During the Gentlemen’s Club Expo I had the opportunity to go to several Las Vegas Strip Clubs as a customer.  I love doing this, Vegas is such a big city that I can usually blend in and not be recognized as The SuperStripper.  My experience as a customer, however, left much to be desired.

I went to the clubs with a male friend who had several hundred dollars of cash earmarked for lapdances.  When we arrived to the establishments, we noticed  two things: 1. A room full of guys who were staring at the stage with blank looks on their faces, NOT buying dances. 2. Twenty girls standing along the wall talking to each other with scowls on their faces.  It reminded me of the chicken and the egg question…which one came first?  The bored customer or the frustrated dancer?  I’m pretty sure the guy who paid for cover charge and the overpriced drink didn’t walk into the strip club with the intention of being bored or ignored…..why is he watching the game on TV?  Could it be that hardly anyone has smiled at him or welcomed him to the club?  Why are his arms crossed?  Maybe he feels uncomfortable and is dreading the inevitable “Wanna Dance?” that he knows is coming?  Even as nice as he can possibly be with “Maybe later” or “No thank you” is met with anger and a side of mental beatdown?

After we sat down, let our eyes adjust, and ordered our first drink one of the entertainers who had been standing along the wall sauntered over to our table, leaned down in between us with her hands on the table and said, “You guys wanna dance?”  We looked at each other, my friend smiled and said, “We haven’t even met you yet.”  I guess the thought of having a 2 song conversation with us wasn’t nearly as attractive as standing along the wall with folded arms, because she just stomped back to her friends.  In a busy club situation, “Wanna Dance” sometimes works…but it certainly wasn’t appropriate for this particular evening.  We left that club with a wallet full of money because we didn’t “Wanna Dance”.  We wanted an experience, and nobody knew how to get the money we brought with us!

How sad!  Clients with money to spend in hand leave the club with money they wanted to spend because dancers were either too lazy or unskilled to take it?  Say it isn’t so!
More importantly- whose job is it to turn things around?  The customer, the club, or the entertainers?  Are these poor suckers just horny ATM machines, or are they people?  Do they deserve a show, or should we just hit them up for cash and be mean to them when they don’t hand it over the first time we ask with no sales skills??

There seem to be a plethora of bad strippers out there, let us teach you how to become one of the GOOD strippers!

A new British study into the lives of strippers has come up with some interesting figures, so to speak — concluding, for instance, that about one in four are college graduates. That’s just one of several recent research claims about those who take their clothes off for a living. Here’s a round-up:

Strippers earn more when they’re ovulating
Strippers make an average of $30 per hour more when they are ovulating than when they are menstruating, according to a study by the University of New Mexico. Women on the pill — who generally do not ovulate — made significantly less. Researchers said this was proof men react to female ovulation, a claim that had some critics scoffing. But, then again, maybe “a stripper who feels sexy gives a more tip-worthy lap dance than one who feels uncomfortable during her period,” said Sharon Begley at Newsweek.

Some say they make as much as lawyers…
How much money does a stripper typically earn? According to a new study from the University of Leeds in the U.K., it’s around $74,000. That’s approximately as much as an American attorney, according to salary experts PayScale. “I congratulate the women who make more money than I do out of a job they say they enjoy,” says Katy Guest at the Independent. But that doesn’t mean I don’t “viscerally object to lap dancing.”

… and are quite happy with their jobs
According to the same study, strippers reported very high levels of job satisfaction. The researchers found the women were overwhelmingly motivated by “career and economic choices” rather than drug addiction or coercion. “These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat,” says study author Teela Sanders.

Sweden is being shortchanged by strippers
The Swedish government is cracking down on online strippers for failing to reveal their assets. Internet stripteases are legal in Sweden, and the government says that strippers may be dodging up to $5 million in taxes. “The bottom line” here, says Andrew Swift at Foreign Policy, is that “the Swedish tax authority has apparently never heard of the phrase ‘not safe for work.’”

