The Bar Business Podcast: Smart Hospitality & Marketing Secrets For Bar & Pub Owners
Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, where we help bar owners increase profits, attract loyal guests, and simplify operations without burnout so you can finally enjoy life outside the bar. Our host, Chris Schneider, draws on his over twenty years of experience in the industry to bring you valuable insights and practical advice every week. From creating a winning menu and designing a stylish bar, to effective marketing strategies and HR best practices, we've got you covered. Join us on the journey to bar business success and take the first step towards a brighter future for your establishment.
The Bar Business Podcast: Smart Hospitality & Marketing Secrets For Bar & Pub Owners
From Numbers to Success: Transforming Bar Operations with Servant Leadership
How do you turn raw data and KPIs into actionable strategies that lead to success in the bar industry? In this episode of the Bar Business Podcast, we explore this transition from numbers to effective leadership. We discuss how adopting the right mindset, concept, and culture—what we call the MCC framework—can be a game-changer for your bar. By focusing on establishing a solid business foundation, we guide you through the process of transforming theoretical planning into practical execution, ensuring your establishment not only runs efficiently but thrives.
Ever wondered why some bars succeed in turning first-time visitors into loyal patrons? It all boils down to creating a guest-centric culture. We dive into the powerful impact of servant leadership and the importance of a happy, motivated team. By prioritizing team satisfaction, from front-of-house to back-of-house, you can significantly elevate the guest experience. Listen to our detailed breakdown of how internal team management and external guest engagement intersect to build an inviting, enjoyable atmosphere that keeps guests coming back.
Team morale directly affects guest satisfaction—this isn't just management jargon; it's a fact we've experienced firsthand. In this episode, we share personal anecdotes that underline the importance of avoiding detrimental management styles like micromanaging and absenteeism. We also emphasize the value of leading by example and genuinely listening to your team. By fostering a positive, supportive work environment, you can enhance your bar's culture and ultimately improve your bottom line. Join us as we outline these essential strategies to elevate your bar business from good to great.
Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, where we help bar owners increase profits, attract loyal guests, and simplify operations without burnout so you can finally enjoy life outside the bar. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals.
Thank you to our show sponsor, SpotOn. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions.
**We are a SpotOn affiliate and earn commissions from the link above.
Thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software using AI to help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
Learn More:
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Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
You can have the best data, the best numbers, the best bookkeeping, the best ideas and systems in the world, but none of that matters unless you can convince your team to actually do the work.
Speaker 2:You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about bridging the gap between the data and the numbers that we normally talk about and leadership, and how to actually get your team to perform based on those numbers and your goals and your KPIs, and actually getting them to produce the results you need them to produce, based on data-driven decision-making. So, of course, we talk about data-driven decision-making all the time and it's hugely important, and that data-driven decision-making is what makes sure that you're on the right path, that you're pushing your bar in the correct direction and actually accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish and actually accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish. However, you have to go from the theoretical, from the numbers, to actually having the work done, to actually reaching those goals, and that's not always an easy process. In a lot of ways, the numbers and the financials and coming up with that data measuring the KPIs is easier than implementing the changes you need to implement to improve those KPIs and to actually make your bar better, and so I really want to spend some time today talking about A that process, but B, how to think about that More, the philosophy behind going from the data and the numbers that we talk about all the time on the show to the execution and impacting your bottom line.
Speaker 1:And before we really get deep into this, though, I want to go back and kind of preface this by talking about the framework that I always use, and if you've listened to the podcast for a long time or if you've gone back and listened to old episodes I think it's episodes two, three and four cover my framework, the philosophy that I use to guide decisions, and kind of look at the bar or a bar, I should say, as a business, and look at it holistically to decide. You know, how do we implement things, what are the building blocks, what is the framework to look at. And that framework I use is what I call the MCC framework, which is mindset, concept and culture, the idea there being that you have to do those sequentially. As an owner or a manager, you have to have your mindset right. First, you have to be thinking properly before you can affect your business, and then, once you have that mindset, once you're in the right mental space and have the right tools personally to guide your business, you have to have a business, and a business, at the end of the day, is a concept.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times when people think about concept when it comes to bars, they think about just the kind of the surface level. Right, I am an Irish pub, that is my concept. Or I am a cigar bar, that is my concept, and that is true. But the way I look at concept is a little bit broader than that. So, yes, a concept is an Irish pub. But also part of when I talk about concept would be all the standards and procedures to run that place. What are the different positions and who's working them. What does the financial back end look like? Everything, kind of I don't want to say the laws of your business, but all the standards, all the procedures, everything that you put together for your business is what that concept is. So concept, yes, irish pub. But in a broader sense your concept is kind of all the procedures, all the policies, all the the hand in the material you put together to understand what your bar is and how it's operated.
