Mixing Success: Mastering SMART Goal-Setting for Bar Profitability

Ready to shake up the bar scene with some expert guidance on goal-setting? Let's raise the bar on your business's performance with the SMART goal framework – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This episode isn't just a lesson in terminology; it's a crafted cocktail of strategies that can lead to a staggering increase in profitability. We zero in on the importance of clear and strategic objectives, demonstrating the difference between aimlessly mixing drinks and concocting a recipe for success. From understanding the power of specificity to breaking down a colossal goal like a 50% profit boost into manageable sips, we're distilling the essence of effective goal implementation in the bar industry.

Pouring into the details, we tackle the topic of increasing draft beer yields – a common pain point for bar owners. Together, we navigate the nuances of setting relevant and time-sensitive goals. And for those among us with a tendency to procrastinate, we highlight the importance of deadline-driven targets. By the end, you'll have a clear map to tap into your bar's full potential and avoid any spillage of profits.

Lastly, we reveal why visualizing your victories isn't just for athletes. In the high-energy world of bars, keeping your team's motivation on high is as crucial as the perfect pour. Learn how to transform your goal-setting into an engaging, team-wide spectacle with tactics like poster boards and creative tracking systems. We celebrate each win, big or small, propelling our collective spirits to new heights. So, let's get ready to clink glasses to your bar's success, as we guide you through setting goals that will not only measure up but exceed your wildest expectations. Cheers to that!

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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, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode we're going to be talking all about how to set smart goals. One thing you will hear people like me say over and over again the consultants of the world is that you need to set goals. And the thing is that if you think about all the self-help books out there, all the business help books out there, almost all of them say set goals. But we rarely set goals, and part of the reason for that is it seems like it's unnecessary, it's annoying, it gets in the way. Life and business are hard. They take time, and so setting aside that time to set goals and to worry about goals and strategic planning can seem like a huge lift. But when we set goals and we do strategic planning, what we're really doing is giving ourselves a path to achieve our dreams. And I know that sounds lofty and like some potentially just some BS that somebody like me would say to try to make you feel better and energize you and get you to do things. But it's actually true, because your goals are what guides you. They're what gives you direction, whether they're personal goals, business goals, any goals. They're going to guide you and give you direction, and it's not necessarily about meeting that goal or setting a goal that's huge and lofty. It is in part we want to do that long term. But short term we want to set goals that give ourselves milestones of achievement, that guide us in making smart decisions, that make us excited and energized, because every time we hit one of our milestone goals we get dopamine hits, our brains feel great about it, we've accomplished something. We get the wonderful sense of fulfillment. So goals do a lot for us mentally, psychologically. That helps push us further along, and I would challenge anyone to come up with a way to prove me wrong on this statement. If we set hugely lofty goals if you say I want my bar profit to increase 50% or 100% in the next two years If you don't set that as a goal, if you don't look at that goal every day, if you don't set milestone goals to get you there and create a process that's going to drive that change in your business, chances are two years from now, you'll have a net profit that's about the same as it is now, if not a little bit lower.

Chris Schneider: 2:49

Thinking something, wanting something, is not enough. Setting a goal forces us to put in place plans, and one of the ways that goals force us to put in place plans is when we have a structure to how we set our goals, and that's structure. The one that most people use now that's really popular everywhere, is smart goals. And when we say smart, what does that mean? It's an acronym, so specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound, and we will get into all of this as we go through this episode.

Chris Schneider: 3:23

But the big takeaway here, as we get started, should be unless you have goals, unless you have somewhere where you are going, you will go nowhere. And by setting goals and then setting small, by setting lofty big goals, I should say and by setting smaller goals to help you get there, to drive you down that path towards your bigger goal, you will have the ability to achieve more than you ever thought possible. But if you don't set goals, if you just let yourself think about moving in a direction and you don't give yourself a lofty goal to reach for and be the milestone goals to guide you towards that lofty goal, chances are you will not see improvement where you can see improvement. So, to tie this into where we started with most people don't set goals because they don't have the time. What they don't realize when they do that, and what they don't realize about the goal setting being in way of them doing whatever it is they're doing, is that once the goals are set and once you have that direction, and once you get some clarity and some focus, you have the ability to do so much more. Take the time to give yourself the foundation to be able to multiply your efforts moving forward.

