You wouldn't actually open a bar.... would you?

[Guest]

To complement the "Advice on opening a bar...." thread AND avoid taking that one off topic:

 

Well, you wouldn't actually open a Thai gay bar anyway would you?

 

Most of us are mature single males & I suspect the majority have the funds to open a gay bar. Money could be raised by liquidating a few investments or re-mortgaging the house etc. No problem if you get a decent return on capital & your ownership is secure is there?

 

Now I would love to have a gay gogo bar. However, only as a hobby business - in the same way Roman Abramovich owns a football club. He has more money than he will ever need to live on and Chelsea is for entertainment. I wouldn't buy a football club, but would love a gogo bar.

Incidentally, owning both wouldn't work. Sooner or later you end up on the front page of The Sun: "Owner of ***** United pictured with nude male dancers in gogo bar".

 

Sadly my finances don't stretch that far and any modest sums of spare cash have to be invested so that I can hopefully retire to Thailand one day.

A proper return is required on that investment, which for me totally rules our a gogo bar.

 

Luckily the owners of places like Funny Boys do an excellent job already, so I can enjoy visiting as a customer.

 

Still it's nice to talk about how we would run one.

[Guest]

Well, you wouldn't actually open a Thai gay bar anyway would you?

 

LOL I am one of the nuts who have wanted to do this for a few years. I go up and down on it but I think it would be fun to open a bar. As I have said, it would not be in the hopes of getting rich, but more to enjoy trying to make a success out of something I am sure is hard to do.

 

That being said, I have never taken the leap and the few offers I have made for bars over the years have been turned down. I guess I can't afford the price of admission to this elite group.

[Bob]

LOL I am one of the nuts who have wanted to do this for a few years. I go up and down on it but I think it would be fun to open a bar.

 

Glad you said it first. 99% of us would be friggin' nuts to own/operate a bar or almost any business in Thailand. I've known too many guys who owned bars (you know, just the drinking and food variety) elsewhere to even suggest that most falang could make a go of it. You've got to be there all the time, you'd have a higher likelihood of screwing up your liver, you'd begin to hate some of your regular customers, and, most of all, you'd absolutely go nuts with all of the administrative (staff personal issues, paying bills, guessing what the public wants, etc.) issues you'd deal with. Now add to all of that the problems/issues that would be added if you're also acting as a pimp (I don't like that word but it's probably an accurate one).

 

Never forget the old axiom we all know - the only way to make a small fortune in Thailand is to invest a larger one. With respect to the boybar business, I doubt if there are more than a very small percentage of owners that have ever actually made money at it. There are exceptions, of course [Lumsden comes to mind - but can you even imagine all the hours and issues he's had to deal with over the last 15 years? My god, I wouldn't wish that on anybody!], but if you believe you'd be one of them, you're dreaming in my view.

 

For most people that open a restaurant or a bar, it's simply "in their blood." Pray to god (buddha) you don't catch the same disease....hehe.

[Gaybutton]

Never forget the old axiom we all know - the only way to make a small fortune in Thailand is to invest a larger one.

That's definitely the truth! I think one of the mistakes that farang bar owners have made when trying to run a bar in Pattaya is they first opened the bar and only then did they start really finding out just what had gotten themselves into. I think another mistake was when farang would open a bar, but entrust a Thai guy, even experienced ones, to run it for them. It just doesn't work that way. The successful farang bar owners are the ones who truly knew what they were doing and made sure all bases were covered. And even then there were several eventual failures.

 

In other words, I would not recommend getting into it unless you can afford to lose the whole kit and caboodle.