Speaker 1:And then culture I look at in two separate ways. There's internal culture and external culture. Internal culture is going to deal with team management. It's about getting the people that work for you to execute on your concept. External culture is marketing. It's reaching out to guests. It's how you project the culture that your business has into the world. So external culture deals with what you put out into the world. Internal culture deals with the you put out into the world. Internal culture deals with the actual culture within your establishment.
Speaker 1:And so, when it comes to talking about how do we go from numbers and data and making those decisions based on data to executing those decisions in the real world, first of all, it comes down to mindset, and one of the biggest mindsets that I push anyone that I work with to have is that of servant leadership, because servant leadership is going to have a huge, huge impact on your culture, how your employees feel, how they behave, how well they operate, and it's going to ensure that you have the best guest experience. Now, that being said, what I want to do is work backwards to servant leadership. So we're going to go through this conversation, but first I want to talk about guests, then we'll talk about your team, and then we'll talk about you as a servant leader and how to develop that mindset and some things about servant leadership itself that are crucial to taking data and leading it to decisions, and then to policies and procedures, and then to doing those things in practice, which, of course, is everything required to make more money or to increase your profits in the bar industry. So first let's look at the guess in the bar industry. So first let's look at the guests, because any framework, any thought process when it comes to a bar, you have to be guest-centric. We are a business that lives and dies by the people that come in, and not only who comes in, but how long they stay, what they do there, how we engage them, how frequently we can get them to come back All of these things matter. If we don't have a wonderful guest experience, we're out of business. So a bar, first and foremost, is there to serve the guests, and it's in the words that we use even who serves the guests the servers. So it's pretty obvious in this industry that our only real goal at the end of the day is to serve our guests as best as we can, and that means that nothing, absolutely nothing, comes before the guests.
Speaker 1:Now, that does not mean the guest is always right. I mean there are a lot of drunk people out there that have no clue what they're talking about. I mean, there are a lot of drunk people out there that have no clue what they're talking about, and it does not mean that we should sacrifice our team for our guests Right, just because someone comes in and complains about a bartender doesn't mean you fire the bartender. Maybe you need to, maybe their complaint's valid, but I think all of us are aware that about 75-80% of what we hear from guests, especially when they're complaining about our team, can be exaggerated. They can have a different view of things, karens and social media. There are a lot of people that are willing to complain a lot more about a business than they should. That all being said, unless we turn a guest that visits us the first time into a reoccurring guest, unless we turn our guests into raving fans, we don't have a business.
Speaker 1:So the guest always comes first, and the thing is that that guest experience comes from our team right. As an owner, you set the framework and maybe you're there working some too. Maybe you're actively managing as an owner. Maybe sometimes you're bartending as an owner, in which case you're a lot closer to that guest and that relationship. But in general, as an owner, even if you're managing, you're setting the stage to allow your team to make the guest experience, you are not doing the guest experience yourself. Now I will say that does not mean that as an owner, you don't need to talk to your guests. Obviously, you need to go out, you need to schmooze, you need to do your table touches, you need to talk to people. But regardless of your own ego or what you think in your own head, you're not the primary driver of that guest experience. You're not the one that's actually creating it day in and day out for your guests. Your team, so your team is the genesis of the guest experience.