Chris Schneider: 4:39

Now, before we get to breaking down smart goals and how you form them all out, let's spend a little bit more time talking about the value of goal setting. So, as I mentioned, goals give your work purpose, they give you direction, they give you focus, they give you clarity and the thing is, as we all know, owning bars. There are a thousand fires to put out every day. You have people calling you, demanding your attention. You are getting pulled in a hundred directions at once always, and what that does is it takes away your ability to focus. It doesn't allow you necessarily to spend time on what's most important, and some of that is just the hecticness of owning a bar and being in the bar business. That will never go away, whether you have goals or not, but some of that is that we don't always give ourselves clear direction on what we should be doing with our time.

Chris Schneider: 5:32

When you set goals, you've now given your work purpose and direction and focus and clarity. You know what you're trying to achieve. You can constantly ask yourself is what I'm doing guiding me to the result that I'm trying to get? If your activities aren't guiding you towards that result, well, maybe you don't have to do them, or maybe you can delegate them, or maybe it's something you have to do, but we just have to accept that this thing is not getting us close to the goal. But in general, as an owner, your focus should be on accomplishing your goals, on making your business better, rather than on things that are not doing that or just day-to-day tasks. So in a lot of ways, goals can help us delegate.

Chris Schneider: 6:13

The big thing is goals give us purpose and if you think to the conversations we've had about cultural foundations, mission and vision statements, the mission and vision statement give you structure. The mission statement is your statement of purpose, and so those will guide your business. In an abstract way, something we talked about when we have talked about vision is. Vision is aspirational. Your mission is your reason for getting out of bed in the morning. As a business, those are great things, those are wonderful things, those are things that you need to define and have, but that's not necessarily a statement that's going to generate action. Goals generate action. They give you an idea of where you're going and, like I said, we set these milestone goals, the smaller goals, to drive towards your big goal, and now they're going to give you guidance, clarity on where to spend your time and what actions you take.

Chris Schneider: 7:14

Before we go any further, I think I need to take a step back real quick and explain what exactly I mean by long-term and short-term goals. So long-term goals are going to be obviously a longer time frame. Generally, when we're speaking long-term goals in a business sense, we're talking about years, and it all depends upon how large of a goal you have to, how long it will reasonably take. And when we get into the next section, we'll start talking about what makes a smart goal and how to define all those variables, one of which is time bound. We'll talk more about how to determine what makes sense for your timeline on a long-term goal, but it's going to be over a year. Long-term is always over a year in a business sense, and when we set these long-term goals, it could be two years, it could be three years. We need to just make sure that we have enough time to accomplish whatever that goal is.

Chris Schneider: 8:07

So if our goal is to increase profits by 100% depending upon where we're starting from, where we're going a bunch of different variables that could take a while and it may not even be achievable, which could be another issue, but maybe that's a three-year goal. Now, conversely, when we're talking about short-term goals so if our goal was to increase profits 50%, let's say, and that's our long-term goal and we're going to do that over two years, short-term goals are going to be goals that are under a year. So if I wanted to increase profits 50%, maybe I'm going to set a quarterly goal for the first quarter to increase profits 15%, 20%. Or maybe my first quarter goal is to lower food costs, because I know if I want profits to go up, I have to lower my prime costs and I can set a quarterly goal on each piece of prime cost to slowly and effectively bring my costs down to make my profits go up. Now, again, obviously it depends upon a lot of variables. It depends upon what our starting places are, what profits are, what prime costs are, percentages. All of that is going to play into what these goals are.

Chris Schneider: 9:24

But as an example, I think you guys get it. We have a long-term goal we're trying to reach. We have smart-term goals, short-term goals, I should say, that drive us towards our long-term goal. We just have to make sure that we set short-term goals that are good goals, long-term goals that are good goals, and that our short-term goals drive to our long-term goal. And often what you will find is, when you get into a goal-setting situation like this and when you really take your long-term goals, break them into short-term goals and all of that that, what you think will take a long time actually gets achieved much, much faster. That you can be more productive than you think, that your business can improve at a more rapid pace than you expect it to Now. Don't always bet on that starting out. Don't always assume that you're going to move faster than you think you are, but be prepared that maybe your goals that you thought were going to take a year, your four quarterly short-term goals to lead to your long-term goal, end up only taking you two quarters to complete all four of them. You have the ability to do more than you think you can if you organize your efforts proper.

Chris Schneider: 10:42

Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution. With my coaching and consulting services, we deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization. Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week, picture this a thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30-minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the Bar Business Coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.