Canada has a stripper shortage
So few Canadian girls are willing to strip that Ontario strip-club owners were forced to hire legal consultants in 2008 to find a way for get foreigners to staff their clubs. Until 2004, the Canadian authorities would give foreign women visas allowing them to strip in the country — but a crackdown prompted a widespread stripper shortage that continues to this day. “The government’s putting a real squeeze on the industry,” said Tim Lambrinos, of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada. “It really is affecting our ability to find dancers.”

Originally posted at The Week

Strip clubs — good for men? VCG Holdings, an adult entertainment giant with 19 clubs in 10 states thinks so. Recently, they commissioned Empire Research to conduct a study about the impact strip clubs have on men’s health.

“Besides the obvious — beautiful women — we wanted to know what attracted men to adult clubs.” Michael Ocello, president of the VCG Holdings, told The Riverfront Times. “We always knew that our clubs made men feel good, but we didn’t expect the researchers to come back with medical findings that our clubs can also be healthy for you.”

We couldn’t find the study to analyze the sample size and methodology, and as a result, find the whole thing somewhat dubious, but let’s hear them out.

So according to the study, frequenting a strip club can lower cortisol, also known as the stress hormone. The study also suggested a boost in oxitocyn (the “love hormone”) levels and testosterone.

“As a society, 54 percent of us feel overwhelmed with work,” said Ocello. “We only have 16 hours or so of leisure time a week and more and more of that is interacting with people via Facebook or the Internet. We’re social creatures. We need human touch, human contact. They’ve done saliva tests that show that men’s testosterone increases when they’re surrounded by beautiful women. Why is that? Because there’s no fear of rejection. The women are going to talk to you. They’re going to flirt with you. That’s how it works. The question is: would you rather go to the gym and do push ups to increase testosterone, or spend her time here surrounded by beautiful women?”

If you have the cash, by all means. But take up too much of the girls’ time when you only have enough money for one or two lapdances and watch the cortisol go through the roof. You’ve been warned.

The first academic research project into lap dancing has found that, rather than being uneducated young women who have been coerced into the industry, one in four dancers has a degree and has been attracted by the money.

Dancers took home an average of £232 a shift after paying commission and fees to the club, with most working between two and four shifts a week – giving them annual incomes of between £24,000 and £48,000 a year.

The researchers found no evidence of trafficking in the industry, and concluded that career and economic choices were motivations for dancing rather than drug use or coercion.

Aspiring actresses, models and artists used exotic dancing as a career strategy which fitted alongside their other work, training or studies.

Unemployed new graduates – mainly with arts degrees – were also dancing because they could not find graduate jobs and found that lap dancing paid much better than bar work.

The research by Dr Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy, from the University of Leeds, found the vast majority of dancers reported high rates of job satisfaction.

The main attraction of the work was the flexibility it offered to combine different work options and studying.

However, the researchers also found dancers’ welfare was often disregarded. They called for better regulation to improve dancers’ safety and security, including the banning of private booths in clubs, arguing that women could be in danger when alone with customers or that standards could be lowered by women offering more than was allowed in dances. Dancers were also open to financial exploitation by the clubs who could impose charges and fines.

One dancer told researchers: “There’s not enough security. I know of girls who have been raped and abused at work. You cannot go to the police as you are a stripper, so there’s no legal standing.”

The research comes at a pivotal time for lap dancing clubs. After an explosion of clubs across UK high streets, a change in the law earlier this year saw their reclassification as sexual entertainment venues, giving local authorities more powers to limit the number of clubs in their area and to take objections into consideration.

The change in the licensing laws governing lap-dancing clubs came after a campaign by the Fawcett Society and Object, the women’s rights organisations. They have welcomed the change in the law but called for it to go further, saying “lap-dance clubs are a form of commercial sexual exploitation and promote the sexist view that women are sex objects”.

Dr Sanders said she had been surprised at the “endless supply of women” wanting to be lap dancers. She said: “These women are incredibly body confident. I think there is something of a generational cultural difference. These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat. You have got to have a certain way about you to do it. They say 80 per cent of the job is talking. These women do work hard for their money – you don’t just turn up and wiggle your bum.

“But there is an issue about whether these women become trapped in the job because of the money. I think people often stay longer than they want.”

