Unlocking Your Bar's Potential: The Importance of a Great Manager

Are you up for the challenge of hiring the perfect bar manager? We're here to guide you through this critical process that could make or break your bar business. We tackle everything from the fears and trust issues surrounding the decision to hire, to the practical considerations of whether to promote from within, hire externally, or even hire a friend. And it's not just about hiring - we've got you covered on how to effectively train and transition your new manager into their role, building their confidence along the way with a slow, steady delegation of responsibilities. 

But that's not all. We're also super excited to introduce our Facebook group, Bar Business Nation, where we're planning monthly open session chats. Here, you'll get a chance to learn from and interact with other bar owners, sharing your triumphs, challenges, and insights. Plus, we discuss the advantages of having a bartender who can hold the fort when you're not around, freeing you up to focus on growing your business. So, let's get started on this journey together - to mastering the art of hiring a bar manager and maximizing your bar's potential.

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Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Schedule a Strategy Session
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group

Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

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.

Chris Schneider: 0:20

Welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast. Today, we're going to be digging into one of the key ways that you can actually spend more time working on your bar rather than in your bar, and that's by hiring a manager. And whether you are starting a new business or you have purchased a bar that was already existence, or you're currently running and operating a bar, there's no way that you can even begin as an owner to start spending time working on your business rather than in your business unless you have someone to do that work that you're doing in your business for you. So having a manager is very important, and we're going to dive all into that in a second. But before we get there, why don't you step back and talk about a new thing that we're going to be doing with the Bar Business Nation Facebook group? So, as many of you have heard me talk about, I have a Facebook group called Bar Business Nation and the idea there it's not for me to push things and I do sometimes, but that's not really the purpose. The purpose is to create a community of bar owners to support and help one another and to build a resource and a sounding board for bar owners so that we can all talk with one another and we can all learn from one another, because there's no way that anyone in the bar business has come across everything that is out there. There's no way anyone in the bar business has dealt with every issue possible. But when we join together as a community, we have the opportunity to have access to people that have faced specific issues, and so, with that, we've had the community on Facebook. That's been going great. We're starting to get a lot of more members and some really good conversations going on. But, with that said, one thing that a number of folks have talked about and that I am fully behind is getting together once a month and kind of having a open chat or an open session regarding what we're dealing with questions people have and the ability to bounce ideas off of each other live. So we're going to start doing that. We're going to do that at 8 pm Eastern time on Monday evenings, and the first one we're going to do is going to be October 9th, so a couple of weeks from now. But if you have not had a chance, head over to Facebook, join Bar Business Nation. All the information about these open session chats, whatever we determine we're going to call them, will be on that page. So if you want to be able to interact with other bar owners, if you want to help each other grow, learn from each other all those sorts of great things make sure to head over to Facebook and join Bar Business Nation.

Chris Schneider: 2:54

Now let's dive back into our primary topic for today, which is how to find the right manager. And again, as I said just a few minutes ago in the intro, unless you have the right management in place, there's no way for you to be able to work on your business. You're stuck in the day to day, and so you have to have a manager. You have to have someone that you trust, that you can delegate a lot of your day to day responsibilities to for running the business, so that you can do things like promote the business, work on sales network, meet people, build relationships, and if you're always stuck doing the day to day of the business, you just will never have the time to actually do that. So it's very important to have a manager in place.

Chris Schneider: 3:35

Now, when we talk about managers, finding the right manager is one of the hardest things to do and, unfortunately, there's a few reasons for that, and the main one being that a lot of people you can't trust them.

Chris Schneider: 3:47

A lot of managers in hospitality whether it's restaurants, bars, hotels every part of hospitality faces a lot of issues with theft, inventory loss, things of that nature. So if you can't trust your manager, you can't operate, and I know a lot of folks that are listening to this are very scared of trusting a manager. That's one thing that you see a lot when you talk to small business owners Inside bars, outside of bars, retail, wherever a lot of small business owners have trouble trusting managers. But here's the other thing we know that the vast majority of restaurants in the United States are chains and well, the vast majority of restaurants have hired multiple managers and don't have an issue. So while it may seem like a big deal to trust someone, especially as a small business because if you hire a manager in a chain and they steal you fire them it's no big deal. You take a little loss on your balance sheet, doesn't hurt anyone.

