Boost Bar Profits with Strong Branding & Culture: Tips for Bar Owners

This really struck me in the last couple of weeks when I talked with a few different folks in the bar and restaurant business who mentioned to me we're doing everything right , everything is set up properly , my business is in good shape , but I don't know what's going on .

As I investigated , I realized what was going on was a lack of attention to the small details . I think too often we look at the big stuff Do I have a website ? Do I have a menu , do I have branding but we skip the small details involved .

That really separate everyone in the industry your standard bar from the top bars , because the top bars don't have an issue getting every single little detail properly . When it comes to details , though , it can be a bit hard sometimes to make yourself focus on those . In some ways , managing the details and micromanaging are very close together .

Now , obviously , from a culture standpoint , we never want to micromanage , but we do want to manage all the details . We want to manage our steps of service . We want to manage everything we do and everything we present to our customers to make sure that we are providing an absolutely cohesive experience for them .

As a starting point for our conversation , let's focus on the framework I like to use , which is mindset , concept and culture . You have to have the right mindset to be successful in the bar business . You have to have a concept that works properly and then you have to foster the right culture to support your concept .

In all three of these areas , there are details that really will make the difference . Unless you're applying a really detailed look at all three pieces of the framework , there's really no way that you can be as successful as you could be .

Again , what's going to separate your average bar from the best-in-class bars is attention to details , because almost everyone is getting the basics right . Now , obviously , if you aren't getting the basics right , that's a different conversation , but most people in the bar business are doing the basics .

It's the details , it's that refining piece that is going to set you apart .

What we're going to do today we're going to go through mindset , concept and culture , talk about details in relation to all of them and places to look , because , again , I've found in a few conversations in the past week that this attention to detail is really what some folks are missing . We're going to look at our mindset .

Our mindset is all about how you view your business and your life . Mindset is not necessarily related entirely to your business , but it's related to you as an owner , you as a manager , and how you perceive the world around you .

It's a personal thing , but you as a person , especially as an owner of a small business , you affect your business when it comes to mindset details . It really all comes down to maintaining your physical and mental health . The reason why these matter is you are not properly focused .

You cannot be the best person you can be unless you maintain your physical and mental health . Any sort of negative mood , excess stress levels all those things will affect the way that you work . I will tell you right now no one is immune to that .

I know that when I face periods of high stress , when I am not in a good mindset , when I have a bad mood , the quality of my work suffers Because of the stress , because of the poor mood . I don't have the ability to focus on the details . I miss the little things .

In missing the little things , I produce a substandard product to what I should be doing when it comes to mindset , maintaining a level head and reducing your stress to the point that you can function and you're not racing through things , you're not throwing things at the wall .

You're thinking through your ideas , you have the ability to concentrate , you have the ability to focus on your business is absolutely essential to be able to get your concept and your culture details proper . Now , when it comes to your physical health , it's the bar business . I know a lot of us are not the picture of physical health .

I certainly have my struggles when it comes to physical health , but the healthier you are , the better your body works . The better your body works , the less attention you have to spend on your body , the less Limitations you have on what you're doing based upon your body .

So physical health is extraordinarily important to give you the time and the bandwidth to focus on the details . Now , like anything else , it's very easy for me to sit here and say be in good physical health and maintain a great mood and maintain low stress and again , I would be lying to you if I told you I was always able to pull those things off .

But like everything else we talk about , the key here is continuous improvement . Work towards making yourself better every day , because we talk about continuous improvement for the business . We talk about ways to manage your KPIs . All of that is great , but continuous improvement starts from within .

It starts with you focusing on your own person and and improving yourself Bottom line here , in order to have the best attention to detail which will give you the best possible bar .

Pay attention to the details in your personal life , pay attention to the details in your physical and mental health and do everything you can To make yourself as productive as possible . Now , once you've worked on yourself , that leaves us with concept and culture , and with concept .

Details really matter , and we've talked about concept before and , as I'm sure many of you are aware , one of my big things is that every part of your Experience for a customer in your bar should be cohesive . It should feel like one experience .