Chris Schneider: 11:38

Now let's get into smart goals. Smart goals are a specific framework to make sure your goals are meaningful and attainable. While you could just set any random goal, you want having a plan, having a framework to set goals. Make sure that your goals are quality and that they're actually achievable. Too often, when someone is asked to set a goal, think about all the times you're interviewing someone and you say where would you like your life to be in five years? Normally what you get is a bunch of BS. It's some jumble of words that comes together with some meaning, but there's no real measurable thing in that goal. It may or may not be actually achievable. It's not specific enough to understand. A smart goal helps us define some of these things and make sure that all of the variables are included in our goal. What we have is something that we can communicate to our team, to ourselves, and use as an actual tool to drive our business forward.

Chris Schneider: 12:50

As I mentioned, this is both for the long-term goals and the short-term goals. We want smart long-term goals and then we want to set smart short-term goals to help us reach our long-term goals. Smart is our acronym. Again. Smart itself stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. One more time, just to make sure you got it Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. That's what we want all goals to be.

Chris Schneider: 13:20

I'm going to walk through an example here real quick with you and we'll go through each of these pieces and really dig into what they are and how we do them. The first thing that a goal should be is specific. We need to know exactly what we are trying to achieve. That generally comes down to the who and the what. What are we doing and who is doing it? The who sometimes can be implied. For instance, if we're talking about increased profits, the who is kind of everyone in our bar needs to help increase the profits. The what is increasing profits. That's not terribly specific. That's not really illuminating a lot for us. The other thing to think about when we're talking about specific is how much detail do I need to get to?

Chris Schneider: 14:11

Generally speaking, for our longer term goals, we can be a little bit less specific, because we're talking about a long term goal to reach some metric, some KPI that is lofty, that is going to take us a while to reach. Where? For our short term goals, we want to be more and more specific. For example, if our long term goal was to increase profits by 50%, we know that in order to increase profits by 50%, we need to lower our prime cost. If we want to lower our prime cost and we notice that we have a poor draft beer yield, so our draft beer system is not producing the amount of the number of pints it should out of each keg, then maybe our short term goal is increased draft beer yield. We've gone way more specific. Our long term goal is to increase profits. Our shorter term goal is to lower prime cost. But the specific goal we're honing in on here is increasing draft beer yield, because if we yield more draft beer out of a keg, that will lead to a lower poor cost, which will lower our prime cost, which will increase our profits.

Chris Schneider: 15:24

The fun part is because a lot of the other variables in this equation aren't changing. Every dollar that we can get through an increased draft beer yield should hit our bottom line at about 70%. So if we can save $100 by increasing our draft beer yield in a day, we should put $70 a day directly to our bottom line. But that should show you how we've gone from increased profits very broad down to something much more specific increased draft beer yield. And again, the timeframe of your goal will determine exactly how specific you need to be.

Chris Schneider: 16:02

Now, after specific, we need to make sure that it is measurable. So measurable at the end of the day means that there's a KPI, a key product indicator, a metric that we can point to and say this metric has gotten better or worse based upon the data that we can collect. Our goal needs to always reflect hard data, because we can measure soft things right, like how much did their customers enjoy our experience? We can use a net promoter score and we can measure that. However, if we don't have a way to measure our goals, if we don't have a way to measure the results, we'll never know whether or not we reached a goal.

Chris Schneider: 16:46

You can't reach a goal that you cannot define with a metric. So for every goal we have, we need to pick the individual KPIs that we're going to use to measure that goal and, best case scenario, we want one metric. So, if you think about the example we were just talking about and we'll continue to use this example throughout this episode but we want to increase draft beer yield. That is our one metric draft beer yield. Our long-term goal had the metric increase profits and our metric there is obviously our net profit or EBITDA, but net profits. There are dozens, hundreds of potential KPIs that feed into that metric. So increasing draft beer yield, that is a bottom line metric. So it is easy to define, easy to understand and easy to work on.

Chris Schneider: 17:43

So, regardless of which KPIs you're picking, what your goal is, that you're trying to achieve, you need it to be measurable. So our example goal is to increase draft beer yields and we need to measure that yield. We're always going to measure as a percentage, so what percentage of the keg actually was sold versus what percentage of the keg was poured out in foam or wasted or given out in taste, all of that good stuff. In general, a good draft beer yield is going to be in the low to mid 90s. A lot of bars are going to be running, frankly, in the 70s and 80s and most bars are running somewhere between the 80s and 90s. So let's say, in this case, we measure the draft beer yield, our current state draft beer yield. It was 85% and we decide that our goal should be 92.5%. So now we can change our goal from just increased draft beer yield to increased draft beer yield from 85% to 92.5%. Now we have to determine if our goal is achievable. So SMART, we made it specific, we've made it measurable. Now we have to double check is it achievable? And this is really important because you have to set goals that you can actually reach.

