Building a Culture of Excellence for Long-Term Success in Your Bar or Pub

Are you struggling to build a team that truly excels in your bar or restaurant? Wondering how to foster leadership, engagement, and a winning culture?

A thriving hospitality business isn't just about great food and drinks—it's about having a high-performing team. But without strong leadership, clear systems, and engaged employees, success can feel out of reach.

In today's episode:

• Learn how to develop leadership within your team through ongoing training and shared decision-making.
• Discover key systems and processes that create consistency and accountability in your business.
• Uncover strategies to boost team engagement, from peer mentoring to work-life balance, ensuring a culture of excellence.

Tune in now to gain actionable strategies that will transform your team and drive better financial results for your business!

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...

Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.496)
Today, learn why most bars fail to create lasting cultural change, discover the hidden connection between culture and profitability, and master simple daily practices that shape extraordinary teams.

Today we're exploring how to build and sustain a culture of excellence in your bar, focusing mostly on leadership practices, team development, and systematic implementation. One of the things that's really hard for bar owners, and when I talk to bar owners, I hear this all the time, it's true of restaurants as well, when I talk to restaurant owners, building and keeping a good team is difficult. And because of that, many bar owners are struggling with high turnover.

and an inconsistent customer experience that involves inconsistent product and service. They also suffer with issues from team misalignment, and all of that leads to reduced profits and increased stress for owners. So the system, or the solution rather, lies in creating a system.

to ensure cultural excellence that permeates every aspect of your operation. How do we do that though? How do we turn labor into something that helps us and doesn't hurt us? Well, the first thing we have to do is to create a foundation of excellence. And if you think about the framework that I was talking about, mindset, concept, culture. What we're going to talk about today goes through all of those pieces. Mindset is your foundation of excellence.

Then we'll get into concept when we talk about employee development and systems and processes. And then culture is really team engagement.

Chris Schneider (01:47.448)
So Foundations of Excellence is our initial starting point, and it's all about your mindset as an owner, but also the mindset you use when you approach your team and...

how you create the framework for them to know what to do and how to be successful. So the first thing you have to do to create a foundation of excellence, and this is absolutely a mindset task, is define your core vision values and your mission and your vision clearly. What are your values? What are your mission? What is your vision? And the reason why it's important to define those is your employees, your team,

will rely on those to know what to do and not to do in a perfect world, right? Your core values should allow people to have a framework to use to address any issue that they come across while they're working in your business. So values, you know, mission and vision are important. You have to have them. It's important for your culture. It's important to have everyone having the right mindset. But those core values are really what I like to focus on the most, because I think that's where you get the most value.

And don't just say, core value is accountability. Because what does accountability mean? Actually, say, okay, our value is accountability. And here are two sentences that define that value.

Now if you go over to the Bar Business Podcast website, there is a download there that you can get for a workbook on mission, vision and values. It's also available on the Bar Business Coach website. So barbusinesspodcast.com, barbusinesscoach.com, either one of those places, you can get a copy of that workbook to help you do that.

Chris Schneider (03:43.468)
Because we can't really address anything when it comes to employees until we understand how we're asking them to behave and how we're asking them to behave is in line with our core values. So to get your employee management in line, first thing is you need those values, that mission, that vision. And then from those values, mission and vision, now we're moving a little bit beyond mindset and more into concept as far as the overall framework here is concerned. You need to create measurable standards for excellence.

What does your guest journey look like? And something I like to make people do, and they think it's annoying, but it actually does help a lot at the end of the day, is to map out your guest journey. Actually write down exactly what you expect your guests to do, every step of their engagement with your bar. And as we have talked about before on the podcast,

You have to consider not just what is, you know, it looked like from when they enter the door. No, you need to consider what does it look like from when they first think about dining at my bar? When they first think about getting a drink at my bar. From that point forward, what does that journey look like?

Another thing you have to do to establish your foundation of excellence is you have to have feedback mechanisms.

And whether you're doing that yourself or you're using a system, maybe you're using Akira, maybe you're using Ovation, maybe using Marquee, like they all handle different pieces of this. Akira handles all of it, but that's for a later episode, but a little too easy for you guys.

