How Matt McTeague’s Software Is Transforming the Adult Industry | Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems here in South Florida. My name is Allen Kopelman, also known as the Merchant Maverick. I'm one of the foremost, I guess, experts on merchant services since I've been doing it for 25 years. And today We have a guest on the show who's also a business partner with Nationwide, Matt, Matt Matigue, who's from Xtreme Marketing and BoothPoint. And Matt has some— does a lot of interesting things. We've run across each other at the adult shows over the years. And, you know, and adult nightclubs have unique needs, you know. As far as what they need in their club. And there's a lot of things going on in the adult industry right now. We're going to dive in and talk to Matt about that today. So Matt, introduce yourself to the B2B listeners.

Yeah, well, as you, as you said, it's Matt McTeague. I've been, uh, in the adult entertainment club business for 20-plus years, you know, started with, uh, the infamous Xtreme Magazine Got into publishing that, you know, covering 13 states in the Northeast. Um, got us in pretty much every gentlemen's club in the— that area. Moved on to the Extreme 401, uh, strip club finder app that, uh, covered the whole country for many years. Um, was free on Apple and Android. And then, uh, we expanded to, uh, full digital marketing with, uh, Strip Club Marketing Pros. Handle everything from you know, SEO website, social media management, photography. And then, uh, you know, the main thing that we're, we're talking about today is, uh, our BoothPoint software that we have distribution rights to in the United States, Canada, Mexico, uh, which is specifically for, uh, gentlemen's clubs. Covers, uh, you know, encompasses every aspect of POS, dancer management, staff management, etc., uh, co-paired with the, the original software of CoverJack, which kind of takes over the DJ position in the gentlemen's club, calling the girls up, calling them down, bringing up the, you know, playing the music, etc. So, you know, been doing this for a long time. We got a lot of experience in a lot of different fields of this industry. And as Allen mentioned, yes, it's very specific.

I know, but I'm saying like every year and then, you know, the emails that you get from the people who put on the adult show, you know, there's constant oversight on clubs and clubs are constantly getting sued for everything from advertising, dancers suing clubs over their hours that they worked or didn't work, you know, all kinds of different lawsuits. And, you know, this is subject matter. And going to these, um, the adult nightclub show every year. They call it the Ed Show, right? Yeah, erotic dancer. And I always thought it's funny that it's called ED.

Yeah, I know. First thing I'm going on here, that, right?

You think about the ED Show, it's erotic dancer, not ED. A bunch of men walking around every, every year at this show, you know. And I've been to it probably over a dozen times, the, the show over the years, every, every, every year I would say there's always a discussion about, you know, lawsuits.

Okay.

And so one of the things we want to dive into today is recently there's a lawsuit. Can Google it. Two Denver strip clubs were, you know, in a lawsuit, was over, you know, $14 million. So tell us, like, and, and, you know, clubs need protection. But one of the things that I find, and probably Matt has the same discussions with people, is when you're buying, you know, a point of sale system or you're buying some sort of management system, you know, this is— these systems like Matt's system is designed to protect your business, you know, and it's important, you know, business owners need to protect their business and not be cheap on technology. Right? Because when you're cheap on technology, you're not protecting your business, whether it's your alcohol for your alcohol sales, food sales, hours people are working. Even a regular restaurant we've seen get sued over, you know, hourly wage and tips and all that. So let's talk about— let's, you know, dive in that, talk about how— and I want to kind of expand on— protect their business.

Well, what you just said too, not only just being cheap on technology, but just being, you know, we see a lot of anti-technology, right? Right.

Right.

You know, people want to stick to writing everything on a piece of paper at the end of the night, you know, which can get lost or you're not able to, you know, verify, or you have, you know, the dancer's stage name on there, not her legal name. So how can you prove that this money was given to, you know, so-and-so?

You can't, right?

You know, and, you know, These lawsuits are going around everywhere. They've been going on for what, maybe 10 years now?

Oh yeah, years.

For this misclassification.

