Of course there are exceptions to this. There are certainly a large percentage of failures on the bar world and I recently came across two such bars, struggling to stay afloat. Each owner was very different in terms of their management style, the bars were distinctly different yet both catered to an older clientele due to their locations in more affluent neighborhood. They also shared the same problem: Both bars were owned by guys in their late 20s/early 30s, who were trying their hardest to fill their bar with 40 yr old + neighbors at each location.

It quickly became obvious what the problem was. The owners were not their own customers and as is the case in many businesses, YOU are not YOUR own customer. How a twentysomething runs a business will not instinctively be in a way that appeals to potential customers twice his age.

Him playing hip hop loudly at 9pm on a Tuesday night may not be what his target market want to hear, but this understanding often comes only after a failure.

Him populating the menu with HIS favorite dishes instead of his customers is him not being his own customer.

Him offering a Shots menu instead of a Martini menu is him not being his own customer.

Take some steps today to be your own customer.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What newspapers do my potential customers read?
• Where do they spend their time online?
• What are the food & beverage trends in my demographic right now?
• Are you asking your customers if they enjoy their experience?
• Do you receive regular feedback from customers other than friends or family?
• What’s important to them on a night out?
• If they don’t visit my bar, where DO they spend their time?

If you don’t know the answer to any of these questions, you’re more at risk of failure than those that do. While these are steps that should be taken long before you open the doors, as long as you’re still in business, you can “retro-fit” the experience you offer.

2010 brought social networks like Twitter & Facebook more into the mainstream than they had ever been and 2011 looks to be an even more prolific year for these networks. Add into the mix location based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, coupled with review websites like TripAdvisor, CitySearch and Yelp and you may find you have your hands full keeping up with everything online.

You have a few options. You could choose to ignore these websites and dismiss them as a fad or you could pay attention to the conversation that is ALREADY taking place out there about your business. And it IS taking place. To prove this to yourself, all you have to do is Google the name of your business and the search results will most likely yield a set of reviews with star ratings as part of the results. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The mobile savvy user now actively reviews your business while there, taking pictorial evidence in the process, leaving a tip about what was good, what wasn’t good, all the while blasting this information out to his/her legion of friends and followers.

If you have watched the fascinating short video Social Media Revolution (and I strongly recommend you do), you’ll know that 78% of us make our purchasing decisions based on recommendations. But what recommendations are your customers listening to? Are they positive or negative? Could the $5000/month print marketing/advertising budget be destroyed by a handful of negative reviews? Not only is this possible, but it’s happening every day of the week.

Check out this infographic from early in 2010. I guarantee that the numbers have only gone up since and will continue to do so:

With so much information available to prospective customers, the onus is now on you, the business owner to convince them through your online efforts.

Follow these steps to help influence prospective customers:

1. Encourage satisfied customers to review your business online.
2. Regularly search review websites for comments about your business. Even better, set up Google Alerts to notify you when a mention is made of your business.
3. Stop being “Salesy” in your Tweets and Facebook posts. No-one uses social networks to be pitched at constantly. Ask yourself if the customer was sitting across the bar counter from you, how would you talk to them. See? It’s different isn’t it? Well it shouldn’t be. Be social online as if the audience was sitting in front of you.
4. Engage with negative reviews by thanking them and asking if you can help make it right for them. If necessary take the conversation to the telephone for added brownie points and quicker resolution.
5. Be an active participant on the social networks where your customers participate. It might have been MySpace five years ago, but it’s most likely to be Facebook today so keep up to date and earn their trust and business on THEIR terms, not just yours.

It’s time to take back control of the conversation before someone else does.

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Social Media fanaticism has officially taken over and many business owners feel they’re missing out on something big if they’re not tweeting 20 times a day and spending hours trawling through Facebook. But the reality is that as a business owner, social media might not even be for you. You might never get any benefit from it. In fact, you could end up doing more damage than good.

How do you know if it will work? How can you tell if Social Media is not for you? Here’s how:

Social Media is not for you if…

Your business isn’t social

This might seem like a strange statement considering the number of personal interactions every day in a bar or restaurant. Surely it’s the most social atmosphere in the world? The truth is that most businesses are “transactional” and not social. Think about many fast food restaurants, busy happy hour bars, fast casual restaurants where you are lucky to make eye contact, let alone have a meaningful conversation. If your staff aren’t talking with your customers, asking them about their day, talking about the weather, getting genuine feedback about their meals/drinks, then your business is not social. It may be profitable, but its not social. Check to see what happens when a half finished meal is taken from a customers table uneaten. How did the serving staff deal with this? Was it a transaction or was it social?

