How Faith, Film, and Fearlessness Brought Dig World to Grapevine

A little over a decade ago, Alex Carroll found himself on the phone trying to explain how a critically-praised independent film could lose money for its investors. Strangely, the man on the other end of the line seemed to be the happier of the two. Carroll, who grew up in a household full of entrepreneurs and role models, had a history of making ends meet through hard work and good strategy. At the dawn of his career, he earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration for New and Small Businesses, married a marketing professional, and spent the better part of two years on the road selling documentary films. Believe Me, a full-length feature film released in 2014, gave him his first real taste of failure on a budget sheet. 

But his investor, an elder at Watermark Church, saw things differently. He’d backed Carroll’s film because he believed in the project, the final product had been completed on time with excellence, and Alex had been faithful in his communication and commitments. Most of the factors behind the film’s underperformance – from the collapse of DVD sales to a shift in distribution models throughout the broader industry – were beyond anyone’s control. The phone call ended on good terms, and the pair of them partnered on every venture Carroll launched from then on.

Their latest project? Dig World, a family-friendly attraction involving real construction equipment alongside (in Grapevine, at least) themed trick shots in partnership with Dude Perfect.

A Lifetime of Ads, Ventures

The path to Dig World has more bumps and curves than the park itself, and not just for Carroll. Founder Jacob Robinson came up with the concept as a way to serve his son, Pierce, whose love of heavy machinery and the outdoors never dimmed even after bacterial meningitis left him with a significant brain injury. Robinson dreamed up a place where the pair of them could share an experience, and launched the first version of the park in Katy, Texas back in 2022. Alex Carroll was an early investor.

By that point, he and his wife, Kelsey, had already been through the ups and downs of starting a business. They ran the aforementioned film blitz together, founded a pop-up events company that spun off into a backyard games company, and dipped their toes into the world of designer jewelry. Before that, Kelsey worked in the marketing department at HP and helped the Fortune 500 technology company launch its twitter account in the days before the social media giant rebranded.

 “We met in college, and the first thing we did on one of our dates was her going to hustle DC restaurant owners to buy ads for a website I made on campus,” Alex said. “So one of my favorite photos of us is her holding up a commission check she got selling one of the barbers to put an ad on that website. We’ve done all kinds of stuff, from selling ads to climbing in a van to tour a Christian movie we made, called Beware of Christians, around the country for two years. This was back in the day when people bought DVDs, and we would go to a church, a college, a high school – wherever people would have us – and show Beware of Christians the movie, and then we would sell out DVDs after. We were like a touring band, and my wife and I learned all kinds of stuff through that.”

These days, the Carroll family is a little more focused. They have multiple kids at home, and Alex spends most of his time leading the team at Dig World Grapevine. While he is an active investor on several other fronts, the company’s first satellite franchise has been his primary focus for several years running, dating back to yet another fateful phone call.

Climbing Into the Shark Tank

Nothing about Carroll’s first Dig World investment makes sense. The concept was born in 2020, when “theme park” was about the riskiest concept anyone could back. Within weeks, a pandemic had all but shuttered Toss Up Events, the brand activation engine Alex and Kelsey spun up after Believe Me failed to earn its money back. The couple’s backyard game empire was still just a distant idea. And there he was, on the phone with a dreamer once again.

“Jacob came to me with this crazy idea in 2020, right before the pandemic: ‘we’re going to get families on construction equipment.’ I thought there was no way he could do that, but he was able to convince the Caterpillar dealer there in Katy. So I invested money at the beginning. It was crazy, it was fun, and as he did the hard work and got it all to work I thought ‘why don’t we bring one to Dallas?’” Carroll said. 

The impulse to build the brand simmered on the back burner for a few years, even as the original Dig World in Katy proved itself by drawing tens of thousands of visitors. It wasn’t long before Robinson and his team in South Texas were invited to pitch a bigger, bolder vision on Television.

“Jacob called me and said ‘hey, I was asked to be on Shark Tank. Can you help me put together what we’re going to do on the show?’ Like, the actual visuals,” Carroll said. “Helping him through the Shark Tank experience allowed me to see that this would work really well in Dallas. I was already an investor, so he knew my commitment, and we decided to join forces and build more parks in Dallas and Austin. Then he got the deal with Robert Herjavec and everything went well on Shark Tank, and we started partnering after that.”

“The plan was not necessarily to franchise and he didn’t need the money, but we wanted to get on the show and the best [pitch] was to franchise. That was the impetus for the franchising model, and what was interesting was that we worked on the deal with Robert and got a bunch of people – like hundreds of people – interested in franchising. At the time, we had to say ‘you know what, this is great, and the 26-year-old Alex and Jacob might have said yes to all these people.’ But we sided with what Mark Cuban said on the show: you really want to get your 2.0 second location open and running, learn the next set of lessons, and make sure you have a repeatable clear business model. So we decided to pause, get our playbooks in line, and fine-tune everything before we go do 10-20 [more locations].”

Suddenly, the dream of Dig World DFW had life and purpose.

Making the Most of Every Opportunity

As a DFW native, Carroll knew the broader market well enough to trust that an expansion could succeed here. But the metroplex is a broad place, and finding the right location within it presented its own challenge. Ultimately, a connection between Katy Mills ownership and Joe Szymaszek, the General Manager at Grapevine Mills, helped narrow the search for a site. But local expertise sealed the deal.

“Funny enough, we premiered Believe Me at the AMC in Grapevine Mills back in the day. And I grew up going to Grapevine Mills Mall when I was younger, so I obviously knew about Grapevine,” Carroll said. “Joe did a really good job pitching it and convincing us, and when we talked to Commercial Real Estate brokers in Dallas they said the best part about Grapevine was that you’re 20-30 minutes from everywhere. You can be in Grapevine and cater to everyone in the metroplex. We are in the best location you can be in… this is where people come when they want to be entertained, and we fit perfectly.”

Dig World Grapevine will open to the public on July 11, 2026, although early access passes are available now. Like its predecessor, the park will welcome families and corporate groups alike while setting aside special dates for individuals with special needs to have the machines to themselves. The team even went to the trouble of hiding every bolt or potential trip hazard below ground to create an environment with maximized safety and comfort. Carroll and his team learned a lot in the process of launching Dig World Grapevine; lessons that will undoubtedly be carried over into future expansions. From a broad strategy standpoint, that alone is a win. 

But the company stands for more than that, and so does Alex Carroll.

“As you do ventures over the years, you realize your time is limited. You only have so many ventures and you only have so many years on this earth,” Carroll said. “So I had to decide: is this something that I want to pour the next five or ten years into? And what’s fun is that Jacob, really, is the only reason any of this is happening. He put all the time and effort, the learning, to get this idea over the hump. He found the product-market fit for this… the park in Katy is making money. It gets 75,000 visitors per year. So a lot of this was de-risked for me before we decided to re-co-found the company and expand.”

“We weren’t the first to do this. Diggerland in New Jersey had done this, had proven the concept with JBL equipment. It was helpful for us to say we weren’t the first ones; this has been done in Canada and in New Jersey. But what Jacob did was make it a family entertainment concept. I would say he was the first to do that… we want to be a part of creating a core family memory for people that can really last. It’s just like any other business: it’s so hard and so painful and so difficult. But the outcome is people smiling and having a good time on a fun summer day.”

To that end, at least, there’s no better market than Grapevine.

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