Chris Schneider (05:31.082)
You need a way to get feedback and feedback, as we've talked about many times, essentially comes down to an NPS score. Based on your experience today, how likely are you to recommend to your friends and family that they come?

Chris Schneider (05:50.028)
And if you want to know more about NPS score, you can look back. There are previous episodes where we've discussed NPS score in detail, but you need feedback mechanisms because you need to be able to measure your level of excellence. If we're laying a foundation for excellence, we have to be able to measure it.

Another thing you need to do to get the foundation to have your team in the right spot is you need to implement daily team huddles. Now what do daily team huddles have to do with

training and leadership development and all that, they establish a cadence, they establish a pattern. It's a way for your team to get information about what's going on. It's a way for you to get feedback from your team. So daily team huddles are part of that foundation of excellence required to build a culture that's going to support long-term success in your bar.

The other thing that you should do is develop some sort of recognition program. Now that can look like a lot of different things, but when employees do a good job, you need to tell them that. And when they deserve a little bit of extra money, you should probably give them a little bit of extra money. Now that can look like a lot of different things. You can do gift cards for other places. You can do all sorts of stuff. But you need a way to recognize folks. One thing that I have done in the past that and know a lot of people that have done that works really well is if you can trade gift cards.

with another business around you for employees. So you give them bar gift cards, they give you gift cards for whatever it is they sell. And then you can hand those out to your team. Didn't really cost you anything. It cost you a third of whatever the gift cards are, certainly a 30 % food and beverage cost. Because you gave gift cards to somebody else, and you got their gift cards at full value, it makes it cheap, easy, and quite...

Chris Schneider (07:41.57)
good for the owners on both sides of that transaction to trade gift cards with another local business.

Chris Schneider (07:49.73)
But regardless of how you're doing your recognition program, regardless of what you're giving to your employees, you need some kind of recognition program. And it needs to be better than your picture on the wall that says employee of the month and you get a certificate to take home, right? This isn't 1980 and it's not McDonald's. Actually provide some value for your team and recognize them in a meaningful way when they do something good.

The next thing you need to do to lay this foundation is to document your best practices. Right? Everything you do, every system, every procedure, everything you ever do. And we're going to talk about systems and processes more later, but you need to document your best practices. And a lot of times that means document what you do now, understanding it's not a best practice, but start by documenting what you do now. Then tweak it, redocument, roll it out for a little bit, tweak it.

Redocument, roll it out for a little bit, tweak it, redocument, roll it out for a little bit. You just do that on repeat with all your best practices and they get more and more refined and you're better able to tell your team exactly what they need to do in order to make great tips, which means they're providing your guests with great service, which means you as the owner should be making great money.

And along with all of this, obviously we're going to create some accountability in the system. And like I said, we're going to get into systems and processes a lot at the end, but for a foundation of excellence, there has to be accountability. When people do things wrong, they need to know they did something wrong. And when people do something things right, they need to know they're doing things right. So you need accountability systems, recognition systems, and documented if not...

best practices at this point. If you're going through this and you're just starting out, document current practices and then turn those into best practices over time. But all of this, starting with your vision and mission and values, lays the groundwork you need to build a culture of excellence in your bar. Now the next step to all of this is leadership development.

Chris Schneider (10:03.502)
And leadership development, a lot of times people want to, I don't know a nice way to say this, or a good way to say this, I should say, but a lot of times folks want to hide things from their team. They don't want to be transparent with their team. Transparency, especially with Gen Z and Millennials, is always going to get you ahead. So being transparent is a good thing.

And part of that transparency should be teaching every single person on your team how to be a leader.

There's nothing better than being a small, even if you're a tiny bar. I'm working with a client locally right now. That is a tiny bar. I mean, literally 1500 square foot building. 50 seats inside, another 50 outside. Like that's max, small little, and really it's not even a bar. It's a tap house. We just do beer, but...

Chris Schneider (11:00.27)
But working with this client, right? One of the things I said to him and one of our goals for that establishment is because we know we're small. We know there's not a lot of upward mobility. We want to be the place that trains managers for the other restaurants in town.

Chris Schneider (11:18.082)
They want to make sure that when you go there as an employee and you train and you learn that two or three years later, you're ready to go manage any restaurant around.