The preliminary findings of the year-long study, which will include interviews with 300 dancers, reveal that all the women interviewed had finished school and gained some qualifications.

Most (87 per cent) had at least completed a further education course, while one in four had undergraduate degrees.

Just over one in three dancers were in some form of education, with 13.9 per cent using dancing to help fund an undergraduate degree, 6.3 per cent to help fund a postgraduate degree, and 3.8 per cent using it to fund further education courses.

Some women begin dancing after graduating from university and not being able to find work. The researchers found arts degree graduates were most likely to report that they had turned to dancing after being unable to find other work. Others used dancing to provide a more steady and reliable income when working in more unstable arts jobs.

One dancer had been doing a law degree which included a work placement during her third year. While working, she got used to earning a good wage, decided she would struggle when she returned to university without an income, and began dancing as soon as she went back to finish her degree.

Case study: ‘It’s your job to flatter men into buying dances’

Amber gave up a career as a financial journalist seven years ago, and now earns around £40,000 a year working as a stripper in pubs in London’s East End.

The 32-year-old, who has three A-levels and a journalism degree, said: “I had always been fascinated by the idea of being a stripper. I was disillusioned about the work I was doing. I think many people who have worked hard at school and university get out into the real world and find it’s not what they expected. Someone I knew had a partner who worked as a stripper, so I went to see her perform at a pub in the East End.

“I think it’s everyone’s dream to be self-employed, to not have a boss and to work as much or as little as you want. In journalism, it didn’t matter how many hours of overtime I put in, I still got paid the same. Now I can work really hard one week and earn good money, and then I can have a week when I don’t work so hard and don’t earn so much.

“At first, I combined the stripping with my office job, but then I thought I could come back to sitting behind a desk when I’m older. I’ve started to move away from pub stripping now, moving more into burlesque and pole and podium dancing.

“I’ve tried the big clubs, but it didn’t suit me. In a funny way, I’m not money-motivated enough. I don’t like flattering people’s egos if I think they’re a bit of an idiot. In a club, it’s your job to flatter the men into buying private dances. It’s a sales job, and the girls who do that job do it really well. You have to suss out someone’s body language, look at their clothes and watch to suss out how much money they’ve got, and look at how they behave in the group they’re in.

“I enjoy a proper strip show. I get to choose my own music, my own clothes and perform my own show. In the pubs, I pay £15 on average as a house fee, then you make your money by collecting £1 from everybody. There’s no typical earnings – it depends how many people are there.

“It doesn’t surprise me that dancers are well educated, although in my experience they tend to be from not traditionally academic families. One personality trait most share is being very driven. You need that to get good qualifications if you’re not from a traditional academic background.

“I’ve met dancers who have degrees in astrophysics from top universities. They’ve pushed themselves hard to get those qualifications and now they’re pushing themselves to be successful dancers.”

Originally published at The Independent

The Lodge won Club of the Year Central Division!

By Luna Minsky

When I started dancing years ago, the industry was different from what it is today. Clubs were packed with clients, and there was plenty of money to go around and make everyone happy. These were the days before SARS, before the non-smoking laws were passed. This was the time before the recession, and before massage parlours, rub-and-tucks, and colourful sex ads in the back of NOW Magazine proliferated, luring strip club clients away with a promise of much more for much less.

Today, strip club owners complain about the shortage of dancers (some clubs, such as the House of Lancaster, Fairbanks and Jilly’s, run permanent WANTED ads in NOW, offering their potential dancers hourly wages and even benefits!).  Many of the dancers who have been in the industry long enough to remember ‘the good old days’, desperately migrate from one club to another hoping that being a ‘new face’ will make them a few extra bucks.

It is true, the situation has changed, and strip clubs are not what they used to be. But as every successful dancer will tell you, the potential to make excellent money remained. The key is in keeping up with the times, recognizing the changes in trends as they happen and adapting to them. More importantly, the secret to making a killing while stripping lies in steering clear of the common excuses that mediocre and unsuccessful dancers throw back and forth at each other in the dressing room while the rest of us are busy making money.

Here they are:

The economy is in recession, there is no money to be made.

