Texas Mom Throws Out Corporate Playbook with New Play Center
Located in Azle, Texas, CJ’s Play Corner offers a safe and engaging environment for children aged 6 months to 7 years to explore, play, and grow.
Azle, Texas, is not far outside Fort Worth, but the city is more like a small town than a bedroom community.
“And so you don't have the skating rinks, you don't have the indoor playgrounds, you don't have the putt-putt centers,” said Azle mom and entrepreneur LaChasity Cloud, who noted that the Texas heat also negates outdoor options for part of the year. “You imagine pushing a newborn around in the stroller in 103-degree weather, it's just not going to happen.”
Enter CJ’s Play Corner, the 2,500-square-foot indoor play center that Cloud, 39, opened on Azle’s Main Street in March.
Cloud named the facility after her 2-year-old son and made it the antithesis of the expensive corporate centers she fought traffic to get to in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
She allows outside food so parents (like her) can manage their kids’ allergies and staggers business hours to accommodate morning and evening preferences.
The age limit at CJ’s is 7, so big kids don’t bowl over the little ones. Cloud surmised that the large centers placed profit over safety by packing in kids of varying ages (“And parents, when they go to these, the idea is to check out, right? So they're not watching their kid as closely as they should be.”)
Cloud strategically placed her center next to a Nerf arena that caters to older kids.
Cloud was confident about her prospects from the outset, given feedback from her mom’s group and responses from city residents to a poll she placed on Facebook. “So I felt like with the community behind me, I couldn't fail,” she said.
Business has been brisk enough that she’s employing five high school students part-time to keep CJ’s clean and sanitized.
The staff is also helpful because Cloud has a full-time remote job as an investigator with the federal Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. Cloud has time in the morning to focus on CJ’s because her main role is in California, which is two hours behind Texas. She also keeps tabs on operations during the day online.
A native of Houston, Cloud settled in the Fort Worth area while earning a criminal justice degree from the University of Texas at Arlington. Cloud attended college after serving eight years in the Army as a unit supply specialist, and she said the logistics experience has been invaluable in running CJ’s.
CJ’s features include a trampoline, a climbing wall, a foam pit, a ball pool, four slides, and a two-story structure for running and hiding. It also has a calming dome for kids who are hypersensitive to noise and lights, an infant area with toys for kids under the age of 2, and seating for parents.
As a startup, Cloud figured it would be difficult to get conventional financing. She did not want to go through the long-shot dog-and-pony show of filling out the paperwork for a bank loan.
An online search led her to Shaundra Jacobs, AltCap’s Texas market president.
“After talking to Ms. Shaundra I was like, ‘This woman is going to make sure that if I do what she tells me to do, and I present the right product, that she'll be able to get me taken care of,’” Cloud said.
“And she proved just that every step of the way, the knowledge, giving things to read, giving me the education, all of it, you know, even suggestions about the business itself, so she was just paramount to this even happening.”
An AltCap loan of $40,000 helped Cloud get CJ’s started.
Cloud said Jacobs’ customer service extended to working weekends around the holidays last winter. Cloud had deadlines for importing products from China before the tariffs that then-president-elect Donald Trump was promising; the shipment arrived one day before Trump took office.
“It’s a scary thing to start a business, and it's even worse when you feel like you're being left in the dark or not being heard, and she made sure that all of those fears were quieted,” Cloud said of Jones.