly believes. “It was a rite of passage.”

Growing up on skates

It was part of her personal rite of passage. The San Jose native began skating when she was 9 or 10 years old and became a “full-fledged rink rat” by the time she was in junior high, spending about 40 hours a week in the rink.

She stopped going when she grew up, but the love of skating remained within her. When she started gaining weight due to being sedentary at her office job, Ruiz began looking for a way to exercise. An article about roller derby enticed her back to her old rink.

But eight years later, the rink was sold and was going to close. “It was the only rink in the area,” she recalls, observing that other roller rinks in the vicinity had already closed their doors. “I tried to keep it alive, but couldn’t. If I didn’t do anything, our community would not have a rink. The next generation of children would miss out on skating, which was such a staple of my upbringing.”

Going mobile

Ruiz did something. She bought out the entire inventory of skates as the first step in the next chapter of San Jose skating. Next, she bought a mobile trailer to haul those skates to various locations where she offered off-site events, such as schools and libraries. She also scheduled corporate events.

But her regular gig was at Roosevelt Park’s outdoor hockey rink on summer weekend nights. “I couldn’t afford a building,” she remembers. “I worked as a part-time nanny. So, I partnered with the city to rent their hockey rink.” It kept skating alive for the community.

Four years later, she’s still providing skating at the park, but she finally found a building – almost by accident.

From rink rat to mall rat

When Eastridge Management approached her for a meeting, Ruiz investigated Eastridge Center and found a space she considered suitable for a rink. But during the meeting, she discovered that the group wanted only a one-day pop-up event in the parking lot. “They used to have an ice skating rink,” she says, believing it to be the inspiration for the idea.

She had an idea of her own and convinced the management company to let her use the indoor space she selected. The announcement went viral with more than 100,000 likes. “The response was immense,” she effuses. It resulted in turning a oneday pop-up into a two-month holiday event.

The two-month holiday event turned into a four-year (in November) rental agreement. Going from a little summer operation that took 10 hours a week with two or three employees to a much bigger operation that requires 33 employees was “an immense challenge,” she admits. But it’s another step toward her goal.

The challenge paid off – not only for Ruiz and her rink but also for other shopping center stores. “We’re the only skate rink in the Bay area,” she says. The rink is pulling in people from 45 minutes to an hour away. That has benefited other stores and altered their demographics. Aloha even won an award for its impact on the shopping center, proving its value to the mall.

Ruiz calls her relationship with the mall “mutual love,” but she says the mall is not her forever home, and she is already preparing to transition to a permanent location that she hasn’t found yet.

Eye on the prize

Ruiz had to make some compromises to make the mall space work. She performed a “shoestring budget remodel” on the rented space because it’s not hers, and she has no intention of diverting money from her savings to invest in improvements she’ll have to leave behind once she finds a building to buy.

For example, rather than paint murals on the walls, all the art is painted on canvas so she can take it with her. Similarly, during the pandemic lockdown, she built a blacklight mini golf course she could take with her.

Other amenities the site offers include a party room, arcade games, air hockey tables, a photo booth, and tables and seating for eating. “I’m working on a food and beverage license, but there’s a pizza place next door, and I offer packaged snacks.”

Ruiz wasn’t willing to put money into any permanent fixtures she’d have to leave behind. Instead of classic hardwoods, her customers skate on the concrete floor. “I’ve never been able to provide an ideal skating floor,” she says, referring to both the mall and the outdoor park venues.

No amount of money could fix the most significant obstacle of the mall rink. There are pillars in the middle of the floor she can’t change. This obstacle fuels her dreams of finding a proper building that she can customize to suit a rink’s needs.

Hello, goodbye, hello again

The advantage of renting space is that she can test-drive the concept before signing a long-term lease. Even so, it’s been difficult, notably when the state mandated a lockdown in March 2020 due to the pandemic. “Aloha was going to close down, but this was just a trend of us losing these very valuable places,” she remembers thinking.

She was determined not to let her rink become another COVID casualty. “There were times where I had to take loans against my retirement to stay afloat while waiting for government funds to come through,” Ruiz laments.

In the interim, as a very different way of serving her community, Ruiz used the rink as a walk-in mass vaccination site for Santa Clarita County, capable of inoculating up to 2,000 people daily.

Aloha is used as a way to say both hello and goodbye in Hawaii. Keeping it as the name of her rink was intended as a nostalgic connection to her past and is part of the rink’s origin story. “Bringing back the Aloha name, and helping that kind of spirit stay alive, was important to me,” she says. But it also symbolizes the endings and beginnings of skating in her own life.

