We own an escape room in the Midwest. We've been open for 10 months (of course working on it much longer than that), with two rooms in a cheap place in the downtown area of our town (80,000 people). We are covering our expenses but not making much a profit yet, although this is what we projected. It's a crap-ton of work if you want to do it well (nice website, strong social media and community connections, well-built rooms) and do it mostly from scratch (as we did as good mustachians), and the success of an escape room depends A LOT on your location and market.
If you are interested in getting into the industry I would recommend building a pop-up escape room for a few weeks or looking into mobile escape rooms. Also, spend a lot of time reading industry blogs and Facebook groups.
Interestingly, we got started in the industry the same way you did. We went to our first escape room, loved it, realized it was super low cost and we could totally do it ourselves, went to a few more escape rooms, then jumped in. The problem is, that all escape rooms are fun if you've never been to one before, but it turns out that the first one we did was kind of terrible (puzzles were good, props sucked). Making a good escape room is exponentially more work than making a below average escape room. That's what we didn't realize.
Honestly, I think the money in the industry now is in making props for other people's escape rooms. With a mechanical background you could start helping out area escape rooms with all kind of things.