Announcer: 4:39

As a small business owner.

Chris Schneider: 4:40

If you hire the wrong manager and you have to fire them down the road and they steal from you or they're embezzling money or whatever bad thing may be going on, it's going to hit a lot more. But the bottom line is there are people out there that are managing other bars, other restaurants in your market, that have good track records, that have been absolutely trustable their whole careers. So there's no reason why you can't find that person. A fear of the possibility of something bad happening is not a good excuse not to go and find someone Now. With that said, a lot of bars end up having a bartender that has managerial duties and that can work sometimes. But let's think about this for a second. If you have a bartender that when you're not there, when your manager isn't there, is in charge and they run the show when the ownership is not present, that works perfectly well. That's a good thing to do.

Chris Schneider: 5:39

When we start looking at dive bars and neighborhood bars that are open extreme amounts of hours, one of the bars I had was open from 11am to 3am, seven days a week. My bartenders and my closers didn't tend to leave till 4.35 o'clock in the morning and the guy that cleaned the place and did prep work, showed up at 7. So essentially, I had employees there more or less 22 hours a day, every day. Now there's no way that with one manager and one owner, you're ever going to be able to do that. You're going to pull off full coverage there with two managers and an owner, and that's assuming the owner is working shifts and therefore working in, not on the bar. So, yes, absolutely, bartenders can support your management. Bartenders can have key shifts. Bartenders can be in charge when someone else isn't there. But a bartender is not capable of fully managing what you need to be able to work on your business. If you only have bartenders as managers, they're still primarily bartenders. Yeah, they may do inventory, yeah, they might do some different things for you, but they don't have the time, they don't have the brain space, they won't have the energy to do a lot of the managerial tasks that you should be able to delegate to a competent full-time manager. So when we're talking about a manager, you really want to find a different person, and the hardest thing about finding that person is that, when it really comes down to it, whether you're looking at an existing manager in a bar you have purchased, whether you're starting a bar or just hiring a manager for the first time, whether you've had a manager in place for a long time, realize they're not the right fit and you're getting rid of them and you need to hire a new person to oversee your business.

Chris Schneider: 7:28

For you, attitude and mindset are everything. So if you think back to our three tiered kind of concept that I use for what's important in the bar business, it's mindset, concept and culture In mindset. Normally we talk about ownership mindset, because the thing that holds most small businesses back is the mindset of the owner. But the mindset of the manager matters just as much and it needs to be in line with the mindset of the owner. And culture is hugely important. Right that third pillar of culture. The only way to maintain a culture, to grow a culture, to have a great culture, is to have management that believes in that culture, supports that culture, will live that culture for you. So it's really important that you find the right fit Now, when it comes to finding a manager, there are a couple different ways you can go Now.

Chris Schneider: 8:22

One way that is attractive to a lot of people, because we all trust our friends, is to hire a friend. Now that has the extreme ability to go wrong and most people in business will tell you never hire a friend of yours. I've seen it work. Frankly, every manager I've ever hired I have had a personal relationship with prior to hiring and they have been friends of mine. But that doesn't mean that that's always going to work. And if you look at Bar Rescue there are tons of episodes of Bar Rescue that the whole concept behind the episode and we can talk about how Bar Rescue is fake and a lot of it's made up and not real, like some folks say it is. I'm not sure if it is or not, but let's pretend for a second that everything is real and that it is exactly as it's portrayed, because there's really a lot of good lessons in it. If you just take it at face value, a lot of the bars that they have on that show the issue they have is that they hired friends to be managers and those friends end up abusing it. They see it as a place to hang out, a place to party. So obviously, if you're going to bring in a friend, if you're going to bring in someone you already know, they have to have that understanding that work is work and it's not a time to hang out, it's not a time to bring your friends in. It's not a time to drink and have fun.