Speaker 1:And another thing I should point out here is that too often we think, oh, it's just the front house, it's just the bartenders and the servers that are creating the guest experience. A, that's not fair to the folks in the back of house, in the kitchen. And. B, it's not exactly true. Because if you're serving food, if you have a back of house, you have a kitchen. They make that food. The quality of that food, the presentation of that food, everything about that food is going to impact the guest experience. So there's no way, there's not a single freaking way, that you can say that the back of house and the front of house, those frontline employees that are dealing with the guests, are not the immediate creators of the guest experience, and as owners, we're not. We're just not.
Speaker 1:And so how do we make sure our guests have a great experience? In order to do that, we have to make sure our team has a great experience, something I've said before and I stand by all the time probably say this more than I should, but is your guest or, I'm sorry, your team experience becomes your guest experience. How your team feels, how they behave and how they interact with your guests is your guest experience. So one of the easiest and best ways to influence your guest experience is to make sure you have a great team experience. If you don't care about your servers, if you don't care about your cooks, if you don't care about the people that clean your bar, they're not going to care about you. So that means essentially, how your team feels about themselves, about their job and about the bar, will impact how they serve.
Speaker 1:So let's go through those real quick and break that down. The first part there is how your team feels about themselves. Let's be honest, and I'm sure most of you that are listening to this podcast are currently owners, but probably at some point you were a server or a bartender, and I know in my own experience serving and bartending, and even in ownership, my personal mental state affects how I interact with people, and if I'm in a really bad mood, I'm not going to interact with people as well as if I'm in a really good mood. And so if you have a bartender who just broke up with her boyfriend, or a server who had a death in his family, they're not in the best mental state possible and that's going to affect their ability to take care of your guests. Now, does that mean you should never let anyone work who has an emotional problem or who is dealing with a hard issue in their life? Of course not. A if that was your standard for people working, you would never have anyone work. But B it's just unrealistic in our society. It's too hard to get people. It's not something that can happen. But it's your job as an owner to do everything you can to make sure that while the people that work for you are at work, they have a great experience. There's nothing you're putting in their way that puts them in a bad mood. So how your team feels about themselves affects your customer experience.
Speaker 1:Second point there was how your team feels about their jobs affects your customer experience. Let's be real honest here, and I know I've been this person plenty of times when I don't like my job, when I'm working for somebody else and it's just I don't like it, whether it's because my leadership are not doing what I need them to do or treating me unfairly, or because I am working for someone who has engaged in bad behavior that's negatively impacted the team and I'm caught in the middle. Whatever it may be, if people don't feel good about their jobs, they're not going to work as well. That's just a fact. And so when you put roadblocks in the way of your team and how they feel about their jobs, they're just not going to do it. Now it's not only how they feel about their jobs, but it's also how they feel about the establishment. And that sounds kind of weird, right? Because how you feel about your job is usually a reflection of how you feel about the place you work. That's not always the case.
Speaker 1:I worked for someone years ago. I was a food and beverage director and the GM of this place. I just could not stand but the guests. I loved the place itself. I loved Just the GM made my life hell day in and day out and, frankly, I didn't last there long and so I didn't like my job, but I did like where I was working and I actually could say that's that's. There are multiple examples of that in my history. So it's also possible to be on the other end, to really like your job but not really believe in the establishment. Right you might have. I love going to this job, I make a bunch of money, but I don't like the concept, I don't like the bar, I don't like the people that come in. All of that can be true and that's going to have a negative effect on that person's ability to work.
Speaker 1:So it's incumbent upon us as owners in the bar industry to make sure that our team feels good about themselves, their jobs and the book, because when we do that, we're setting them up to be successful, and in setting them up to be successful, we're setting our customers up to have a great experience. Now there are two things I will say here about what owners do that directly impacts that team experience in negative ways. The two things I see a lot are absenteeism and micromanaging so the two opposite ends of the spectrum, and both ends can kill your team experience and both ends, therefore, can kill your guest experience, which in turn kills your profit and puts you out of business. So in the micromanaging end, a lot of folks are micromanagers because, frankly, they don't lack or they don't have the trust and faith in themselves required to allow someone else to do what they told them to do or just to do what they need to do in order to make a business. Now that sounds kind of counterintuitive because people think, when you normally think about micromanagers, you know they're the people following around the checklist making sure everything is done, doing all of that.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes, if you are a micromanager, that micromanaging is coming from a place of insecurity. You're scared about your own ability to do the job, you're scared about how other people will execute what you tell them to do, so you micromanage. And again, why I started with the mindset concept, culture framework is because micromanaging is normally a function of someone's personal mindset that makes them fearful of outcome and forces them internally really to have to have this hands-on, aggressive approach towards everything, because they feel like if they don't, everything falls. And so if you find yourself micromanaging. Rather than worry about your team, I would encourage you to worry about yourself. Figure out what your fear is.