Because

We understand, a small bar like that, there aren't the growth opportunities. People want growth opportunities, so train them to be good at other places. That means you develop leadership for every single person on your team. I don't care if you're a dishwasher or you bust tables or you mop the floors. We want to develop leadership among everyone. Now, the way to develop leadership starts first and foremost.

With you as the owner leading by example, you cannot be a hypocrite and expect a good company culture. You have to live the culture you expect your employees to live as well. So whatever rules exist for your employees, they exist for you. When you do something that an employee would normally do, you need to do it just as well as they would, if not better. Everything you do should reinforce your systems, your processes, your standards.

and your culture that you're trying to put into place. The other thing that you need to do as an owner, and this is very hard for most of us, and it's something that we need to teach to our team as well, because it's really important when dealing with guests, is to practice active listening. We need to train everyone that works to learn how to actively listen, so that people never feel like they're being ignored. People never feel like they're getting brushed off.

Chris Schneider (13:03.096)
but they feel like you're engaged in listening to them always. And that's important for you when you deal with your team, that's important for your team when they deal with your guests. But everyone needs to understand active listening, everyone needs to understand how to do it. The third thing that you need to do from an ownership's side to develop leadership in your team is you need to provide regular one-on-one sessions. And that means like once a month, you set aside a half hour with each team member

to sit down with them, ask them how they're doing, ask them how the job's going, and have a regular one-on-one coaching session with

Help them develop their leadership skills in that. Learn what's making their job harder. Help them figure out ways to deal with issues they're dealing with.

Now that's not formalized training. But that is a key component to maintaining a culture of excellence to have these one on one sessions with every employee. Every month. Now, if you had a giant bar, if you have about 100 employees, you probably have managers over each department, right? A front of house manager, a backhouse manager, front of house, you might have multiple managers, break it up among your managers. You as the owner don't have to do a one on one with everyone.

On a small bar, if you have 15 employees, yeah, you should do a one-on-one with everyone. But if you have 100 employees, you're not going to do that as the owner. So have one-on-ones with your managers. Let your managers have one-on-ones with your team.

Chris Schneider (14:33.848)
The other thing that we have to do if we're going to invest in leadership development for our team is we have to invest in ongoing training. Now, a couple weeks back we talked about how to do training. or I'm sorry. Tell, show, do, review. So you can go listen to that and really get the details of exactly how I train teams. But training is not something that happens like most restaurants do and most bars do.

for two weeks when you first come in. Training is continuous. And you need to consider what is important for you to learn today.

Chris Schneider (15:15.682)
What do you need to know? What are the most frequently asked questions by our guests?

And then answer those questions. But then two weeks later, teach them more and teach them more and teach them more and teach them more. People who are driven, people who are going to be your A players on your team, they want to learn. They want to develop their skills. So you need ongoing training that does that.

Chris Schneider (15:49.366)
Next thing you need to do when it comes to leadership development is share your decision making responsibilities. Delegate. Give people responsibilities. Give them options. Give them choices. Allow them to be as good as they can, but also allow them to have ideas. Allow them to have input. When you share decision making responsibilities, not only do get more buy in from your team because they are more involved, they're more on top of everything.

But you also make them value the job more because they know they're being heard. It goes back to that active listening part. They know they're being heard. And you don't have to share decision making responsibilities across the board. You don't even have to give your team a final word if you don't want. But you need to get their feedback and their input when you make changes. And you need to make them feel heard through active listening, but then give them input on decisions.

hear them out. You might make a you're gonna make decisions. Not you might. You will make decisions that no one that works for you likes.

But if you give them the ability to give you their input up front, usually they're more likely to go along with them.

Now let's talk systems and processes. So we know we need to develop their leadership. We know we have to lay this foundation. What systems and processes do we have to put in place? Well, from an employee training perspective, from a team management perspective, we need to create training materials and implement quality control measures that they can see and that are easy to follow. And along those lines, then we need to establish performance metrics. Here's how I expect you to do your job. Here's what I expect from you.

Chris Schneider (17:39.34)
One of the problems you see in a lot of independent bars and restaurants, especially the small bars.

is that they lack clear performance metrics.

Now, as an owner, that might be all right, except you really don't know who your A players and your B players and your C players are because you don't have the metrics to gauge their performance. You're not measuring KPIs that tell you.

