The Daily Kroak

I Try

I almost forgot to mention...

If you haven't been to Kroaky's yet why don't you drop by anytime and we'll give you a five-minute rooms tour and let you try 2 or 3 songs for free. No obligation to stay - but we're sure you'll stay longer...

Eight Days a Week

Kroaky is pleased to announce his first daily specials to entice you and your friends to come and party at his place!

Tuesday is Student's Day
50% off room rate with your student ID. Where else can you get a private room with your friends for only $2.50 an hour?

Wednesday night is Ladies Night
What could be better than free drinks for the ladies? On Wednesdays ladies drink for free. We serve two drinks per hour (domestic beer, house wine or sodas) -- that will make you sing!

Senior daytime specials
Seniors, take advantage of half-price room rentals before 7pm every day! We have added coffee and tea to the menu so come with your friends and family and sing classics from the 50s, 60s, 70s right up to the hits of today.

More specials coming soon. Stay tuned!

Friday I'm in Love

Happy New Year! We have become very busy on Fridays and Saturday nights.If you are planning on coming on a Friday or Saturday please make a reservation as we are often full to capacity and may not be able to offer you the time you'd like. We also have a minimum group size of four people after 7pm on those nights.

If you are planning for a larger group please note that our largest rooms now have minimum charges. For example our largest room (Room 8), which has a capacity of 25-30 people, is $100 minimum an hour -- the same cost as if 20 people were to take the room. So if you bring 15 people it will be the same cost as if you had brought 20 people. You can either pay more for that room and have less people in it, bring more friends to your party (they'll love it), or take a smaller room -- it's up to you. If you bring more than 20 people each extra person pays our standard rate of $5 per hour.

Minimum charges

• Room 8  (capacity 25-30) $100/hour
• Room 11 (capacity 10-15) $60/hour
• Room 12 (capacity 10-15) $60/hour
• Room 7  (capacity 10-15) $60/hour

All other rooms are pay as you go.

So it's a good idea to really try to fix the number of people who will come to Kroaky's before you book. Please also try to get your entire group to arrive 15 minutes before your booked time so you can start your party promptly.

I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day

Merry Christmas from all of us at Kroaky's! We've been working away like Santa's elves to bring you the hits and now we can have a few days of rest with our families. If you have kids or grandkids in town bring them down and watch them sing their favorites. We have lots of Christmas songs as well as many kids' favorites.

More and more people are coming to have fun at Kroaky's. We've been doing a lot of promotion, mainly through ads on Google and lots of flyering around town.

In other news (so to speak) we had a great article about Kroaky's in the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The internet version is good, but the one in the actual paper showed two huge pictures of our rooms as well. We were next to an article about Brian Johnson, lead singer of AC-DC, who lives just a few miles from here in Sarasota. I wonder if he'll come down one day and do his version of "Back in Black" I'm sure it'll almost be as good as some of our singer's versions!

If you haven't seen our rooms yet, go to our main site and click the "our rooms" link, or even better stop by and have a look yourself.

We are open on this Monday 29th. See you soon!

I Believe I can Fly(er)

We are now working steady on promotions. With the help of some friends we sent out a press release to the local media. So far we have had good responses: an invitation to do an interview on ABC7 news in the new year and a piece in the Sarasota Herald Tribune coming up next week. We hope to get some more exposure in the run up to Christmas.

We spent a good part of the week designing a flyer for insertion in local high school newspapers. You can print the PDF and bring to Kroaky's for a 10% discount on total room charge). If you join our Facebook group you will also receive discounts and special offers. Spread the word by passing the discounts on to friends...

We are now getting a regular weekend customers and are looking to build our daytime business with kids and teenagers, either coming on their own after school, or booking birthday parties and other celebrations.

In a related development, we fixed "The Disney Problem". Some songs by Disney artists such as Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, Camp Rock and The Cheetah Girls were only showing lyrics -- no music. We rescanned the songs from our CDs and the songs play fine now.

Teach Your Children

This weekend we had our first Kroaky Kidz parties -- three separate groups of teenagers. I am glad to report smiling faces and happy parents! We were finally used our biggest room, which has a stage and on-stage monitor. It was really good to see the kids singing classics like "Barracuda"! I had never even heard of that song before coming to the U.S. -- it's now firmly on my playlist, though I haven't tried to sing it yet. We are taking a lot of bookings for kid's parties for the Christmas season, so call now to make sure you don't miss out.

In huge news, we put some star balloons out on the road, which seemed to have the immediate effect of attracting lots of people coming in to have a look around. Seems people like balloons...

