The Bar Business Podcast: Smart Hospitality & Marketing Secrets For Bar & Pub Owners

Bar Owner's Guide to Operational Excellence: Why Checklists Are Your Secret Weapon

• Chris Schneider, The Bar Business Coach • Season 2 • Episode 90

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Are you tired of constantly putting out fires in your bar because something was forgotten or overlooked?

Many bar owners struggle with maintaining consistency in their operations, leading to costly mistakes, frustrated staff, and dissatisfied customers. Without proper systems in place, it's easy for important tasks to slip through the cracks.

Learn How to:

  • Create effective checklists that actually get used
  • Discover the critical areas of your bar that need systematic oversight
  • Master the art of accountability and staff buy-in for checklist implementation

Listen now to transform your bar's operations from chaos to clockwork with proven checklist strategies that top-performing bars use every day.

Learn More:
Email Chris
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Starfish. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. 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.
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A podcast for bar, pub, tavern, nightclub, and restaurant owners, managers, and hospitality professionals, covering essential topics like bar inventory, marketing strategies, restaurant financials, and hospitality profits to help increase b...

Chris Schneider:

Today, you'll discover why the world's most successful bars rely on checklists to maintain excellence. Learn the psychology behind why checklists work and how to reduce costly mistakes, and master the art of creating checklists that your staff will actually want to use. Hello and welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, where we help bar owners increase profits, attract loyal guests and simplify operations so you can avoid burnout and finally enjoy your life outside of your bar. I'm your host, chris Schneider, the Bar Business Coach. Before we get started, a quick thank you to our sponsors SpotOn, who provide a great, modern POS solution for the bar and restaurant industry, and Starfish, who use AI to turn your books into actual steps to increase profits, and Starfish, who use AI to turn your books into actual steps to increase profits. So today we're diving into the power of checklists and bar operations. We're going to talk about the psychological benefits and how to implement them.

Chris Schneider:

When we think about running a bar, one of the biggest problems people have is that there are a huge number of moving parts. I've said this before and I will stand by this, that actually the bar industry is one of the harder industries out there. Restaurants would fall in the same group, because we're not just providing a singular service. We're providing multiple services. We're bringing in raw ingredients and making products out of those that we're then selling to our customers, and so even the most experienced people can forget some of the details. Steps get missed because we're in a hectic environment and we're doing the same things day in and day out, but those steps that get missed hurt our efficiency and they prevent us from having the best bar possible. Now, if we think about mindset right, I always like to go back to my framework of mindset, concept, culture and mindset with bar owners. One of the things that we all have a tendency to do and I did as well is to want to micromanage and check every aspect of our operation. Now, obviously, we've talked about before on the podcast how micromanaging doesn't really help your employees. It actually makes the work environment worse and tends to have people not do as well overall. But by implementing checklists, we can create a self-running system that ensures our consistency and excellence and allows us to not need to micromanage, because all we have to do is check that something was done and, in this case, check that the checklist was used. It gives us the opportunity to make sure that our employees are fully aware of what's going on, and it makes it easy for us to check that everything that we want to have get done is actually getting done.

Chris Schneider:

As we start the conversation about checklists, I think one of the really important things to talk about first is why do we need checklists? What are the benefits of using checklists? And obviously there are organizational benefits that we've already alluded to, but there are also psychological benefits behind using checklists and the effective use of checklists. Now, the biggest one is it reduces your cognitive load. And so what do I mean by that Cognitive load?

Chris Schneider:

You only have so many decisions that you can make in a day, and I forget the number, but we all make tens of thousands of decisions in any given day, from do I want to go get a water right now or, you know, should I get out of bed or do I want to hit the snooze button, to really intense business decisions that we take in our business. Right, should I hire someone, should I fire someone, should I change the products I'm offering? All of those decisions affect the load in our brain and, just like anything else, when you work your brain hard, it makes you tired. So people can only make so many decisions in a day, and by using checklists we allow folks to not have to think as much, which reduces that cognitive load and makes it easier for them to accomplish their tasks. The other psychological benefits we're getting from checklists is we're creating accountability through clear instructions, which not only helps us build confidence in new employees and give new employees a tool they can use to make sure they're doing their job properly, but it also makes sure that our current employees feel like they're being treated fairly. Everyone's being held to the same standard, and that's true within a shift, across shifts, across every person, because if you're all following the same checklist, you have a consistent standard, that where everyone's performing.

