42,000 Square Feet of Confidence and Power In Fargo

A critical mass is defined as the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. It makes perfect sense then, that Jon Taffer uses the term quite often when explaining why his newest project has exploded onto the scene in Fargo, N. D. In this case, the smallest amount of material needed in fact was quite a bit for a bar property. To detonate a blast heard all over N orth Dakota, the critical mass required was 42,000 square feet packed with enough concepts and ideas to set off a chain reaction of sustained crowds and revenue.

Before Taffer and company dropped this giant party bomb on Fargo, you night say the shell was already there. It just needed some plutonium. Enter the marketing laboratory of Taffer Dynamics Inc. 

Starting Over
The initial investor partners of what would become the on-premise behemoth The Hub (unrelated to NCB’s weekly e-newsletter ofthe same name) hired Taffer’s firm Taffer Dynamics as their consultant, to determine the best use of the existing real estate — a failed nightclub property called Playmakers in Fargo — and make it successful. “I didn’t have a chance of making the building smaller,” Taffer says. “I was stuck with the huge size that it is. I was stuck with the location. Playmakers was a business that didn’t have a great reputation in town and had failed for two years, losing 40,000 - 80,000 a month. “We came in and put together all the concepts, the business model, the financials into a business plan and pulled our people into it.” Those people included Jones Baker Design from Dallas, Berg Architecture, WyattMagnum and Magnum Music Group and Doug Black on tech matters. Jon Taffer is co-owner of the property,along with unnamed partners, and he’s president and CEO of StarMark Hospitality Inc., along with StarMark co-owner and vice president Kerry Fernholz. StarMark manages The Hub.

The Concepts
Cut to November 20. T he Hub opened anddid $1 million in business in the first five weeks, Taffer says. “Two weeks ago we consumed 160 bottles of Malibu,” he says. “We’re selling between 400 and 600 Sake Bombs a night; we’re drawing about 2,000 people each weekend night.” It may be easiest to consider The Hub to be something of a self-contained club city. Other markets are building entertainment districts with a number of venues and shopping, but The Hub is a different breed. It’s seven clubs under one roof, with one cover for the whole shebang. I t’s not terribly uncommon to have multiple concepts in one package, but few offer as much in one spot as does The Hub. It includes The Fan Club (sports bar), Prime Steakhouse & Ultralounge, Cadillac Ranch Bar & Dancehall (country), MonkeyBar (hard rock), Forbidden Asian Pub, Vibe (dance club) — and The Venue (a 1,600-seatlive music hall). And The Hub even has The Bottle Barn, a spirits shop. Each is distinct and harbors a strong sense of individual identity. “You walk into Cadillac Ranch, and you have all the cowboy hats and all that going on, with high-energy dancing,” T affer says. “You go into Monkey Bar, and it’s all stocking hats and tattoos and headbanging rock ‘n’ roll, and the bartender’s walking up and down the bar pouring liquor into people’s mouths like birds in a nest. You walk over to Forbidden Asian Pub, and it’s all really well dressed girls, looking very sexy and beautiful. You go downstairs to Vibe, and the dance floor is rocking. You go into The FanClub, and everybody’s screaming and yelling at a sporting event. The environments are totally different.” Demographically, The Hub overall covers ages 21-45, Taffer says. Ten or 15 percentof the overall crowd on a weekend night is over 35 years old, he estimates.Taffer refers to the “predatory power” of targeting six different psychographic groups with specific entertainment formats across common demographics in this $3.5 million dollar property. “Demographics are different than psychographics,” he says. “We have a country audience at Cadillac Ranch, and when you walk in, you better be true to that lifestyle. Every uniform, every song, every product and every promotion we do is respectful to the country lifestyle. When you go into Monkey Bar, you’ll never hear a Madonna song; it’s all about Metallica and heavy metal. The waitresses are walking around in torn-upfishnets and piercings. “Every room has a really deep conceptual integrity to it, and that’s what makes it work. If it didn’t, it would become one big building of sameness.” One thing is quite certain: The Hub is ideal for those with short attention spans— in a good way. Put differently, it’s barhoppingparadise, with a healthy amount ofcross-pollination among the diverse groups of patrons. “At 11 o’clock, you can walk into Monkey Bar, and there’s about 10 cowboy hats in there, and they’re listening to headbanger rock ‘n’ roll and partying out,” Taffer says.“Sometimes you walk into Cadillac Ranch,and the rockers are in there. We’re at a point now where we’re running sub-lines, with lines to get into Cadillac Ranch and lines to get in Monkey Bar some nights.”

A Funeral and a Rebirth
The concepts within The Hub themselves, one might assume, would captivate enough local attention to market themselves. But Taffer Dynamics has been at the game far too long to just open the doors of The Hub without creating a lot more excitement. Using a number of proven techniques the firm has used in other markets for other concepts, it drove an unparalleled buzz of pre-opening word-of-mouth all over Fargo. While promotions and marketing for the several concepts at The Hub are handled individually, with concept-specific elements and tactics, garnering excitement locally in anticipation of the opening of The Hub did require a few ideas that applied to the entire facility as a whole. It didn’t begin with a grand opening. It didn’t even begin with a soft opening. “We closed Playmakers by having a funeral,” T affer says. “We had radio jocks giving eulogies. As people walked out, within minutes, ‘TOP SECRET ’ was put on the doors.” Taffer is referring to a classic Taffer Dynamics attention-getter that’s worked with other concepts the firm has done in other markets — wrapping the entire facility in a cover, printed on which in huge letters were the words “TOP SECRET .” This viral marketing approach drove curiosity and worked the local media’s interest. “The media started calling, saying, ‘What are you guys doing?’” T affer says. “Our posture was, ‘We can’t tell you. It’s top secret.’” The next buzz-driving element pre-opening was a Preview Party at Prime that was invitation-only, the Thursday night before the Friday opening night. “This was a very swanky, high-class party,” Director of Marketing and Public Relations Tiffany Olsen says. “We had a party with 5,000 tickets given out. We never said what it was for. We just gave the date and the time and said it was going to be the newest entertainment destination in the upper Midwest. “There were lines out the door, and people were begging to get the tickets.” Olsen and company also invited local media into the building that Thursday afternoon, so that reports hit on local TV news that night. And then, of course, there was Kid Commando (see sidebar). All this viral marketing has been augmented by a smart radio schedule. “The way we have marketed this building is really unique,” Taffer says. “Most people who would open a destination like this would spend $50,000 on radio; we spent about $8,000. It only launched a week before we opened, and the radio spots never mentioned the grand opening. It targeted (nightly promotions) right from day one.” “That’s very unique for a multi-milliondollar project like this,” Taffer says. “Most people are inclined to chase it with a lot of money and marketing. We had the confidence not to do that. We had the money and could have spent it if we wanted to. We didn’t do that.” 

