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inno123

I have been thinking about strip club design and management and designing a sample club as an illustration. The parameters are: 4000sf storefront with 10 ft ceilings, lap dances and VIP allowed but no alcohol. Club can run with as few as 3 non-dancers at slow times. The primary design goal is to maximize opportunities for interaction between dancers and customers and thus sell dances.

How many dancers to schedule? At a minimum I think this club needs six. This in particular since at the slowest times the dancers are taking turns at the front desk and serving drinks so out of the hour the dancer has about ten minutes on stage, ten minutes front desk and five minutes personal (toilet, check makeup, change costume, etc.), which leaves only about 35 minutes per hour for selling and providing revenue producing personal dances.

But what is the maximum? It would seem to be set by the number of Lap Dance and VIP spaces. The reason is that if the dancers can't sell a dance they will quickly get frustrated and figure that they could be making more money working someplace else. Unfortunately the best dancers will be the first to have that idea! The club has six VIP and ten lap dance locations plus one dancer on stage and one coming on or off stage would be eighteen. That still presumes that the proportion of lap to VIP dances will be very steady at 5/8ths to 3/8ths so that you don't have all of one type of room filled but not the other. Of course the dancers should be smart enough to know that if the VIP rooms are all filled push the Lap Dances and vice-versa. Also they will be clever enough to realize that if there is a shortage of VIP spaces then sell two-girl shows. But since your dancers won't be completely taken all the time can you push the limit past 18? Very likely so, but I am putting the maximum staffing as 24 dancers before serious frustration sets in. At very busy times there can be one further step that to stretch the number of dancers, and that would be that if all the rooms are full to let them offer bikini dances in the lounge area with the dancer keeping the full tip.

If the dressing room had to handle 24 dancers at once it would have to be rather large. But by using staggered shift starts the room does not have to accommodate all of them at once. So for example the club opens with six dancers. An hour or two later three more are added, then another hour or two later three more and so on as the club gets busier and then ramps down so that at closing there might again only be six dancers. Experience will show how to ramp the staffing on particular days. Strict ‘shifts' make sense in a factory but not in a business where demand through the day is more like a bell curve and you don't want to have to build a monster size dressing room. I designed the dressing room with enough counter space for eight persons to sit at. I also gave the dancers their own toilet stalls adjacent to the dressing area and two showers. I also gave them some deep sinks in case it was necessary for example to rinse stains out of a costume. (I don't think I have to go into detail as to what kind of stains those might be)

Another question is how to handle customer toilets without wasting space. Most, but not all customers will be men, but having the occasional women customers in the dancers' dressing room and toilet is an awkward breach of privacy. So the solution is to have a men's room for customers, a unisex single person handicapped equipped toilet available for the occasional woman customer, and dancer-only toilet stalls as part of the dressing room.

The public toilets will be the one thing that the customers will most judge the cleanliness of your club yet the hardest to actually keep clean. Materials and fixture selection go a long ways. You want hard, nonporous, and easy to clean surfaces without a lot of seams that collect dirt. Large honed stone tiles are a great choice. It is one place where spending more on materials is most worth it. There have been great improvements in ‘no-touch' restrooms: no touch toilet flush valves, no touch faucets, no touch soap dispensers, and no touch towel dispensers. In all though the goal should be to keep the room clean enough that people aren't worried about everything they might touch. Pastel colored, materials are emphasized since they are most likely to seem like they are clean.

One thing that I said in earlier segments is that most of the time you can do without is a DJ. You may not realize this but the typical AM or FM music station, apart from morning or evening drive times, has nobody behind the microphone. They instead use something called voice tracking. A radio DJ can set up a couple of hours of radio time in just a few minutes complete with all the branding, sweeps, and transitions and have it stick rock hard to the clock. But what you need is a radio DJ not a club DJ. That might seem counterintuitive since this is a ‘club' isn't it? Dance club DJs are into smooth transitions and creative improvisation. Strip clubs need to stick to a rigid schedule, have strong brand promotion, and distinctly recognizing the switch from one song to another. Those are all skills of the Radio DJ.
What else do you need a DJ for?
<ul>
<li> To introduce the dancers? As discussed with the stage I have the dancers introduce themselves one on one during the warm up song…more interaction.
<li> To announce specials? Also with the discussion of the stage I let the dancers determine whether to negotiate a special deal, more interaction again.
<li> To add a degree of spontaneity and be the MC? Certainly during special events and when there might be feature dancers, but not all the time.
<li> To adjust the lights and sound levels? This too can be automated via DMX.
<li> So play each dancer's favorite tunes? Although in most choices I put the dancers' needs first I do not here. The club sets the playlist based on the mood that they are trying to set and the customers that they are trying to reach, just like a professional radio station does.
<li> To be the shepherd in getting the next dancer on the stage? That is the job of inside security and/or the House Mom.
</ul>
Which brings up the subject of the House Mom. Many clubs have them but rather than another person of overhead in this scheme is a more experienced dancer on each shift who gets a bonus for among other things, adjusting the schedule ad-hoc if the next dancer up is occupied with a customer in a private booth. She also serves as a general troubleshooter along with the housekeeping staff person for the dancers. But the House Mom is also a dancer, not overhead. This is important since it means that if there is no other way of filling a gap in the dance schedule she does so herself. It also means that there is no ‘tip-out' to her from the other dancers. I realize that in some clubs the House Mom is the career path of the dancer past her prime, but I think that there are better ways of handling that.