The next beginning will be finding a place to call her own. “I want to own my own building,” Ruiz says. “Everything I’m doing goes toward that.”

In the meantime, she was offered another location in Santa Barbara four hours away, and is currently working on renovating that facility in the Paseo Nuevo Mall. “There are a lot of adult skaters and fewer kids in Silicon Valley,” she notes, so that facility will cater to them. It will offer skating, arcade games, laser tag, and a concessions bar when completed.

She remains open to more locations as the opportunity arises, keeping in mind her mission to preserve skating for the community.

Skating is important to her. “It’s what I did for fun when I was young. It was my hobby, my sport,” Ruiz reminisces. She wants to share her enjoyment of skating with the community - to preserve a place for a younger generation to experience the same rite of passage that meant so much to her.

“There’s an energy at the rink,” she marvels. “Everyone is having a good time. I love watching families come in. The parents are sharing something they loved with their kids, and the kids are falling in love with skating.” With her vision, they’ll have a place to skate for a long time.

Ruiz uses removable signage and other things so that when she finds her forever home she will be able to take it with her.

Photo credit: Liz Ruiz

Top 15 Things I Learned from Opening a Skating Rink

Liz Ruiz meets people who want to open a skating rink all the time. She generously shares her experiences and the lessons she’s learned from opening her own rink. Here are some of her tips:

1. Have a goal or a mission and stick to it.

2. Don’t go into too much debt.

“People have a huge, glamorized plan for their ideal rink,” Ruiz says, “but that’s expensive.” In the beginning, taking on too much debt can be a significant stressor on a new business, which often can’t sustain a high debt level. It’s essential to be realistic about your finances. For example, when Ruiz wanted to buy her old rink, she worked as a part-time nanny. The rink owners wanted $40,000 a month; she knew that was unsustainable debt.

3. Long-term budgeting is essential.

“I didn’t want a loan,” Ruiz recalls, explaining that one estimate she got to convert a building to suit her needs came in at $1.5 million. She felt that would have put too much financial strain on her business because it would take too long to pay off.

4. Don’t over-invest.

Ruiz wisely chose not to put too much money into a temporary, rented space. “Calculate your breakeven point,” she advises. Don’t be a perfectionist because the casual skaters don’t care, she shared. For example, her DJ booth was a mall kiosk, and she pulled up carpet squares to panel the walls. “For most skaters, the garage-sale version is fine.”

5. Make the business pay for itself.

Don’t get ahead of yourself with purchases, features, amenities, or employee hires. You don’t have to have everything at once; attempting to do so could over-extend your finances. Monitor cash flow and be sure your expenses are less than your revenue. Manage growth. “Don’t grow too quickly.”

6. Break your plan down into manageable steps.

To get started, you don’t have to have everything done to perfection. Do what you can afford and build on your success.

7. Determine which opportunities will help you reach your goal.

Ruiz capitalized on several opportunities, starting with buying the skate inventory from the rink that was closing and agreeing to the mall’s offer to put on a pop-up event.

8. Check each step you take to see if it moves you toward your goal.

Don’t get distracted by things that won’t help you achieve your goal.

9. Know the difference between “need” and “want.”

Start with only what you need, Ruiz advises. “As the facility starts earning money, you can add some of the wants.”

10. Learn about the industry.

You need to understand roller skating. You have to have knowledge about the skates.

11. Learn about your audience.

For example, Ruiz says Silicon Valley attracts many singles just starting their careers in the tech industry, so she anticipates fewer family and child skaters than adult skaters at the new rink she’s opening. You need to adjust to provide what your customers want.

12. Learn about yourself.

“You have to know your shortcomings,” Ruiz says. “Mine is marketing.” Calling herself her worst employee, she recognized that she was “standing in the way of my own business,” so she hired a marketing professional.

13. Invest in getting the right team members and rely on their expertise.

“You can’t even open by yourself,” she explains, adding that the team includes contractors and employees. It’s easy to understand that remodeling requires contractors with a different skill set than the typical rink owner.

14. Take steps.

“You can’t stay in the planning stage forever.” Even if things aren’t perfect, she urges potential new owners to move forward. “It will always be scary. You’ve just got to take the step. Don’t be afraid to fail. This is skating; we know how to get back up.”

15. Do a soft opening.

After all the staff training, have an invitation-only private session to test where your weaknesses are before going public.