I’m Jorge Martinez. I spent 15 years running nightlife venues in Northern California — taking over a club its owners had decided to close and rebuilding it into the city’s #1 room. Now I’m in Austin, helping hospitality and event businesses fill their rooms and strengthen their books.
In 2015, ownership at The Beach Nightclub in Chico, CA was ready to shut the doors. I’d worked my way up from floor security, and they handed me the keys instead. As Director of Nightlife & Marketing for 3 Downtown Bars, I rebuilt the room end to end: programming, talent buying on a $117K annual budget, marketing, security, staffing, and the bar experience.
The result was a ~600-cap club doing $11K–$14K in nightly bar revenue, named the city’s Best Place to Dance four times — and never finishing below second place from 2015 through 2019.
Since then I’ve co-founded a second nightclub (Frequency, 2024), and built two event companies of my own: Eclectic Sound DJs (500+ weddings and corporate events since 2009) and Black Noise Silent Disco (2018). I learned every department a club has, on a shoestring — and what that taught me is that the job has two halves: building a team culture that owns the night, and running the numbers behind it. With a real budget and a real team, that experience is upside — not a learning curve.
Most operators rent expertise: a promoter here, a production company there, an agency for talent. I’ve done every one of those jobs myself — booking, marketing, sound and lighting, floor management, security. That means I’m cheap to operate and hard to surprise. And the floor is only half the job — I run the other half too: P&L, labor, inventory, and the analytics that show which nights make money and why. Culture fills the room; the numbers keep it open.
I’m bilingual-market fluent too: my DJ company ran five bilingual DJs across 500+ events in the Hispanic market, from quinceañeras to club residencies.
Fifteen years of doing every job in the building means that whatever seat I’m in — assistant manager, general manager, operations, or production — the whole team levels up. It comes down to three buckets:
If your venue or event business could use a manager who’s done every job in the building — and helps the whole team level up — reach out. Worst case, it’s a good conversation.