Closed down — what it feels like to be a club owner during corona lock down

We’ll, It somehow overtook me very quickly. I own a nightclub in Germany and I run that club for 7 years now. Every single weekend I was there and giving everything to make that thing happen.

The beginnings were very harsh. We didn’t know a thing about nightclub business before we started it. We just knew that we wanted to try. I was around 20 years old when I signed a lease contract. I didn’t think about the consequences. I just signed it. It was a big adventure. Until the point where I felt fix cost (fist cost how I call them) roll over me. Monthly payments went above 50k pretty quick and I was broke within 2 weeks. What now?

I don’t know how I could capture all my power and make that thing happen in retrospective. But somehow we figured it out. We raised money from families, friends, banks and breweries. We struggled through it for about 3 years just to recognize that no one cares about us.

I was standing at the bar. We had a spacious floor plan and could fit a crowd of about 1.500 people. But there were like 18 guests in total. It was a complete disaster. I felt horrible. I was already planning to talk to everyone that I failed and that I wasn’t able to pay back their money any time soon.

We had to make a decision. Either we would give up or we needed to raise even some more money to try a different concept. How could I raise even more money when everyone around me was seeing clearly that I was failing all along the line. In start-up Slang we had a burn rate of 80–90k a month with zero capital to burn.

So I came up with the idea to consult people who did run successful clubs. There was this one guy who owned a nightclub where I used to dj when I was younger. His name is Timo. He is a special guy. You know you either love or hate him … or both. But he is incredibly successful in what he does and he is very smart in finding ways to get things done properly. So I called him and told him about what was going on. He already knew. He was watching us already.

He came to our club and said it is actually pretty easy. We just needed to separate our club in two different clubs with different target audiences because we were to big for one single audience.

Well that sounded easy but I was so desperate at that time that I didn’t even believe that success was possible at all. I yelled at him how he could think that this dumb advice would work and so on. Kind of stupid when I think about that right now. But at that time I was exhausted. I couldn’t go any further.

So we decided to raise another 250k to give it a last shot. There was at least a chance. I thought it wouldn’t work. But at the end I was already condemned to death so it wouldn’t matter how I was going down.

We made small changes in the venue. We added a second Homepage and a second brand. So we could target a new audience from now on. A second one.

On the opening weekend we generated quite good numbers. I was like ‘yeah that won’t last people are just coming to see what’s new and won’t come back’.

I was wrong.

They did. Every single weekend and it was getting better and better. No end in sight.

Than there was a dimension I couldn’t think of before. Corona. The federal lock down due to the corona virus somehow overwhelmed us. We were informed by a press conference that no bars, clubs etc weren’t allowed to operate starting from 13th of March. Friday the 13th.

That was crazy. We were forced to close the curtains. That was a strange feeling. We went through the club and switched off everything. The club was silent again. No sounds of electric devices or buzz of the ice machine. Just silent like it was et alive any more.

We stopped all payments and took preparations to lower our payroll to a maximum.

We feel that we are responsible to help stopping the spread of the virus. And I am glad that I had such harsh times before. Because I don’t feel to bad about it now. It is sad to be unemployed (at least in some sense) but I can feel now how it would be to sell or shut down that company. Within the last ten years it became a family member.

The corona virus teached me that I wouldn’t be easily able to sell that club. It teached me as well that everything we have is built on a very fragile system. We should be prepared in business and in life that everything can change within hours. And it teaches me that it will always go on, maybe not the same direction but somehow there is always a way.

We hope that we will be able to operate soon again. Weekends are so long when you are at home. That is a completely new experience for me.