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.

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On September 17th, 2009 Kellie Vaughn filed a claim with PayPal claiming that she had not received the book and that I was a scammer. I scanned and emailed her a copy of the receipt that is shown here at which point she stopped replying all my emails and messages. She esclated the claim on PayPal and continued through with it despite my evidences.

Later PayPal decided that since I did not have a tracking number to show that the book had been delivered, her claim wins and I lose. PayPal took $84.00 from my account and gave it to her. Needless to say Kellie Vaughn never replied to any of my messages or emails on PayPal and/or eBay.

She knows that the item was mailed and she most certainly has received it. She thought she can file a claim with PayPal and get both the money and the book and she did.

At this point there is nothing I can do except writing this post. I am out of $84.00. I hope Kellie Vaughn’s future employer, friend, or family reads this and know her better for any future business or personal interactions with her.

Kellie Vaughn is a student living in Orland Park, Illinois.

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Right now Bam Directory is holding a $100 cash prize contest in which two $50 cash gifts will be given to 2 randomly chosen new subscribers.

How to enter:

• Go to Bam Directory
• Sign up for the Once A Month coupon code (through homepage or footer area)
• That’s it.

Rules:

• Only one email sign up per each participant. I will check for same IP addresses and same names before choosing the winner.
• The name of person signed up has to be verifiable (to make sure there is 1 sign up per user)
• Must have a PayPal account.
• The raffle is open until midnight Friday on October 2nd.

Update: The winners are as follow:

lou????ns@shadesshuttersblinds.com

alast?????ight@outrider.com

Thank you all for participating.

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It sounds like an obvious point (being remarkable is important). It is an obvious point, but it is very hard to make risky decisions and to be willing to go to the edges. It is easy to want to capitalize on what is already working and not pursue new innovation.

Some great lesson / quotes from the book:

• Dont be boring
• Safe is risky (my favorite)
• very good, is bad. Seth argues that unlike what people think the opposite to remarkable is not “bad”. The opposite to remarkable is “very good”.

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Here is a good example: I ordered a keyboard from Amazon.com last week. When I got it in mail it wasn’t working. I went to Amazon.com and in my account history I found the latest order. There was a return button right beside it. I went through one or two pages of explaining why I wanted to return the item. At the end Amazon said that they will ship a new one out for me the next day and I will only have to return the defective one (return postage paid by Amazon) during the next 30 days. They didn’t even wait for me to send the defective item back. This was amazing. Also my original shipping was via USPS. The new item was shipped via UPS which would cost Amazon even more.

There are numerous similar stories about Zappos.com (which Amazon actually just bought out a while ago).

If you have an online store have a liberal return policy. It will bring in so much more money than you might lose by one or two extra shipping cost. Besides, if it was your fault (the item wasn’t working, it was broken in main, etc) why should the customer deal with it? If you have mail insurance and want to claim it, do it yourself. Give the customer a new product or return their money and keep them happy.

Always remember that attaining a new customer is 5 times as harder and more expensive than keeping the current ones.

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The number one reasons convincing online shoppers to shop at a website is confidence and trust. One way to help your visitors betters trust your ecommerce is by showing a trust logo or seal. Following is a list of the most well known trust logos/seals available. The list is not in any particular order.

SSL Certificates and Seals:

• Comodo: Comodo has many different trust logos to choose from. I particularly like their “Corner of Trust” seal. I personally use this seal on my ecommerce sites.

• Verisign: VeriSign is probably the most reliable one. Sites such as Bank of America and NewEgg.com use that.

• McAfee: McAfee’s special deal is that if you have them thier trust logo also appears beside all search engine searches if customers have McAfee virus scan software on their computer. They bought the company behind Hacker Safe seal and in my opinion made their biggest mistake of changing the graphics to McAfee. Hacker Safe was already a well established seal in everyone’s mind.

• Thawte: They are also a very well known SSL certificate provider.
• Starfield: I used to use them for a while. Their prices are on the lower side.

Privacy & Customer Support Seals:

• BBB Online: This is great to show your customers that you truly provide quality customer service. If you don’t know about them go to their website and learn more.
• eTrust: As the name sounds like, eTrust is a privacy policy certification. This is great for websites that sell softwares or gather a lot of customer information when a purchase is made.

I personally use Comodo right now and have put my application for BBOnline certificate. I believe this is enough for smaller websites. If your sale are over $100,000 a month then getting eTrust and a Hacker Proof seal would be definitely worth it.

The point is to give your customers the trust and confidence they are looking for in your website. Once you get couple trust seals (real ones , not something you make yourself) the lower the return becomes on getting more trust seals. However if your number of sales are high enough they will definitely pay off.

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- They made the club 24 hours now. you have to pay for a special key but that is understandable.

- They seemed to have hired new trainers. I will definitely try to work with one of them once I go back in a week or two.

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This is what I did:

1. Took the Memory Cards (RAM) out and turned on the computer. It beeped so the problem was not the motherboard
2. Put one memory card in to test. Turned the computer on and it worked.
3. Put the second one in, the computer didn’t work.
4. Replaced the second Memory card and we are good to go.

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Many of us, Iranians, felt let down by BBC. Even many conspiracy theories came out on the reasons why BBC has made this shift. Shame on you BBC.

I, as a former daily (hourly) BBC and BBC Persian reader have moved the BBC bookmark to the bottom of my News bookmarks.

On another note I would like to thank Voice of America (VOA) for covering all the events in Iran.Please keep it up. We need more news agencies that does that.

For those of you who are interested my News bookmarks are as follow:

• Gooya News (Farsi)
• Balatarin (Farsi)
• VOA Persian (Farsi)
• CNN
• NY Times
• Democracy Now
• BBC

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This is brand new, not refurbished or returned item. Absolutely great value for a tablet.

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