And if you go back and listen to the podcast I did specifically on culture I think it was episode 4 I Go into great detail about how , from your website and the initial exposure someone gets to your bar Online , whether that's through your website , through social media , through review sites .

However , that first image is formed because , let's remember , most people nowadays Google something before they go . Do it Through the way your parking lot presents itself , the exterior of your business , the experience they have when they walk through the door seeing your decor , your menus .

All of that needs to tie together and I will tell you right now the thing that makes that all tied together is the little details , and one of the biggest of those little details is cleanliness . People want to go to a bar that is inviting , that is open , that is friendly and that is clean .

And we've talked about bathroom cleanliness , because bathrooms if your bathrooms are not clean , people have a negative overall view of your establishment . But the details do go into how well you clean your bar . Now , obviously , a lot of bars we have people in and out all day . We're busy , we're humping .

Not every table is going to get bust within two minutes , but that should be something that happens more often than not .

You need to strive to keep your physical location as clean as possible Every time someone walks in , because that is part of that first impression and even if your interior design is great and your website is great and your menu is great and all that , that will cause them to have a negative connotation associated with your bar .

Now , when it comes to your food or your cocktails . Small details Make the item and what I mean by small details for your food . Are you using the right kind of plates ?

If you are a high-end small plate Topist style bar and you serve something on a Glass seven inch round plate that looks like it came from 1970 , that's not cohesive with the feel you're trying to be .

For that type of bar I'm expecting a square plate , a rectangular plate , maybe a triangular plate , maybe a round plate nothing against round plates , but everyone knows those seven inch round glass salad plates from the 1970s and that does not fit modern and cool and hip .

If you have cocktails and you're trying to go higher end on cocktails even if you're not you need the right glasses . Margaritas should go in margarita glasses . Now , if you're a die bar , a neighborhood pub I used to do this you can serve a margarita , a pint glass .

But if you're trying to be at all higher end , that margarita needs to go in a margarita glass . You need appropriate wine glasses . You need champagne glasses if you serve champagne . The details in your presentation matter and Beyond plates and glasses , it goes down to your garnishes . Every cocktail on your cocktail menu should have a garnish .

That garnish should be right . Don't just cut up lemons , limes and oranges and just pick one to put on something . Make the garnish fit your service , make the garnish fit what you are doing . If you're going to rim glasses , make sure that they are getting rimmed Fully , unless you intend to do a half rim and then make sure it's a perfect half rim .

But if you're rimming a margarita glass with salt and you get three quarters of it because there's some salt some places and not others , that's not attention to detail , that's not training your bartenders to have attention to detail and that's not presenting the best view of your bar that you can .

So always make sure , whatever you are serving to a guest , that you have gone to the level in your training where those details are second nature . As we've talked about before , the purpose of training with your staff should not just be to introduce something real quick and then get away from it . You need to train until you get things right every single time .

That is your attention to detail . And from a training perspective , just introducing something , showing your bartender , showing your service how to do it and then never addressing it again , is not attention to detail . So if you want your margarita glasses rimmed perfectly every time .

You have to be detailed , you have to go into depth like that to ensure that your guests not only are getting a consistent product , but are getting the perfect , consistent product every single time .

Now , while we're talking about training , let's talk about service standards , because one thing that happens far too often , in smaller bars and neighborhood bars especially , is that a lack of consistent training produces an inconsistent customer experience .

So you have to not only train your service to do their job , but you actually have to establish service standards , which , frankly , is oftentimes harder than training the service themselves . Every step of service should be defined for your bar . If you serve food , are you doing a two minute or two bite check back to make sure everything's proper ?

Because I'll tell you right now , most bars don't do that . But that is the kind of attention to detail that separates the great bars from the not so great bars . You want to make sure that you're cutting off any service issues as quickly as possible , so that two bite check back or two sip check back on a cocktail is hugely important .

