Farooq Ahmed is used to crowds of 2,000 people. Once, he pulled in 12,000.

These days, he sees about 200 on a good day, and is hoping for a daily average of more than 300.

A decade ago, Mr. Ahmed was a rock star and flamboyant frontman for his band, Aaroh, in his birth country of Pakistan.

Now, he and his wife are raising their two daughters and running their newly-reopened dollar store, Disco Dollar, on Green Ridge Avenue in Scranton.

"People keep asking me back home ‘What the (expletive) are you doing?'" Mr. Ahmed said with a chuckle.

"Back home I'm still a star," he continued. "When I go home, people are still taking pics (with me). It's a totally different story altogether. Over here, it's like ‘OK ma'am, that'll be $1.06.'"

The 38-year-old man, now living with his family in Dunmore, has always dreamed big. And while the flowing hair and clothes of his rock n' roll days are gone and his aspirations have shifted, they remain enormous.

A change in tune

While growing up in Karachi, the massive Pakistani port city, "I was dreaming of becoming Guns and Roses," he said. "I'm serious. People used to laugh at me when I was in school. ...Now when I say I want to have at least 1,000 stores, people still laugh at me."

He came close in his first attempt. The son of amateur singers, Mr. Ahmed first fell in love with rock music when an uncle who studied in the U.S. brought back records from bands like The Rolling Stones and Jethro Tull.

He received Eastern classical voice lessons as a youngster and eventually formed the rock band Aaroh, which means, fittingly, "to ascend" in the Pakistani language of Urdu.

The band caught its big break in 2002, winning a Pepsi-sponsored battle of the bands competition in Karachi over a pool of more than 70 other groups.

The victory led to opening gigs for some of the biggest bands in Pakistan, Mr. Ahmed said. Aaroh was indeed ascending.

They toured the country, made flashy music videos and lived a life of leisure — high-end restaurants welcomed Mr. Ahmed without waiting, he said, and he met his wife, a designer named Konple, at a fashion show.

"It was a lot of partying," she remembered while recently tending the register at Disco Dollar. "It was a lot of fun."

But the party ended in 2008, when the Pakistani government changed. The music industry in turn became much less profitable as the country backslid into a more corrupt and dangerous place, Mr. Ahmed said.

His parents had left for the U.S. in the 1990s, so when his Green Card came through, Mr. Ahmed, packed up his wife and baby and headed west. They moved to his family's Chicago home in 2010, and he got a new job managing a Dunkin Donuts downtown.

Windy City Pakistanis stopping in on their way to work were often shocked to find Farooq of Aaroh behind the counter.

"For people, it's really hard to swallow the fact that a rock star from back home is serving coffee here," he said. "When I landed in the U.S., I put my ego aside. I said, ‘Dude, you've gotta do what you gotta do."

Mr. Ahmed did not see a path to success in Chicago, so he jumped at an offer from a cousin in New Jersey to buy into a dollar store there. He learned the business and transferred a couple times within the large chain, eventually landing in Scranton.

The mountains, natural beauty and cheap cost of living and doing business in Northeast Pennsylvania convinced him to drop his anchor.

"Dude, this is it," the self-declared outdoorsman said upon seeing the area. "I'm staying here."

Keeping a steady beat

But a first shot at their own store in the area did not go so well. After considering several locations for Disco Dollar (a marriage of Mr. Ahmed's music and retail backgrounds), the family settled on an empty storefront in Dunmore at the corner of Green Ridge Avenue and Blakely Street in 2013.

It may not come as a surprise to some, but prospective business owners must answer a plethora of questions before launching successfully in Northeast Pennsylvania, said Lisa Hall Zielinski, the director of the Small Business Development Center at the University of Scranton.

"What is it that you're looking to do, and who's your market?" she asked. "That's a big part of the challenge here. Are there people here who want to purchase the product or service you want to sell them?"

The Ahmeds found that despite the high amount of cars rolling past everyday, many of the drivers were not the type to shop at a dollar store.

"I've learned it the hard way," Mr. Ahmed said.

They closed down last year and reopened last month in the Green Ridge Plaza in Scranton.

Standing in the store earlier this month, surrounded by stacks of styrofoam cups and multi-colored dish soap and keeping an eye on his roaming 2-year-old daughter Raania, Mr. Ahmed said the new location was a better fit. People drawn in by the large supermarket and fitness center will often pop in to buy a few items at the new Disco Dollar.

There's a lot of potential for growth, he said, in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Living in an area without many Pakistanis, the rocker is fairly incognito these days, but still gets recognized by his countrymen when he visits relatives in New Jersey and New York.

Though he hopes to get back to his music career once the business is large enough, Mr. Ahmed feels he is well-positioned to build again, this time with dollar stores, and starting with his anchor in Scranton.

He and his wife sometimes miss the old rock star life in Pakistan, but "you have to move on," Mrs. Ahmed said between inflating balloons for a customer. "Now we have kids and life is different here. But we are happy."

Contact the writer: pcameron@timesshamrock.com, @pcameronTT on Twitter