A strategic partnership and investment case for the world's largest venue management company — grounded in a decade of shared history between Mark Hadland's Level 11 and Brett Parker's Bowlero Corp.
The Dynery × Legends Global partnership is not a cold outreach — it is the natural conclusion of a relationship that began when Mark Hadland's experience design firm, Level 11, was engaged directly by Bowlero Corp to redesign their guest experience. Brett Parker, then President and CFO of Bowlero, was named on the executive team that commissioned and reviewed Level 11's work. He sat across the table as Level 11 mapped the Bowlero guest journey from Plan → Arrive → Experience → Remember. That language, that methodology, that philosophy — it is precisely what Dynery is now building for the dining world.
In April 2020, Level 11 presented the Current Service Blueprint for Bowlero Corp — a comprehensive mapping of the Bowlero guest experience across five phases: Plan, Arrive, Experience, Pay, and Remember. The work was the product of three weeks of embedded workshops with Bowlero's Ops, IT, Sales, and Marketing teams. Level 11 built service blueprints for both the Event guest and the Retail guest, synthesized observations and opportunities, and presented a roadmap for a Future Service Blueprint 2.0.
At the end of the presentation, under the heading "Next Steps — Create Focus," the exec team designated to review Level 11's observations and build the priority heatmap included:
The methodology Level 11 applied to Bowlero — guest journey mapping, touchpoint analysis, service blueprint design, the Plan-Arrive-Experience-Remember arc — is the same conceptual DNA that Mark Hadland has carried into Dynery's platform architecture. The dining experience Mark is building with Dynery is the guest journey platform that Level 11 demonstrated the blueprint for at Bowlero.
Brett Parker didn't just hear about Level 11's approach. He reviewed it, approved it, and used it to guide Bowlero's future experience strategy. He knows this methodology works. He knows who built it.
The Bowlero Service Blueprint identified pain points that are structurally identical to the problems Dynery is solving in the restaurant world — and which Brett Parker has carried with him into the Legends Global mandate. These are not abstract observations: they are problems Brett Parker personally commissioned Level 11 to solve, in 2020, while he was running Bowlero.
The Strategic Framing: Brett Parker's mandate at Legends Global is the same mandate he gave to Level 11 at Bowlero in 2020 — at a scale 450× larger. 165 million guests, 450 venues, 100,000 employees. The question he is asking right now is identical: "How do we create a more fulfilling, efficient, and profitable experience for our guests — at every stage of their journey?" Mark Hadland and Dynery are the answer he already knows works.
Between January 2020 and late 2020, Level 11 undertook approximately $5 million of work for Bowlero Corp — the largest engagement in Level 11's history to that point, and the deepest proof of the methodology that now underlies Dynery. The work was not cosmetic. It reached into the operational and technological core of the business that Brett Parker was leading as President and CFO — and it produced outcomes that directly enabled Bowlero's revenue performance, its M&A growth agenda, and its competitive position as the dominant force in location-based entertainment.
What follows is a summary of what Level 11 built and why it mattered — told not as a list of deliverables, but as a set of business capabilities Bowlero gained that it did not have before.
On December 30, 2019 — the single busiest group booking day of Bowlero's calendar year — GEMS went down. GEMS (the Guest Event Management System) was the digital backbone of every Bowlero group event: every corporate outing, every birthday party, every league booking, every sales contract. When it failed, Bowlero's sales reps across hundreds of locations couldn't close bookings, couldn't confirm reservations, couldn't process payments. The timing was catastrophic.
The root cause wasn't a single failure — it was a system that had been built on a foundation never designed for the scale Bowlero had reached. GEMS was built on top of Microsoft Dynamics 8.2. The database had grown to over 1.3TB. Saving a single group event contract triggered over 700 underlying SQL operations. Deadlocks compounded under load. The entire system ran on a single point of failure with no redundancy. It was, in Brett Parker's own mandate to Level 11, a system that needed to be made "more fulfilling, efficient, and profitable" — before the next holiday season arrived.
Level 11 was brought in to address this. What followed was a comprehensive, multi-phase transformation of one of the most business-critical platforms in the location-based entertainment industry.
The December 30th outage was a revenue disaster at the worst possible moment. Level 11 designed and implemented a SQL Server High Availability architecture — an Always On Availability Cluster — that eliminated the single point of failure at the heart of GEMS. Simultaneously, Level 11 decoupled the Lane Grid from the core GEMS database and redeployed it as an independently scalable Azure-hosted service. The result: GEMS could sustain a hardware or software failure without going dark. The 2020 holiday season — and every peak period after it — was protected. For a company whose event booking revenue concentrated in holiday windows, this was existential capability.
