Maximizing Bar Profits in Slow Seasons: Smart Strategies for Success

Is your bar's profitability taking a nosedive during slow seasons while your expenses remain the same?

Many bar owners struggle with maintaining profits during predictable seasonal downturns, leading to cash flow problems and stress. Smart preparation and strategic adjustments can help you maintain healthy margins even during slower periods.

In today’s episode: • Learn proven strategies to reduce costs without sacrificing quality • Discover creative promotion ideas that drive traffic during slow periods • Master the art of staff scheduling to maintain service while controlling labor costs

Listen now to transform your slow season from a financial burden into a period of opportunity.

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 (00:02.286)
Today on the Bar Business Podcast, discover counterintuitive cost-cutting measures that actually enhance the guest experience, learn how to create exciting promotional events that drive traffic during off-peak times, and master the balance between efficient staffing and exceptional service. So today on the podcast, we are diving into what to do during your slow seasons. So for all of us, regardless of where you are in the world, regardless of what type of bar you have,

There are periods of time in the year where you're busier and periods of time in the year where you're slower.

Chris Schneider (00:38.766)
And a lot of times that adjustment between slow periods and busy periods is rough. And there's some waste that happens. And it's harder to be profitable, obviously, when you're slow than when you're busy.

Now, a lot of people will tell you the best way to deal with those slow periods is to make sure you saved enough money during your busy periods to pay for everything during the slow periods. Well, that's absolutely true, right? If you're not making a profit some months out of the year and you know this, and it's a structural piece of your business, and I can hear a lot of you saying, well, why would you not make money some months? Well, if you're in a tourist area, let's say you're in Florida.

There are certain months in Florida on the beach that are slammed. There are certain months that are absolutely dead, and when it's absolutely dead, you're probably breaking even or maybe even losing money. But those months that you're slammed more than make up for it. Or think about a college town. If you have a bar in a college town, you're going to be busy nine months out of the year. But over summer, you're going be pretty much dead. It's going to be real slow. You're not going to do much. So you need to know, OK, sometimes I just save money and I use the money from when I'm busy to cover when I'm slow.

But wouldn't it be better to figure out how to make money when we're slow, too, and then we don't have to burn money. We can just make less money when we're slow. So there are three big things that it comes to managing these slower periods that are really important. You need to manage your costs in a very smart way. You need to have strategic promotions, and you need to work on operational efficiency during these slow periods. So we're going to talk about these and how you can maintain healthy margins and even find opportunities for growth.

growth over your busy periods, but year over year growth compared to how slow you were the year before. During these traditional slow periods and push your business forward. So first thing we're going to talk about is smart cost management.

Chris Schneider (02:30.434)
Now with smart cost management, our largest costs are always labor and food and beverage costs. We'll talk about labor when we get down to operational efficiency, so really we're going to talk a lot about food and beverage right here.

And the main thing here, the biggest issue, the worst problem you can have as a bar or restaurant when it comes to just wasting money and added expense is having too much inventory and then throwing things out, having waste that you don't need. So it's really important when we talk about slower times of year to understand,

I know it's going to be slower in May than it was in April. This happens every year. And so I need to move my pars back. I need to order less. I need to restrict what I'm purchasing going into May because, well, I don't want to waste things. Now, there are a lot of you listening that I'm sure are thinking, well, I don't want to waste things, but I also never want to 86 items off my menu.

And that's an interesting thing and a lot of us do feel that way. But if you think about a let's take a totally different random concept for a second. Barbecue and think about barbecue because barbecue there are a lot of barbecue restaurants out there. They're very popular. And one of the things that's true of all barbecue restaurants is it takes forever in a day to cook an item. Right, the pulled pork that you have for dinner was probably cooked yesterday because it takes eight or 10 hours or whatever to smoke and then it has to rest and blah blah blah. This is a giant.

long process.

Chris Schneider (04:11.168)
And so in a barbecue restaurant, because it's so long to cook everything and you're just really holding things and serving them, barbecue restaurants, 86 items all day, every day. That's what they do. They cooked a certain amount of stuff, they sell it out, it's 86, boom, done, no problem. So there are restaurants out there that exist purely with the model of 86ing things every day.