There is always money to be made. Recession or no recession, there is always money that is waiting to change hands. When the economy is down in the dumps, the entertainment industry thrives. Why? Because people who are stressed out seek ways to make themselves feel better, they want reward themselves for all the hard work they do and sacrifices they make. Inside the strip club, that reward is you- access to your beauty, youth, sensuality. Offer your client the encouragement and reassurance of his self-worth, and he will reward you in return.

No one is spending.

If no one is spending, you are not doing your job. True, sometimes it takes as little as a smile and your perfect customer is following you into the VIP. Most nights, however, it will take a little more than that. Every man who walks into the club wants to feel liked. Talk to him, engage him, flirt with him and, at the very least, try to appear sincere as you do. Make his visit worthwhile, and he will reciprocate.

With all the extras that the other dancers are doing, I don’t have a chance to make any money.

If you know for a fact that there are illegal activities going on, and you are uncomfortable about that, change clubs and move on. In most cases, however, the only ‘extras’ that other dancers are performing is hustling- something that you should be doing instead of complaining in the dressing room.

Economy fluctuates, epidemics strike, and there is usually someone younger and more daring around.  But the fact remains: beautiful, confident, attentive and sexy women are always in high demand; and those of us who remember that always make money.

Click here if you want the skills to become the top earner at your club.

I cannot emphasize enough how Stripping requires skill, tact, confidence, patience, and sobriety.  These five things take time to develop.  It’s completely impractical for a dancer with 2 years of experience under her gsting to think that she can consistently pull what a dancer with 10 years of experience does.

I think about how I acted ten years ago when I first started dancing at the Spearmint Rhino in Upland, CA.  I had to sit at the bar and down 3 Captain and Cokes until I had enough confidence to strip down to my pasties and bootyshorts (no bare nipples or gstrings in Upland!)  That particular club didn’t have a VIP room and ran 3-for-one lapdance specials every half hour.  Dances were $10.  My best night ever there I think I made $330…which was three times more than what I was making teaching 36 10-years-olds to play Hot Cross Buns on the recorder.

Two years into my career I moved to San Francisco and I started working at Boys Toys, an upscale club with a VIP room.  I had absolutely NO IDEA how to convince a guy to give me $400 to sit with me fully clothed for an hour.  It was a completely different hustle from the bikini bars I worked at in LA.  I didn’t understand the sales process, so I just tried to apply the same techniques that worked for me in LA.  Key word is tried. On busy nights, my $20 dances would add up to a few hundred dollars…but I was never one of those girls with a stack of $2000 in funny money at the end of the night.

So, I figured I would go to Vegas.  Yeah…Vegas!  The mecca of stripperdom!  Where it’s sooooo easy to make $1000/night.  Again, I applied the same techniques as I used in San Francisco (which weren’t that good to begin with) and I would make about the same amount of money per hour as I did at Boys Toys.  The difference was that I could work more hours because the club never closed.

Then I moved to Phoenix, which again was a VERY different hustle than LA, SF, and Vegas.  Phoenix from 2002-2005 was a very fast paced “wanna dance” atmosphere.  It took me about a YEAR of working at Christie’s to figure out that I was wasting too much time with idle chit-chat (aka being “nice”) to only close one $10 sale.  The real estate boom hit in early 2004 and lasted until 2006.  The volume of people through the clubs in Phoenix was mind numbing.  Every outta towner was speculating, flipping, investing in real estate.  Cash was flush as even the construction workers were throwing around their double-overtime dollars.  It was EASY to make money in Phoenix in 2004-2006.  Much like it was EASY to make money in San Francisco during the Tech Bubble from 1999-2001

I must have uncanny timing.  Just as my timing placed me in SF after the tech bubble burst (Nov 2001-Nov 2002) I was in Phoenix as the real estate bubble burst.  I saw a lot of the same things happening in Phoenix that I saw in San Francisco: lots of locker room whining and crying; girls fighting over customers; girls switching clubs weekly because they think it’s better somewhere else; girls wondering what Avalon is doing up in VIP as she cashes out a huge stack of funny money on a slow night….