No, and another thing, like, your software helps us. When you talk about paper, I've gone into clubs that we'll do the credit card processing for, and you'll see they'll have like a clipboard in the office that has a picture of the girl's driver's license or ID and just a piece of paper filled out. And if the police, ICE, or The human trafficking people show up, they go, okay, we want to see everybody who's working, and you're handing them a clipboard. Why not just hand them over an iPad?

Yeah, everything's right there.

Or your phone and go, here, look, here's all the people in the club, and they can walk around and verify who's there.

Yeah, our software has that ability to have the scanned IDs, passports, contracts, complete records of their work history, when they clocked in, when they clocked out, what they did, etc.. And, you know, not only does it save you paperwork, but it saves you time trying to track your paperwork internally too, you know, sitting there adding up receipts at the end of the day. But, you know, going back to the lawsuit, yeah, it's, you know, something's going on a lot. And, you know, with this recent one that you just mentioned, it's not just dancers, it's, you know, DJs, house moms, which is kind of, you know, another level to this. That wasn't there before either, you know. Right. So not only does our system help, you know, with the dancer end, but now you have a DJ software that can essentially replace a DJ. You don't have to worry about him suing you, you know. But going back to, you know, the dancer end of things, when they do these lawsuits, the lawyers rely on the fact that you are a club that just has a stack of paperwork and you're not organized, right?

Right.

You know, they, they rely on— you're not going to be able to prove when this entertainer was there, how much you paid her, when they were paid to the T, you know, what they did for that, etc. You know, a lot of people, a lot of clubs just have, you know, oh, she did 10 dances. When did she do them?

You know, right?

How long were they each? How much was she paid out for each? You know, What time does she clock in? What time does she clock out? You know, so with our software, you're able to, one, be able to see exactly when she clocked in, she paid a house fee, not when she clocked out. You're able to see exactly what time she went into every room, what her splits were, whether it's lap dance, VIP, etc. And she gets a, you know, a full Z-Read printout at the end of the night that she can have a copy of, sign, approve. And the whole nine, you know. And this is proven fact with one of our clients who actually had to face and settle a lawsuit recently. They got hit for 3 years of back wages for dancers on misclassification, and they've had our software for the last 2 years. So they were able to go in there and show the work history for every single dancer that was part of that lawsuit as far as what they were paid, when they came in, exactly, you know, how much work they did, etc. And because of that, they, you know, they were ordered not to have to pay out for those 2 years of using our system. They only had to pay out for the first year, which is a, you know, saving grace for a lot of these clubs. And this is, you know, one of the first times that this has been able to really happen, in my knowledge. Um, so making that— yeah, like you said, making that investment in technology and protecting yourself is, you know, uh, kind of a proven fact here.

I think kind of the next move for clubs is going to be not just giving the dancers and, you know, employ other employees that are contractors cash, but probably switching to a more electronic type of a system for that as well. You know, and even though they don't really want to do that, I think that it's going to be necessary if people want to stay in business in the future.

Yeah, yeah, of course. And especially too, you have a younger generation that don't even— that doesn't carry around cash anymore either, right? Starting to fill up these clubs more and more, you know, and it becomes an inconvenient on top of, you know, trying to cash management and record everything. But then now maybe you're potentially losing customers for not having that ability to, to take cards, or you're a cash-only business, right?

Well, I'm talking about like paying out the employees, like getting all, you know, like I've talked to clubs and they're like, you know, for years we didn't send out 1099s to the dancers and the other 1099 people, you know, we didn't do that. Now they're doing it. It's like I talk to people all the time, I'm like, if you're a 1099 worker Right. What does it matter what, what you're doing? You're a dancer, you're a DJ, you're an entertainer, you're what you're selling, you're a salesperson, right? No matter what, you should just incorporate and have that person pay your corporation, right? And then that way you have some corporate protection yourself, even if you're a single person. You have this corporation veil and you can deduct, better deduct, better ways to deduct like your expenses, your phone, your outfits, your whatever it is that you need for your job.

Makeup, hair, nails, all part of it.