But as an employee, there's nothing more frustrating than never knowing what your boss actually wants from you. So you have to establish performance metrics so that people understand how they're doing. And then guess what those one-on-ones we just talked about? Those regular coaching sessions? That's when you go over their metrics.

Chris Schneider (18:26.72)
You also need to look at system audits. So anytime we have systems and processes.

It's great to make a checklist. But what I find more often than not is a checklist gets made, it's used for a week, and then it's put on the shelf and nobody looks at it ever again. So unless you're auditing the systems and processes you're putting in place, unless you're making sure that those standard operating procedures are being followed, and that the training is being followed, and that the quality control measures are actually being used rather than just written and forgotten, you need to audit your system on a regular basis. You need to have ways

to make sure people did things. Now there are different ways you can do this. One way is to just do them on paper. It's a lot of paper to print out a checklist every day. But you print out the checklist every day, they check it off, they sign off on it, you know there's your written record that at least someone took the time to check boxes and sign it. Personally for me, that's a little bit too much paper usage. I like to print things out and then laminate them and then you just use a dry erase marker and you can check it off.

Not always the most trackable because it does wipe right off, but...

I don't like printing things every day for checklists. That's just me.

Chris Schneider (19:43.192)
So we talked about the framework of the beginning. Mindset, concept, culture. So mindset is that foundation of excellence. Your mission, your vision, your values, understanding your current state, all of that.

Leadership development, systems and processes, that's your concept portion. And now the culture portion is team engagement. How do we actually get folks

engaged and not engaged in just doing their job, but more engaged than that. How do we create this? Put all this stuff together to create this real culture of excellence.

And I'm telling you right now, culture of excellence is all about team engagement. People have to believe it, they have to follow it, they have to live it. So how do we do that? Number one, implement peer mentoring programs. Now this is something you don't see often, but every new employee should have an old employee that's their buddy that is their mentor. You should require them to meet multiple times over the first six months so that they can talk.

and answer questions. And when I say meet, I don't mean like, you're working, you can talk while you do side work. No, like actually give them a half hour on the clock to mentor that person, to focus on that person's work and what they're doing and how they're doing, answer questions and help them build skills. And that can all be done peer to peer. Managers, owners, you don't need to be involved in that part.

Chris Schneider (21:15.0)
But the big thing here is it makes those newcomers to your team more successful. It gives them someone to ask questions of. And it ensures long term that you have a more cohesive professional team.

Now we talked about career advancement. You need to create career advancement paths. So if you're a very small bar, that could even just look like bar back to server to bartender. That could be a career advancement path or server to bar back to bartender. However you would want to do that. If you're a large organization, obviously you want management track and all that involved. But remember, the smaller bars, we don't have as many positions to fill, right? Maybe you only have 10 employees. Well, there's not much advancement there.

But if there's not much advancement there, you can tie your training into raises. Hey, when you reach this level, you get a quarter. You reach this level, you get another quarter. You reach this level, you get another quarter. And that can be its own form of career advancement. Or you can talk about career advancement not in...

Chris Schneider (22:22.978)
change from a server to a bartender, but you could have a server. And then maybe that server is now a mentor. And maybe once you've been a mentor for a while, you can become a trainer.

So you can come up with different ways to phrase the same job and add responsibilities on that give you little bumps in career advancement. Those should come with a raise. If you're asking more of someone, you should pay them more. I think that's pretty logical, but not everyone always does that.

but create a career advancement path. Create a journey for these folks to go on.

Chris Schneider (23:05.698)
Then you need to work on, for team engagement, establishing clear communication channels. Now what do mean by that? Well, how do your employees talk to each other? Where does this stuff happen? What is the communal messaging board, if you will? I know some organizations, some restaurants and bars that use Slack. Everybody has Slack on their phone and they have different rooms and channels and different things going on there. And that's great for a big organization. A lot of the smaller bars I work with and I know,

We're using text messaging groups. Why text messaging groups? Because it's easy, it's quick, it's simple. But you need a clear way to communicate with everyone on the team in one shot. And preferably is a way that you can track a little bit. That always helps to make sure that people read things. But if you don't have clear communication with your team, there's no way that they will ever be engaged.

goes back to the whole active listening thing. If there's not clear communication, you're probably not actively listening. This is a bad scenario that we need to figure out.