And that's just one example of the minutia that you should look at for your standard of service and how you do service . Another detail when it comes to your service is that you should have your servers set up and your bartenders set up to upsell , whether that means suggesting a premium spirit .

If somebody asks for a martini , do you automatically go to a high value , high dollar vodka or gin , or are you going to the well , you should always be going high dollar , high value . Likewise , in a more neighborhood bar setting , you probably have some sort of burger that comes with chips and fries is a little bit more money .

Are your servers always recommending that someone moved to fries or moved to a more expensive side item ? Upselling is part of your standards of service , but upselling also makes the customer experience better and when you upsell , it's a win win .

So that needs to be trained as part of your steps of service that again need to be very clearly defined , down to the minute details , in order to give a consistent , reliable , seamless service to your guests every time they come in , regardless of who is working .

Now , lastly , in our conversation here about details when it comes to your concept , it's important to consider how all your menus look . A lot of bars you go into and you will see that they have three or four different menus . They may have a cocktail list , a beer list , a wine list , a food menu .

Maybe they have a late night food menu , maybe there are table tents on the tables that say , have the wine list on them or have a draft beer list on them . All of these different menus need to be cohesive . They need to have the same branding to them .

That means everything from the way that you write your descriptions , the fonts you use , the colors you use all need to be the same . Well , a lot of small businesses don't do this . Whether it's in the bar and restaurant industry or retail or really any small business .

Almost every large company has a brand kit that standardizes the way they display anything related to their brand . Normally , this starts with a logo , then goes into the colors you use , the fonts you use , and when I say fonts , you don't just pick one font . You need a title font , a subtitle font , heading fonts , subheadings fonts , section headers , body fonts .

Now , maybe some of those are the same , but every menu should have the exact same font in the header . Every menu should have the exact same font above your menu sections . Every menu should have the exact same font in your menu descriptions .

Too many fonts on one page are going to get busy , so you may want to talk to a graphics person as you're looking at your brand kit , but you need to make sure everything you do is consistent . Other brand kit items to consider are graphics that you use or icons that you use on your menu .

If your cocktail menu has line drawings of different types of glassware and you want to put an illustration or an icon on your food menu , it needs to have the same feel . It needs to be consistent with what you've done on your cocktail menu . The other thing to consider here and we've talked about this before when we talked about marketing is your brand voice .

Whether it's on your menu , on your social media , wherever you have something written about your brand , internal or external , it needs to use the same voice . It needs to sound like one person speaking .

Now , one of the advantages of small business , especially small bars and restaurants that we have , is that a lot of this brand packaging , a lot of this brand kit , a lot of the voice here is coming from the owners themselves . So if you just are yourself and consistently are yourself , you've created a consistent brand voice .

But that means then , if your GM is going to write a menu or your chef is going to write some new food item descriptions , or your bartender is going to write a guide on how to make specific cocktails that are coming out on your new cocktail list . They need to use that same voice .

So you need to ensure consistency across your entire brand and how it's presented Because , again , well , it may seem like minute details to say consistent icons , use the same fonts all the time , and things like that .

That consistency makes everything more cohesive and it's that attention to detail that makes your business seem absolutely seamless and , in that way , makes your guests think that you're doing better than other people .

Because even if people don't consciously notice changes in fonts and consciously notice changes in colors , subconsciously they do , and that lack of attention to detail subconsciously will be apparent to them and it will cause them , whether they realize it or not , to not view your bar , your brand , as strongly as if you paid attention to all those small details .

That brings us to the third pillar of our framework culture and details that impact your culture .

Every time we talk about culture , one thing that I always say is that your mission , your vision and your core values need to be defined Not just mission , not just vision , not just core values , but all three together they form a three-legged stool , if you will , that your entire culture is built upon .

Attention to details when it comes to your mission , vision and core values means making sure that they are all consistent with one another . You don't want one of your values to contradict something you say is your mission . You don't want your vision to not be possible because of how it interacts with one of your values .

