- I love niches, especially those that involve a bar, so listen to this episode, find out where we're going on this one. This one, hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of "The Wedding Business Solutions" podcast. I am so happy to have a guest on who had me on her podcast, and it is Sarah Murphy from Mobile Beverage Pros. Hi Sarah.
- Hi, I'm so excited to be here, Alan. Thanks for having me.
- Well, thanks for being on, because you had me on your podcast and we were talking. I'm like, I need to have you on because you have both a niching pivot, kind of scaling all these different things that kind of came together, and then how you got into this is interesting story, so you're checking so many boxes here. And I wanted to have on because, and then we were talking bourbon and bars and things like that, which we could do all day anyway, so we were doing that before I started the recording, but we'll get back into that. So let's start right off here. So what is Mobile Beverage Pros?
- Yeah, so Mobile Bev Pros is the world's leading education and resource center for entrepreneurs or business owners that are looking to start their own mobile bar or beverage catering company.
- Okay, now for those who are not familiar, what is a mobile bar? So talk about that.
- Yeah, mobile bar is the colloquial term that the industry has really claimed for anyone who is slinging drinks at an event, and we're all familiar with restaurants. We're all familiar with bars, but events have always, and will always have a beverages as well, and historically it was kind of a sub-task for the caterers, but as consumers we've gotten more sophisticated in what we expect from the bar experience, and while caterers really specialize in food, bar caterers or mobile bars specialize in the drink side of things, and so we've always kind of talked about the fact that mobile bars elevate the beverage experience to the point where it can meet the experience that caterers provide for food.
- So would the mobile bars be the people that have the liquor license?
- Not necessarily. Liquor license rules and regulations are vast and varied. They differ from state to state. In some states, mobile bars can access pretty readily liquor licenses, which enable them to sell alcohol. In other states it's near impossible to do that, and so mobile bars in those states will operate as what the industry has termed dry hire. It just means that they can do everything other than supply the alcohol. They can mix it, they can serve it. They can't purchase the alcohol on behalf of the host.
- Right, and that that's again, as you go around the country and probably county to county in some places, it's where those rules are, and then where you buy the alcohol is also different in different places. Some states it's state controlled. Some places it's local, all over the place, and then like liquor licenses in New Jersey, they're trying to change it, but there has been a finite number of liquor licenses, which made the licenses themselves very, very valuable by themselves, but also very difficult to get because somebody had to give one up in order to get one, kind of like taxi medallions back in the days when that was the thing, so how did you get into this? Did you have your own mobile bar business before?
- I did, yeah. In 2016, I decided that I wanted to break away from corporate America, and start my own thing, and when I looked at kind of my experience, I had been in the food and beverage industry for most of my life. I went to the Cornell Hotel School, and after that I got into restaurant management and worked everything from bar back all the way up to a CFO for a $25 million restaurant company in DC. And then when I started a family, I got out of the actual operation side of things, because it's hard with the restaurant industry when you have little ones, and I got more into leadership development for tech companies, but the bro culture just really wasn't doing it for me, and I decided to break off and do my own thing, and what was in my bag of tricks that I could monetize was slinging a great drink, and I was scrolling Instagram one day and I saw a camper bar in Australia and I just showed it to my husband, and I was like, "This, this is the thing that I can do."
- Right, so describe that camper bar for us.