On Saturday, Mary and I decided to make use of the facilities ourselves. Y'see having fun karaoke nights is part of our ongoing program of "quality control". Well the wine was good, the quesadilla was surprisingly tasty, and the service impeccable! But we really do need to get a better version of the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "The Power of Love", both of which sounded like someone made it using a kiddie piano and some pots and pans. This is surprising because the general quality of our songs is fantastic. (I replaced the offending songs with new versions today.)

I tried some Roxy Music, Kenny Rogers, ELO, Bette Middler (for some strange reason, Mary seems to think my version of "Wind Beneath my Wings" is highly amusing) and some old songs like "Sylvia's Mother" from the 70s that I hadn't heard since then. Perhaps there was a little too much wine involved in those decisions. I wanted to do "What's Up", but it was a failure -- far too high for me, although I got some points for Pulp's "Disco 2000". Why didn't we all meet up in the year 2000?

Having completely conquered Meatloaf's "Two out of Three Aint Bad", Mary is now making steady progress on James Blunt's full catalog. So a fun night and day was had by all, kids and adults alike.

A Day in the Life

Mary had a small write up in Creative Loafing, Sarasota's alternative weekly. Thank you for writing about us -- everything helps right now. We actually opened a few days earlier than the article. It's funny that we actually traveled East to get to 'The West"...now I'm just plain confused.

In other news today (oh boy) our first week has been a big success. We have been getting a steady stream of wannabe rockstars and starlets, young and old, in the evening and are quickly booking up daytime and weekends for kid's parties (three booked for this Saturday alone). Call now to book your Christmas parties too.

We have had surprisingly few glitches so far. The karaoke system is working well, the intercom works good and our point of sale system has arrived so we can process your check much faster now. The food is also very tasty.

A big thank you also to all the staff who have worked so hard this week to make Kroaky's comfortable for our guests.

We will be doing a big promotional push next week so expect to hear a lot more about Kroaky in the news and on radio and TV.

Here are pics of some of our first week customers.

Imagine

 Sorry to not have posted for a while. We've been busy working on the final touches to Kroaky's and are happy to say that Kroaky's is now officially open! Until Friday we will be open from 7pm to 2am and after that we will be open from 3pm - 2am everyday except Monday.

We are now accepting reservations at 1-877-4 KROAKY. Please feel free to stop by anytime to have a look.

In these final weeks we have finished the construction of the kitchen, printed the songbooks, installed all the equipment, added all the seating, painted everything and put up all the lights.

We would like to thank everyone who got us this far - it has been quite a challenge. We hope you will agree that our team has made a great place to party! 

We still have a long way to go, we look forward to having you singing by our side as we make Kroaky's bigger and better.

Happy Kroaking!

The Final Countdown

We are entering the final stages now. The construction is complete. The floor was finished yesterday. The lights have been installed, the walls painted and the doors have been hung and are being painted today. 

We've been running around trying to put all the final details in place. From buying equipment and supplies for the restrooms, to buying vinyl decals for the walls.

Tomorrow we will start to install all the karaoke equipment and get our final construction inspections. We have built up all the AV cabinets, and have constructed a small stage for the large room. We have already done some speaker tests and they sound great.

We are still waiting to install the seating in all of the rooms - they have been delayed by the manufacturer but we have been promised they will arrive on Tuesday. Then we will be able (finally) to open the doors! 

Paint it Black

Many things are happening in Kroakyland... The painting is almost complete, although we decided that the darker green in the green rooms wasn't dark enough so we're doing a few walls again. We decided to use a wave pattern to breakup the design of the corridors so yesterday I was up early and drew a wave design in Illustrator and traced and cut the shape onto a six foot long election sign. It was fairly easy to transfer the wave design onto the walls using a pencil. I was feeling kinda sick by the time I finished and ended up having to spend the rest of the day in bed with a fever and stomach bug. Then Mary got it too so we lost a little time -- even so we seemed to get a lot done.

This afternoon, once I had recovered, I went over to the building and saw the wave was done -- I think it looks really good.

We also started the final electrical work with the electrician who came up with some good ideas to attach the LED lights to the roof.

The floor tiles were being laid when I arrived. I am really happy the way they are turning out. We spent days and days discussing so many flooring options so it's good to see that the one we chose actually looks good. Regular readers will know that the walls and the seats were originally coordinated to the floor tiles and I am happy to report that so far it all seems to be coordinated. 

The TVs and most of the speaker mounts arrived. We had to order from multiple locations to get the number we wanted quickly.

Our front counter arrived. on a big truck from New Jersey. We haven't unpacked it yet, but it's 700 pounds of PURE AWESOMENESS! More photos in a few days...

And the first of our kitchen equipment was installed -- the PEPSI machine so I can drink my own favorite drink -- Diet Pepsi topped with Dr. Pepper.

Back home and I made a late order for our effect lights. Wehad tested several types of effect light a few months ago. We decided on sound-activated mirror-ball like effect for each room.