So you need to make sure when you write those , when you develop those , that they are consistent with one another . If you look at the core values and the mission and vision that you have now and they are inconsistent , change them so that they are , and then the detail , part of that piece of your culture becomes living it every day .

If you're going to tell me that you have a value of hospitality and you believe in treating everyone equally and that you follow the platinum rule and you believe that you should always treat your guests the way they want to be treated , then you need to do that day in and day out .

You need to hold your team accountable for following those values , following your mission , achieving your vision , because there's details there that matter . If you just write this stuff down and forget about it .

You're not paying attention to the details , you're not going to live your values , you're not going to achieve your mission and your vision , and that's going to stop you from achieving a world-class level establishment .

Now , also in culture , we always talk about internal and external culture , internal culture being your employee management , how you treat your employees , all that good stuff . External culture being the way you portray yourself to the public , your marketing , your social media , those sorts of things .

From an internal culture standpoint , you need to make sure everything you do as you manage your employees , as you write policies for your employees , as you look at what benefits you're giving your employees , are consistent with your values . Again , it's just about attention to detail . It's making it all cohesive .

So if on the concept side , we have to have a cohesive experience from our customers , on the culture side , internally we have to have a cohesive experience for our employees . That means if you're going to hold people accountable for knowledge , you have to train them on that knowledge . You have to provide them the materials they need to learn that knowledge .

If you want cocktails made the same way every time which you should you have to train your employees until they make them the same way every time . Everything about how you treat your employees needs to be cohesive and fit in with your values and your mission and your vision .

And again , some of that's training , but a lot of that is the way that you pay them . If you say you want to attract and retain the best talent but then pay people poorly and don't give them good benefits , that's not consistent , that's not going to work . You're not paying attention to the details that matter to your employees .

Now , the detail that gets missed here the most is scheduling consistency , and I don't necessarily mean that you have to schedule everyone on the same shifts every week . That makes employee management way easier . That makes scheduling way easier . There's all sorts of reasons to approach it that way .

If you're in a place that can but let's say you're in a college town let's say that you're a large bar that has huge seasonality . Or maybe you're in a tourist town and you have large seasonality .

Obviously , saying that you're going to work every Monday all year , every year , may not be a reasonable thing to say to some of your employees , but you need to be consistent in how you do your schedule , when your schedule comes out , the rules that you put upon your employees when it comes to request offs and when those request offs need to come in .

And , to be real honest , this is one of the biggest complaints employees have in the bar and restaurant business , in hospitality in general , is that their schedules are inconsistent , that their schedules come out on Sunday for Monday . You need to pay attention to the details . You need to stay on top of your employee management .

You need to have policies in place and you need to follow them . And , along the lines of having policies in place , you need an employee handbook . You need all the details that your employees expect handled properly like you were some big , giant Fortune 500 company . Obviously , most bars are small businesses .

Most bars don't have more than 15 , 20 employees , but you need to make sure that you absolutely work out all the details for them so that they have a consistent employment experience . One of the places where the details especially have to be worked out , beyond the scheduling , is if you have a tip out policy .

Changing tip outs will greatly affect your employees . It's something that is always controversial , but you need to have a proper tip out policy or not have a tip out policy , but whatever you do , it needs to be documented . It needs to be detailed . You need to explain to your team , explain to your employees why it is what it is .

And I'm sure some of you are thinking this is the first time he's ever mentioned tip out policy in a podcast about bars . And it is , I'm pretty sure , because , frankly , they're always controversial . They're always going to have problems . Someone is always mad about how you do your tip out policy .

So I leave that up to you guys to figure out what works best for your establishment and your employees . Frankly , I would ask them and involve them in that detail . But all this needs to be documented . All of this needs to be in writing .

All of this needs to be available to them and all of this you should probably run past either an HR consultant or an attorney to make sure that you're not just stepping in some shit when you're writing it out .

But the reason why you need to do these details is so that your employees always know what's going to happen and that they have a very consistent experience working for you . The other thing I will mention while we're talking about employee rules and handbooks and the details involved there make sure everything you do is not hypocritical .