Chris Schneider: 9:45

Now, assuming you can do that, hiring a friend works fine. The first bar I was involved in, the person who was my GM was actually one of my best friends from college. We both had hospitality degrees. We had worked together in restaurants before. We both knew what we were doing. There wasn't an issue there. We could make that division between friendship and our work experience.

Chris Schneider: 10:10

But if you can't do that, if you have a friend that you're even beginning to question their ability to do that, don't do it. If you hire a friend, go look elsewhere. Now, obviously, the benefit of hiring someone you already know that you're close with, is you assume you can trust them. You assume that well, you don't assume you know where their knowledge base is, and it's a little bit of a safer option for those reasons. But again, there's a lot of pitfalls. So if you're not going to hire a friend, that essentially leaves you with two other options go outside of the bar and find someone from the general public to come in or promote someone from within.

Chris Schneider: 10:51

Now, promoting people from within can have a lot of benefits and it can be a wonderful option. When you're promoting people from within, you're showing your staff that there is room for growth. Everyone on your team says, hey, if I hang out here and I work hard and I do what I need to do, there's a potential for me to grow into different positions. The problems, though, that you run into can be really, really difficult for a new manager to get past. What's happening is you're promoting someone that was a bartender or a server to that management position, and they, frankly, already probably have some interpersonal issues with some of their team members. They already have people they like and people they dislike, and if they bring those biases into the management role, you have a lot of problems, because they're not necessarily going to give the server that produces the best results the best shifts. They might give the servers they like the best the best shifts.

Chris Schneider: 11:54

Everything in a business to maximize your potential for profit, to maximize the ability, the chance that you make really good money, has to be based on metrics. It has to be based on facts, not who likes who. When you're from within, that can be a huge challenge because, again, they already have people they like. They already have people they don't like. The other part of that is it can be really really hard for that manager to manage a group of their former peers and for the rest of your team to accept that person as a manager because they've probably done some stupid shit at one point or another. Everybody on the team remembers that that could hurt their ability to be seen as a manager and not really give them that sort of stepped up position in other people's minds and they wouldn't necessarily understand that person actually has power to do things in the business now.

Chris Schneider: 12:49

Now of course that can be easily fixed. They fire somebody and boom it's done. Everybody gets the picture. But you don't want to necessarily just fire people because you hire a new manager. But the one real advantage same with a friend in hiring within the one real advantage here is you know you can trust that person. So there are some benefits there. There are some issues there.

Chris Schneider: 13:10

But where you potentially have more benefits and less issues than either hiring a friend or promoting from within is hiring someone from the outside. And obviously when you're hiring somebody from the outside, your process is hideously important. It's all about the process you follow. And when you go to hire a server or a bartender or a cook, if you don't quite dig in deep and there's some issue with that person, or you find out down the road that they're not quite as good of a worker as you thought they were, or they don't quite seem to have the experience that they said that they did. It's not the end of the world that happens with a manager. You have a real problem.

Chris Schneider: 13:50

So the first thing you have to do if you're going to hire from the outside, before we get to where the problems are, is you have to attract people to a point, and so, obviously, the way that most businesses are going to do that nowadays is post online, and that is a great way to do it. That's how you're going to get that job ad out to the broadest reach of people. Now I would challenge you to think about things like posting on LinkedIn versus posting on, say, indeed. Indeed is a great source. I would post on both, but one thing I've always noticed is that LinkedIn job postings tend to attract a slightly different group than just any online job board.

Chris Schneider: 14:29

So think about where you're going to find someone that's more professional, and look for people that have good work histories and when I say good work histories if I'm hiring a manager for a dive bar, if they have dive bar experience, great. If they have corporate restaurant management experience, better. Yeah, they might not know dive bars exactly, but I can teach almost anyone. You can teach almost anyone A little nuance-y stuff about your bar how the cocktails are made. You can teach people about wine. You can teach people about beer, but that mindset that you get from someone that's a corporate restaurant manager is actually very useful. And they understand culture, they understand how to push those things, they understand nuance in their jobs a lot more than a lot of bar folks do. So that can be a great way to look at it.

