Let's build a business.

[Chaostracize]

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Sorry if this is already made clear, but by 16-18 staff, you mean on the staff roster and not all required at the one time right?

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YES!!

[Chaostracize]

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Aren't you worried that by limiting your food choice to paninis you are limiting potential customers only people in the mood for paninis. I think this is potentially fatal decision

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I think it's better than serving a wide range of foods and not being known for something. By serving a specific type of food and wrapping up a niche, we should do just fine. I'd suggest reading Purple Cow. In the book, the author suggests that it's important to appeal to a niche, and I believe there will be a niche for a fast, healthy, grilled sandwich. Besides, drunk college students don't want to look through a 5 page menu when they are hungry; the fewer options the better. Even when my idea was to servce purely friend food, I was planning on having a menu of a max of 8 different foods (absolute max).

[adsman]

Chaos,

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Right now my idea for lighting is to have the bar and dancefloor both pretty dark with neon tube lights on the bar.

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Start studying lighting, really study it. Go into every bar, club and restaurant in town and see which ones make you feel like staying. Then check out their lighting. You can do everything right, you can have the whole place perfect, but if you feck up the lighting you'll be history.

And do not use neon. We have neon lights in our bar. We use them as the "get the customers out of the bar at 3am lights". They work really well in this regard. There is no sarcasm intended here.

Lets talk DJ's. Your average punter doesn't know jack about music or DJing, but they all think they do, and they're vocal about it. I advise you not to base your music rostering system on public popularity from tenny-bobbers. Here is the key with DJ's; do not have a fixed DJ at a fixed time. Move them constantly around, keep them on their toes. As soon as one starts getting stale, swap him for another one. We are a small club, I can get maybe 200 people inside. I have a roster of six DJ's and I'm training three more to do my bidding.

My suggestion to you is to locate and hire a music and lights co-ordinator. They are responsible for the DJ roster, band bookings and out of town DJ bookings and managing the dance floor lighting system. What? Managing the dancefloor lighting system? What the hell is he on about?, I hear you say.

You didn't think you could just put some moving cool lights up and that was it did you? Apart from the fact that gels burn out and need constant replacing, you need to reprogramme your lights every week. Otherwise it becomes staid and predictable and boring. I can do this in my current bar, you won't be able to, you'll have too much on your plate. And lights are an evolving science. You won't hit on the right combination until about 6 months into your operation. The same goes with your sound system. Move one subwoofer two feet to the left and your entire phasing balance is out. Or Perfect. Who knows? A sound and light engineer, that's who. And that's who you need to worry about all this stuff.

[Zeestein]

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Aren't you worried that by limiting your food choice to paninis you are limiting potential customers only people in the mood for paninis. I think this is potentially fatal decision

[/ QUOTE ]

I think it's better than serving a wide range of foods and not being known for something. By serving a specific type of food and wrapping up a niche, we should do just fine. I'd suggest reading Purple Cow. In the book, the author suggests that it's important to appeal to a niche, and I believe there will be a niche for a fast, healthy, grilled sandwich. Besides, drunk college students don't want to look through a 5 page menu when they are hungry; the fewer options the better. Even when my idea was to servce purely friend food, I was planning on having a menu of a max of 8 different foods (absolute max).

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Strongly agree with this, though you might want to look into having more upmarket type finger-foods for the "classier" section of your place (cheeses, crackers, stuff thats tasty and goes well with wine/cocktails). Also the margins on these finger-food type are pretty huge.

Really what makes you money is shifting assloads of drinks, so just always work from that starting point. It's no good to overlook the forest for the trees - stuff like dancing, DJs, arcades are the secondary concerns.

Also strongly agree with keeping the two areas separate.

[Chaostracize]

Handicap accessibility rules are so [censored] ridiculous.

A. What handicap person wants to go to a dance club?
B. What handicap person is going to need to use a bathroom on the 2nd and third floor of said dance club?

On top of that we are going to need to separate exits from all floors. Fortunately, we won't need to be putting in elevators so that is an enormous relief, clearly.

Basically with all the rules regarding new construction the usable square footage of the place is slowly dwindling.

I'm going to be checking out a different of possible floor layouts this afternoon.

I'm strongly considering completely ditching all arcade games (but maybe keeping DDR? and air hockey or something) and making the first floor a cafe. With an interior stairwell this could be pretty cool if people want to just head downstairs, and it wouldn't mess with branding cause the feel of the whole building would remain intact.

This isn't a major update, but I'll be talking to a GC sometime early this week about #s with the architect there as well.

On another note does anyone have experience working with VCs? An associate of mine has a friend who is a VC and he said he could organize a meeting, but I'm not sure if this is the way I'd want to go...I also have no experience in the matter, and if anyone does I'd appreciate input.

The closing on the building is scheduled for Wednesday morning, and once the building is ours, I donno...that will make this all seem more real. I'm still extremely excited, and this entire process is incredibly enjoyable to me, and hopefully rewarding as well.

I will keep everyone updated.