Managing Ten Regulars Without Losing Your Mind

Ten regulars are manageable when each has a usual night, a time limit, and notes with his details, so that no two of them collide and none of them lives in your head between shifts. The dancers who run big books do not have better memories than you. They have a schedule, a set of standard texts, and a rule about how much of themselves any one customer gets. Without those, ten regulars feel like ten relationships; with them, ten regulars feel like a schedule.

The three problems of a full book

Dancers who build a book quickly hit the same three walls. The first is collision: two regulars on the same Friday, each expecting the version of you that does not share. The second is drain: the regular who pays well and leaves you empty, three times a month. The third is attention: you cannot hold ten men's kids' names, drinks and grievances in your head, and the moment you mix two up, one of them feels like a number. Each has a fix, and the fixes are boring, which is why they work.

Spread them across the week

Give every regular a usual night, and when you can, make it a different night from the others. Most of this happens naturally; the day-shift guy and the Saturday guy will never meet. For the ones who overlap, steer with the working-tonight text: tell the quiet-night man about Tuesday and the game-watcher about Sunday, and stop mentioning Friday to either of them. One Round Table dancer, Leigh, had a weekly regular who confirmed by email two days ahead; a few of yours will settle into that kind of rhythm if you let them, and a rhythm is a slot nobody else is in.

When two do land on the same night, say so and set the order. "You're first, then I've got a set, then I've got someone who booked. I'm yours till 10." Regulars tolerate a schedule. They do not tolerate being abandoned mid-visit for a man they can see across the room.

Time limits make everyone bearable

Every regular gets a defined amount of you, and the room is the clock. Leigh's point about her most difficult clients is that time limits are what make them manageable: a man you could not stand for an evening is fine for a paid half-hour, and knowing the half-hour ends is what lets you be warm inside it. Decide, per regular, what his visit looks like, and sell that. "You get me for the two songs and the half-hour, then I'm back on the floor" is not cold; it is the deal, and a regular who knows the deal keeps coming back to it.

The time limit also protects your number for the night. A regular who spends $200 and then sits with you for two free hours has cost you the three customers you did not meet. Warmth on the clock. Rounds off it.

How do I handle a regular who drains me?

Schedule him for when you can afford it, and give him a hard stop. Leigh schedules difficult-but-paying regulars for shifts where she can decompress afterwards, or for weeks when she needs the money and will tolerate more. Caty finds one likeable trait in each regular and focuses on that, which she calls deep acting, and it works precisely because you are not pretending to like all of him. Josephine handed her hardest regulars to younger, more patient dancers and kept the easy ones. All three are the same move: match the cost of the man to a night you can pay it.

If no night works, he is not a regular you can keep, and /advice/firing-a-regular covers the exit.

Keep the notes, not the memories

Ten regulars means ten names, ten drinks, ten jobs, ten things they are worried about. You will not remember them, and remembering is the service. Write three lines on each: the name he knows you by, his name and night, what he spends, one detail, anything to avoid. Read it before the shift and after each visit. Dancers who do this describe the strange relief of not carrying the book in their heads between shifts; the notes remember, so you can forget. The full field list is in /advice/keeping-notes-on-your-book.

The same notes drive your texts. Standard working-tonight messages, one detail swapped in from his notes, sent to whoever fits the night. One Round Table commenter runs her whole regular business on standard routines and accepts the handful of customers who notice and drift. Ten personalised texts from templates take five minutes. Ten from memory take an hour and you will miss three.

Should I let regulars know about each other?

Not by name, but do not hide that you have a business. Pearl.escent writes that her regulars continue to pay for her company long after the novelty is gone, and part of why is that she never pretends any of them is the only one. A regular who thinks he is the only one will eventually see you with another man and feel cheated. A regular who knows you have a Tuesday guy and a Saturday guy and that he is the Thursday guy has a slot, and a slot is a thing he can own. "I've got people who come Fridays. Thursday's quieter, Thursday's yours" tells him the truth and makes him feel chosen at the same time.

The capacity question

There is a number beyond which the book stops working, and it is the number at which you can no longer send a personal text or remember a detail. For most dancers that is somewhere between twelve and twenty active regulars, depending on how often each one comes. Past that, the right move is not more effort but pruning: let the low-spend, high-maintenance ones fade and keep the slots for men who pay for their time. Scarlett-Mae told Vice that her best regulars were the reliable ones rather than the biggest spenders; the point extends to how you spend your attention. Reliability per hour of you is the metric.

Do this tonight

• Assign each regular a usual night and write it in his notes.
• Pick your two most draining regulars and move them, by text, toward nights you can recover from.
• Decide the time limit for each regular's visit and say it out loud next time.
• Write one standard working-tonight text and send it, personalised, to everyone who fits your next shift.