When choosing a location for you lan center you definitely want similar businesses in your area.  I’ve heard plenty of success stories going into the same strip mall as a movie theater or a toy story.  Even in some cases if you want to appeal to an older crowd next to a bar.

I personally setup next to a Video Game story and it turned out to be an extremely fruitful relationship between me and the Video game store owner.  I not only marketed on his traffic but he also marketed on mine.  People playing the Xbox 360s would get extremely involved in one of the games and want to purchase I refered them to the Video game next door to purchase (Some would say this is a bad move,  but I never really lost any customers using this method).  The Video game store own when people wanted to try games would refer them to me with a coupon that gave them one free hour with purchase.  So they would come try out the game they were interested in purchasing and the next thing I know I would have a regular customer.

Besides location you also need to take some very specific things into account when choosing a location.  First and foremost is the Air Conditioning.  You will be running alot of heat generating equipment so much in fact that when winter came around I did not have to use the heater.  But in the summer it could be absolutely unbearable.  You will want to ask the land lord how old the air conditioning unit is.  Has he kept up with servicing it.  What is the size of the unit.  General rule of thumb is a 1 ton unit is good for about 350 square foot at capacity.  Now that a comfortable estimation.  Me first location had a 5 ton unit for the sales floor and a 2 ton unit for the stock room and in a 2200 square foot store the sales floor could get warm if I didn’t take precautions.  For example you will want to the thermal tint your front windows.  This will reduce some of the extra heat coming in from the outside.  Air curtains over the front door worked well for me also.  These “Air curtains”  kept the hot air from outside from rushing in when the door was opened.

You will also want a seperate room that has easy access to the floor for network installation and to house your Server equipment.  I had a portable air conditioner in the server room to ensure my servers were as cool as possible.  (I also ran webhosting from the game center so it was a neccesity).

You also want the location easily seen from any traffic areas.  if this cannot be accomplished make sure if your putting in at a strip mall you get alloted space to put up your signage on the main traffic areas.  Setting up close to a school, a mall, a string of restaurants is also a plus this will help you in driving just a little bit more natural traffic into your store.  Honeslty using your location to drive traffic is the most cost effective way to generate traffic into your store next to word of mouth.

These are all things to take into consideration when starting a Lan Center and there are many more you can probably think of but these are some of the important ones to help make your business successful.

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