Chris Schneider: 19:08

For instance, as much as I may want to or think that it could be cool, I am never going to climb Mount Everest. Why? Because I'm an overweight dude in his late 30s that doesn't know how to climb mountains. If I decided I wanted to climb Mount Everest, if I made that my goal and I worked my ass off and I lost weight and I exercised and I learned how to climb mountains and I did all of that, the chances in my late 30s of getting the cardiovascular strength, of getting the muscle strength needed, of developing the skills and doing the training and getting the increased coordination and all of that, the chances of me actually being able to climb Mount Everest and do it without dying are not high. So probably a good goal for me is not climb Mount Everest Now. If I wanted to go to a different country and climb a big mountain Kilimanjaro is not as technical, it's not as cold, it's a lot more approachable I would still have to train my ass off. But maybe climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is something I could do and, who knows, maybe I could do that and then climb Mount Everest.

Chris Schneider: 20:19

But just saying I'm going to go climb Mount Everest when the chances of me ever being able to physically pull that off, because we haven't even gotten the fact that I have torn ACLs and MCLs and ligament issues in my knees, and I'll add shit from bartending and standing on my feet all day working in bars. The chances of me ever being able to do that are like zero. So it would be a really bad goal. It's not achievable, it's not something I can do, and achievability is one of the reasons why we set short term goals in the first place. Our long term goals are high and lofty. Our short term goals are made to give us wins, give us that dopamine hit from accomplishing something, from saying, oh my God, this is great, we've done it. And we'll talk about how to celebrate wins a little bit later on, but in the short term, what's important here to understand is short term goals. We want to make them achievable, we want to make them absolutely achievable and we want to make them achievable Not easily. We need to stretch ourselves, but we want to make them achievable in a way that's not going to kill us, it's not going to push us over the top, and we need to be reasonable with ourselves and our understanding of what we're capable of.

Chris Schneider: 21:28

So, thinking back to our example goal that we've been working with increased draft beer yields from 85% to 92.5% absolutely achievable. It's a 7.25, sorry, it's a 7.5% change in draft beer yield. 92.5% is an absolutely reasonable draft beer yield to assume that you can get. It's not going to be easy. 95% is possible, but maybe a little bit less achievable. So maybe we could go up to like 95. I probably would try to push 95 after I got 92.5% reasonably consistently. But we're not setting our draft beer yield expectations at like 99%, which is almost impossible to hit, only because when you stop pouring beer for 8, 12 hours you get a lot of foam buildup in the lines and so you're always going to have foam every morning to get a yield that's way higher than that. You almost well you can get one of the bottom draft systems that the draft beer comes in from the bottom of the cup, or you have to be in an event where you're just pouring a keg and you're not stopping and you're burning the whole keg at once. But again, our goal 85% to 92.5% increase in draft beer yields. That is absolutely attainable.

Chris Schneider: 22:47

Now the next thing we want to check is is our goal relevant? So your goal needs to be something worth doing and I know that sounds stupid, but it's true. It needs to be something we're doing and it needs to produce the result that matters as part of your long-term plan. If your goal is to increase your profits, then everything about that goal and any short-term goals related to it need to be focused on increasing profits. You have to produce results that matter to what you're doing. So, if we're thinking about draft beer yield, it would not be relevant if I had a goal that I should yield more on my loggers than on my ails. That really doesn't matter for overall yield. That really does not matter for bottom line. If the overall yield is right, great, you know. Or I should yield more on darker beers than lighter beers Again, not relevant. Color has nothing to do with it. Type of beer has nothing to do with it. We're talking about what makes us money, and color and type of beer have zero impact on what's going to make us money. So if we look at our goal our example goal again increased draft beer yields from 85% to 92.5% is that relevant when our long-term goal is to increase profits? 100%, absolutely relevant. So we are good there. Now the last piece of a smart goal is that it's time bound, and by time bound what we're really saying is you need a time frame in which to achieve your goal.