These days I am in Dallas.  It didn’t experience any type of crazy real estate boom, so the only bust around here is saline and silicone.  Nevertheless, the clubs are oversaturated with girls, many of which are brand new to the business due to layoffs.  Compound that with many 10 year veterans who are returning to the industry (also due to layoffs) or just to make ends meet.  Much of the tension I sense these days is due to the dichotomy between the perception of appropriate strip club behavior of newbies (who grew up on rap videos and reality TV) and the old school veterans (who remember when “no touching” really did mean NO TOUCHING or else a $100 fine from management) 

Ultimately, whatever strategy that worked well in the past may not work in the current market conditions.  Everything Changes and unless you have more than one strategy in your SuperStripper Toolbox you are out of luck!

The good news is that there IS a solution!

We at SGR are REALLY excited to be a part of the 2020 Gentlemen’s Club Expo in Las Vegas at the end of this month.  If you work at a strip club, then you should become  familiar with this this annual convention. It is the largest gathering of the year for the owners and operators in the multi billion dollar nightclub industry.  We are proud to be part of The Lodge’s booth.   So if you live in Vegas, or are planning on attending the Expo, be sure to stop by and say hello.

This years theme is positive, which fits in perfectly with what we teach in DancerWealth.  Clubs are beginning to recognize that dancers are their MAIN sales engines.  Entertainers who know how to get themselves into the POSITIVE SuperStripperZone make more money everytime they work.  Since DancerWealth is  online 24/7 we are reaching thousands of dancers worldwide!

Another one of the main tenets in DancerWealth is how dancers must build Social Capital  between with vip hosts, cocktail waitresses, security staff and GMs to truly flourish. As discussed in our blog entry entitled Economic Darwinism We think being at this show is going to help owners see another way to significantly increase their club revenues while simultaneously improving working conditions and loyalty with their entertainers.

Preparing for the show is more work than I thought!!  As you can see, the blog entries have become a bit sparse.  I can’t wait to do some blogs FROM the show, so stay tuned for those!!  Much of my time recently has been allocated to creating materials to give out during the show, fun contest ideas, and more!  Be sure to stop by and say hello!

Strippers work grueling hours in the clubs and all perched on top of a pair of towering heels. Wearing 6 inch high heels or higher has been compared to walking on stilts or dancing on ballet pointe shoes. Yowch!

Not only is the risk of falling flat on your rear a concern, there are also long term foot complications that can arise. Chiropractors and Podiatrists recommend that you stay in your stilettos for no more than 20 minutes at a time to avoid permanent damage.

The main areas that stilettos can cause  injuries and pain include the back, hips and knees, shins, balls of the feet and the toes. It is imperative to look after the health of your feet on a daily basis if you wear heels everyday. Soak them in a warm tub of water with Epsom salts and massage with moisturizer and a few drops of Peppermint oil afterward.

After 10 1/2 years of dancing, I  credit practicing yoga on a regular basis as my savior. Hot Yoga is particularly effective in combating the toll dancing takes on the body.  Whenever possible, hold onto a pole to stabilize yourself.   Touching the ceiling can also relieve some pressure on your feet.  Be sure to take regular breaks in the dressing rooms not only for energy enhancing snacks…but also to liberate your feet!

I received one of those “A-ha!” moment texts the other day.

Being an online business owner is tough sometimes, especially when your online business is trying to sell a self-development product to strippers.  There will always be a critic, and we certainly have our fair share of those!  Sometimes it is disheartening to read a comment from someone who thinks that we are trying to “hustle” our peers.  Granted, it takes a small minded person to think that way but nevertheless we are always making efforts to remain the most credible Stripper School on the planet!!

So back to my “A-ha!!” moment…sometimes it only takes the smallest gesture of gratitude to make someone’s day.  I was having a less than stellar day when I received a text from Lindsay, one of our SuperStripper Bootcamp participants.  It said “Thanks to Strip and Grow Rich I sold 7 Champagne Rooms last night.   I am so glad that I met you and Donovan.  You both have helped me in countless ways.”

It was so simple, but yet so powerful.

Helping women enrich their lives is why we are here.