Built to Fail (Four Ingredients for an Unsuccessful Nightclub)

By Gamal Hennessy

I’m not an operator. I have never owned or managed a club. The jobs that I have had in nightlife have been minor and temporary. So, I don’t presume that I can tell professionals how to run their businesses better. I don’t pretend to have answers based on years of work in the trenches. All my observations and ideas ultimately come from the patron’s side of the bar. The ideas I recommend or pass on are offered from the perspective of a nightlife native obsessed with going out. Now that I have offered that disclaimer, I can share my observations about how NOT to open a new venue.

There are a lot of different ways to jump into the New York market and establish a new spot. Once you figure out how you are going to fill up your room with people and how you are going to make more money than you spend to keep them there, your options are only limited by your imagination and your resources. But while there might be a lot of right ways to do it, there is a recipe for the wrong way to do it. Here are the ingredients:

Your venue has no hook: Patrons have a lot of choices when it comes to where they party in New York. If you give them a reason to come to your place, then you stand out from the competition. Maybe you offer a distinct style of music. Maybe you cater to a specific type of crowd. Maybe you have celebrities showing up. Maybe you are just convenient to get to for a quick drink. Any reason helps. But if all you can offer people is a liquor license and a dark room, then you probably won’t last long.

The music is too loud to lounge and programmed to prevent dancing: As an operator, you can use music in the same way a golfer uses clubs. A golfer picks his the club based on what kind of shot he wants to make. You pick the music based on what kind of crowd you want to draw and what you want that crowd to do when they arrive. If you want them to do more dancing and less talking, you can play house or hip hop loud enough to get girls on the dance floor. If you want drinking and conversation, you play jazz, top 40 or whatever so it is just loud enough to be pleasant background noise. What you can’t do is play music that literally clears the dance floor and play it so loud that people couldn’t talk to each other even if they resorted to licking each other’s ears. A musical combination like that will shank your crowd right into the sand trap.

Your gender ratio is way off: At the risk of sounding preferential towards women, I firmly believe that a successful venue needs to have a crowd that contains more women than men. Men go out and spend money at places where they know (or at least hope) women will be. Women don’t feel comfortable in a room overwhelmed by hordes of drunk and horny men. If the ratio between men and women is even or favors the ladies, then you will avoid potential fights and keep the sexual energy high enough in the room to encourage people to stay. If you look out onto your dance floor and there are 30 guys trying to dance with 4 girls then your doorman let in too many guys. That will lead to trouble. Please note that in a gay bar this rule does not apply because many straight girls that I have talked to love to be in a room overwhelmed by drunk and horny gay men.

Your bottle service system kills your revenue: Some people think that the bottle service trend in New York is over. Some people think that it is just as prevalent as it ever was. I don’t know which statement is true. I do know that if your promoter gets comp bottles and then everyone in the spot goes over to the promoters table to drink for free, then you have just eliminated your major revenue stream. If you have no cover and no one is actually paying for liquor, how are you making money? And if you are not making money, how are you going to stay opened?

There are probably quite a few other ingredients that go into this formula that my operator friends will tell me about later. There are issues like complaints from neighbors, internal theft, poor service from your staff and bad publicity that can be just as bad for the long term success of a venue. But when I’m in a new place that has no hook, bad music, not enough women and too many people drinking from the comp bottles I start to wonder how long this place will last and who is going to come in and do a better job.

Have fun
G

The Story of Claire and Imette

By Gamal Hennessy

Imagine this; you and your friend go out for drinks. You both succeed in getting very drunk. At 3:30 the two of you leave the bar. But she isn’t ready to go home. She wants to hit another spot. You playfully argue with her in the loud, slurred tones that drunks argue in and neighbors complain about. Finally you agree to disagree and separate. You get into a cab and watch her stumble down the street towards the next bar. You shake your head and laugh at her. You go home, go to sleep and wake up with a hangover.

A few days later, you find out that your friend was abducted, beaten, raped, murdered and dumped on the side of a road in Brooklyn. Your friend is dead and the image of her walking away haunts you for years.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an imaginary story. Imette St. Guillen was murdered in 2006 after she left a bar called the Falls. When the trial of the suspected killer started this week, her friend Claire testified to watching Imette walk away after failing to convince her to get into the cab. It was the last time she saw her friend alive.

This tragedy raises a question for natives; what can we do and how far can we go to keep our friends safe?

I tend to overanalyze things, so there are principles I follow when I go out with a girl. When it’s time for me to go home I do one of four things; I put her in a cab heading to her place, I leave her with her friends, I take her to her place or take her to mine. If I don’t go home with her, I ask her to call or text me when she gets home to let me know she’s OK. I feel like if I follow this principal, the young lady won’t spend the night tied up. (Now if she likes being tied up, that’s different. I can do that for her, but that is another story and not the point of this post.)