Next is security. Who do you hire for that? First of all you have plenty of cameras. You just can't pay for enough eyes and they provide evidence for when people file bogus complaints against the club. You have camera(s)

1. Covering the entire parking lot.
2. Covering the lobby
3. Covering the club and Lap Dance Area
4. In each VIP
5. Specifically at the private dance area entrance/check in computer
6. At the entrances to the toilets and dressing room
7. At the rear entrance.
Two nine camera setups should be sufficient Most cameras auto-record either all the time or on movement detection. The VIP cameras only save the video with pre-buffering if the security call button is pressed. Beyond that procedures are clearly posted as to how to archive footage in the event of an incident.
Plus of course you need security people. Basically there are two types:

1. Door Security. Their primary job is to stop trouble before it gets into the club. And it is always preferable to stop it before it gets in. They need to be a good judge of people to know who to block, who to let in, and who to let in after being sure that they understand the limits. They are the ‘bouncers'. Unfortunately anything that occurs within the range of the unaided eye of your club will be reported as happening ‘outside' of your club so your Door Security will need to keep an eye on everything around your club. That will also apply to watching that the dancers get to and from their cars safely at the start and end of their shift.

2. Inside Security. Their job is to stop problems before they get out of hand if troublemakers get by the Door Security. Fortunately since this is a non-alcohol club if they aren't drunk and stupid when they get through the door they won't become drunk and stupid once inside, so fights inside should be rarer. Compared to the Door Security the Inside Security will try to handle things without having to spoil the experience for everybody else.

For Door Security the choice is obvious. You want retired or off duty cops. They have all the requisite skills and if they need to call in law enforcement they can do it in a way that will get action but not overreaction. You might wonder about having someone who will ‘take the police side'. I think that, exactly the opposite, you do not want somebody who will see the police as the opposition or that the police will see as their opposition. Every so often you will need the police to do something for you and you don't want them to use inaction as their chance to get even. On the other hand having off duty or retired cops as door security means that they will recognize all the cop tricks that they might try to, for example, get entrance without a warrant.

For the inside security my idea may seem unusual. You want tough women. A woman will better pick up the signals that a dancer is uncomfortable with a situation and the dancers won't have to worry about the security ‘taking the guy's side'. Furthermore guys won't see it as a macho challenge or a way to show off to pick a fight with a woman security staff person. The guys will certainly realize that if they get mouthy or confrontational with a woman security staff person they are going to get zilch from any dancer afterward. So confrontations inside the club will be rare, particularly in a nonalcoholic club. If you are concerned with the ability of the women security staff to get physical each inside security staff person has a taser and a radio to call the Door Security for backup.

In the front of the club there is the lobby. The lobby is set up with a fairly typical two part operation. the larger outer lobby is where customers wait to pay. The cash register and a low gate separate the outer lobby and the inner lobby where, one at a time, the customers are security checked before entering the club. If the club is in a very safe area the security check step might be skipped but for most clubs this is a sensible and expected precaution. The security check will be a pat-down (by female staff) or metal detection wand (by male staff)

Adjacent to the lobby is the security offices with the monitors and a good view down lap dance lane. At the opposite end of lap dance lane from the security office is the entrance to the DJ/Audio engineer's booth. Although much of the time the club has no DJ they still need a place for when they are there and a place to do the editing of songs and setting up of playlists for when they are not. Either wasy the booth provides a good second lookout location over the club floor and lapdance lane.

Finally there is the manager's office for handling private personnel matters and financial transactions.

(Note, there are computer renderings that go with these articles including some new ones to go with this installment. To access them click on my name and select pictures. When viewing one of the renderings you can right click on a picture to download a higher resolution version)