Right. You could, you can, you could deduct a lot of things and probably save a ton of money even though maybe you weren't paying so much taxes before or no taxes or whatever. Yeah. You're able to at least control and better and have, you know, pay less tax, you know, because you're operating as a business versus operating as a sole proprietor, you know, a sole entity, a person with on your Social Security number.

Yeah.

And, you know, that, that might be how, you know, these businesses have to do things moving forward and see changes. You know, we also talked about like human trafficking, right? It's a huge subject. And, you know, your software records that and authenticates people's identification, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And it also tracks work visas and things like that. You know, if a visa is expired, it won't let you clock in, you know, give a warning that you need to supply a new one before, you know, next 7 days because it's going to expire, etc.

You know, that's super important because human trafficking is a huge, you know, thing in the news all the time. We talked about a club that got raided recently in Tampa, and the owner or managers were charged with human trafficking.

Yeah. And they, they do have those, uh, what, down there in Florida where you guys are, they do have that law in place where you do have to have everything on file, right? They have to come— if they come in there, you have to be able to present every single dancer's information on file. You know, and that can be complicated if you're sitting there with copies of things, whereas our system will have a whole list of them all right there with all their information. You can print out for them if you needed to, you know.

Oh yeah, I mean, I've seen—

I've—

I was talking to a club owner once and they were like, yeah, they closed us down for like an hour and a half, 2 hours in the middle of the rush. And, you know, we're in there scrambling around trying to get all the You know, everybody's copies of IDs. People didn't have their ID on them. Yeah, they had to go find the copies in the office. And, you know, that can create a bit interruption of your business, you know, for, for different types of things. And also protecting against lawsuits. Nobody likes lawsuits.

Yeah, exactly. And the loss of revenue having to close down like that, you know. When you, you brought that up and kind of remind me of another point as well about our systems. Our, our system is in-house, so it's not in the cloud, you know, where I've ran into clubs that are dealing with other systems that are cloud-based. But, you know, in today's day and age, you know, your internet goes down, you know, with your credit card readers, you're still able, you know, you have your data lines that you can still chime into and process, but your POS, you can't sell drinks, you can't do anything like that. I had a club out in Rhode Island, Saturday night, system went down for 2 hours. They couldn't sell anything out of their bar, you know, because it was all cloud-based.

Yeah, whenever we put in point of sale in, uh, clubs, we always talk to the business owner. We're like, listen, you need to get the— a router and where you can put a prepaid 5G, 4G, 5G card in it. So it's a failover. It knows like, oh, your AT&T or your Xfinity went out, Comcast, and then it fails over to the prepaid card that you have linked to your cell phone and you put $50 on it. Most places like never use up the whole $50.

Yeah.

And if you get low, you set it to like $10, then you just go, oh, I'll add— you add more money on. This way you're not paying some— you— a monthly fee for that, you know, the card. But for a couple hours, you're probably only going to use $5 or $6 worth of data. Yeah, but you're going to stay open and, you know, you can't be cheap today. People need to, you know, invest in technology. Technology is the— is the— is here to help your business, save your business from lawsuits, save your business from aggravation. You know, nobody wants aggravation.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's just— it's time to— it's time to adjust and adapt, you know. Or otherwise, you know, you had mentioned prior that, uh, in a previous conversation that, that a lawsuit like this, and the lawsuits just close down the business and completely destroy the business, and just for you not wanting to, you know, adapt and change some modern, modern ways, you know.

Yeah, well, I was telling you that story, uh, there was a dancer union and it's in California, and they went after a lot of clubs there, and the clubs that were like paper, you know, pen and paper. They got— they were getting sued for millions of dollars, and we saw like 5 clubs go out of business because they had no way to protect themselves. They probably weren't even— probably didn't make— weren't in the class, didn't have— didn't have the money to even begin to pay that out, right? Yeah. So they just— they end up— what do they do? They close the doors, sell the real estate, move on to something else. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's all could be stopped with technology.