Speaker 1:What is going on in your head that's causing you to be a micromanager, like I said on the other side, that's absenteeism. And absenteeism can come in a lot of different ways. Right? Sometimes absenteeism in our industry is just because I live in Indiana and I own a bar in Michigan and I have managers and it's all good and I'm engaged, but I'm not really engaged and so I'm not crafting that team experience day in and day out. Other times absenteeism is I'm'm so stressed I cannot deal with this anymore, and so, rather than dealing with it, rather than facing it head on, I'm just going to go hide in a corner, and that happens. We all go through times like that.
Speaker 1:I would imagine some of you have noticed that over the past month, I've missed some podcast episodes. Well, that would be absenteeism. Now, what's the cause of that absenteeism? I'll be real honest with you. My brother had a health issue and he had a tumor and he had to get it cut out. Now, luckily, there's no foreseen future health issues. It looks like everything's great. But in my struggle dealing with my brother's illness, helping him deal with it, helping him recover after surgery all of that. I was not in a mindset where I was able to be present and talk as much Because, frankly, everything I had to say and everything in my brain was negative. Everything I had to say and everything in my brain was negative and so, rather than face that and deal with it which I did in my own way, but I withdrew. Now I missed three podcast episodes. Not the end of the world, right? I mean the clients I was working with I still talk to the whole time. Did other people get put on the back burner so that I could deal with a personal issue? Absolutely so.
Speaker 1:Absenteeism isn't always, by definition, a bad thing. Sometimes it's just something you plan to do and it's a good thing that you did it. But where absenteeism can become really bad is when you just run away from your problems, and this is an industry where owners get in, get in over their heads and they run away from their problem. That's never going to create a better team experience and because it doesn't create a better team experience, it's going to ruin your guest experience. So both micromanaging and absenteeism the two divergent, separate sides of kind of the continuum of leadership styles. Leadership styles are very bad for your team experience and they're never going to put your bar in a better position to be successful. So where does that bring us? It brings us to the idea that you got to stay in between those two lines and, because we know our guest experience comes from our team experience, we have to figure out the way to have the best team experience possible.
Speaker 1:I would submit to you that the best way to do that is to be a servant leader, and this is something that, especially for owners that are new in the industry, or people that have been in the industry for years but are new to ownership, can be really hard. And part of the reason why it's hard I feel like in a hospitality for us to be servant leaders is we've had such terrible examples of leadership going back through history and there's just not. We have always been kind of a fringe business industry. Right, we're not. No one thinks about hospitality or owning a bar at the same level of prestige, let's say, as owning a tech company, although I would argue this is absolutely true that you're more likely to make as owning a tech company, although I would argue this is absolutely true that you're more likely to make money owning a bar than you are owning a tech company. That being said, you're more likely to make hundreds of million dollars owning a tech company than you are owning a bar, but I don't know how many times.
Speaker 1:But we've had bad leaders, and some of that is just how our industry has grown up. Some of that is lack of professional training and things that have not really existed in our industry ever. We have much more of an apprentice system than an educational training system. Like many other industries, leadership skills are something that have been taught essentially two ways the first one being I had a manager who was a dick, so I'm going to do the opposite. And the second one being I had a manager who I like, so I'm going to model what they did, and for most of us, we've had not one manager, but we've had 15 managers some we liked, some we didn't and we kind of smashed that all together and there's a leadership style. But if I'm being real honest, most people that have been in this industry for a long time are definitely not servant leaders, so servant leadership is, frankly, a little bit different than how most people approach leadership in hospitality.