Level 11 shadowed Bowlero's sales reps live at the Times Square office and documented the friction that was costing deals every day. The product configurator — the first screen every rep opened — was taking 20 to 30 seconds to load. Saving a completed event contract was taking minutes, with some operations timing out entirely. Every delay was a moment where a customer on the phone experienced hesitation, doubt, or a dropped call. Level 11 implemented intelligent caching across the CSR and e-commerce call pathways — eliminating over 20% of the most expensive operations — and rewrote the SaveContract workflow, improving performance by more than 33%. Reps who once fought their tools could now close events faster, quote more accurately, and handle higher call volume without the system becoming the enemy of the sale.
Bowlero's e-commerce front-end — the channel that allowed customers to book events and lanes directly online — was unreliable. The SaveContract operation regularly exceeded the platform's 60-second timeout, causing online customers to see failures even when their booking had actually been processed. The result was duplicate bookings, customer confusion, lost transactions, and staff time spent resolving the fallout. Level 11's performance improvements brought contract save times well inside the timeout window, making the online booking channel reliable for the first time. This was not a marginal improvement — it was the difference between a digital revenue channel that worked and one that actively damaged customer trust.
The Lane Grid — the system that determined which lanes were available, who was assigned to them, and how to orchestrate the flow of guests through a bowling center — was deeply embedded inside GEMS and the Dynamics database. Creating a Lane Grid for a busy day took operations staff one to two hours. Real-time updates were unreliable. Staff couldn't provide accurate wait times, couldn't manage walk-in vs. reserved traffic efficiently, and couldn't view lane availability across the floor from portable devices. Level 11 architected and began implementing the Lane Grid as a fully decoupled, independently scalable service — designed to serve thousands of simultaneous users, deployable horizontally on Azure, and capable of real-time updates accessible from any device. This was the foundation that would eventually allow Bowlero's floor staff to manage their venues with the same real-time intelligence that an airline gate agent uses to manage a flight manifest.
Brett Parker's growth strategy at Bowlero was explicitly acquisitive — AMF, Brunswick Bowling, Bowl America, Lucky Strike Entertainment. Each acquisition added hundreds of locations to a system designed for far fewer. The existing GEMS architecture, built on a 1.5TB+ monolithic Dynamics database growing rapidly under normal use, was not built to absorb acquisitions without proportional performance degradation. Level 11's architectural recommendations — decoupled microservices, Azure cloud hosting, data warehousing and archiving strategy, and a REST API layer for the Lane Grid — created a platform that could scale to new center acquisitions as a capability rather than a crisis. Every acquisition Brett Parker completed after Level 11's engagement was adding venues to a platform designed to accommodate them.
Parallel to the technical work, Level 11 conducted a three-week embedded design engagement with Bowlero's Ops, IT, Sales, and Marketing teams — producing a comprehensive Current Service Blueprint of the Bowlero guest experience across every touchpoint: Plan, Arrive, Experience, Remember. The blueprint documented what guests thought, felt, and encountered at every stage; what tools staff were using to serve them; what observations revealed about current friction; and what opportunities existed for improvement. Brett Parker was named on the executive team to review and heatmap the findings. This work gave Bowlero's leadership a complete picture of the guest journey — many of whose friction points they had never been able to see in aggregate before.
Level 11 built the engineering infrastructure that gave Bowlero's IT team the tools to continue improving GEMS long after Level 11's direct engagement concluded. This included implementing Splunk for log aggregation and system observability — giving the IT team real-time visibility into system health for the first time — and rebuilding the test automation suite using Level 11's Valid8 framework and the Gatling load-testing engine, capable of simulating thousands of concurrent users to measure and validate every performance change before it reached production. Staff across sales, operations, and IT gained tools that reduced the time they spent fighting technology and increased the time they spent serving guests. The engineering investments — CI/CD pipeline capability, performance monitoring, and automated regression testing — gave the Bowlero technology organization a modern foundation that reduced the risk of future system failures and accelerated the pace of improvement. Level 11 left behind not just a better system, but a better-equipped team to maintain and evolve it.
GEMS was never just an internal tool — it was Bowlero's proprietary competitive advantage in the group events market. No competitor had built a system of this complexity and scale for managing group event bookings across hundreds of locations. But an advantage that was unreliable, slow, or prone to outages was no advantage at all. Level 11's work restored and significantly enhanced GEMS as a competitive asset: a rebuilt, scalable, proprietary booking engine that could handle the holiday season without going dark, process contracts in seconds rather than minutes, and support the online booking demand that Bowlero's marketing team was driving. The work turned GEMS from a liability — a system that sales reps worked around — into the capability that made Bowlero operationally formidable at the scale Brett Parker was building toward.
