Building the Perfect Strip Club: Part 1 - The Overall Factors

I guess from the title you might think that this article is about plastic surgery, but it is actually about my other pastime, architecture, and making photorealistic renderings from 3D computer models.<br /> <br /> So in the span of a few articles I am going to talk about my ideas regarding strip club design and management. Some of my ideas might be rather conventional and others quite creative. If you think 'that will never work here' I would likely agree for reasons that will become clear. In addion my plan is to illustrate it with an original sample design of a small club, which I shall call Club Ten.<br /> <br /> I will be including computer generated renderings of the club design. You can find them in my profile. If you right click on them and select ‘Save Picture As' you can get them in higher resolution.<br /> <br /> And I am not just thinking about how to try to get a 10 on the club rating factor of the reviews, but on dancer quality and dollar value as well. After all it is relatively easy to get a 10 on the physical club. All you have to do is lavish tons of money on the finest finishes and furnishings…and go broke in the process. Just like you can't eat the atmosphere at a restaurant fancy interiors is not what you came to look at. A club can be a ten on the inside, but if it has gone out of business it is pretty much a zero.<br /> <br /> Now you may think that I am over-reaching thinking that architectural design can have something to do with how sexy the dancers are. And in some ways I am. Good management of course is the key but a good manager would be quick to realize that something was not working in the design and economics of the club and fix it. Beyond that though dancers quickly learn which clubs are the best to work at. That usually means the club that offer the best income with the least hassle. So the club that can offer the best income with the least hassle will have the choice of the best dancers while sending its rejects to the other clubs. Since architecture can play a role in making the best income with the fewest hassles then architecture can indeed make the dancers prettier.<br /> <br /> The same thing goes with the dollar value rating. Clubs with low overhead and operating costs can make a profit wile siphoning less from the dancers. We all know that you aren't there to look at the furniture. So the idea is to make the place seem ‘classy' or ‘upscale' while spending as little as possible. Get the balance right and it can be a beneficial spiral…lower costs, better dancers, better prices, more customers, more profits.<br /> <br /> So what is the starting point when designing a strip club? That is where managers can make their first mistake. A strip club is a completely unique place. It is not ‘like' a bar except that there are naked women dancing on stage and extras being offered in back. The differences behind the ‘except' are more significant than the thing before the ‘except'. Neither is it ‘like' a night club or a dance revue or whatever. Clubs that start with the notion that they are ‘just like' something else have started off on the wrong path before the first choice.<br /> <br /> So if a strip club must be approached as a unique thing what factors guide the design? The number one factor is local laws and the attitude of law enforcement. That is the absolute starting point. Trying to mimic an otherwise successful club with different local laws is going to be a disaster. Is alcohol allowed? Is full or partial nudity allowed? Would trying to get and maintain the health inspections and insurance requirements for a restaurant give officials an extra route to shut down the club? Is contact allowed? Are private dances allowed? This involves both what is in the letter of the law and what law enforcement has decided to enforce. You cannot control these things, you have to adapt to them. As clubs went from just tipping a stage dancer to offering table dances to lap dances to having private VIP rooms clubs either had to almost completely remodel of go under. Many clubs went under anyway because the managers felt that certain things were the way things had always been done. That is always a trap. If the local ordinances force a regression the best choices are either to remodel or to move away to a more lenient jurisdiction. That will likely be the first reason why you will say 'that will never work here' because each place represents a different set of core rules.<br /> <br /> So since I am going to actually design and model a club I need to make some assumptions regarding the local rules. The parameters that I will use are that no alcohol is permitted if there is full nudity in the club (and that the club will go the fully nude option), that there is no minimum distance between dancers and patrons, touching is allowed, lap dances are allowed and VIP rooms are allowed. This is a pretty typical set of rules in most places where clubs thrive. Generally where clubs have to choose between full nudity and alcohol the fully nude clubs are higher rated. As I go along these limits will have some big influences on the design of the club.<br /> <br /> With rules being no-alcohol but lap dances and VIP rooms allowed the vast majority of the revenue will be in the form of private dances. There is only so much you can charge for a juice or soda or water and get away with it and it is certainly not what the customer will be coming for. So the entire function of the design is to maximize the personal interaction opportunities between the customer and the dancers in order to sell dances. Everything is focused on that. I do not mean a constant hard sell but rather a constant soft sell, and by that I mean something as soft as a touch of the hand, a brush against, and a flirty thing whispered in the ear.<br /> <br /> After the local ‘rules' come the local market forces. Here is the other reason why you might conclude 'that will never work here'. To use a typical example could your favorite local strip club survive in Las Vegas? Or similarly could one of those Las Vegas mega-clubs survive if transplanted in your city? The answer is most likely no in both cases. The one would be too small to be taken seriously and the other too expensive to cover their overhead. The Vegas-style clubs are having a trouble staying afloat even in Vegas! It is not simply a matter of just Las Vegas. Some cities expect a strip club to be a large and lavish thing and others want to have it be a small cozy place. So for example Los Angeles is a big city but there are no strip clubs of the size and scope of say Tootsie's Cabaret in Miami or the Sundowner in Niagara Falls. The local market does not expect strip clubs to be so large, perhaps because there is no shortage of potential locations and a correlation between club size and community backlash. If you want another example what works in Tijuana would not last a week in Idaho and vice-versa.