Life lessons from a Strip Club

Life lessons from a Strip Club

Aug 20, 2008 1:11 AM by Paul White

Stripper
Anyway it was a Sunday evening.  And I got a Call from a long time friend who manages one of the more successful ( as if they all aren't successful ) strip clubs in Houston. He said they where having problems with the computer in the DJ booth, and asked me to come in and take a look at it.  I gladly drove down to inspect the problem.

Diagnosing the Problem.
The computer they have in the DJ booth runs special software that is designed just for strip clubs.  It has a list of Dancers, with a list of what songs each dancer likes.  The DJ then can cue up the songs on the computer to keep a non stop flow of music all night.  In all I would say they have about 100 Gigs of music on this system.  The problem they were having is the computer was crashing.  This of course makes it so the girls can't dance, the guys don't want to watch, and as a result can cost the club several grand per hour.  The first thing I suspected was not enough memory on the computer.  This would make the system use virtual memory when main memory is used up, and this leaves the system very unstable and prone to crashes.  The computer had 2 Gigs, so I knew this wasn't the problem.  The next suspicion I had was that one of the drives was starting to go.  Even though hard drives can last for 10+ years.  In environments where they will be abused like server environments its normal for them to only last 4-5 years.  I doubted the drive was already going bad, but kept an open mind.  I checked the stats of the drives.  The main drive was only 120 Gigs and was holding 114 Gigs of files.  This only leaves an open 6 Gigs and is horrible for performance.  I tried to run defrag on it, and I got an error message saying please check disk for errors.  This was not good.  After some further research I realized that drive in the system was over 6 years old.  I figured that it would be best to just back up the data and install a new drive.

The solution
I bought an external WD passport 160 GB from walmart. and backed up the content.
Then I installed a new 500 GB internal hard drive and restored the files to this drive.
Afterwards everything seemed to run great.

The wait
Even though this sounded like a simple data migration, and system backup,  Keep in mind I was moving
over 120 GB of data to a external Hard Drive via USB, which is rather slow.  So while I waited for over an hour for the system to move the data, I talked with the DJ. It is amazing what people in the corporate world could learn from a strip club. Here are just a few things.

Investing in yourself will increase revenue and profits.
The girls that took the first 5 Grand they made at the club and got a boob job, made much more money than girls who did not.  Also the girls that dressed up in theme outfits ( school girls, ext. ) got better tips as well.  In the corporate world its good to invest the money into yourself to help you perform your duties more efficiently.

Show a little enthusiasm
Even if a dancer was on the larger side, if she showed more excitement and enthusiasm on stage she would make more money than girls who maybe had a great body but were shy and passive.  Companies promote the positive employees that show enthusiasm.

Don't be afraid to spend a dollar to keep yourself making thousands.
What shocked me the most was that a club that makes 250K a month, didn't want to spend 1K on backup DJ hardware.  As a result when the computer when down, there was no music and the crowd quickly left.  By being cheep and not spending even a few hundred dollars on a backup CD player, they were loosing thousands per hour when the DJ wasn't able to play music.  Many times a few minutes can be the difference from making the sale and not.  By not investing in the right communication systems such as wireless internet, you are essentially missing out on alot of revenue that would greatly exceed the cost.

Blondes Make more
Even though I don't know if this is true in the corporate world or not,  the DJ informed me that in strip clubs Blondes make more.  The majority of the blondes I met at the club were not natural.  Obviously they figured it out. 

Know when its your time to leave the industry.
Even though the club I was at didn't seem to have this problem.  Many clubs have a few girls that should have gotten out of the business over a decade ago.  I am talking about the over 40 women who haven't walked into a gym since they were 20, and are still trying to make a dollar on the pole.  In the corporate world, if the industry has left you behind and you are unable to keep up, it might be a sign that you should find a new job.  There are too many older people in the corporate world who don't know how to use a computer.  This puts them at a huge handicap to those who do.  Plus it slows down the company because they are always lagging behind. 

Its all business.
If there is one thing strip clubs and corporate jobs have in common, is the tendacy for people to want to blow every dollar they make to try to achieve some sort of status through the collection of material items, or even worse is not drawing a line between personal and business.  This is one of the leading causes for the foreclosure crisis.  But while I was at the club, I did meet one girl that was also a Houston realator agent.  She used stripping as a way to supplement her income.  ( 2K a night is supplementing? )She was younger and had the body to do it, plus had a good head on her shoulders.  I was very impressed with her motivations, and how she managed her finances.  She treated stripping the same as selling homes.  It was all business.  While other girls get caught up in the fast pace night life, develop a addiction to coke or prescription drugs, and eventually burn out and are left broke and without a skill to work in the real world.  This girl had all the right intentions.  I hope she does well.
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