Meet Joy Haven and Jeremey Penn of Mob Accountant in Gardena

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joy Haven, Jeremey Penn.

Joy, Jeremey, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Joy: Jeremey and I met on a set of a commercial and hit it off. We fell in love and like most whirlwind Hollywood romances, two months later we moved in together. I had just moved back from Hawaii after 6 years and was getting back into the acting thing. Jeremey was an actor/nightclub promoter. Even though I wasn’t really a club person, I found myself in one every weekend with Jeremey and ended up helping him with the nights he worked. While promoting one of the biggest nights on his birthday, he got roofied and it was pretty easily decided to quit the night club life. We then went on a journey of self discovery together in which we worked a lot together, from farming weed, putting together a small production company, PennHaven Productions, to eventually working in an escape room together. Most of the time there, Jeremey was the actor and I did tech, which required me to sit in a small booth overlooking everything. In 2015, we tragically lost my father to a stroke. Some of my dad’s last words was to Jeremey, asking him to take care of me. My dad had a small business, creating games and teaching casino card dealers and after he passed, we inherited his space. Jeremey and I knew we wanted to start a business together and building an escape room just made sense. Theater. Puzzles. Games. Team Building. And giving back to the community. All of it.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Jeremey: No smooth road is worth traveling. Actually, I don’t think my attention span would allow me to stay on a smooth road for very long. A lot of what led us to running an escape room was realizing how much we like people. We enjoy sharing moments with folks, telling a story and drawing them into our world. We went through many challenges figuring out what we could do with the space effectively but more important to us was fitting into the already existing tapestry of games offered here in Los Angeles. After all, we are among some of the most highly regarded escape games in the escape room industry offered right here in the city of angels. We are both graduates of iO Los Angeles and improvisational theater is a huge part of our immersion and we plan to carry that quality through to our other games as well. When iO closed we were both in ensembles performing regularly at the theater and honestly the game was born mostly out of a need for a creative outlet to fill a void that the closing of the theater left. 

Joy: Fortunately, there are always amazing opportunities that come up and we have gone on to do other productions as well, currently I’m performing with a comedy burlesque troupe called Victress.  We’re performing at The Complex Hollywood as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. And Jeremey and I are now working on larger immersive experience productions to be released by Felix Games.

Please tell us about Mob Accountant.
Jeremey: We are an immersive experience and game company. We specialize in Team Building and having fun. As of now, we only have one scenario open. What sets us apart from our peers is that we don’t approach our projects intending to make escape games. We make immersive experiences that are also escape games. Typically an escape room is either an escape room or an immersive experience. We are both. We include an improv actor in our current game to justify the reality and raise the stakes organically. You can choose to interact with the actor, or not. It is entirely optional. As of now, we plan to include an improv actor in all of our games. Most of the feedback we receive is from people who were not sure how they would like having an actor in the room of a game where it is possible to lose, but time and time again people admit to really enjoying that aspect. Our reviews speak for themselves. We chose to try this on a small scale with Mob Accountant and after receiving such positive feedback we now plan to do it on a much larger scale. 

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Joy: I probably wouldn’t of hesitated as much early on. I guess the thought of starting a business was a scary idea, it seemed far fetched. If we had to start over, I would push myself to have more confidence and just go for it. A lot of time was wasted because we questioned ourselves a lot in the beginning. I often feared that what we were doing wasn’t good enough, so sometimes I would stall out. It wasn’t until we finally opened and got our first feedback that I became confident in our product.  I know we have an awesome game that helps people to work together as a team and just enjoy spending time with each other. 

Jeremey: Ditto.

Pricing:

• $35 a person
• Team Building starts at $300

Contact Info:

• Address: 15501 S. Vermont Ave.
  Behind Cherrystone’s – Suite 108
  Gardena, CA 90247
• Website: www.mobaccountant.com
• Phone: 323-301-5137
• Email: info@mobaccountant.com

Image Credit:
Graphic design by Guy Adrian Labayen

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