- Sure, it was like a vintage style caravan. It's what they call them in Australia. They have different styles there than they do here, but I think if you were to make it like an extra long Shasta, it had that look to it, and we, my husband and I, had had a tiny house, and so literally anything on wheels was attractive to us, and I was like, well, we took our house on wheels, why not build a business on wheels? And at the time, there really wasn't much about mobile bars in the industry online. There was a bunch on food trucks. There was a bunch for caterers, but then if you started asking how to keg a cocktail or how much ice to bring to an event that had beer, wine, and two signature cocktails, it was like nobody knew, and so that's kind of where the beginning of Mobile Bev Pros happened was just this community of people who understood the unique challenges associated with this particular niche, and it was a baby industry, not that, again, drinks had always been happening at events. What wasn't happening was this elevated experience, and my husband and I used to go to a whole bunch of networking events. He was in politics and he worked for the mayor of Nashville, so we had to go to all these networking events, and the bars were always so sad, and I remember one of the key moments for me was I went up and I ordered a drink and they had tequila on the bar, which that's my favorite spirit, bourbon's number two, but tequila's number one for me, and I asked what they had that they could do with the tequila, and he kind of looked around, and he's like, "Um, club soda." I'm like, "Oh, okay, Ranch water. That sounds delicious. Do you have any limes?" He's like, "No." And I'm like, What's going on here? This is not hard. It is not hard to do this well. And so my husband at one point, after probably like 10 networking events in, turns to me, he goes, "Sarah either do something about it, or stop complaining about it."
- Right, and again, this is the experiential part of it, right? To you, and really to almost anybody like, "You don't have a lime at the bar?" Like, "What is-?" I remember going to a wedding where they had a beer and wine, that was it, at the bar, and that's fine. I walked up, I said, "What type of bourbon do you have?" They said, "We have beer and wine." I said, "Okay, what type of red wine do you have?" I'm fine with that. I'm not mad at the couple that they didn't have my spirit, even though it was a relative or whatever. That's what they chose to have. That's fine. But then again, you still have to have a decent choice of beer, a decent choice of wine. I had the experience, actually in a restaurant, I order my bourbon neat. I drink it neat because I drink less. I sip it, I savor it. That's what I do, and I ordered, and they didn't have a big selection, but they had Woodford Reserve, which is fine. I love Woodford. if they tell me all they have is Jim Beam, you're not even trying, I'm sorry, you're not even trying, right. But they had Woodford. I said, "Neat." Comes over, glass has ice, soda, a straw, and I said, "No, no, neat." Now first of all, why does the waitstaff not know? Right? Did they not communicate it to the bartender? Does the bartender not know what neat means? And I know there's this debate about what neat and straight mean, like one of them over ice, and then you strain it, one of them, it's neat, but fine. So I said, "No, no, no, I asked for it neat, please. You know, not with the soda and stuff." Great. They came back on the rocks. I'm like, okay, again, you should know this. This is not a hard thing. And then I've had the other experience of having a waiter that was just so incredibly knowledgeable about the list, the spirits, the different things on there that you want to have more, and this is the point, right? You're going to have more when you have a better experience. So your husband said, "Stop complaining, or do something about this." And what did you do?
- Yeah, so it kind of sat there for a while until I was scrolling Instagram and I saw the camper, because when you start a business, you really want to have that wow factor, right? Like what makes you different? What makes you impactful? And back in 2016, when this all started, that was a real differentiator. It's a little bit less of a differentiator now, but we do like to, I do tell people the the camper bars, the rigs, they're like the billboards for a business. They may not book that, but that might be what gets you noticed?
- The horse trailers.
- Yeah, the Airstreams, the horse trailers, the Piaggio Ape, they're all so cute. They're very Pinterestable, Instagramable, and so they add a layer to the experience. But to your point, and I think this is a really important part, is that for as long as there's been beverages at events that have been handled by caterers who are experts at food and food presentation, the people who have been behind the bars were extras. They probably were servers. They may have an ABC or a TABC license, depending on where you are, but they probably don't know anything about booze. They probably don't know anything about what's being served. They probably have no connection with the ingredients or the garnishes, and since mobile bars, what we do is really focus on elevating the bar experience, it's all we do. So we're really well suited, or at least in my experience, I can't speak for everybody, but I work with a lot of the mobile bars out there, and our passion for this industry means we know about the wines we're serving. We know about the beers that we're serving. We know about the cocktails and what ingredients went into it and the experience that we're trying to create with it, and yeah, we can do fancy menus and fancy garnishes and all of those things that further elevate the experience, but I have walked up to a wedding bar before, and asked for a gin and tonic, and someone poured me vodka, and I said, "Do you know what gin is?" And they didn't, and that's the difference I think that we're able to bring is that we care enough.