The ~$5M Investment in Context: Level 11's total engagement with Bowlero represented approximately $5 million of work across discovery, performance engineering, architectural design, test automation, and guest experience design. In the context of Bowlero's group event revenue — which ran through GEMS for every booking at every venue — this investment was not a technology expense. It was a revenue protection and capability expansion program. Every holiday season that ran without a GEMS outage, every online booking that completed without a timeout, every sales rep who closed an event in seconds rather than minutes — these were the returns on Mark Hadland's team's work. Brett Parker commissioned this work. He saw the before and the after. He knows, from direct experience, what Level 11 delivers when it is given a platform problem worthy of its capabilities.
The principles that drove Level 11's Bowlero engagement are the principles that drive Dynery's dining experience platform architecture. Map the guest journey completely — Plan, Arrive, Experience, Remember. Remove the friction that stands between a staff member and a great guest interaction. Give operators real-time intelligence rather than retrospective reports. Build for the scale of tomorrow's business, not yesterday's. Make technology invisible by making it work perfectly.
Bowlero had GEMS. Dynery is building the equivalent platform for the dining world — but with a consumer identity layer, a narrative engine, a loyalty architecture, and a data intelligence stack that GEMS never needed to include. Brett Parker has already seen what Level 11's team does when given a complex, operationally critical platform to transform. Dynery is that team's fullest expression of everything they learned — at Disney, at Carnival, at Starbucks, and at Bowlero.
Before Dynery, there was Level 11 — Mark Hadland's experience design and software engineering firm that earned its reputation building the world's most sophisticated guest experience platforms for the most demanding clients on earth. Understanding Level 11's track record is essential context for the Legends conversation: this is not a startup pitch from an untested founder. It is the next chapter from a team that has already changed how hundreds of millions of people experience the world's greatest brands.
Level 11 operated as skunkworks for Disney's Next Generation Experience team, designing and developing the xConnect system that made MagicBand data actionable. Launched in 2013, MagicBand is recognized as one of the largest and most successful launches of a consumer wearable in a connected ecosystem — over 30 million guests and 100,000 daily visitors, powering over 250,000 events per second. Level 11 was instrumental in designing a resilient system for managing 20 million annual guests at the intersection of contact readers, long-range readers, mobile payments, and the xConnect dashboard.
Since 2014, Level 11 partnered closely with Carnival Corporation to create the world's largest, most revolutionary guest experience platform. OCEAN is the first platform to fully deliver on personalized experiences based on location, identity, and context — enabling seamless boarding, real-time crew intelligence, and unprecedented guest service across an entire cruise ship. Level 11 played key roles in all phases from early ideation through technical engineering and solution deployment. The OCEAN Medallion became the benchmark for IoT-connected hospitality personalization globally.
Level 11 designed the operational processes for both drive-through and in-store Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay — one of the first QSR pre-order systems in the world. Level 11's design leadership cast the philosophy that shaped the implementation, rollout, and ultimately the remarkable public adoption of the platform. Today, Mobile Order & Pay accounts for over 16% of Starbucks revenue. The working prototype proved out key technology stacks; Level 11's design philosophy became the product's soul.
Level 11's methodology — Experience Design Engineering (XDE) — combined design and engineering under one roof, with a philosophy that the technology is always there to support the in-person relationship, not replace it. "It's all about the experience. Extend the relationship. Engage guests before, during, and after their visit." This is the founding philosophy of Dynery, carried forward from a decade of proving it at the world's most complex and successful guest experience platforms.
The Pitch Frame: When Mark Hadland walks into a room with Brett Parker, he is not an unknown founder asking for money. He is the architect of the guest experience philosophy that Brett Parker hired to redesign Bowlero — and the designer of the systems that transformed Walt Disney World, Carnival Cruise Corporation, and Starbucks. Dynery is what happens when that pedigree is applied, for the first time, to the dining world.
Founded in 2008 as a joint venture between the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, Legends has evolved from a concessions operator at two iconic stadiums into the world's premier live experience company — serving 165 million guests annually across 450 venues on six continents. Their August 2024 acquisition of ASM Global and the subsequent Legends Global rebrand in September 2025 represent the most significant consolidation in live event hospitality history.