Speaker 1:Servant leadership essentially starts by service. Right, and it makes sense. Our servers serve our guests. We serve our servers to enable them to serve our guests the best way possible. Now that all sounds great, but in practice, how can you actually be a servant leader? Help someone. None of us are perfect, right? No one's going to be a great servant leader, but five points that help you be a servant leader. And then, if you keep top of mind and you think about your decisions and what you're doing in relation to these five points, you're more likely to be a servant leader more often than you're not. Because, again, no one's infallible. You will have days where you are a fantastic leader. You will have days where you are the worst leader on the planet. That is just part of business ownership.
Speaker 1:So what are those five things? The first one is you focus on your team first. And when I say focus on your team first, one of the things that means to me and we can all you can agree or disagree on some of the exact ways to say follow these five points of servant leadership I'm giving you, but you got to do it one way or the other but to me, one of the ways I've always focused on my team first is that if there was an option or if there was a point where, say, money was tight, I would make sure my team got paid before anything else. Well, I shouldn't say that. Make sure my team gets paid, as long as I'm clear with everything on the government. Government gets paid first, team gets paid second, but that's a priority. I would prioritize team development, spending money to make my employees more knowledgeable or have more tools to do their job or support them by. You know, sometimes it's buying something, sometimes it's buying a new bar rail so that the bottles fit better, right, whatever that may be, I would prioritize spending money that makes my team happier, that makes them more efficient, over spending money, say on myself for sure, but even spending money on things like a new chair for the office, which I was having dinner a couple weeks ago with my old GM from my bar and one of the things that we were laughing about was the chair in the office Because it never got replaced. It was really really bad. But the reason why it never got replaced and it was really really bad is every time I went to spend a couple hundred bucks on a chair, there was a couple hundred bucks I could spend on something that helped my team, and so that became the priority over the chair. So, first principle of servant leadership focus on your team first. Second principle would be lead by example.
Speaker 1:Now, those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a long time have heard me go on multiple tirades against hypocrites. I really don't like hypocrites, and hypocrites are something that have been around hospitality forever, like it's. The number of times I have had a manager or seen a manager essentially give the old do what I say, not what I do is amazing. So it's not like. Many of us in this industry aren't used to a little bit of hypocrisy on the part of management or owners, and even more than managers, I've seen a lot of owners go out and just be like, no, I can do whatever I want, I own the place. Well, technically, that's true, but when you say, well, the employees can't drink here, and then you go to the cooler and you grab yourself a beer and you go sit down at a table and have three, four beers while you're talking to your buddies, you're not leading by example, you are being a hypocrite and you're hurting your culture, right, because in your mind. You have the mindset that I'm the owner, I'm the emperor, I'm the king, I can do whatever I want and at the end of the day that mindset degrades your culture, because now your employees think you're a hypocrite. They care less about their jobs. Your customers get worse service. Everything starts to crumble. So if you expect other people to do something, you should do it yourself.
Speaker 1:That's why one of the things that I have told lots of people and it's a rule that I always followed when I had my bar was I didn't drink at my bar. That's not to say I never booze at my bar. I never imbibed, because I tasted things. I would. You know, we do training with the team. Everybody would be tasting things. When we brought in new products, we would taste. You know, we'd do training with a team. Everybody would be tasting things. When we brought in new products, we would taste them. When we had new cocktails, we would taste them. When we were going through cocktail ideation, we would try all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:So when I say I never drank at my bar, that's not to say I didn't ever physically drink an alcoholic drink at my bar and, for that matter, it's not to say that I ever wasn't buzzed or slightly intoxicated in my bar. Trust me, some of those tastings got a little out of hand. I remember one with a rep one time where uh, let's just say, he tried me on a bunch of products and then I took a nap in the office. So I'm not saying don't do it, but the example I was setting. There was the only time I'm drinking, I am drinking for the purpose of the business. Now we can obviously make the argument that I was a little bit of a hypocrite when I got drunk with the rep and took a nap in the office, but in general that was what I tried to do was not drink while I was there, and if I wanted to drink I'd go to the bar down the street. And that's something I encourage all bar owners to do Don't drink in your own establishment.