Chris Schneider: 24:20

A goal without a timeline, a goal without a deadline, most of us will never achieve, and I hate to say it, but the bar business is made up of people that don't necessarily do well in corporate America, people that are not necessarily type A A lot of us kind of are, but in weird ways and many of us have some neurodivergence, and normally our neurodivergence is coming in the form of ADHD. Adhd causes you to procrastinate. Our owners, bartenders, the type of people drawn to this industry, we are all great procrastinators and the problem is that you take some ADHD, you take some other neurodivergence. You put us in the day-to-day of bars, where there's things going on left and right and we find that exciting and energizing and wonderful. But there are things going on left and right. There's always a fire to put out, there's all this stuff going on. We will procrastinate on anything that's not right in front of our face, not some of the time, not most of the time, every single fricking time. So a goal without a timeframe is just a goal that we've designed to be procrastinating. It's something we will never accomplish.

Chris Schneider: 25:30

By giving yourself as a deadline, we create urgency, especially if you're an ADHD person. This is 100% true for me. If I sit down at the week and I say this is what I'm doing this week and I laid out all my goals for the week, I accomplish so much. If I don't do that, if I don't manage my time and set goals, every week I will drink coffee and watch some TV and probably read a book. Maybe I'll almost definitely take a nap, but shit ain't happening that's supposed to happen. So you need to set goals, you need timelines, you need urgency behind those goals, otherwise you will never achieve them. And the only way if you're an ADHD type bar person, which I think like 98% of us are I have no statistics to prove that that's purely anecdotal in my own speculation that's like 90% of us are, I bet ya and so you have to give yourself a time frame, you have to give yourself a deadline.

Chris Schneider: 26:29

So, for our example, we want to increase draft beer yields from 85% to 92.5% over the course of the next three months. You're getting ourselves three months to achieve this goal and, frankly, we could probably do that within a month. It depends on how hard the training is. It depends on exactly what's causing that decrease. But this is where I said you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish in time if you set the right goals and you use the right framework of making smart goals. Because, depending upon what it's going to take to get that 7.5% increase in draft beer yield, it could just be changing some temperature settings and some gas settings and a training session or two, and boom, we're done. It's a month later, we've done it. It could take three months, it could take five months, but I think three months is a real easy goal. So give yourself that deadline. Give that self your timeline. Otherwise, if you're like me and a lot of people I know in the bar industry, your ADHD and your neurodivergence will make it so that that goal is never accomplished because I don't know, there were some boxes that came in the back door that needed to be broken down.

Chris Schneider: 27:36

Instead, I want to take a moment to highlight a powerful resource that could be a game changer for your bar my book how to Make Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business. It's not just a book, it's a comprehensive guide with 75 lessons covering crucial aspects like bar design, menu creation, team culture, marketing strategies and much more. Imagine having this wealth of wisdom at your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned bar owner refining your craft or someone dreaming of stepping into the bar business, this book is your ultimate companion. You can grab a copy on Amazon and print eBook and audiobook formats. The link is in the show notes below. Join the League of Successful Bar Owners who found their blueprint to working less in their bar and more on their bar.

Chris Schneider: 28:17

Once you've set a smart goal, there are three things that I would encourage you to do to help you reach that smart goal, and the three things are we need to document our goals, we need to track our progress and we absolutely must celebrate our wins. So when I say document your goals, this can be physical, this can be digital. Personally, especially in a bar environment right, we have people in and out. We have teams that we work with. Goal is great. If I'm setting a goal for my coaching business and I need to talk to a few people about the goal and I don't want to leave my house, that's great. But in a bar, physical boards with goals on them is actually better because everyone on the team can see the goals.

Chris Schneider: 28:59

Everyone knows what you're driving for, everyone knows where you're going and so, as much as it sounds like an elementary school art project, but go get a bunch of giant poster boards. I get two or three poster boards, the big ones you know. Let they sell in the kids art section or whatever the school section at Walmart or wherever you happen to go. Buy one Office Depot or whatever. Go get a couple of poster boards, tape them together, make a giant fricking poster board and then put your goals on the poster board and if you can, if you really get into this, you can put a timeline, like make your poster board a timeline and kind of turn your whole poster board into a Gantt chart. But now I'm just getting nerdy. But put your goals up on a board, let people see where you're trying to go and then track your progress on those boards.