A restaurant consultant I respect, Jeffrey Summers, summed it up recently when he said that “Social Media won’t make a mediocre business better, but it will amplify the mediocrity”.

Solution: Start to make your business more social before diving into social media

You don’t want to know

Social Media and online interaction invariably means you have to listen to what’s being said about your business. If you don’t want to know or you have no interest in participating in the conversation that is ALREADY taking place about your business, then Social Media might not be for you, If you don’t see the value in creating a feedback loop in person in your business to notify you of complaints or problems, you won’t be comfortable dealing with it openly online and should avoid Social Media at all costs.

Solution: Take it on the chin and listen to what your customers are saying

You seek short term gains

If you have spent the last few years focusing your marketing spend in newspapers, magazines and radio or if you are used to pumping large sums of money into marketing stunts, then Social Media will be an unfamiliar beast to tame. There are no successful stunts on Social Media. There are ways to build engagement that can result in the ringing of the cash register drawer, but stunts will be called out for just that.

There are few short term gains in Social Media, but instead there is a longer, more profitable and more reliable return on investment once you have built a community of loyal customers who support your business, defend you online and ensure they spend their hard earned cash in your bar or restaurant. So ignore the short term “pressure cooker” gains or stunts for the slow-cooking crock pot and build loyalty bit by bit. It’s worth more.

Solution: Buy into a longer term concept and you’ll reap the rewards increasingly month by month.

You don’t understand Social Media

As a digital immigrant myself and not one of the digital natives born since 1985, I too had to start somewhere and learn how to handle it. I started by listening to what was being said on Twitter about the bar industry, I listened some more, and once I understood what was going on, ventured to comment and engage back. Then I started to offer my own thoughts and ideas that eventually attracted comments and feedback too and on and on it went, bit by bit.
We all have to start somewhere. There are plenty of free resources on this site to help you navigate through the jungle as well as such helpful sites as Social Media Examiner and Mashable.
Don’t forget, your customers get it, they trust it and spend most of their time online using it, so you or a manager are going to have to get it soon. It won’t be for you if you don’t fancy tackling the learning curve.

Solution: Start to research the benefits and business being generated by bars and restaurants through their use of social media

You have too much else to do

Having been in the bar and restaurant industry since 1993, I know that there is no industry with longer hours, tougher pressures and more uncertainty than this one. The thing is, you can put all the work you want into your kitchen, into training your staff and into getting your prices right, but if nobody knows about your business or if there are negative reviews and comments circulating online that you don’t know about, then its all for nothing, isn’t it? Once you have the correct listening/social platforms set up, then there is no reason that Social Media marketing and engagement need take more than 15 minutes a day. Have you really got too much to do that this can’t be fitted in or delegated. If so, then you might have more pressing issues in your business than Social Media.

Solution: Clear a little time from your schedule each day to reap the rewards of Social Media.

Is social media for you? Would love your feedback below

In fact, 78% of us now make purchasing decisions based on peer recommendations. What does this mean for your business?

Facebook Places is a feature that allows customers to “check-in” to your bar or restaurant and in doing so shares their location information with all of their friends.  You can imagine what this means for your business. Every time a customer checks in on their mobile phone, a message appears on the Facebook wall of all of their friends who may choose to jon them or check out your bar or restaurant a bit further online.

Why you wouldn’t want to take advantage of this is beyond me, so check out Facebook’s introductory video that tells you a little more about Places and I’ll have a few more tips over the coming days about how you can implement special offers & deals into Facebook places.

This video gives a great example of how to leverage a Facebook Page as a bar owner to engage customers, keep them informed as to the latest promotions and keep them in the loop as to what’s going on in the bar when they’re not sitting there with a glass in their hand!

Cork’s Irish Pub has mastered the art of engagement and keeps it social and un-salesy at the same time. Hope you enjoy the video.