Post-ASM Global integration, Legends Global operates across eight verticals: feasibility and consulting, owner's representation, sales, partnerships, venue management, hospitality, merchandise, and content and booking. The hospitality division — which manages food and beverage operations, premium services, suite management, catering, and retail — is the division where Dynery's dining experience platform would live and create the most immediate value.
Sixth Street Partners — a global investment firm with more than $115 billion in assets under management — is the majority investor in Legends Global, in partnership with YGE Holdings LLC (an affiliate of the New York Yankees) and Jones Concessions LP (the Jerry Jones family company). The previous ASM Global equity holders, Onex and AEG, sold their full ownership interests in the transaction. Sixth Street's presence as majority investor signals institutional appetite for aggressive growth and signals a structured path to exit or IPO.
| Segment | Key Clients | Guest Experience Opportunity for Dynery |
|---|---|---|
| NFL / US Sports | Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans (NRG Stadium) | Premium suite dining identity, season ticket holder personalization across 20+ home games per season |
| MLB | New York Yankees (Yankee Stadium) | 81 home games = 81 dining occasions per season per guest. Behavioral identity compounds over years of repeat visits. |
| Soccer / Global | Real Madrid CF, FC Barcelona, Ryder Cup | International visitor dining passport — guests whose Dynery identity travels with them from their home city to the stadium |
| Entertainment | OVO Arena Wembley, Avicii Arena, Kai Tak Sports Park (Hong Kong) | Multi-event narrative — the VIP guest who attends 10+ events per year and expects to be known |
| University | University of Notre Dame | Alumni dining identity across campus F&B, game day hospitality, and event catering |
| Attractions | One World Observatory (NYC) | Tourist dining identity — first-time visitors who become advocates |
| Major Events | LA28 Summer Olympics hospitality design | Global guest dining passports for the world's most prestigious once-in-a-generation occasion |
Brett Parker is not a contact to be cultivated — he is a relationship that already exists. His career trajectory at Bowlero, his personal involvement in the Level 11 engagement, and his current mandate at Legends Global make him the single most important executive in the Dynery partnership ecosystem. Understanding his full arc makes the conversation's natural arc clear.
Brett Parker joined Legends Global in March 2025 as President and CFO after 24 years at Lucky Strike Entertainment (formerly Bowlero Corp). He served as CFO from 2002 to 2023 and added the role of President from 2020 to 2023 — which means Brett Parker was President and CFO of Bowlero when Level 11 was engaged to design the Current Service Blueprint in April 2020. His name appears explicitly in the presentation's "Next Steps" section as part of the exec team assigned to prioritize Level 11's observations and opportunities.
He didn't just receive a report. He was the executive sponsor of a major guest experience redesign project led by Mark Hadland's team. He evaluated the methodology, approved the approach, and was responsible for translating it into Bowlero's future product roadmap. He has already experienced, firsthand, what Mark's team does — and approved it as worthy of his company's investment.
Brett Parker guided Bowlero through four major acquisitions that transformed a single bowling center into a 360-venue public company — a trajectory that is the direct analog of what Dynery is designed to enable for the dining experience world:
He is a Cornell University (Dyson School of Management) graduate who served as Chairman of the Professional Bowlers Association and board member of Qubica AMF. A deal-maker by DNA, a guest experience thinker by conversion.
The Opening Line for Mark's Outreach to Brett Parker: "Brett Parker — you may remember we worked together when Level 11 built the Bowlero Service Blueprint in 2020. You and your team helped us understand exactly what world-class guest experience means at scale in venue entertainment. Now I'm building Dynery — the dining experience platform that applies everything we learned from Disney, Carnival, Starbucks, and your team at Bowlero to the restaurant world. I'd love to show you what it looks like."
This is not a cold pitch. It is a warm reunion between two people who share a common philosophy, a common vocabulary, and a common belief in what transformative guest experience design can do.
The numbers are elegant in their simplicity: 165 million guests, 450 venues, 20,000 events per year — and zero current platform connecting the guest's dining identity across any of them. Every premium suite, every club-level seat, every VIP hospitality package represents a guest who expects to be remembered and currently is not.