Chris Schneider:

So what is it with checklists? What are the checklists that we need? And let's be real honest here, if you have not read it, there's a great book. It's called the Checklist Manifesto, and he's a doctor and he writes all about using checklists in operating rooms and how that improves patient success. But there are checklists. He goes through medicine, he goes through aviation pilots, all sorts of different places where they use an extreme amount of checklists, and you can have a checklist literally for anything.

Chris Schneider:

But there are some essential checklist categories I think are really important for bars. The two that you pretty much always need are opening and closing checklists. What are your procedures for opening? What prep needs to be done when you're closing, what needs to be cleaned, what financial things need to be done? Right, how do you run that Z? How do you put together your money at the end of the night? So an opening and closing checklist are pretty much required for everyone. And then, beyond those, you're going to include some cleaning and things in your opening checklist and your closing checklist. But you probably need a separate checklist for cleaning and sanitation standards and that can be something really formal like a HACCP checklist, hazardous analysis and critical control points where you're looking at food safety, specific items, measuring temperatures. You can do something like that. But also you need more general cleaning checklist. And when it comes especially to your cleaning checklist, you need to look at hey, here are monthly tasks, here are weekly tasks, here are daily tasks and figure out how to break those out on a checklist so that everything gets done as it should be done.

Chris Schneider:

Another place you're probably going to want checklists is for your equipment maintenance. So whether that's going into all your refrigeration units and cleaning the condenser coils or it is having someone making sure that you've arranged for someone else to come in and clean your hood every three to six months. You need those checklists to ensure that your maintenance is getting done Because, as we've talked about before, preventative maintenance is always cheaper than things breaking. The other things that you want checklists for and this is something that a lot of people forget about is emergency response procedures, and when I say emergency response procedures, I'm talking anything from. What is our procedure if someone passes out, and not necessarily from being drunk I mean, obviously people do pass out from being drunk and that's a different story but like, has a medical problem and passes out? I know I have had folks in my bars over the years that have passed out due to an issue with diabetes or another medical issue and you need a checklist on that to say, okay, step one make sure that they're not injured. Step two call 911. Step three do this. Step four do that. Other kind of emergency response that you would want a checklist for if you have a fight, if you have a safety incident. Those all need to get recorded, and a lot of times, especially if you have a fight or again, if someone just passes out due to a medical issue that has nothing to do with your service or what you're doing. You need a checklist because you're going to be full of adrenaline, you're going to be just going, and sometimes it's hard to collect everything you're supposed to collect in the process of getting a situation handled, so a checklist comes in really handy there.

Chris Schneider:

Now, how do we create checklists that actually work? Checklists can take on any framework that you want them to. I personally like them to be as simple and straightforward as possible, and I think it's really important that you use clear and actionable language. Rather than say clean the floor, say sweep the floor, then mop the floor with floor cleaning right, be specific, be clear, be actionable. And part of the reason why you want to be, in a lot of cases, a little bit more specific than you think you need to be is for those newer employees, for people that are maybe cross-training, or someone's helping someone else out and doing a job they don't normally do. Having that information where it spells out exactly what they should do is important.

Chris Schneider:

Now, the other thing that we need to consider when we're creating checklists is we need to have specific completion criteria. Now, what I mean by specific completion criteria is there needs to be some indication in the checklist itself about what the end state of whatever that checklist is doing should be. So, for example, if the checklist just said clean the fryer, all right, I would argue that we can, you know, drain the fryer, boil it out. There's all sorts of steps in there that can be in there, scrubbing and all those sorts of things. But then we also need to give a specific completion criteria, such as when the fryer is clean, the oil should be perfectly clean, there should be no residue left on any of the surfaces of the fryer and all the stainless steel should be shiny. Whatever that completion criteria is, we want to give that to people because that's going to allow them to understand when they've done the job fully.

