darqly:

I managed a cafe for nearly 2 years in the past. The advantage we had was POWER. We were hooked up to NESCO in Jos, which trumps PHCN hands down ANY day, so we had little use for our generator. Try to cut down on your spending on diesel by seeking alternative power sources, I know this is difficult sha,

Secondly, explore other value-added services:

Phone Apps, Mp3s, Games, Pc Games,

We once had damage to our V-sat that put us offline for 3 weeks; We opened every single day to love-vendor phones and host UNREAL TOURNAMENT on all our PCs. We peaked on nearly N10,000 per day during that period, without internet services.

Lastly, improve customer service. Get the right people to be your attendants, not stupid pricks who'll make passes at your female customers and be arrogant to the male ones,

darqly:

Lastly, improve customer service. Get the right people to be your attendants, not stupid pricks who'll make passes at your female customers and be arrogant to the male ones,

Hi,

I hope this reply is not too late. However, I think you'll still need it in order to improve the profit margins of the cafe.

First of all, I'll need answers to the following questions to enable me help you better;

1. How many functional PCs are there in the cafe?
2. What bandwidth is he using?
3. How reliable is their ISP?

While waiting for those answers from you, this is what he needs to do immediately. Choose anyone in any order below;

1. Create a "Pick & Win" Bonanza where each person that buys at least a 1hour ticket dips his/her hand into a basket to win a price. The price(s) should be more airtime (i.e. 30mins, 1hr & 3hrs tickets). Put in about 20 free tickets (3hr(4), 1hr (6), 30mins (10). The aim here is to have as many as 20 people win free tickets every day. Make sure you have up to 200 'Please Try Again' tickets in the basket. Exactly 1week to the bonanza date, start advertising within your cafe to walk-in customers that you are going to be giving out 20 free tickets everyday from a certain date(which will be your take off date) and you must give a reason for doing this which in this case will be for the Xmas celebrations (you can still use it as a New Year's gift). Don't give the details until 1day before the main day. This will create anxiety and buzz as in each customer will tell at least 2 or 3 friends.

Don't bother about the first day, you may not make much because people will be there just to see if its for real (you know us 9ja's now) but once they see people winning and most importantly, those that win will certainly tell their friends and you'll begin to notice a steady increase in sales from Mid-day of day 2.

Run this bonanza for 14days or 21days maximum.

Sorry I can't give you actual step-by-step details in this post but I hope you get the message. Now let's move on to the next idea,

2. Offer a never before seen ticket with huge amount of time for a premium fee and make that look exclusive. What I mean is this,  Have a ticket containing up to 48hours or more worth of airtime with 21days or at most 30days validity. Then put the price at N1,200 (that's like N31 per hour). Make this ticket available only between your slow hours. In my case I made it available b/w 8am - 9am only.

Now before you ask any question, let me clear something.

This ticket will be useable at any other time of the day but the customer has to buy it b/w that time frame and at least login to activate it. The reason for that is that it allows the customer to come to your cafe early and if he has to login, then he'll at least spend some of the airtime before leaving. Also it stops customers from just buying the time and leaving or worse still asking staff to buy the time and keep for them. (These are from my experiences in trying out this system.) Also I can't give entire details in this post that is why I've summarised it so you can understand.

This tactic alone made me an average of N12,000 daily b/w the hours of 8am - 9am for 2 weeks. I'm not adding what was made throughout the rest of the day.

Let me leave you with these two for now. I hope you can make good use of it.

Remember,  if you don't try it, you'll never know if it'll work in your situation. You don't have anything to loose.

I hope this helps you and any other person who'd like to implement this in his/her cafe.

I've been trying to put together an extensive manual to help fellow cafe owners improve on their cybercafe business.

The most common problems I hear about is Power, Power, Power and then that of ISPs and I totally agree that these are very serious issues but should we continue to complain and make excuses? or should we rather find solutions to the teething problems? you tell me.

I know there are lots and lots of ways to work around these and many other problems and thus make the cybercafe business what we expect it to be.

I can only share what people are interested in. So if you feel this information is useful or will be useful to you or anyone you know, then leave a comment below.

Please Note: When I talked about a manual, I don't want you to think this is a ploy to put up those N5,000 - N9,000 re-hashed reports (copied from other people's info). I'm talking about real life experiences of strategies you can put to good use right away to improve you cybercafe earnings for a premium price of free,  YES, you read that right. It'll be 100% free and the information you'll receive will blow you away.

Was this helpful? then let other cybercafe owners know about it.

Maximum Success To You & Yours in 2G9.

tundecraig:

The cold hard truth is that no matter what you do or don't do the income of a cyber cafe is limited to the number of hours in a day and you can never have more than 24 hours  a day.
Thus if you have 20 computers in your cafe and you charge N100 per hour, all you can make is N48,000 in a day and the reality of course is that you will most likely NEVER make that as there will always be times when a computer or the other is free even if you open 24 hours  a day, 7 days a week.
Most Cafe's close shop after their first year  in operation. Very few stay open for up to 5 years and I  do not know ANY cyber cafe that was operating in 2003 that is still operating (I may be wrong).
There is lots of cashflow in cyber cafe business, but very little profit.
The are only two ways out:

1) Customise your browsing services
2) Add other services such that browsing pulls in less than 5% of your income. Services like Training, E-Commerce services, Web Hosting & Development, Computer Sales, Ebay services, Information products distribution, Online & Merchant Payment services.

tundecraig:

The cold hard truth is that no matter what you do or don't do the income of a cyber cafe is limited to the number of hours in a day and you can never have more than 24 hours a day.
Thus if you have 20 computers in your cafe and you charge N100 per hour, all you can make is N48,000 in a day and the reality of course is that you will most likely NEVER make that as there will always be times when a computer or the other is free even if you open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Most Cafe's close shop after their first year in operation. Very few stay open for up to 5 years and I do not know ANY cyber cafe that was operating in 2003 that is still operating (I may be wrong).
There is lots of cashflow in cyber cafe business, but very little profit.
The are only two ways out:

1) Customise your browsing services
2) Add other services such that browsing pulls in less than 5% of your income. Services like Training, E-Commerce services, Web Hosting & Development, Computer Sales, Ebay services, Information products distribution, Online & Merchant Payment services.