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Download a Recipe Costing Calculator from ManageYourBar.com by Clicking Here

A recipe card creates:

1. Consistency in the kitchen. When I talk about consistency, I mean that very often there are changes of chefs, the head chef may be off duty, there may be new chefs in the kitchen and so it’s really important for consistency purposes to have a written recipe of exactly what goes into your dish, so that everybody who makes that dish today, tomorrow or next week can create the same dish using the same quantities and the same ingredients. Your customers who come back again and again, expecting to have that special dish they had the first time are guaranteed to get that when the same recipe is followed.
2. Staff Training. So when you get a new staff member joining the kitchen, instead of passing down your recipes and your methods just by word of mouth, you’ve got a written record he can take a copy of. You can create a little “kitchen bible” for each new member of staff based on the recipe cards, based on the breakdown of every single thing that you want in there. Based on your standards in your kitchen. So it’s really easy to train your staff. You’ve got a written record and a written set of instructions as to what’s involved.
3. Cost analysis. Only by working out the cost of every single ingredient, and that will fluctuate depending on times of the year, depending on availability from your vendors and your suppliers, that will vary, but costs analysis will allow you to see how viable is this dish? Can I even afford to be serving it? If not, how quickly can I get it off my menu because I don’t want to serve something that I can’t even afford? So breakdown your costs, one by one. Even down to the little grain of salt. Not just a grain of salt, but a pinch of salt. I know it sounds like I’m breaking this down really deep into the smallest pieces but only am I getting into the understanding of what’s my dish costing me, how much money is it making me. I’ve done this exercise with a few restaurant owners in the past and as soon as we started working out the breakdown of the costs, we realized that they weren’t even making any money. It was actually costing too much to serve them. We’re losing money in the dish because the chef hadn’t kept up to date with supplier prices. Supplier prices have gone through the roof on certain items and made the dish not viable anymore. So break it down, bit by bit.

First reason again is consistency, second reason is staff training and the third is cost analysis. So if you don’t already have a recipe card in your kitchen, in your restaurant, in your bar download one below this video for your business right now. If you want to get in contact with me to help you with your recipe cards, to help with your costs in your kitchen you can also get my details by clicking on the bottom below. And as always, make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter to be kept up-to-date with all these blog posts and you will find details of that below this video as well.

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If you’re a frequent visitor to this blog, if you’ve been watching my videos in the past, you’ll know that I’m big on weighing items that are delivered to your bar, your restaurant by weight. If you order items by weight, you weigh them when they’re delivered. If you order items by unit, you count them when they are delivered as well.

So, I’ve come across more cases than not when I work with restaurants and bars who have an early morning operation like a breakfast operation, deliveries often occur at the same time. If you haven’t told your suppliers or vendors “do not deliver at this time”, they will often come at the same time as breakfast. It’s a busy time, there’s one chef on duty, maybe it’s very difficult to count everything and to weigh everything.

However, I suggest first, you schedule your deliveries when there is somebody available who can actually weigh your produce. If you’re ordering a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of expensive meats and shellfish, you’re going to need to know what’s on your invoice is exactly what you’re receiving. If it’s not, why would you bother paying for it?

So the only way to keep track of that is the first thing you have to do, is to weigh everything. Everything that is delivered has to be weighed if it’s ordered by weight. It’s as simple as that. You do that in the company of the driver or delivery person. As soon as you weigh it you compare it to the invoice and you check to see if it’s exactly the same. If it’s not, you show it to the driver and you agree upon it that you’re making changes on the invoice there and then. And you get a copy of those changes. And what you do with those changes is you keep a record of them in your credit note tracking sheet. If you don’t have a credit note tracking sheet, there’s one below this video you can download it and implement it in your business straight away.

And what you do with this is that, in your credit note tracking sheet, there may be 20 lines that details every difference between the invoice and what was actually delivered. And you keep a record of this and you pass it along to your accounts payable. If that’s you, then you have it when the invoice comes to compare it or your accounts payable people can check to make sure that they’re only paying for what was received and they can compare it against your sheet. This is a really simple way to track and make sure that you’re getting credit for what was not delivered to you. Because nobody’s going to want to pay for produce or for expensive meats or shellfish or fish that was not delivered fully.
So be on top of it, use the credit note tracking sheet. You’ll find it below here. If you want to make contact with me, by all means please follow the links below this video. I’ll be happy to discuss how I can help you with your own kitchen cost management. But in the meantime, get this credit note tracking sheet and start tracking those costs in the kitchen.

Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll track their progress and show you what we have been doing each step of the way. Here’s the first video:

Want me to work with your bar? Take a peek at some of the ways I can help you HERE