Quote:
Originally Posted by seeric
long time no see. glad to see you're doing great.
i'll give you an educated, experienced opinion. of all the clubs i've ever dj'd in and promoted and managed, i think the thing that is MOST overlooked and not taken seriously, and causes tremendous discomfort to patrons is the bathroom situation. Many clubs are jammed into buildings that shouldn't be clubs, or were one type of club in on era, yet another type for the new business.
A tricked out plush girls bathroom designed for girls will fill your club ten times over with puss. You know as well as I do, girls do consider that stuff when they go out.
If you have the luxury of building a club from the ground up focus on the things from the patron's view. Traffic flow and plenty of bathroom stations. If a building code calls for 4 urinals put 12 in there. Like I said if you're building your club from the ground up and not moving into a venue that's built.
Make plenty of space for people to get into the bathroom and back out. There's nothing worse than having a great time and having to go wait in a bathroom line for 25 minutes with a bunch of other dudes. The best clubs I've ever been in were built from the ground up to be super clubs.
Bathrooms. Oh, and a coat check. Must have a coat check for the girls.
And, if you really wanna get big pimpin, put a separate bathroom somewhere for the talent to use. Nothing is worse for the staff than having to wait in bathroom lines.
Hope it helps. |
some wise words here I can expand on I learned the hard way.
I agree on the bathrooms completely. Lots of pissers in the mens - TONS - you need like maybe 1 shitter though per 300 total people int he club for the mens. If men can't pee they can't drink more and less revenue so the men above anything have to have TONS of urinals. They have to able in a packed club to walk in and pee without waiting.
When I took my club over from my ex-partner the woman's washroom was shit. I totally rebuilt it tiling the whole thing and having a huge makeup area with lots of mirrors. It doubled the amount of women comming into the club. WOmen need a makeup area and it needs to be cool, clean and neat with an area to spread their crap out on. LOTS of mirrors. Tile isn't that pricey and it's almost indestructible. Frilly things get broken fast. Going like a roman tile theme worked really well and once completed I got amazing reviews on the bathroom. Also toilets are HUGE concern. I got ones that had an air bladder in them that forced anything upto donut size down them. Nothing got clogged. The worst thing you can have is clogged toilets and if you're in an old venue redoing plumbing is way more expensive than just changing the toilets for air bladder ones. (they look the almost the same but when you flush then it sounds like a jet wooshing off)
Coat checks need to be able to handle 1 staff per hundred people in the club at closing -(much less the rest of the night but getting coats back FAST is key) ie - 500 person club - 5 people in coat check getting jackets. If people have a hard time leaving it's the last thing they remember and dont' come back.
A separate bathroom is great for talent - I had that with a separate room for them. A single unisex bathroom is fine for this. Gets you much better acts and upgrades the feel for the local acts that arnt' used to high end treatment.
As for the Good looking people comments... I believe honestly it's probably the worst thing you can market to. The hottest crowds are the hot tiny girls and the super hot guys. They don't drink. They have to stay thin and fit. Unless you're selling coke the profit margin on them is horrible. If you're going to make any money you need drinkers. Blue collar, students going wild, gays, or gangsters. FIND a NICHE and stick with it.
A good club averages 3-4 drinks a person - targeting students, blue collar or gangster can push that to 10 or more. The profit difference on that is HUGE. My Friday nights when i ran a club was targeted at the native population with higher income and gangsters. they averaged over 10 drinks each. The 'good looking' people clubs near by where I was did 2-3. I did events Saturdays and they were always different.
Work with promoters. Grind though them till you find some good ones. Just building it does not work.
I got killed by financing cause I owned the building and was robbed a few times in the end. My most profitable time was the last 4-5 months of the club once I got the game figured out. Refinancing a commercial building after the stock market crash was almost impossible. Don't own the building - lease it. Less expense and way less headaches. If I wanted to do another club I'd be able to hit the ground running with what I know now and be profitable from the start, but honestly I want nothing to do with that business. Dirty cops, dirty liqueur inspectors and 2-3 different gov't inspectors of one sort or another hurrassed the shit out of me. Fuck that. I never wanted a club in the first place - just backed someone else who fucked it up and robbed me.
commercial stage lighting companies are the biggest ripoffs on the planet. you can buy all the lighting you need online or at your local sound stores for 1/7 of what the lighting guys charge and in the end they arn't good. do it yourself or have a trusted electrician do it. basically you want places to clamp different effect lighting on all sent to switches and a controll board. I never found one lighting company worth spitting on. I lost 10's of thousands to them and in the end tor out their shit and redid it myself for 1/10 the cost and it was 10X more effect. The LED stuff out there now from american DJ is pretty decent. The idea that you need 'commerical quality' is complete bullshit for any club under 800 people.