And what that tells me is if you can have a whole concept based around it, yeah, do we want 86 things on a regular basis? No. In general, we don't. But a lot of times it's better to 86 an item one day or for a couple of days than it is to waste food. And when we're moving into slower periods of time, it can be really hard to get that right. And I tend to always err on the side of 86ing rather than waste. I just feel better about it personally. You can err on the side of waste rather than 86ing.

But 86ing isn't hurting your bottom line. Waste is always hurting your bottom.

The other thing that you can do when it comes to talking about inventory and cost management is look at what you're serving. We've talked a lot about menus should be seasonal. And so when you know, say you know spring is always a slow period for me. All right. Well, in the winter when you're making that spring menu, you should work on lower food cost items. You should work on adjusting.

what's going to be on your menu so that that cost profile is nicer to you when you're in a slow period. As a matter of fact, if I always knew that, hey, I'm busy in winter and I'm I'm busy winter, summer and fall, but I'm never busy in the spring. If I knew that I would have a shorter menu in the spring than I did in the winter, summer and fall. Why would I have a shorter menu? Because then there's less opportunity for waste. There's less people coming in the door.

Chris Schneider (06:09.614)
There's those people ordering things and having a little bit of a shorter menu is not going to hurt you if it's one quarter out of the year. And really, let's be real honest, your patrons view how long a menu is because they look at it and it's the same number of pages. If it's one page front and back, as long as it's one page full front and back, they won't notice if you take off, you know, five of 40 items or even five of 30 items. They're not going to notice that. You just make your fonts a little bit bigger.

So you're not impacting your customer experience, but you can then help control your waste more. The other thing to look at during slow periods is to look at your utility usage and to look at your equipment usage. One thing that always makes me laugh and that I always call out people in kitchens on.

I was gonna be so slow today, All right, then why are all your ovens and all your friars on?

I always turn them on. Well, why? If I know it's going to be super slow, I don't need necessarily two fryers. Depending on what I'm frying, I might just be able to get away with one. And if I can get away with one, I shouldn't turn that one off. Let's use less utilities there. Let's not use that gas. If something's not in the oven, right, if I'm going to be lower volume and I know I don't need both ovens, I can do just with one oven. Why am I putting them both on and preheating them? That's wasting gas. So look at places.

where you can save a little bit of money because you don't need that excess capacity.

Chris Schneider (07:44.632)
So once we get our inventory in line, once we get our waste in line, and we've worked on adjusting what we're offering, adjusting how we're using our equipment, and we have that cost management piece in line, what's the next step? Well, the next step is to do strategic promotions. Now, strategic promotions are always going to be different based upon where you are and what season it is that you're slow and everything else.

But there are some general things we can talk about here.

that will give you ideas on how to form a strategic promotion for a slow period for your bar. It's just really hard for me to be specific on the podcast because there are so many places, it's so many different seasons that we could be talking about. What is a slow month? In one spot it's not a slow month, in another spot. So the first thing I would say when we're looking at strategic promotions or slow periods is...

look at your locals. A lot of times where we see the biggest seasonal swings, these areas are tourist areas. And because they're tourist areas,

Your locals are the people that are left in that slow period. So what can you do to target your locals? How can you reach out to your locals? How can you become more involved in your community?

Chris Schneider (09:07.15)
Those are the questions if that's the situation you're on. Now there's the other flip side of this where maybe you're in a major city and every August the city drains out a little bit and a lot of people go on vacation. A lot of people have a country house they go to or something and there's just not the same money floating around the city in August, say, than there is the rest of the year. Well, now look at who's left.

Because your blue collar folks, your hospitality industry folks, a lot of those folks don't have the money to be seasonally in the city and seasonally out of the city.

So what can you do to target those people that are left? How can you reach the people that still exist in your market? Because that's essentially what we're saying in both these situations. Because when the tourists leave, you've got to target the locals, the people still left in your market.

So that's what you have to figure out. A, you have to identify who that is that's still left. And then we have to build an ICP around it, a customer profile, a guest avatar, whatever you want to call that. And we have to build that guest avatar so we can understand that person and then target them. And when you target them, you now have an exact idea of who we're after. We know they're local. We know they're here during the slow period. So what can we do?

Two, bring them into the business. And there are a couple key things here. One is loyalty programs work great during slur periods of time, especially with locals. If you're in a tourist area, those loyalty programs work year round when you target the locals.