| Revenue Stream | Unit Economics | Year 2 Est. | Year 3 Est. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform licensing — Legends venues | $500/venue/month × 50 pilot venues | $300K | $1.2M |
| Guest intelligence API fee | $2/active guest × 500K active guests | $1.0M | $4.0M |
| Dynery Pay transaction fee | 1.2% × $25M venue F&B via Dynery Pay | $300K | $1.5M |
| Scenario A Total | $1.6M | $6.7M |
| Revenue Stream | Unit Economics | Year 3 Est. | Year 4 Est. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium venue program license | $5,000/venue/month × 20 flagship venues | $1.2M | $3.6M |
| Suite/club guest subscriptions | $29/mo Tasting Menu tier × 50K members | $17.4M ARR | $43.5M ARR |
| Venue Tastings™ analytics | $1,500/venue/month × 20 venues | $360K | $1.1M |
| Data intelligence revenue share | 15% of Legends' attributable F&B uplift | $2.5M | $8.0M |
| Scenario B Total | $21.5M | $56.2M |
At Scenario B revenue levels, Dynery's ARR supports a $500M–$1.5B valuation at 10–15× SaaS multiples — consistent with the SevenRooms × DoorDash comparable ($1.2B, May 2025). A Legends Global acquisition of Dynery at this stage gives Legends the dining identity and narrative layer for their entire 165M-guest network. Dynery's founders realize a liquidity event; Legends acquires the product Brett Parker has been looking for since Level 11 showed him what was possible at Bowlero in 2020.
At $100–150M ARR across restaurants, venues, card partnerships, and data intelligence — a 10–15× SaaS multiple. SevenRooms ($1.2B acquisition by DoorDash in May 2025) is the direct comparable floor.
Legends' majority investor manages over $115 billion in assets. A $20–50M Series A from Sixth Street via Legends would be a rounding error to their fund — and a transformative catalyst for Dynery's venue expansion phase.
A Legends partnership does not require Dynery to acquire 165M guests one by one. It requires signing one enterprise contract with one company whose guests are already there, already spending, and already deserving to be remembered.
The Level 11 / Bowlero relationship gives Mark Hadland something no Dynery competitor has: a proven professional relationship with Brett Parker at the precise intersection of experience design and venue hospitality. The engagement strategy should honor and leverage that history — not treat it as ancient trivia, but as the living foundation of a conversation that naturally leads to partnership.
Mark Hadland reaches out to Brett Parker directly, referencing the Bowlero Service Blueprint engagement. The message is personal, specific, and brief. It references the work Level 11 did together, acknowledges Brett Parker's move to Legends Global, and opens a door — not a pitch deck.
Frame it as: "The dining experience platform I'm building is the natural next step from the work we started together at Bowlero. I'd love 30 minutes to show you what it looks like applied to the world you're now operating in."
Once reconnected, propose a focused venue pilot: Dynery guest identity and narrative for suite-level guests at one or two Legends flagship venues in the US. Zero upfront capital required. Legends provides guest access and operational support; Dynery provides the platform. The pilot produces measurable outcomes: guest satisfaction uplift, F&B spend per head increase, and repeat visit rate improvement. These numbers are the Series A case for both parties.
Pilot results trigger the formal investment conversation. Legends / Sixth Street participates in Dynery's Series A as a strategic investor — providing capital, distribution (165M guests), and a commercial commitment to expand the pilot to 20+ venues. The investment structure gives Sixth Street a pathway to full acquisition at Series B or C, at a price that reflects Dynery's demonstrated venue revenue.
The Core Message for Brett Parker: "You already know that experience design, when done right, transforms a business. You saw what Level 11 did for Disney, for Carnival, for Starbucks — and you brought us to Bowlero to do the same. Dynery is what happens when that philosophy is applied to the restaurant and hospitality world at scale. You're now running 165 million guests across 450 venues. Every one of them deserves to be known. Dynery is how you do that."
Legends pays Dynery to provide the guest identity and dining experience platform for their venue hospitality division. Structured as a SaaS licensing fee + guest intelligence API fee + transaction share on Dynery Pay. No equity changes hands initially. Revenues build from Scenario A ($6.7M Year 3) to Scenario B ($56M Year 4) as the relationship deepens across venues. This is the lowest-friction entry point and the natural starting position for the relationship.
Legends Global, via Sixth Street, leads Dynery's Series A with a $20–50M check. In exchange: favorable commercial rates on the venue platform, a board seat, and first right of refusal on future acquisition. Sixth Street's $115B AUM makes this check trivial to execute. The investment aligns Legends' financial incentive with Dynery's growth — every Dynery restaurant that joins the platform is a potential venue F&B intelligence asset for Legends.
At Series B or C (post-proven restaurant and venue revenue), Legends acquires Dynery outright. Dynery's dining identity and narrative layer becomes the permanent guest experience layer for Legends' entire 165M-guest network. The acquisition price at $100M+ ARR and a 10–15× multiple implies $1–1.5B — a transformative return for Dynery's founders and early investors, and a foundational capability acquisition for Legends. Brett Parker's M&A track record (six acquisitions at Bowlero) makes him the ideal architect of this transaction.