Chris Schneider: 15:15

Now, if you can find a corporate bar person, great. Now, I'm not saying only look at corporate folks, look at folks from all walks of life. I'm just pointing out that because someone works in a corporate casual dining restaurant for most of their background, to me that's not a negative. If they're applying for a bar management job or a bar GM job, that could be a positive. It all depends on the person and the situation.

Chris Schneider: 15:41

Now, once you've posted that obviously you're going to get applicants, you're going to look at those applicants. You're going to look at their qualifications. You're going to say, hey, here's what I think I need, these folks have it. I want to have interviews and have your interviews be thorough. Ask a lot of questions. Ask questions that both get into their knowledge. So, if you're a wine-focused bar, maybe ask them some questions about French wine. See what they know and what they don't know. If you're a cocktail-focused bar, ask them drink recipes, because your manager, you want to know drink recipes. Now, again, you can teach facts. You can teach that, so it doesn't have to be great, but if you can get someone with the experience, with the knowledge, you're a step ahead. Now, once you've done that, the thing is that you also need to look at their personality how they're going to interact with your guests, how they're going to interact with your team, and so there you need to ask a lot of situational what-if? Questions.

Chris Schneider: 16:39

For instance, you have a customer that's complaining about X, y and Z. They receive a, b and C. How do you handle this situation? And you're looking for two things there. One thing that I see a lot with former corporate managers, and it's how corporate restaurants, at least here in the United States, have always pushed things. They are very quick to comp, and I don't believe in being quick to comp because comping is just giving away things for free, and if someone's eaten something or drank a whole cocktail, normally I don't think we should comp it. Now, there are obviously reasons to do that. There are expectations of that based upon how corporate restaurants behave.

Chris Schneider: 17:17

But if you have a manager, or rather a manager candidate, whose only de-escalation method with guests is to give them free stuff, you probably don't want to hire that person. You want someone that's going to have a conversation with the guest, that's going to really delve into the issues and determine what they can do to make that guest happy. And beyond that, beyond the checking their knowledge and checking how they react in certain situations, you need to do as much of a background check on that person as you can, depending on where you live. Obviously, there are different laws that impact different states in the United States, different countries around the world, as how much you're allowed to dig into someone. But if you can get them to sign off on a document that lets you do a full background check and credit check, do it Because you want to know exactly who you're dealing with and I can tell you I was working with a guy that had been in business with my dad off and on for years and he was looking at getting into a restaurant.

Chris Schneider: 18:17

It was a good restaurant. It was a place that made a lot of money or had made money at least historically according to their books and it was a destination restaurant inside a pretty large city, and so it was all great. Now he had a guy that wanted to do this with him. The guy that kind of set up the deal. He was planning to manage it. It was the kind of your managing partner type guy and at least where I am in Indiana, you can run free court record checks on folks. And we ran the court record checks and let's just say there were some suppliers that had sued him for some money and there were some questionable situations with employees that we found in the court records and all of that.

Chris Schneider: 19:02

And on its surface this was a deal that my dad and I were looking at. We were on hey, you might want to do this, but after we saw the background of this one guy who went, nope, sorry, or we're out, this is not something we will touch and so it's important to dig into as much of the background, as you can Find out everything you can about someone before you trust them, because you may have someone see this a lot, especially in the bar business somebody that's a good salesman, a smooth talker, knows their shit, knows how to say the right thing at the right time, but really isn't a great person like they seem A bullshit artist if you. And so the only way to determine if somebody's a bullshit artist or not is to run as much background on this person as you can Talk to their former employers, talk to their former employees, look at public court record. Like I said, if you can get them to sign something and let you run a full background check and a credit check, go ahead and do it, because you're gonna learn and if everything looks good, then you know this person is someone you can hire. So, whether you're looking at hiring a friend that you know that has industry experience, that you know can be professional or promoting from within, or you cast this wide net and you hire somebody from the outside in, hiring them is not the end of the process.