Yeah. Yeah. Being able to embrace new ways and getting familiar with it, you know, getting comfortable. And, you know, even if you're, if you're not comfortable as a, you know, a long-term owner, some of these guys are not, you know, right. Having some people on staff and entrusting the younger generation on staff to kind of guide you and direct you in the right direction and embrace it. Instead of combating it, you know, which we tend to see often as well.

No, definitely. You know, technology is kind of a, you know, I always tell business owners, they're like, oh, well, my employees don't, you know, we installed a pizza shop with a point of sale a few months ago. Right. And, you know, the owner of the pizza shop said, Oh, some of the employees are complaining about point of sale, the point of sale system. I'm like, okay, like, then I get a call from him and he's like, well, you know, it's really interesting. And I say, what's interesting? He's like, well, my food cost hasn't gone up, but my sales have gone up. And I just like, I'm like, well, you know, I hate to say this, but you know, a point of sale system can really put a stop to people doing things like, you know, stealing from you or, you know, floating drinks or, you know, in a pizza shop, somebody walks in and they're paying cash and they're getting 2 pies. And, you know, the cashier, nobody's watching, you know, puts $20 in their pocket. The same thing can happen at a bar.

Yeah.

You know, you know, if you're not keeping track of your inventory and making sure what you're doing and the same thing, everything, you know, What's the biggest, you know, someone was asking me the other day, what are the biggest expenses, you know, in a restaurant bar? I told them rent, you know, rent is a huge cost. I would probably used to say like your liquor and food was next, but I would say today your next biggest cost is labor.

Yeah.

And, you know, you need to manage your labor, whether they're hourly labor or your entertainers, all your labor needs to be managed properly.

And, you know, you bring up a good point there, you know, because I've heard a lot of times, uh, when talking to some clubs, they're like, oh yeah, we, you know, we have a digital POS for the bar, but our lap dance and VIP rooms are still just cash drawers, right?

Right.

Old school registers. But, you know, the bouncers and dancers have that relationship and they'll work together and, you know, be skimming thousands of dollars out of your club and you don't even know it. You know, and now you got a system in place, it's a POS specifically to track dances, you know, can have a timer clock down. We even have little restaurant buzzers that'll buzz off when the dance is over so they know it's time to come out and kind of track it to the T where it's like, okay, I can see this person's in this booth on the camera, but it's not being registered in the POS. So what's going on, you know?

Right.

Point, you know, you have a security that just pocketed $100 for a VIP and the girl's doing her own thing, you know. So it's, uh, you know, definitely a great loss prevention tool for sure.

And, and the other thing is, is a lot of these clubs that we're talking about, the owners are not there running the place on the day-to-day basis. They're not in there, you know, 24/7, you know. In a lot of cases, they're entrusting everything to their managers to be running these places. And having, um, electronic, you know, having a a good system is going to help you, you know, control exactly what's going on in your business.

Yeah, and being in, like you said, being able to see that revenue increase that really was already there, but you just weren't getting it, you know.

Oh, believe me, listen, we do, we, you know, we're involved in all aspects of, you know, different types of things in business, from, you know, like even ATM machines. We had a club owner one time, we went to their club and we were like We're like, oh, how much money do you make off this, your ATM, every month? And he tells me $500. I go, $500? I go, come on. I says, I says, I'm sitting in here for 2 hours. I said, I don't, I don't know who, you know, what kind of report you get, but you need to let us do the ATMs in at least one club. Try us out. They tried us out. We paid them $3,500 the first month. The guy's like, you're taking over all our clubs. You know, and people don't understand, like, you know, we give them the report from, you know, we give them full-blown reporting, everything, you know, you got to, you got to be, you know, everything's today, everything is, it's all recorded, right?

Yeah.

All recorded. You need to make sure you're maximizing everything that you have, you know, in your business, you know, keeping track, but lawsuits. Let's, you know, the whole thing with the, you know, Matt's product is, you know, you're having your contract, they're signing the contract, you have a record of it. It's not a paper record, it's electronic, stored on your computer. You know, you obviously do back—

you know, people back it up to the cloud, or back up automatically does a backup every day for you, right?

And then, you know, you have law enforcement come in or somebody decides to give you a lawsuit, you go, okay, well, we have all kinds of records. Here you go.