- Well, but whose fault is that, right? That's what you have to say to yourself. Who's the fault is it that you put somebody behind the bar that doesn't know that this clear spirit and that clear spirit are not the same thing, right? So let me just step back a little bit because you dropped some acronyms, which is a podcast that just recently did about the alphabet soup that we all have in our businesses, so ABC, TABC, so just very, very quickly, what are those acronyms?
- Yeah, so Alcohol Board and Commission, I believe is what the ABC stands for, but there are some states that begin with T that just decide that it has to be Texas or Tennessee. I've really only heard it from the Texas and Tennessee, where they've added a letter to the beginning of that, but it's really the state board in any given state that regulates the sale and the service of alcohol. And so most states, not all, but most states will require a bartender to be certified, whether it's ServSafe, TABC, ABC, there's a few others out there, but basically it just means that the person behind the bar has been trained on how to serve responsibly. It doesn't guarantee they know anything about spirits.
- Right, so that again, they've done the certification, which could be an online course or in person, whatever it is that they've done, they therefore should not be serving people who have been overserved. As a woman in Texas once told me. She goes, "Alan, I never drink too much, but I'm occasionally overserved." Right? So there could be that, but I also had a great experience in Canada one time where, I'll try to make it a short story, but we're at a restaurant and this gentleman sends over a bottle of wine to us. We don't know him, and I think he just wanted to talk to some people, so he sends a bottle of wine to our table, turns out to be the most expensive bottle on the wine list as well. And I said to the waiter, "Just bring five glasses." He goes, "No, I'm not drinking wine." He sends this bottle, he's not drinking wine, so he's having his cocktail. He said, "You bring me another one." And the waiter said, "Yes sir, I'll bring you another one, but that'll be your last." And he looked at the waiter and he said, "Why?" He said, "Well, in my opinion, sir, I feel that you've had enough." He said, "You're not going to bring me a drink?" He said, "No, I'll bring you one more, but I'm not going to bring you more than that." And the guy looked at him and said, "You had no problem putting that 100 bill in your pocket that I gave you, but you're not going to give me another drink." And the waiter went in his pocket, took it out, and gave it back to the guy. He said, "No sir, I will give you one more, but no more than that. I think you've had enough." And that was integrity that I saw that was like, wow.
- Two things here. Integrity, but a real understanding of the risk that he was at at doing the contrary. A lot of times people don't understand, and this goes out to anybody who might be listening that is going to at some point have Uncle Joe tend bar at your wedding, the number of stories that I have heard of people being overserved at an event, getting in a fist fight, and there being injuries slipping on the floor, cracking their head open at the event. Bartenders are really in charge, and legally obligated to serve responsibly, and so had that bartender decided, "Okay, that 100 bucks is nice. Here's another drink," and this guy got a DUI or he injured somebody, or God forbid killed somebody, that bartender is now on the hook for that, and so, it's really something that we, as mobile bartenders, take a lot of, as a community, we talk about this a lot, and our obligation and responsibility to ensure that we serve this controlled substance responsibly.
- Right, and that was a part of the discussion. He said to the guy, "Well, you know, nothing's going to stop you from getting in your truck and driving." He said, "Well, I live in the building." It was a building and the guy happened to actually own the penthouse in the building. He said, "Yes sir, but that does not stop you from going to the garage then and getting in your truck." So again, the integrity that I saw from this young waiter, I was very impressed with that. You would hope that that's what everybody would do, but this does get back to why is this important, right? And part of it's important for the experience, part of it is important for the control, and not having Uncle Joe just pouring anybody and everybody over there, not serving the underaged, right? This has been something I've heard many stories about this, I'm not going to generalize, but I think all of them have been down south, but about people who are not 21 getting married and wanting to know why they can't drink at their wedding. Well, you know, the fact that it's their wedding doesn't change the fact that you're not 21. I mean, it doesn't change that. So let's fast forward here. So you go and you get this camper trailer, this caravan, did you make it, or was it already made and you bought one that was already like that?