Chris Schneider: 20:19

Hiring someone is the first step in the process, and that's where a lot, a lot of bars go wrong. They hire somebody. They go oh, you know what you're doing here, go ahead and do it. Just jump in, figure out my bar, figure out what we're doing. Here's the cocktail list, here's how you use the POS machine, have fun. And they just expect this person to be effective, to be able to manage.

Chris Schneider: 20:42

I've seen situations where people haven't even been introduced to new manager, to the team. So everyone shows up to work and they go oh, who are you? Oh, I'm your new boss. It doesn't work. So once you've identified the person and hiring them, the only way you set them up for success, the only way you set yourself up to be able to work on your business rather than in your bar, is by training that person, is by developing them, is by helping them grow. Trial by fire is the worst idea ever Now to back up real quick. That does not mean that part of your interview process for a manager can't be something like a stash where you have them come in and kind of work a shift, interact with some guests, watch them bust some tables, things like that. That's great.

Chris Schneider: 21:27

But just to hire somebody and throw them on the floor and go hey, there you go. I mean that's not going to work. With a bar back. That's not going to work. With a host or a server or a bartender, it's definitely not going to work with a damn manager.

Chris Schneider: 21:40

So make sure you train your manager, make sure you're bringing them up to speed and, frankly, as you're developing a manager, as you're training them and teaching them and helping them grow into the position, do it slowly. Allow them to build confidence in the new job over time. Because, just as they're building confidence in their abilities and what they know how to do and what they're doing, you're building confidence in them and their ability to execute. Because when you're trusting someone to come in every morning and count through thousands of dollars of your money and decide what goes to the bank and what goes in the drawer, you've got to trust it. So it's a great way, especially if you have not had a manager in place before, whether that's a new bar, an existing bar that you bought, the bar you have.

Chris Schneider: 22:24

Now that you're just trying to work yourself out of the day-to-day management, allow yourself that time to build the confidence with them and for them to build the confidence with you, and do that by delegating a little bit of responsibility every day to them. Work side by side with them, have them come in for your shifts and just work with you for a few days or a week or two, so they get the idea, and then slowly delegate your responsibilities to them. We've talked about this in other episodes that the only way that you can pull yourself out, especially if you're someone that does not like delegation, that says, you know, hey, I think I can do this better than anyone else which is probably true, but that's a mindset that will just bury you in the long run, because you'll never get out of working on your or in your business. You'll be constantly in a strange struggle and never able to focus on the big things that are really going to generate profit and drive your business forward. But if you have trouble delegating, doing it a little bit at a time is going to help, and that's going to help you and that's going to help the new manager that you're training get up to speed quicker. And the thing is, as you delegate, as you hand over those tasks, those activities, those different things that you do day to day, is absolutely essential that everything has a system, and we've talked about this before, we will talk about this again Everything in your bar must have a system.

Chris Schneider: 23:47

Every system must have a check so that when you come in to evaluate how your new manager is doing, you don't have to go back through every system, you don't have to duplicate the work they did to see if they did it properly. You just have to check whatever in that system was made for you to be able to do a quick quality check and say, yes, this is correct, this person has executed this task properly, I don't have to worry about it. So again, you find the person. But after you find that manager, after you find that person, you can delegate to. You have to train them, you have to delegate over time and you must delegate with systems that allow you to be able to check that what you have instructed them to do, what you've trained them to do, is being done properly day in and day out. So with that, we'll go ahead and wrap up this week.

Chris Schneider: 24:38

If you have not had a chance to check it out, my book how to Sell Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business is available on Amazon, kindle and Audible. There are links in the show notes. As we talked about at the top of the show, bar Business Nation on Facebook is our Facebook group where we're trying to build a community. We're going to start doing those monthly chats with everyone on October 9th. If you have not joined there again, go to the show notes. There is a link there. And with that, I hope you guys have a great week and I will talk to you later on.

Announcer: 25:12

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.