Another thing you can do for team engagement, organized team building activities. Now I know when I say organized team building activities, almost all of you let out a groan, and if I listen to me say that in a podcast, I would have grown too. Because team building is not something that. Especially in hospitality, we particularly.

So what could a team building activity be? It could be a cookout. It could be everybody goes and races go-karts. It could be all sorts of different things. Don't limit yourself to the corporate. You know, you don't have to go do a high ropes course and do trust falls and have HR give a presentation on how trust falls or just like how we trust each other while we work. You don't have to get all hokey like that. A team building activity literally is anything

Chris Schneider (25:00.14)
where everyone gets together and does something.

Chris Schneider (25:05.292)
Now, hopefully it ties in the business. Hopefully there's a bigger lesson there. But there doesn't necessarily have to be. You could all go on a hike in the woods and just, hey, we're going on a hike this month. It doesn't matter what that activity is. But the idea here is you get everybody together at a time when you're not serving guests, where everyone can relax, be a little social, be a little casual, get to know each other more and build some of that outside of work.

And it's really not outside of work, but outside of a shift connection with each other. You get to know each other more, understand each other better.

Chris Schneider (25:44.098)
The next thing you have to do to have this team engagement and this culture of excellence.

And this goes back to something we've already talked about. Trust your team. Encourage innovation and feedback from them. You should never go a day without asking as many people on your team as you can, what's wrong with your job? Why did we screw up today? What made your life harder today? Get their feedback. Because from that, you learn how to improve. And nine times out of ten, seriously.

And people think I'm full of shit when I say this, but it is absolutely true. Nine times out of ten. If you have an employee give you feedback on something.

It probably ends up saving you money.

Because whatever they're telling you is a pain point they have that makes their job harder. You solve that, their job is easier. They can be more efficient. When they're more efficient, they can serve more guests. When they can serve more guests, you make more money without incurring additional labor cost. So always get feedback from your team to drive team engagement.

Chris Schneider (26:53.132)
Celebrate your wins. That's the other thing here. Celebrate every single time you win. Celebrate the win. Now some of that can be that recognition system that we talked about before.

But celebrate wins. Every time I set up Daily Huddle standards for a client, the last thing in that Daily Huddle is what wins can we celebrate today? What was awesome that we can talk about? Who did something amazing? Could be a guest, could be somebody on the team. The win could be, hey, this sports team won. If it's the local sports team and they won, that could be the win that we talk about that day.

But every team huddle should be about wins, and you should celebrate wins for the whole team and wins for individuals.

And that keeps people more engaged because that is part of a recognition system is just celebrating wins at the end of your hot.

Now the most important thing for team engagement, the last thing that we're going to talk about today, foster work-life balance. It is really easy in this industry for us to work people open to close two, three days in a row and just be like, yeah, OK, you wanted 36 hours, there's 312s is 36 hours, have fun, buddy. You're also kind of beating up on your people now. If they only work three days a week, maybe that still gives them work-life balance.

Chris Schneider (28:20.226)
But it's incumbent on you as the employer to ensure that your team has a work-life balance. Because if they don't, and their life suffers outside of work because of it, they're going to become resentful towards work. And even if they don't, their significant other will become resentful towards work.

You know, you don't want some, an employee's husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse or whatever.

to think negatively of them working for you because it takes away from their life. mean, every job does to an extent in any relationship that will happen. But the more you foster work-life balance, the more you focus on that, the less likely their spouses are to bitch about the job, the more likely they are to stay working for you. Work-life balance is key to every single hospitality job. We work hard. We work in fast-paced environments. We

run our asses off, quite literally, every shift. So unless you're ensuring your team has a work-life balance, you're going to have low morale. You will never have a culture of excellence.

Chris Schneider (29:33.422)
So to wrap us up for today, creating a culture of excellence requires consistent effort, clear communication, and unwavering commitment to your standards. I'll repeat those. Consistent effort, you always have to keep going on this. Clear communication, everyone on your team must know exactly what's going on and why. And unwavering commitment to your standards. Everything must be standardized, you must follow them.

But if you implement these strategies, you'll build a team that is stronger, that works harder, and that is more efficient, which will increase your guest satisfaction and ultimately drive better financial results.