Chris Schneider:

The other big thing with checklists and this is something I see, unfortunately far too often management makes a really good checklist, owners approve of it, they implement it, they train people on it and then those checklists like disappear because there's no place for them to be, it's not accessible. So your checklists always need to be insanely accessible and preferably have a place where they just live, and it's always in the same spot. What I always did for checklists is I would print them out and then laminate the sheet of paper so that they could use a dry erase marker to check it off. That way I didn't have to print a new checklist every day and then I would put that on a clipboard and I would have clipboards hanging in specific locations with checklists. So right next to the POS, behind the bar, was the bartender opening and closing checklist. By the server station was the server opening and closing checklist and the front of house cleaning checklist. In the kitchen you'd have the prep checklist and the cleaning checklist. So make sure they're accessible when you create your checklist. Now a final note on creating checklists.

Chris Schneider:

A lot of people today want to do them in a digital format and you can absolutely do digital checklists. But here's the thing Personally, I don't really want employees on their phone during service. It just doesn't look good and it's really funny. But if you think about the psychology of a bar guest if they're watching someone do work and then be on their phone checking things, some people will interpret that as being rude or that you're on Facebook and ignoring them. But if you have a clipboard with a physical checklist on it and you're checking things off, no one's going to think anything of it other than you're using a checklist. So there is some guest psychology that can come into play whether or not you want to do a digital versus physical checklist.

Chris Schneider:

The other thing I like about physical checklists and you can make an argument the digital checklists are a lot harder to manipulate because we have timestamps and we have logins and we can see who did what and all that's true. Physical checklists I can just check, check, check, check, check and you don't know whether or not that actually got done. We just see that there's a check there. But physical checklists, I also feel like, are a better reminder to people. It's on a hook next to where they're doing their work. They're going to see it, they're going to be aware of it, whereas something that's on their phone maybe they don't pull their phone out of their purse, maybe they don't see it. So it's plausible that a digital checklist gets used less than a physical checklist. So we understand why we need checklists and then what kind of checklists we need and how we want to create them.

Chris Schneider:

But how do we implement them? And this is actually one of the hardest parts, because it's really easy to make a checklist and it's really hard to get staff to use, and I cannot tell you how many times I go into a place and you know we start talking about policies and procedures, we start talking about checklists and they go. Oh yeah, we have tons of checklists. Awesome, let's see them. Awesome, you got them. They're great. They meet every requirement that a checklist should. When's the last time somebody used them? I don't know a month ago. Well, clearly that's not an effective checklist if no one's using it. So implementing a checklist is just as important as what's on the checklist, if not more important, because you can spend all the time in the world making it, but if no one's using it properly, it is not providing your bar a benefit. So how do we implement checklists? Well, one thing that I see a lot of people do that I very much discourage is they come out with 20 checklists all at once and try to implement them all at the same time.

Chris Schneider:

If you don't currently have your staff using checklists, implement one area of your bar at a time. So you want to start with either one area or one type of checklist. If you're going to implement checklists and you don't currently have any, providing each job duty with an opening and closing checklist is a great place to start because it's simple, it's concise and it should really be. If you don't have a checklist in place, things they're already doing maybe one or two things that they're not, but most of it should be things they already know how to do and are already doing. But you can't just hand somebody a checklist and say do this, you have to train them on it. A you have to train them on how you want them to use it. If it's a laminated sheet of paper, you have to be like okay, when you come in, I want you to go around and you check this every time you do something and then you initial at the bottom, however that process looks like, but you need to train them on how to use the checklist. Then you need to train them on how to use the checklist. Then you need to make sure not just that they know how to use the checklist, but they know how to do everything on the checklist.

Chris Schneider:

Like I said, you can say clean the fryer. It sounds like a simple statement. There are a lot of steps involved in there and there are a lot of different ways to do it. Are you draining the oil and throwing it out? Are you filtering oil. When do you filter oil versus when do you throw oil? So make sure that not only do you train them on how to use the checklist itself, but train them on what each line item means and how to properly complete that line item.

Chris Schneider:

Then you need to monitor completion rates, because you've implemented a checklist, but you need to monitor that people actually use it. One thing that happens in almost every business on the planet someone has an idea, they make a checklist, they train it, they go over it really well and two months later it's fallen to the wayside because no one's actually monitoring that it's completed. So make sure that not only do you have a checklist out, but you're monitoring that it's completed, not for the first week, not for the first month, but into perpetuity, because that checklist, if you're still using it, you need to check it for completion. Obviously, some days you're going to check more than others, but you always need to check.

