How the Sex Writing Sausage Gets Made #1: Interview with a Strip Club CEO

The things that get left on the editing room floor

It’s hard out there for a strip club CEO (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)

Recently, I got an email from a guy who works with RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., which, if you don’t know, is the only publicly traded company that owns strip clubs. (Look for it on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK.) The guy who sent me the email wanted to know if I wanted to write about the fact RCI would be holding its next earnings call on Twitter Spaces; it was the first company to do so, he said. And they were doing other tech-y things, too. A platform that was an OnlyFans for strippers, and an NFT program for VIP members that involved arty images of hot chicks.

Sure, I said. Why not, I said.

That produced this story for Forbes.com: “Meet the Strip Club CEO Who Wants to Get Guys Off Their Phones and into the Clubs.” I hadn’t posted to my Forbes blog in a long time for a variety of reasons, but there’s something about the platform that keeps drawing me back to it. (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” as I like to say.) Anyway, I got on the phone with the guy who had emailed me about RCI, and he reminded me that in 2015 I had written about one of RCI’s strip clubs on my Forbes blog. That club was Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami, which either is or was the biggest strip club in America. I’ve been to a lot of strip clubs, from Los Angeles to New York City, but Tootsie’s was next level. As I mention in that story, “The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances.” I had forgotten about that fact, and several other details in the piece, like the dancer who made $800 to $1,000 a night who told me: “I have a lot of spunk.” It made me glad that I’m a writer, so I have a record of these things that I have done, and these people that I have met, and these things that I have seen. According to the guy on the phone, a guy who works for RCI started working for the company because he read my story on the Forbes website. You’re welcome, I guess?

Anyway, I ended up talking to the CEO of RCI, which informed the story. A few things he said got left on the cutting room floor. Like how they were doing the Twitter Spaces earnings call because “retail shareholders get left out of this whole process, really.” And how their NFTs mean guys don’t have to worry about getting caught carrying a strip club VIP card in their wallet and young guys don’t carry wallets anyway. And how when I asked him if, as someone had suggested on Twitter, Elon Musk would be on their earnings call, he said, “Oh, man, I would only hope.”

In any case, at one point he told me, which I put in the story: “We’re really in the cash flow business.” This is typical of the C-suite guys I’ve interviewed who run risque businesses. Sure, the work is sexy, but at the end of the day, it’s all about money.

You can read the full story here.

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