Speaker 1:Drink down the street, because then you're not giving a bad example to your employees. Likewise, if you expect your employees to be on time for meetings, if you expect them to do certain things, you need to show them how to behave, not by your words but by your actions. So you must lead by example to be a servant leader, and you have to be very careful, very mindful of not doing anything that would seem hypocritical and therefore cause your culture to erode, which will cause your profits to decrease. So you need to lead by example. The third piece about being a servant leader that I like to encourage everyone to do is to listen.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes especially owners we get asked a lot of things. We have a lot of opinions, we're running the business, we talk a lot and I'd be lying I mean, I have a podcast right. Of course, I enjoy to an extent hearing myself talk, but to actually lead people, you have to listen, you have to allow them to say what they want to say, and I'm sure all of us have experiences where we've had a situation whether it was at work, in a personal life, whatever where we go to talk to someone and we start to say what we want to say and they immediately cut us off, assume they know the answer, give it to us and move on. Well, I think in any social situation, all of us would agree that's pretty rude, that's not something that we would want to do, that's not how we would want someone to respond to us. But in business, oftentimes we do that to each other and we don't even notice it. And part of that is I'm stressed, I'm busy, I don't have time to talk to you, I'm not going to listen. Part of that is I know better than you, so I don't have to listen, and part of that can just be hey, I'm tired and worn out and I really don't want to listen to this shit right now, like I've been in all three of those positions.
Speaker 1:But it's important to consider that unless you listen to somebody, you don't actually know what they're saying, you don't actually know the point they're getting at, you don't actually know what their complaint is. Because if you think about interactions with your team, the people you are leading, a lot of times they'll come to you with one thing and when you try to say, okay, what is the root cause of this problem, you'll listen to the cause and you'll move on. Well, you didn't listen to what they said enough and they told you half the story. You came up with the cause. You moved on when, in reality, you should have been listening to these folks for hours, and maybe not hours. Hours is long, but you should have given them the time to explain themselves, to actually understand what the heck it is you're talking about, because frequently what people say at first is not what they actually mean.
Speaker 1:And along the lines of listening, something I like to do it's really weird when you start it, but it actually helps you get a lot out of people is to allow conversations to pause. So, rather than try to fill every second of a conversation, which is all of our natural inclinations, especially those of us that are in hospitality we talk to a lot of people, we talk for a living. We're probably in a bop from conversation to conversation to conversation, especially if you think about doing something like table touches. You are just walking around a room talking to everybody and you just boom flow of conversation to conversation to conversation. The second talking to customers on a busy night. The second they give you a break and you can get out of there. You usually do, but when you're talking to your employees, when you're having conversations that matter, rather than try to rush through that conversation, if there's a pause, let there be a pause. Don't fill it with your own words. Let the person who is speaking get to the point that they fill that part of the conversation. No-transcript, because usually if you let people, if you allow a pause, to sit there for five or six seconds A they'll fill it in, they'll say something else, and B that something else that they said normally gets you closer to what they're actually trying to convey to you than what they said before the pause. Now, the whole pause thing aside, again, to be a good leader, you have to listen. To be a good leader, you have to listen. So listening is important.
Speaker 1:The fourth thing on my list of kind of requirements to be a servant leader is you have to be inclusive. Now, I think the term inclusive lately has gotten confused in the way inclusive has been put as part of DEI. There's a lot of politics around the word inclusive, part of DEI. There's a lot of politics around the word inclusive. And so what I would ask you to do when I say inclusive is to throw all your preconceived notions about what the heck I probably mean out the window. What I mean is everyone that should be involved in something needs to. Everyone that has an opinion should be able to say their opinion, that we should not discredit someone because of the position they hold.