The problem is that my principal does not guarantee her safety. She can get out of the cab or walk away from her friends. She might meet Justin Timberlake at the bar and will actively get rid of me to prevent inadvertent cockblocking. We must remember that nightlife is a playground for adults. As an adult, she is free to go where she wants to go, even if she’s blind drunk. Our playground has potential dangers, just like any other playground. There is no guarantee that she or any of us will live to see another bar. My principal reduces the risk, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Nothing can.

Twenty four million people go out in New York every year and violent crime and death are extremely rare. Ms. St. Guillen fell victim to an isolated but fatal combination of insanity, oversight and error. Her death isn’t something we would wish on anyone, but her circumstances were not that uncommon. How many times have you lost track of your friends after they were amazingly intoxicated?

Everything turns out fine most of the time. There is no realistic way to force someone to do what they don’t want to do. There are no neat answers on how to protect our people. Having said that, I still think it helps to at least try and keep an eye on our friends when we’re out at night. We’re all big boys and girls, but the extra effort is worth it. I don’t want to pick up the phone and get the call Claire got.

Have fun.
G

If Nightlife is Dead, then You Killed It

By Gamal Hennessy

If you read the nightlife blogs on a regular basis, you’ll often find reader comments about how New York nightlife is dead, how all the clubs suck, how all promoters suck, how (insert the name of a random city here) has a much better nightlife scene, how things aren’t as good as they were in the old days and other cultural critiques ad nauseam. This commentary isn’t isolated to online chatter. It isn’t hard to find people willing to bemoan the current state of affairs and pine away for the good old days (even if they weren’t around during the good old days)

What do people mean when they say our nightlife is dead? They can’t mean that no one is going out anymore. Clubs in New York currently register more than 64 million entries every year, which by some accounts is more than every major local sports team and Broadway show combined. They can’t mean that nightlife doesn’t generate any money. Clubs are responsible for 9 billion dollars in annual spending which is a lot of money for a dead industry. They can’t mean that no one is working in nightlife. The unofficial count right now is that there are at least 30,000 operators in the city. They can’t mean that the environment is stagnant. At least a dozen spots open up every week. So what are they talking about?

I think what they are really saying when they say ‘New York nightlife is dead’ is “my personal experience in New York nightlife is not meeting my expectations and therefore I have decided that the entire industry is somehow deficient.” If that’s your opinion you can’t be wrong. That’s the way you feel and no amount of statistics or data will change that. Your level of satisfaction with the nightlife climate is a subjective and everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but if you can’t consistently find a party you like in New York then you might want to consider changing your game instead of bitching.

Option 1: Look around
The sheer size of New York nightlife negates the idea that you can’t find your sweet spot. There are literally more than 1,100 nightlife venues that have a valid liquor license (I would never send you somewhere that had no liquor) and there are thousands of parties going on every single week. There might be tens of thousands of parties but I’m too lazy to sit here and count them all. I’m not talking about parties just on the weekend. There are events every single night. I’m not just talking about bottle service and Top 40 hip hop either. Almost any variation and combination of qualities you might be looking for happens here. You want reggae music in an outdoor garden on the East Side? Done. You want an interracial swinger party in Midtown? Not a problem. You can have loud or quiet, cheap or expensive, basement or rooftop…whatever. You can find it. All you have to do is look for it. Besides, that’s why God made the internet, so you can find stuff like that.

Option 2: DIY nightlife
Now let’s assume that you’re selective. You’ve searched and searched for a party that has the right combination of people, music, and atmosphere that you’re looking for but can’t find anything. That means NY nightlife is dead, right?

Wrong. If you can’t find what you’re looking for you can make it yourself. A prominent promoter that I recently interviewed told me that the only thing you really need to throw a party in New York is a Crackberry. A few phone calls, a couple of handshakes, an invite on Facebook and Going and you’re in business. You won’t be running Saturday night at Pink Elephant, but if you wanted that, you wouldn’t need to throw your own party. If it’s your party and you can pick the setting, the crowd, the music, the theme and all the other factors that you feel are missing from nightlife now, how can you not enjoy it?

Some people simply enjoy complaining. The ‘lack’ of nightlife in New York just gives them another reason to bitch. Some people are intimidated and complain as a defense mechanism because even if there was some ‘perfect, ultimate party’ to attend, they wouldn’t go. It is easier to wait around for some amazing party to walk up and smack them in the face than actually look for it or create it. But that probably won’t happen. Don’t let the complainers discourage you from going out and having a good time. Life is short. There is a lot of drinking, dancing and general carousing to do before we’re done. We don’t have time for a lot of bitching.

Have fun.
G