Chris Schneider (10:49.442)
But you can get more innovative than that. One thing that I think is really good to do when we're targeting local business during a slow time of year is to implement local business partnership programs. Who can you work with in your local community because they're slow too? What can you do together to drive business? Can you get with all the other bars in the area and create a bar crawl for your locals? Can you get with businesses maybe that aren't bars, but

say a retailer, a boutique or spas or masseuses or anyone that offers anything in your area and put together some kind of package that you can sell to locals where they get an experience at all of your businesses.

Chris Schneider (11:39.592)
What can you do with other businesses around you to generate business? That's the question. And obviously that's going to be different everywhere you are.

But that is something in the slow season you should really look into.

And then obviously we can look at how you're doing social media during these slow periods. If you're in an area that's targeting largely tourists sometimes a year and locals different times a year, you probably need to change your social media campaign a little bit from time to time to hit those different segments. Now, one thing that we always do know, though, is that those tourists are less likely to be on your social media than your locals. Social media tends to be not first time guests, but guests that have interacted with your business enough to want to follow you.

So these are folks, generally speaking, that you know you have on the hook a little bit. What can you do to bring them in more? What offers can you give them?

Chris Schneider (12:36.374)
And maybe that's as easy as having a really discounted food special during the week to drive them in, to pull in those locals, because you're offering them a great deal. And we've talked about doing super discounted food before. I used to sell steaks at cost one night a week on Tuesdays, because I knew for every steak I sold, I'd sell a couple drinks and one or two other food items that I was getting my normal margins on. And I made money.

Chris Schneider (13:05.73)
bottom line is you have to get innovative. You have to work with other businesses around you. have to implement loyalty rewards programs that are going to target those people that still exist in your market during slower periods. You have to target your social media at them. And overall, you just have to be laser, laser focused.

on promotions that fit the market, promotions that fit not just the market, but the exact time of year in that market, the exact people that exist in your market that are still going out and eating. Now, the biggest thing to do during slow periods, and quite frankly, the hardest one to do, is increase operational efficiency.

Chris Schneider (13:47.724)
And this is always difficult, and I hate doing this, but especially in tourist areas like the area I live in, we are busy from May to November. That is our busy season. December is all right. January, February, beginning of March, might as well just write it off. Like, there are a lot of businesses around me that are just closed those months because we don't have tourists and it's snowing and it's crappy and a lot of the locals go to Florida because it's warmer and nicer down there and they aren't even in town.

So it's a bad time for business.

if we're going to be operationally efficient during that period of time.

You got to cut your staff. And that's always hard, right? Because you either have to take people that are on your team and lay them off for the season, and then you can bring them back or not. Or you have to take everyone that was getting, you know, 35, 40 hours a week and now suddenly everybody's getting 20 hours a week. Those are your only two options.

But maintaining the same staff levels as when you're busy, when you're slow, doesn't help anybody.

Chris Schneider (15:00.738)
Because one thing we have to remember, yeah, for your kitchen, your cooks, it helps them.

But when you're overstaffed on the front of house, your folks are making less money. It doesn't help. Appropriate staffing is what you need. And too many cooks in the kitchen is never a good thing, right? So even on cooks, appropriate staffing is what you need. So you have to adjust those staff levels lower. And it's hard and it sucks. And yeah, you might have to lay some people off. Yes, you're going to pull hours from people.

Yes, all your employees are going to be mad at you because they're not making the money they were during the busy season. Is what it is. There's no way around that piece. Now there are some ways that you can take a small team once you've adjusted those staffing levels and make them more efficient. Your biggest thing is cross training your team. The more roles people know, the more ability you have to run a super tight team when you need to.

Chris Schneider (16:04.854)
And so cross training for those slow periods is absolutely essential. You know, if you have somebody that can bartend and serve and be in your kitchen.

they're always going to be useful for you, right? And they can fill in when people are sick and all that. But also, if it's really, really slow, I mean, let's talk like really slow bar.

Maybe your cook and your bartender and your server are all one person. It happens. It doesn't happen often. That that makes logical sense, but you can be that slow that that makes sense. And you see that rural bars, neighborhood bars, suburban bars during the day, sometimes it's just one person. Or you have a cook and a bartender who is also serving who's running the whole front house.