I've said it before , I will say it again hypocrites are assholes and a lot of bar owners . One of the details they miss is they put in a bunch of rules for everyone else and then don't follow them themselves . Attention to the details means that if you put your employees under a constraint , you put yourself under the same constraint .

Always make sure that you are treating everyone equally , fairly and inclusively . When it comes to more of your external culture Just like I was talking about with the menus and the table tents and everything that's going on inside your bar having a consistent brand kit , staying on point with your colors and your fonts and your font sizes , and all of that .

All that needs to be true with how you reach out to people publicly , especially in print advertising . Now , social media , I understand . Obviously , if you put a post on social media , you cannot necessarily control the font , unless you're using words in an image , in which case you can , and it should be consistent with your brand .

How you interact with your community , how you message in social media and in your marketing , needs to fit in with your brand voice and , when it comes to social media in particular , the quality of your social media posts matter you need to pay attention to the details .

Whether you're posting images or video or writing your brand voice , your image quality , your video quality all need to be the absolute best you can do . You need to pay attention to all the details there . Now , the one place online where you absolutely can't control your fonts and your images and your colors and all of that is your website .

One thing I see way too often where people are missing the details in the public display of their culture A is not having their mission and vision and values on their website , but B is having parts of their website that don't work . I was looking at a website for a bar recently where it had a cocktail menu and a food menu .

Well , if you clicked on cocktail menu , it was right there . There was a little toggle that said food menu . You could see the food menu all on that screen . If you clicked on the link that said food menu , you got what was essentially a WordPress page filled in with BS .

That was supposed to be changed because it was just the original template and the original template formatting with the words that came with the template . Literally nothing had been done to that page of the website , so whomever had made . That website had zero attention to detail when it came to make sure everything was filled out properly .

The information on the website also had not been updated in a long time . It was not correct . The only thing that lack of detail is going to do is turn guests off .

Let's be honest A one page website with very little information that is accurate , that is correct , that displays your brand well , is much better than a complex website with broken links and incorrect information .

So one of the most important things with your external culture is to make sure your website properly reflects your brand and properly reflects correct information on what's going on .

So if you really look at the details across your business , across your personal mindset , your concept and your culture , both internally and externally , how that culture presents itself , you can set yourself apart from the rest and move yourself into the best , because the best bars have that attention to detail .

Your average bar does not , and so the only way to make yourself exceptional is to pay exceptional attention to the details .

A few final notes before I let you go this week , if you are holiday shopping for other bar owners , bar managers , anyone in the bar business , my book how to Make Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business is a fantastic gift for anyone in the industry Also . Have to brag on myself a little bit real quick .

That book just won a silver medal from the Nonfiction Authors Association . They had some fantastic things to say about it , so it is a wonderful book that makes a wonderful gift as we are getting into the holidays . Those are available on Amazon . There is a link down in the show notes to buy those and they are available now .

Next Monday , december 11th , is our third monthly Bar Business Nation meetup . Bar Business Nation is the Facebook group that we have to bring bar owners together so that we can all learn from each other and talk together . There is a link for that in the show notes as well . Go down there , check it out . We have this meetup .

It's on December 11th , 8 pm Eastern Standard Time , so anywhere in the world it's all online so you can join us . It should be a great time and a wonderful opportunity to have conversations among different people in the business to really help each other and help each other grow , which is the whole purpose of Bar Business Nation .

Well , I do talk a lot in there . It's really not about me . It's about creating a space for you guys to build a community and to learn from one another and to grow , because we are all stronger when we put all our ideas together .

Finally , if you really are interested in figuring out what details you need to work on for your business , if you want to get into the weeds of discussing the details specific to your business in the show notes , click there . You can schedule a 30-minute strategy session with me .

We'll meet , I'll get to know about you , your business , learn about what details matter to you and what details maybe you're missing , and give you some ideas on how to fill those in , and then , potentially , we can find a way to work together moving forward . So with that , guys , I hope you have a wonderful week . I will talk to you later .