- Yeah, so I learned a long time ago to stay in my zone of genius, and so no shade down anybody in this industry because there's a lot of people that are like, "I've never done this before, but I'm going to give it a whirl," and they do, and I love that for them, but I went out and I found a builder to build me one.
- Okay. Who was already doing this, or who is just a fabricator and works with campers?
- Yeah, so at the time they were mainly building campers, but they had done one or two other mobile bar conversions, and so that's really what sold me.
- Right, 'cause again, you do need certain things to make this right whether it's ice makers and freezers and refrigerators and all these type of things there because I think it's a thing that I've run into a lot of times when I talk with my clients about who are venues who do not have a liquor license but can provide licensed bartenders, and what couples who love the idea of being able to buy their own alcohol, 'cause they think it's going to save 'em so much money, but they don't realize is, "Well who's buying the ice, the lemons, the limes, the onions, the olives, the toothpicks, the stirrers, the napkins." We can go down the list there besides the equipment, right, the zesters and whatever, all these things, none of that's going to exist unless somebody brings it, so you're not just bringing the experience, but you're bringing all that. So when somebody like you walks up and says, "Oh, can I have a lime with that?" And they're like, "Sure." And there it is. You never think about it when you get it.
- Yeah, oh Alan, I have this great story. So when COVID happened, we got shut down, right? No events whatsoever, and so I spent the time to create a do it yourself wedding bar course for brides that was like, "I want to do it myself. I don't want to pay someone else to do it." The course ended up being like nine or 10 modules just of things that they have to consider, and I had a bunch of brides buy it, and like not get past the first or second module before they're like, "I will hire someone to do this." I mean, you listed off some of the things, but some of the other questions people get was like, "Well how much ice should I, and how many cups do I need, and what kinds of beer are good for events, and what kinds of wine will go well with my food? And how many bartenders do I need if I want two bars?" And the questions are infinite. And so when you hire a mobile bar, you are getting all of this expertise where you can ask any of these questions where it's like, "Should I have passed drinks and how much kava do I need?" And there's just so many little things that you wouldn't even consider that need to be answered, and a mobile bar owner or a manager, whomever is involved in that, that's their whole job is to know the answer to all of these questions that you might think are like inconsequential until you're like, "Oh actually I don't know how much vodka versus bourbon to order for this event."
- Right, and this is in anybody's business, there are all these little details that you take for granted 'cause you do it all the time that somebody else might not. When I show up as a speaker at events, I have my little kit with all kinds of adapters, and I have a backup clicker to my backup clicker, right, and I have my Bluetooth clicker, and my regular, and the AV guys are always amazed that I come with all this stuff, because often I'm my own AV guy and I have to walk back and plug this stuff in, and it's not working, so it's, again, you don't often get credit for getting it right, but you lose points for getting it wrong, right? If you run out of anything, you're going to lose points for that, but then also we talk about the experience. I think something else that people that you're training and people in your niche are doing is you have to match the experience level. Like if I were to go to an event and it was a higher end event and there was a cool mobile bar, whether it's the camper, whether it's the trailer, whether it's just inside, I also pay attention to, "Did you put that in the right glass?" And not everybody's going to do that, but I hate being served my neat bourbon in a rocks glass or a pilsner glass or something ridiculous like that, which has all happened. And even at a restaurant and I'll say, "Oh, excuse me, I want that neat, and if you have some sort of a nosing glass or snifter, I'd appreciate it." And sometimes they go over with a Glencairn and I'm impressed, or sometimes it's a cognac snifter there and okay that's fine, that's my number two. But if they don't, again don't understand, how are you changing my experience, first of all, like if it's in Las Vegas and they pour by the fraction of a fraction of an ounce, 'cause you know that's what they're doing automatically, and you're barely covered the bottom of this huge glass and you're charging me $25, you've changed the experience, right? I'd rather you brought me a shot glass filled to the top, so you're going to spill it, so change the experience there. Okay, but now I'm getting on a tangent. Now that's my personal rant. Let's come back over here. Okay, so you have your own bar. And then tell me about your business as it grew and how that turned into Mobile Bev Pros.
- Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, when I started the mobile bar, I had, at that point, 15 years in the hospitality experience. I had done events through the guise of like restaurants, and catering, and that sort of thing, but I had never done the mobile bar exclusive piece of it, and I had a bunch of just little questions, and I tried Googling, I looked for books that would give me the answers. I tried reaching out to other people that were in my network and mobile bars weren't as prolific back then, so I was really talking to food trucks, caterers, and there just was this gap in in information, and so at the time I had a social media VA who, 'cause I was still working full-time, that's how you do things as a crazy entrepreneur, you juggle multiple balls. And so I had a VA social media expert who was handling my social media and I asked her, I was like, "Do you know how to start a Facebook group?" And she's like, "Yes." And I was like, "I think I might reach out to a bunch of random people from around the world that do this, and see if they'd want to get together in a Facebook group so that we had a community of people who like get it." And she's like, "Okay, but how are you going to like," so I was like, "I'll DM them on Instagram and see if they want to join." And so I probably sent out like, I don't know, 50 or 60 DMs and about 30 people joined, and we called it the Founders Group, and we had people from Australia, the UK, obviously here in the United States, but we had, it was like Washington State, Ohio, Florida, California, just a handful of people from around the world, one from Mexico, and we had good conversations, and we got this real community, and the one thing that I realized was how cool we were. It was a real community over competition environment and everyone was just really giving of information, and it was almost like we recognized that what we were doing was really unique and really special and that we needed to support each other. And they started inviting more people and then more people, and so before we knew it, it was probably 400 people. And that's when I realized we probably should open it up and not just have it be an invite only founders group. And so over the course of the years, it's grown to be about 5,000 people in the free Facebook community. You have to be either a mobile bar owner or someone who's interested in starting a mobile bar. It's not like you can't go in there as a vendor or a builder or any of those other things. And then as the community grew, we started to get a lot of the same questions over and over again, and that's when I was like, "Well let's just create a resource place, a place where we can answer these frequently asked questions." And then it became, well let me create a swipe file or a done for you template that you can do that. You can just copy and paste and use it. And then it became, "Okay, well I have a master's degree in business, specifically in hospitality. I can teach you how to do this." It's not just me giving you the file, but here's actually how to utilize and how to think about budgeting, forecasting, pricing, all of that. And that's where the Mobile Bar Academy came in. And so it's been a slow process over the past five years, but in the midterm, we do an industry conference every year where 100 to 125 mobile bar owners from around the country. We've had some Canadians come down too. We are just so fun. We just hang out. We have fireside chats. We have amazing speakers that give up their time to teach. A lot of 'em are other mobile bar owners that are like a little bit ahead of where the other people are, and they're sharing their information, marketing professionals, all of that, and then at the end of the day, we all sit around a campfire, we drink tequila, we dance, Latin dancing, and we just spend a couple days out of every year just really kind of building that community. So, it's a fun industry, and it's a really great community that we have.
- So if you've been listening to hear, what you hear is business starts because of a pain, a need of something, right? You should do this mobile bar. And then the community is, I want to talk to other people like me because there are people that know stuff that I don't know and I probably know stuff that some of these people don't know, and then that grows and then opening that community, which some people wouldn't have done, they would've kept it closed. And then it's, there are people out there that are like, "Great, you gave me all these resources, but can you help me?" And this is something I hear all the time, and it's the difference between someone who wants to read a book and learn about it, Google it, and learn about it, watch a YouTube video and learn about it, or is willing to invest to say, "Well I can get to step Q if I hire you, or I can muddle my way 'til I get there." And that's the difference, right? But you're also listening to your yourself and other people and saying, "Is there a need for this?" You follow the need. So do you still have your own mobile bar company?