Chris Schneider: 29:48

Things like sticky notes are a great way to track your progress on the boards because you can write notes, you can slap them up there. People see movement, people see action on the goals. Not only will that help you know where you are and where you're going and help to energize you, it will help energize your team when your team sees every day in front of their face that your draft beer pork cost is going down. They're going to be more mindful of how they treat your draft beer If they see that you have a goal to increase guest satisfaction. And they see sticky notes and things on this board that change day to day that show where guest satisfaction is and the gap to where you're trying to go and all of that they're going to increase guest satisfaction. Metrics that get seen are metrics that get managed and metrics that get managed are places where you realize results. So the more visibility it has, the more you can just shove it on the wall. Show everybody this board, show everybody the goals. Refer to it during your pre-shift meetings. It is the way to guide your team to reach your goals.

Chris Schneider: 31:00

We've talked about this. That is also part of continuous improvement. We will get into that more in other episodes. There are episodes on continuous improvement you can listen to, on how to use huddles and boards to really drive your business forward. But even if you're not going on a full-blown continuous improvement system, if you're going to have goals, make sure people can see them, make sure that you're tracking what you do, and it can be as crazy as the poster boards on the wall.

Chris Schneider: 31:29

Another thing that works really well, especially if it's something where you're trying to get up to a certain level, and what I mean by that is think like a fundraiser. Fundraisers always use those thermometers. The thermometer thing works. It communicates to people really, really well. So if you have a goal that we need to get 100 of these vows of wine that we want to sell, every time you sell a bottle you mark it off on your little thermometer and it gets up to 100 and the top pops off and everybody celebrates. It's wonderful. But you need a way to track your goals and document your goals that is visible, that people see, so that it stays top of mind, because when they see the metric, they will perform to the metric. When they perform to the metric, everything gets better because you will hit your goals.

Chris Schneider: 32:17

Now, with that and I just said it, and this is quite possibly the most important thing you can do when it comes to your goals you have to celebrate when you win, and there's a few reasons for that. One is you're going to get a dopamine hit right. When you accomplish something that you're trying to get, your brain releases dopamine. It feels good when you can share with your team, hey, we all accomplished this great thing. If everyone gets a dopamine hit, it's wonderful. It gives you momentum. It's a chemical reaction in your brain that makes you want to achieve more goals. So the more you celebrate, the more you can find a celebrate, and every little win is worth celebration, because every little win is going to push that momentum, it's going to build upon itself, and that momentum is key to creating a bar that is a fricking juggernaut, where problems solve themselves and profit just happens to increase, because it does. You have to celebrate when you win, and achieving a goal is one of the biggest wins you can have, because if that goal is smart and it's rooted in your KPIs and it's rooted in your metrics, that means that your business is better, that means you're making more money. So, fricking, celebrate it.

Chris Schneider: 33:34

So, to wrap up everything for this week, if you want to move your business in the good direction, you have to set goals, and those goals should be smart. And again, smart is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. So every goal you set should meet those five requirements. Then you need to show your team your goals, work on your goals, reach your goals and celebrate winning them, because with a good goal setting process, with a good process to understand and achieve your goals, you can make more change in your bar than you ever thought possible. You can create an environment that attracts team members to you because other people from other bars that are coming in and your staff, when they go and talk to other people in the industry, will know what a crazy environment you've created of creating goals, achieving goals, just having this, we all win together mindset. And so with a good goal setting process, you have the basis of creating a culture that works, a concept that is continually being refined. You, as an owner, have embraced the mindset to get you there and you will create a jugger not a fricking jugger, not of a bar in a business Once you allow yourself to set goals, long term and short term, and go about achieving those goals in a scientific manner. So that's what I've got for you today.

Chris Schneider: 35:07

Make sure, guys, if you haven't had a chance, subscribe to the podcast, follow us. Depending on what platform you're on, leave reviews. Places rate us. I love ratings and reviews, not going to lie. If you want to talk to me more, if you're looking for more insights into what's going on.

Chris Schneider: 35:24

Make sure you join our bar business nation Facebook group. We do monthly meetings there to get everyone together. We're switching those over to workshops, so that should be pretty cool. That's a benefit of being there. Plus, it's a great place to ask questions, interact with other bar owners, learn from each other because, frankly, none of us not a single one of us knows everything or even most things. So when we come together, we can achieve things together and think through things that are not possible to do alone. As always, if you want to talk to me more, feel free to schedule a free strategy session. We can talk about your bar, where you are, where you can go and great ways to optimize your bar for success moving forward. You can find links for both bar business nation and to schedule a free strategy session in the show notes below. So until next time, guys, have a great week. We will talk again later.

Announcer: 36:19

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.