At 9am I meet with my accoutants, Grant Thornton, to set up "From Dusk Till Dawn Ltd" of Birmingham. Due to the gaming laws this is not straightforward.
Then have go meet with the Managing Director and Finance Director if sf group, my recruitment company, to sign of the 2007 budget, which I am not very well prepared for as I have been spending all my time on the poker club.
While in Birmingham, I am planning on hooking up with Action Jack to see if we can agree for him to come on board. I have not spoken to him for a couple of weeks and I am not sure if he has been following my posts.
After that, I am travelling down to Oxford to interview a Card Room Manager who has applied to work in the club. I want all of the key people lined up before March 2006, as I think they will have to start well in advance of the club opening to get everything organised, dealers trained etc. The problem with recruiting people into a new venture is the uncertainty, they are often in stable jobs with mortgages and families to support, and if I sense that this is a concern for them, I won't pursue their application. I don't want people to join just because I am paying higher wages.
I am hoping Womble and Nowab stick around tomorrow night so we can play a bit of poker at my place, relax and have a few laughs. The debate on membership fees is niggling at the back of my mind, and I could do with a few people to bouce it off face to face. I was using the fee not only to generate some income, but to deter non poker related people / or undesirables from coming in. Because we are out of town we will benefit from more leeway on the licence, we could even get 24 hours, so we could be a nice stop off the people who want to carry on boozing in nice suroundings without any entrance fee.
I'm not opening a general public drinking establishment, its a poker club, how do I keep people out who just fancy dropping after a shed load of drinks on the town cause we have a late drinking licence? How do I keep it exclusive to decent, repectful poker players? Is there another way apart from fees? I want a place where I can entertain my clients and employees from sf group, have a nice meal with my girlfriend in a friendly atmosphere with nice people.................I would never do this is a "casino type environment" ........................I'm not feeling too good about the poker club today.
If fact, the image in my head of a "poker meat market" type business where my job is to drive volume through the door is a place that I would not want to even want go in myself. Maybe I should have been looking at a smaller club with lower overheads? Maybe I should have assessed what I really wanted properly before I went ahead with these premises? I need to re-assess I think, because I do believe that I will not be able to get the required volume of people without comprimising what I want the club to be like. Of course, at festivals and major events, that "homely" feeling cannot be there as there will be so many one-off visitors, but the rest of the time, I want it to feel like a big home game.
I also think, after refection, I have miscalculated how much poker players actually want to get a dedicated poker club, if people on Blonde have reservations about the costs, your average jo who doesn't even know me is going to have even more.
I think I will re-vist the costings, the refurb specification, and what I actually want to get out of it. I'd still go for that property, its just too good, but I can scale down other costs for a "smaller" customer base. I'll re think the membership sheme aswell.