Maintaining the Energy
Since opening, key promo nights have included a Ladies Night facility-wide on Thursdays, working with local sponsors and radio stations, “making it a haven for all the females in town and all the males as well,” Olsen says. Regarding the sponsors, Vibe has a major video system with sponsor images and audio running. Friday Night Live at The Venue brings live music, with a D J mixing during intermissions to keep the energy high. Every Saturday night brings live music to Monkey Bar as well. One of Taffer’s tried-and-true tools used at the opening of the property was “negative cover.” For a $3 cover at the door, each guest gets a $5 drink ticket. “It’s not negative to us, from a cost standpoint,” Taffer says. “After a couple of weeks, we pushed the hours back. Now you only get that coupon before 10 p.m.; afterward you pay (normal cover).” Of course, The Hub has to get those people to the door first. “The building has such critical mass,” Taffer says. “We’re on six radio stations. We’re on a country station, two rock stations, a dance station, a sports station — constantly, 52 weeks a year. Our market reach is so predatory by nature. We’re in every demo. At midnight on a Friday night, when you walk into Vibe, there are people 45 years old dancing next to people 21, and it works.” One example Taffer offers to illustrate that “critical mass” of the facility is its Weekend Wednesdays promotion. “We had no promotions on Wednesday night,” Taffer says. “It wasn’t a very good night for us; our big nights were Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I drove by a competitor down the street called Buck’s. There was a line around the building. The next morning, I woke up and said, ‘We’re going to empty that building.’ We called Vacation Adventures, bought 200 trips to Jamaica, switched to low drink prices, $5 at the door and put together a series of radio spots on six stations that said ‘The Hub is giving away 16 trips to Jamaica every Wednesday night.’” Management spread those 16 trips out, with four apiece given away in Monkey Bar, Cadillac Ranch, The Fan Club and Vibe every hour at 10, 11, 12 and 1 a.m. “In two weeks, we’re doing over $20,000 on Wednesday nights, and the competitor is empty. That’s the power of a facility like this. The critical mass is overwhelming.” Most of The Hub’s competitors are independent bars and clubs. “It’s not a conceptually deep market,” Taffer says. StarMark Hospitality also owns the Hooters North Dakota franchise (soon opening Hooters at The Hub at the end of the month) as well as the Avalon E vents Center, a historic 4-floor downtown catering and events center, doing upscale weddings and social and corporate events, and Renelli’s Pizza, a freestanding delivery pizza operation. Its other newest concept is NYPD (New York Pizza Delivery). “We’ve got a strong footing in town, and it’s all based around The Hub,” Taffer says.  

Managing the Mass
Within The Hub, StarMark has established each concept as a separate operating entity. “We’ve set up a very specific financial model,” Taffer explains. “The budgets are departmental; each concept has its own departmental P & L. I t has a general manager, a staff, labor and product costs that are budgeted and promotions for that room that are set up. We run each as an individual business. Different rooms open at different times during the week. “We have accountability, and that’s the magic word. There’s accountability for the numbers within Monkey Bar, for example, at a general manager level, for his average check, sales, service quality and profit margin. Then we have the corporate staff at StarMark.” Included in that corporate staff is Olsen, whose department runs all the promotions in all the rooms — which, of course, brings us inevitably back to marketing and promotions, one of the strongest suits of The Hub. The conceptual integrity of the individual concepts carries over also into its promotions, right down to even the finest detail. “There’s certain fonts for certain rooms, and there are certain looks,” Olsen explains. “When we do promotions, we only do it with people who fit that room. E very poster is individual for that specific room; there’s not one mass promotion for the whole bar.” The Hub holds one liquor license across the board, which is essential for the interconnectivity of the several concepts. A guest may buy a drink in Cadillac Ranch, for example, and walk right into Monkey Bar with it. The pricing for drinks and the liquid offerings is largely the same in all the concepts, with a few exceptions. Prime offers some upscale Martinis and wines that the other rooms don’t have. Forbidden’s hallmark is its Sake Bombs, which are unique to it within The Hub. One fun and distinguishing factor for each bar is glassware. The Fan Club uses football-themed glasses, and Monkey Bar has monkey-themed glasses, for instance. Tooters and neon-lined trays, as well as waitstaff serving beer on foot, help round out the beverage offerings. The Hub’s rooms feature no drink menus, except at Prime. “It’s too much of a madhouse,” Taffer says. “Prime is different. “You’re sitting in Prime, sipping wine or Martinis, and there’s jazz playing, and you’re looking out the window into The Fan Club, and people are screaming and yelling and their arms are moving.” To be sure, The Hub is a paradox — a study in contrasts that is at the same time totally cohesive. Party on, Fargo.