Chris Schneider:

The other thing you need to do is you need to realize that your checklist probably is not right, and this goes back to what I love to talk about, which is continuous improvement. You guys have heard me talk a lot about continuous improvement over the years, but if you do something once, the chances of it being perfect and efficient and right and working well for your team is about zero. To get that level, to get a very effective checklist that's well trained, that is working very well for you and your team, it takes time. So, just like with anything else, once we've implemented the checklist, let it go for a week or two and then go around and ask every single person using that checklist hey, do you like it? What's good about our system? What's bad about their system? Get that feedback from them and then use that to adjust and make your checklist and your process of using that checklist better. Refine the items on it. We find the procedures around it, because anything we implement we need to understand. We have at least three, six, a lot of cases, 12 months of improving it and making it better before we actually have something that we can set aside and say okay, this is good for the long.

Chris Schneider:

Now I hit on this with monitoring completion rates. But one of the big things with checklists is you need to measure your success right. We can't just have a checklist and implement it. Even if we implement it well, is it helping us? So here are some metrics that I would look at to say is this checklist actually being effective for our business? First of all, is it getting completed? Because if it's not getting completed, we don't have data. So what is your completion rate? That's the first metric I would look at. Then I would look at okay, has this changed anything about my business? Do I see food costs going down? Do I see labor costs going down? Is my kitchen cleaner? Are my openers less mad because my closers are actually doing all their job?

Chris Schneider:

Whatever that checklist may be, are we reducing error, as in, not an error like something is well, something is wrong, but not error in the way a lot of people think of it. Not error in the way a lot of people think of it. Error in more of a lean management, quality management, ideal. Where are we closer to our ideal than we were before? Are we making less mistakes? Are we closer to what we want it to be? Is the variance between the theoretical place we want to be and the actual place we are. Have we reduced that gap Now?

Chris Schneider:

The other thing we want to measure when we're looking at the success of a checklist is is our team happy with it? Because you might have a great team. They may trust you, they may go along with whatever you throw at them, but if they don't like it and they're not happy with it, long-term, that's going to decrease morale. It's going to hurt your team as a whole. So how is your team enjoy using it? Is it solving their problems? Is it creating new problems for them? And again, this is where we go back to the feedback, adjusting and continuous improvement piece, because if they're not satisfied with it, we need to dig in there.

Chris Schneider:

Now, another thing I personally like to look at when we're talking checklist and sometimes you can measure this, sometimes it's very difficult is has the checklist increased our efficiency or saved us money? Increasing efficiency not the hardest thing in the world to judge, because even if you can't really measure, like how long it takes folks to do things, you can say well, are we getting this done more often? You know, is the sink always getting clean during closing? Yes, okay, we've improved our consistency and therefore we're being a little bit more efficient overall, which means we probably are saving some money. But when it comes to things like inventory counts or opening and closing procedures for behind the bar for your cash, you can actually probably document real cost savings there, because every time we eliminate waste we've saved money. So really, a checklist right, and I've been dancing around this this whole episode but really a checklist is about reducing error, variation and weight and making, hopefully, a better employee experience in the process, a better employee experience in the process, and all that should lead to a better guest experience.

Chris Schneider:

So checklists are very important and if you're not using them, I highly suggest you start, and again, I would start with an opening and closing checklist for every position.

Chris Schneider:

So today we have talked about checklists, how to create them effectively and how to implement them, as well as some of the psychology behind checklists.

Chris Schneider:

And I create them effectively and how to implement them, as well as some of the psychology behind checklists. And I would encourage all of you to go out and implement checklists, if you don't already have them, and if you do have them, look at your completion rates and look at your staff satisfaction. Are they doing it, are they happy with it? And if they're not doing it and or they're not particularly happy with it, work on how to make those checklists better, because checklists, at the end of the day, will reduce your errors, your variation, they will improve your consistency and they will create a more professional operation that is able to better serve your guests. That about wraps it up for today. If you enjoyed today's insights, make sure you like, subscribe and leave a review. If you are ready to take your bar to the next level, schedule a strategy session with me by clicking the link in the show notes below. Until next time, have a great day and we will talk again later.

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