Speaker 1:You know you can't just write off your dishwasher because they're a dishwasher. Sometimes they have good ideas. So when you think about your team, when you're giving them direction when you're talking to people, rather than try to segregate your team into groups, rather than try to target individuals. Be inclusive in the way that you go about managing and leading your team Because, frankly, I personally think that if we get into continuous improvement and things like that, some of the best ideas come from the bussers and the dishwashers and the barbacks. Now, why do they have great ideas? Well, a, they're doing a lot of the back-end work and that happens to mean that they see a lot that other people don't. You know, if you want to know if your food portions are too big, first person to talk to is your dishwasher, because they see all the food that gets thrown away. If you want to know where your bar is lacking efficiency, talk to your bar back, because they're the one restocking everything, for that matter. If you want to know which of your bartenders is quicker, talk to your bar back. They know. So be inclusive, not in some political sense that we have today or anything else, but be inclusive in the idea that all of your employees are part of your team and in order to make your team successful, you need to talk to every member of your team. You need to value every member of your team. So be inclusive.
Speaker 1:Now our final point on the five points of how to be a great servant leader is to inspire vision. Inspire vision. Give people goals. Give people places they're going. Let them have a vision in their head of what that bar should be. Now, obviously, that vision, you shouldn't let them come up with it on their own. Necessarily, because then everybody that's working for you has a slightly different vision and that's not at all what we want. But when you're setting up your company and you're getting that mindset piece together, what I'm talking people through? Just the mindset, concept, culture, framework and how to go through it. Company culture is the last piece of mindset, because your corporate values, vision is the last piece of mindset Because your corporate values, vision, mission are all going to dictate your concept and your culture.
Speaker 1:Now that vision, if done properly, should be something you can use to inspire your team. You need to get them on board with it. It needs to be something that connects with that. So you have to inspire the vision of your team. You have to inspire them to see what the bar can be where you're going, but you should also inspire them to see what they can be individually, where they can go with you, and whether that is promotion or if you have a larger group, you know being able to move to a different store in a higher position, or if that's getting everything they can out of the experience so they can move on to a different business with all the wonderful knowledge and learning that you provided them.
Speaker 1:Either way, it's good for you, but you need to give them the corporate vision for the bar. You need to also inspire them to have personal vision, whatever that may be, whether that's 20 years working with you or two years working with you as a stepping stone to something better. You need to inspire that vision in them. You need to allow them to dream and be creative and you need to foster that. And then, if their dream really is to work with you for two or three years, become a bartender, learn how you run the bar, get all the cocktails down and then move somewhere else to be a manager, because your one bar doesn't have the ability for them to move up, because your manager has been there for 10 years and ain't going anywhere Then help them do that, understand where they want to go and help them get there.
Speaker 1:Serve them as a leader in achieving their vision, even when their long-term vision may cause you short-term harm. Because when you get them out there, if you get them through your bar and trained and give them a wonderful experience and they go somewhere else, all you're doing is spreading your culture and spreading your message across the industry, which is a powerful thing to do, it's a rewarding thing to do, and you're creating people that will cherish the time they worked for you and realize that you helped them through that journey with you but then to a new opportunity. So not only inspire their vision in the bar, but inspire their vision in themselves and help them. So those are the five key points of being a great servant Focus on your team first, lead by example, listen, be inclusive and inspire vision. So I would challenge all of you listening, think about your leadership, think about how you're leading your team and think about how are you able to go from data and KPIs and finances and all those things that we talk about all the time to executing it, and are you leading in a way, are you serving your team in a way that makes that process of data to execution more difficult, or makes it easier for you to go from data to execution, providing a better experience for your guests. So with that we'll wrap it up for today.
Speaker 1:If you liked today's episode, make sure you like, subscribe, leave a review, all that good stuff, as always. If you have not joined, join Bar Business Nation on Facebook. It's a Facebook group. I'm in there. We got a bunch of bar owners in there. We're having conversations. It's really a place for bar owners to interact with other bar owners, to learn to grow, to have people to bounce ideas off of and, as always, if you're interested in talking with me, schedule a strategy session. There's a link in the show notes for that as well. With that everyone, I hope you have a great day and we will talk again later.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to the Bar Business Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. Check out our website at barbusinesspodcastcom and join our Bar Business Nation Facebook group for more strategies and tips.
