“Hookah!“, is a bar/lounge/dance club/restaurant place in Lafayette, Indiana. They have  been there for quite many years. I wrote a review about them a long time ago on HookahLounge.net and here I am writing another. Before writing this review I should mention that I have been told I’m better off not going to Hookah! anymore by the employees there without being given any reason. I’m sure that affects my opinions below.

Great Website

First thing, their new website is great. Good job. There are still sections of it not working and a decent number of typos in there, but overall I like the design.

Fairly Good Hookahs

I like the fact that they offer Starbuzz tobacco (at a little expensive price). They also make fairly good hookahs. This is probably their main advantage against Egyptian Cafe (the other hookah lounge in town).

Great Food

Their food was great when I used to go there and fairly cheap. I hope it has stayed the same.

Not So Good Music

Smoking a hookah is not about sitting down and smoking out of a water piper at all. It is all about the atmosphere, people with whom you smoke with, the conversations, and the atmosphere. The music at hookah is very loud at nights (when most customers go). You’d have to scream from your side of table for the other side to hear and the music is always the same Trance songs. You can go one Friday and be sure you’ll here the same songs next Friday and Saturday.

The rest of the issues below have mostly to do with the owner and the way the place is managed.

Just Because You Own the Place Doesn’t Mean You Should Manage It

The owner runs the place himself. At times he has hired “managers” but even when there is a manager on board he runs the place himself. That would fine (after all he owns the place) if he had the required skills to do so. During the times I used to go there I saw serious management issues. This included managing the staff, their timing, their incentives, as well as keeping a full inventory at all times and taking care of customers.

The owner rarely saw the long term affects of his decisions. He always looked at how much money a decision would make him in short term. For example, whenever he ran newspaper ads he looked at the weekend right after that ad to see if any more customers would show up and when they didn’t he would talk about how the newspaper sucked or how they ripped him off.

On other times, if someone was looking for a place to take a large crowd or event, not only would the owner not give them discounts or incentives, but he would talk about how he should charge them more because he is providing a space that they otherwise would not have. That would be true if he had no competition, but Lafayette and West Lafayette are certainly not short on restaurants. Lo and behold another hookah lounge opened in Lafayette called Egyptian Cafe about a little over a year ago and took almost all of the Hookah!’s regular customers.

Note: Newspaper and radio ads are to be run for long term advertising campaigns, not short term.

Educate Yourself, Read Books

If you do choose to run your own business/restaurant, accept the fact that you don’t know everything and learn. The best way would be to read books. I highly suggest the books listed on top of this page.

Don’t Be One Size Fit None

Hookah! tries to be a hookah lounge, bar, restaurant, and dance club. The owner wants the place to appeal to high rollers of town as well as students as well as Purdue professors. He wants to compete with the lowest priced bar specials on campus and constantly complains how his margins are not high enough.

The lesson is don’t be one size fit none. Appeal to few market segments, make them happy, and create more loyal customers (that’s where the real money is, not the impulse random customers). I suggest giving an international feel to the place and offer a lounge with cultural diversity and attractions.

Along the same lines another mistake is the choice of music at Hookah!. When I used to go there, international songs (Arabic, Spanish, Italian, etc) were the least number of songs played. It was always either same Buddha Bar CDs in the afternoon or same Trance music at night every night.  Customers go to a hookah lounge because they are looking for something other than average bar/lounge/club music and atmosphere. They are looking for the cultural experience. So why not give them just that with better music and decor?

Have a Business Plan

When I went to Hookah! I always got the feeling that the owner didn’t know how he wanted to grow the business and didn’t have long term plans. He would come up with a new idea every couple days and get really excited on how it would help his business improve incredibly. He sometimes implemented them and sometimes didn’t, but he didn’t have a plan on how he wanted to expand the business a year in advance. These impluse changes included small things like buying a Nintendo Wii for the place to a $6000 pair of disco lights to adding a whole new storefront and dance floor (probably over $40,000 cost) to the business.

It’s good to always be improving and thinking of new ideas, however there has to be a plan and good analysis behind it. To get into a new lease agreement for a whole new store front one needs to study the market very well and take into consideration the possibility of it not making money at all. I think the owner should have at least hired an analyst for this job besides asking the employees and customers as suppose to only the latter.

It has now been almost a year that Hookah opened its new dance floor (called Blue135) and I can say for sure that it has had much less success than the owner expected.

Value Your Customers

It costs 4 times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep one. I would say this is the biggest mistake that Hookah! has made and continues to make. They do not keep their customers happy or offer incentives for them to keep coming back. There is a culture of “who makes us more money right now” at Hookah! instead of “how can we create loyal customers who keep coming back”. I know people who easily spent $1000 a month at Hookah! and never got anything as simple as a complementary free hookah from the owner and if any of the employees did such a thing for any customer he/she would face an angry owner and possibly being fired.

On a personal note: I am Iranian and the owner is Lebanese. There were countless times that I went to Hookah! with my friends and the owner came up to us and complain how Iran is destroying Lebanon by supporting Hezbollah and how Iran is evil and all of that. Seriously? Did he expect us to write a letter to Iran and have it fixed? Or did he just want to make sure we wouldn’t have a good time at Hookah!?

Don’t Bad Mouth Every Other Business Around You

If you want to compete with businesses around you, be better than them and offer something they can’t offer; don’t bash them all the time and talk bad behind them to all your customers. The owner was always talking bad behind one of the local restaurants accusing some of putting water in their alcohol and others of hiring illegal workers and others of using the store as a front for other activities. I think it would have served him much better if he had even a few friends in the local bars and restaurants.