So cross train your staff for multiple roles that way you can use less people to do more things if you are slow enough that you are there.

Chris Schneider (17:07.234)
But also, if we want to not have people lose all these hours, if we've saved up the money for it, there are some things that we can use our employees for that is operationally efficient during the slow period, gets them some hours, and yeah, it's not necessarily directly serving guests, but it is things that need to happen. The first thing that I would say, when you're in those slower times of year, that is the best time for your staff development. That is when you should be doing your training programs.

That is when you can have workshops with your team and go over the nuances and the little details you want them to know in order to be the best team possible for you. So use that slower period as a time to work on staff development. The other thing that you can do with your team to give them some hours and make sure somebody's flowing in as long as you have the saved up cash to pay for it is to use slower times for deep cleaning and to bring in your team. That's you wait on tables.

But to clean. Now, that means front of house, if your team's normally getting paid five bucks an hour and you want them to come in and clean, you better be paying them like your cooks. Right? That $5 an hour that they're getting tipped on is not the 15 or 20 or 10, depending on the market, you know, $10 to $20 that you should be paying them to come in and deep clean. But your bar has to get deep clean sometimes. You got to do this throughout the year or all at once. But when you're slow is the time to do deep cleaning. It's the time that you can take all your

mirrors and stuff off the walls and scrub the walls. Clean all the mirrors. Clean all your frames. Get all your bar stools cleaned. And I don't just mean wipe off the things. I mean wipe off the rungs on them and the legs of them and all that. Flip over all your tables. Clean your table bases. All that stuff that should happen in front of the All your preventative maintenance back of the house. Pulling out equipment. Cleaning behind the line. All that should happen in these slower times of year.

And that's a good way, again, to give people some hours to pay them a little bit when you don't have other things for them to do because you're slow. And at the same time, move that ball forward and remain operationally efficient. The last piece of operational efficiency that I want to talk about when it comes to slower times of year.

Chris Schneider (19:23.982)
Change your operating hours. Now, I am someone that absolutely, absolutely believes you should set your hours and you should stick to them. If you say you're open 11 to 11, you should always be open 11 to 11. If you say you're open 11 till 3 a.m., you damn well better be open till 3 a.m. That doesn't mean, it's slow, I should close at 1. No, if you say you're open till 3, you're open till 3. Period. End of story.

When you start closing early, that is the kiss of death. Someone will come in, they'll see that you're closing or closed earlier than you said you would. They're not going to try to come in by close again. So you absolutely must.

Make sure that you are maintaining the hours that you say you are operating. But that does not mean that you can't change your hours throughout the year. It doesn't mean you can't change the days you're open even throughout the year. If you live in a high tourism area, well, during tourist season, you're probably gonna be open seven days a week. But when there's no one coming to town, there's no tourists and it's absolutely dead, maybe you're only open four days a week.

You can adjust your days you're open with when people come in. And quite frankly, all you need to do to mathematically show yourself when you should and should not adjust those times is start by generating for yourself.

an idea of how much money I need to have in revenue to make it worth being open. There's some amount you can factor in your labor, your average food and beverage costs, and then utilities and things that cost to be open and determine, hey, you know, for me to open the door and make money, I need to make. 1000 bucks. In the day. And during slow periods on Mondays, I'm ringing an average of 600 bucks. It isn't worth being open. Boom.

Chris Schneider (21:26.478)
Shouldn't be open on Mondays. Now, I will say, if you're going to change your hours of operation, you need to post that everywhere. You need to make sure all your directories are getting updated. Google and Facebook and Yelp, your website, everything needs to get updated when your hours change. So make sure you're reviewing and optimizing your hours. Make sure you're changing them. But then once you've changed them, stick with them.

for at least a month or two. We don't want to constantly give people whiplash that our hours are different every week.

And make sure you actually follow them. Whatever they are, follow.

Success during slow seasons comes down to smart cost management, strategic promotions, and operational efficiency. By implementing the strategies we've just discussed, you can maintain profitability and even find opportunities for growth during traditionally slow periods. If you're not growing, at least you find the ability to not lose money. That's what this is all about, maintaining profitability or just breaking even in some cases when it's slow. Slow seasons are predictable and manageable.

with proper planning and execution. Use the slow periods to strengthen your operation and prepare your business for busier times ahead.