<br /> <br /> So again I am going to make some assumptions for the sample design, and that is that small clubs are generally the norm in the area. This actually is the more interesting challenge as it means balancing the maximum number of customers and dancers that can be accommodated at the busiest times without costing too much in rent or looking too empty at ordinary times. In general I would say that it is better to start small and have to expand or relocate later once the club is established than to start too large and crash. The only fly in that ointment is that usually a club is approved for a certain square footage and you would have to go back and ask again. So if applying for a new permit it is best to ask for the size the club is expected to grow to and not the size that it already is. So I am going to start with a club footprint including support spaces that is somewhat less than 4000 square feet. That is about a third to a quarter of a typical chain drugstore. I am also going to give it a relative low ceiling height of ten feet, meaning that just about any storefront could qualify.<br /> <br /> So having set the parameters of the club let's look at the economics.<br /> <br /> In general a week at the club can be divided into three categories of times.<br /> <br /> 1. Times that are wildly profitable and where you cover your rent and major sunk costs and profits.<br /> <br /> 2. Times where you cover the minimum costs of just having the place open and maybe a little more to be applied to sunk costs.<br /> <br /> 3. Times where you don't even cover the minimum cost of having the club be open and are unprofitable. However you might want to have some such hours just to have easy to remember and consistent hours day to day and week to week.<br /> <br /> Obviously one wants the least number of the last category and possibly with clever management have some of the hours in the third category move into the second category. The biggest factor in doing that is the fewest non-revenue earning employees. Lighting, heat, etc. are relatively miniscule and the number of dancers you can control.<br /> But beyond the dancers what is the minimum number of people that you need to have the club open during slow times? Conventional wisdom would suggest the following for a non-food serving club:<br /> <br /> 1. Security<br /> 2. Backup Security<br /> 3. A floater to monitor and record the number of dances by each dancer,<br /> 4. Someone at the front desk,<br /> 5. Waitress<br /> 6. Bartender<br /> 7. Janitor or Maid<br /> 8. DJ<br /> <br /> That makes employees of overhead not including management. Of them only the bartender and waitress having a hope of bringing in enough revenue to cover their own cost and in a soda and juice service it would be chancy. If you have eight dancers on shift then each dancer is essentially carrying a person of overhead on their shoulders. On slow hours that really will be tough. If you have decided to make your slow times staff four dancers then it it a two to one ratio!<br /> <br /> But in slow times do you really need that many and how could you reduce them?<br /> <br /> 1. Can't skimp on security. Too much risk.<br /> <br /> 2. A security person needs a backup and second set of eyes. So that is a must.<br /> <br /> 3. I believe that a combination of cameras and technology can substitute for the floater at slow times.<br /> <br /> 4. Why not have the dancers rotate to the front desk at slow hours? They can pull a big company logo T-shirt or robe over their dance costume. Imagine if the front desk person told you “My name is Mandy and I'll be dancing a little later. Oh, and I need to frisk you. You don't mind if I touch you, do you?” If you are worried about the girl not being able to handle unruly arrivals, they can call on security. Otherwise it is one more opportunity for interaction, see? In addition having eight dancers with one occasionally at the front desk is better than seven dancers and a front desk person. Why? Because it makes one more chance that the customer will see a dancer that they want to get a personal dance with.<br /> <br /> 5. At the slow times have the dancer bring you your drink. Another opportunity for interaction and income for the dancer. Just like the front desk at slow times It is better to have eight dancers each spending a little time serving drinks than seven dancers and one waitress.<br /> <br /> 6. Since this is just a juice/water/soft drink service do you really need a drink mixer at slow times? Have the dancer/waitress log the bottles or cans taken from the chiller which will be charged to them by security at the end of the shift. Or if you want tighter controls set up a vending machine.<br /> <br /> 7. Since even a half occupied club can get messy looking fast the cleaner needs to be there all the time. Having the dancers double as cleanup is unlikely to work and takes them away from interacting with the customer.<br /> <br /> 8. The DJ can be voice-track automated at slow times, much like most radio stations are. I will likely discuss more on this later.<br /> <br /> So we've gone from eight overhead employees at slow times to three. So if there are eight dancers each would instead of having to carry an overhead person on their shoulders they would carry less than half of one. Of course it also means that they would be spending some of their time at the front desk, serving and pouring drinks, but the alternative would be for them to be sitting idle and worrying about how little money they are making. And idle dancers worrying about paying their bills often wind up causing problems. Of course as the club gets busier it makes more sense to have dedicated service people and let the dancers concentrate entirely on selling dances.<br /> <br /> With slow times having no bartender and no waitress it means the bar can't be a focal point of the club. In fact I demote it to barely more than a serving counter. No seats. In my mind this is fine because the focus on the club is facilitating interaction between the customer and the dancers that they might buy dances from, not between the customer and the bartender and waitress that they can't buy dances from. The situation would be different in an alcohol club where there is more money to be made from selling drinks. Customers get sodas and bottled water at a non-alcohol strip club only because it was essentially required or included at the entrance. In addition having no focus on the bar makes it easier to have the club be focused on: the stage.<br /> <br /> One thing I will not get deeply into is the various significant concerns of site selection, however there is the matter of what kind of a building you are looking to buy or lease. Typically when creating a club there will be three alternatives. The first is older storefront retail space, the second is vacated warehouse space, and the third is building it yourself on an empty lot. While building it yourself has the greatest flexibility it has many drawbacks, since the nature of the club business is that you may need to relocate if community conditions change and there may be more trouble with community opposition to permitting a new building to house a strip club versus a new tenant in an already approved and built building. As for warehouse vs. storefront the biggest difference is ceiling height. Old warehouse space will frequently be tall enough to allow a two-story club, but may be hard to find a good location. Storefront space will usually have a ceiling height of between eight and twelve feet unless you are taking a portion of what used to be a much larger store. That may force you into a somewhat cozy confines, and obviously no really tall pole moves!<br /> <br /> For this example design I am going to presume storefront space with a ten foot ceiling height because that will make the design more challenging but also presumably have reasonable rents.<br /> <br /> That pretty much covers the big picture parameters of this project. In the next installment I will begin analyzing the individual components.<br />  <br />