Come to Webster Hall, and here’s what you hear: Techno-pop with a grinding beat. Hip-hop and R&B. Top-40. Salsa and merengue.

Here’s what you see: A grand ballroom with laser lights and smoke machines. Hundreds of dancing, sweaty young people with bare midriffs, tattoos, and pierced noses. Amateur strip shows. A trapeze act. Singles auctions. A dating club. Special performances by top acts like Evanescence, Alicia Keys, and Limp Bizkit.

The East Village venue, which bills itself as “New York’s hottest nightclub,” occupies a grand 1886 building that’s been a society function hall, a speakeasy, and a recording studio. Weekend nights are especially crazy at Webster Hall; thousands line up behind police barricades to get inside while club workers confer over walkie-talkies.

Holding down the fort, shepherding the club and all its related businesses, is thirty-four-year-old Sean McGarr, AS’93. As president of Webster Hall Entertainment, Inc., he co-owns the nightspot with longtime club moguls Lon, Doug, and Stephen Ballinger. McGarr oversees the club, a dance-music record label, a music distribution company, e-commerce ventures, an advertising company, corporate events, and a disc-jockey tour. It’s a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

Not bad for a speech communication major, though McGarr credits Northeastern with helping him develop business smarts, too. “The co-op program allowed me to sell real estate and get my feet wet in business while I was studying communications,” he explains.

McGarr met the Ballinger brothers shortly after he graduated, when he was selling nightclub advertising at a small New Jersey ad agency. Eager to win Webster Hall’s business, McGarr managed to get Madonna to perform at the club. Webster Hall became his biggest client.

In 1997, Lon Ballinger asked McGarr if he’d start a Webster Hall record label. “I had just gotten engaged,” McGarr recalls. “It was a rough time to make a career decision. Plus, I was already making a good salary, and I’d have to take a major pay cut. But it happened to be the best thing I ever did.”

Within a couple of years, McGarr says, the label was doing about $2 million of business a year. Today, the electronic party-music series, twenty releases strong, has sold over a million copies. “I had no record-label experience,” he says. “But if you can market it, you can do it.” McGarr got more and more involved with other aspects of Webster Hall’s business and in 2000 was named president.

He’s most proud of how successfully the club’s been promoted. “I go to the South of France every January on business,” he says, “and I see French people wearing Webster Hall T-shirts. We were always well-known, but the record label was the catapult for getting us worldwide recognition.”

To top it off, the job is fun. “It allows me to be around young people all the time,” McGarr says. “That’s where trends are happening. The best thing about it is it lets me be creative.

Ministry of Sound

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