Boom. Yeah.

And you're, you know, and then what are they going to do? The lawyer, you know, once the lawyers start to see that clubs are, are not on a paper system and they're on an electronic system, they're going to start to not want to do these lawsuits anymore. That's what it's going to come down to.

Yeah, because they're going to lose the money on them now.

Right. So when somebody— yeah, when somebody sees even a restaurant, right, I've seen restaurants get sued because they have a point of sale system, but they don't have the work— the waitresses, the waiters, the bartenders, hostesses— they don't have people clocking in and out on the system. As soon as somebody, a lawyer sees that, boom, they go after them for not paying the, the staff properly. Right. Even in a restaurant. So in a club, it's much worse. That's why you have to have systems in there. That are going to keep track of all the hours people are clocking in, people are clocking out, you know, and if they're not clocking, you know, in, in and out, you know, you cannot— you can have problems if it's all on a paper system.

Yeah. And you, you know, another thing came to mind, you mentioned like, you know, police visits and stuff like that. Another way that our system can protect the club is that we have— the system's got all your built-in site visits, your police visits, what happened, incident reports, everything is there. Along with refusal, uh, refused entries. So, you know, you can mark on your front door, this customer came in at this time, we did not let him in. You know, that way if he goes out and gets into an accident, like, oh, I came from the club. You didn't get through that front door though, you know. Here's when you had to come in, this was the time, you know. And it'll be time stamped if the police want to come check. Okay, here it is. You know, I just had a club, they have an incident, and, uh, you know, they were able to just run back the timestamps on when things happened in the POS system, quickly check the cameras and show the police what happened, you know. And, uh, we're not— you know, we're able to avoid any kind of issues.

Yeah, it's super important. Probably a lot of that stuff can be used when you're getting insurance, you know, or you're renewing your license with the city, and the city's like, wow, the cops are at your place all the time. No, they're not. Here's our, here's our log.

We log every time the police come out to our place and log the visits, everything.

You can log a lot, a lot you can do. What are you going to do? You're going to walk in there with your logbook? You know, they don't want to read that.

I got to read through all that. But you push a PDF of all the, you know, every day that something happened. It's all right there. You skim through it and good to go.

Right. Then, you know, these electronic records, they'll help save your business. Okay. So, Matt, if people want to find out more about BoothPoint and get BoothPoint for their club, where do they go?

So you're gonna go to www.boothpoint.com, and, uh, there you can check out some online videos. We offer, uh, remote demonstrations, you know, depending on your location. We can do in-club demonstrations as well.

Yeah, you know, I'm gonna also say one more thing about your software. So we have a few clients that use Matt's software, and when they get a chargeback, the evidence that comes from Matt's software is great.

Never lose.

We help them write the letters. We send in all the evidence, comes with pictures, and they never lose a chargeback. I will say that because we do. We have a couple guys that have your software, and when they send us a, you know, they'll get a chargeback and I'll say this, whatever, send me everything, I'll write the letter for you, you know, or we train them how to write the letters. We give them like sample letters.

Yeah, use these.

You know, use this format with this explanation. Sometimes they don't want to do it. We do it for them. But the evidence you get out of Matt's system is excellent.

Yeah, everything's right there. All the data you need.

Yeah, all the data you need. Timestamped pictures, timestamped receipts, everything works very, very well, you know, paired with the credit card, you know, and then we get all the receipts for the credit card processing. But everything's like registered electronically, so it works great.

Yeah.

So check out Matt's software again, BoothPoint.com, right?

Yep. You got it.

Yeah. Get a demo book and check it out. And, you know, you can get your, you know, take the lot, you know, reduce the liability you have at your adult business today. So I want to thank Matt for coming on the show. Yeah, I appreciate it. And of course, yeah, you can catch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Also on YouTube. You can follow us on LinkedIn. Um, we're on all the social media, and I appreciate Matt coming on as a guest today. And everybody have a great day. Peace out. Carpe diem from B2B Vault.

Thank you very much, everybody.