- I sold my mobile bar company in October of 2021 for a couple reasons. One of which is it was at a real high point, and you always sell when it's high. It was at a real high point. We had reached multiple six figures, and at the same time, Mobile Bev Pros was getting big, and it was like two competing priorities, right? And so I had to sit with myself and my coach, 'cause I'm a big believer in business coaches. I had to sit with myself and my business coach, 'cause I was feeling very overwhelmed and really figure out which one I love doing more, and what it came down to was that, when I as a mobile bar owner am sending bars out into the world, 'cause I didn't execute all my own events by that point, I'm serving drinks, and making people happy on their most important day sometimes. But when I'm teaching a mobile bar owner how to build a successful business, I'm impacting thousands of lives. And so it became about impact for me more so than revenue or having two successful businesses. And I just knew if I had focus on one thing, I could be more impactful.
- And that's another great lesson is you follow your joy. It doesn't matter if you're good at something, right? You follow your joy. I just had this conversation, I was consulting with a client before, somebody I speak to about every month, and we were talking about that same thing, and I said, "It's easy to look and say there are these 18 things I could do, and then you do nothing." And we cut it down to, "This is what I'm going to do." And it was just in the conversation finally say, "Yeah, this would be great, this would be great. This is great, but you know what, you can do this first, and then this is going to lead to that and this is going to lead to that." And it did, and the conversation did that because we all get paralyzed by, there are so many good ideas, or we get distracted because someone else is doing something that we think would be cool, but it's not right for us, but it's going to be cool. And I love that part about how you impact more people. It's kind of like with what I do, I'm impacting people with businesses, everybody who's listening here, which is then impacting them and then impacting and then it goes down and down and down, so it's wonderful. So you're in a crazy niche, right, and we have in the show notes where you can find out more about Mobile Bev Pros and more about Sarah herself. You have on there, you have this Facebook, or what is the Facebook group? It's still open, the Facebook group is open?
- It is open if you are an aspiring mobile bar or a mobile bar owner, yeah, and it's just called Mobile Bev Pros.
- Okay, Mobile Bev Pros. Okay, great. I think we have a link to that as well there. And then you do the training, you have all that kind of stuff so we can impact more people. So we have you on, because you have a niche. We have you, 'cause you did a pivot corporate world into the bar, into the training over there. So check, check, check, scaling, you built your business up and then you sold your business. It's wonderful. You're checking all the boxes over here. So again, thank you for being on and everybody listening. I really, I wanted Sarah on, because it's just such an interesting story and an interesting niche, which again, you may not pay any attention to. You might show up in event and not realize that that's a mobile beverage company, mobile bar company that's serving. It's not the venue, it's not the caterer, it's them, but the guests don't care. If they don't like the bar experience, they're going to blame the host, who's going to blame everybody, right, at that point. They're just going to blame everybody at that point. But then again, what I'm talking with mobile beverage companies or bar companies in general, I say, "Listen, we're selling the experience, so don't sell them the second bar. Sell them the shorter wait. Don't sell them the horse trailer. Cool, whatever you have alone. But let's, do people want to walk outside to go to that bar? Let's sell them, one inside, the different places." So the upsell is the experience. It's not just that. So I have a feeling we could talk forever, but I'd like to keep these to about a half an hour. So what is the website if people wanted to go find out more about you and Mobile Bev Pros?
- Yeah, mobilebevpros.com. And that's B-E-V as in Victor. It's short for beverage, 'cause we also do work with coffee caterers, lemonade caterers, if it's a liquid, if it's a beverage, then we can help you build a business around it.
- That's it, brown liquids, coffee, bourbon, there we go. I love it, my Diet Coke. There's my other brown beverage over there.
- Hot chocolate.
- You know, if it's brown, it's probably good there. Sarah, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with people over here. I hope you got some inspiration, everybody listening here. Go to the show notes, find out more. If you either have a mobile bar already, or you're aspiring to it, go and find the Facebook group Mobile Bev Pros, and tune into the next episode of "The Wedding Business Solutions" podcast.
- Pleasure as always, thanks so much.
I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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