Mixing Mastery with Marketing: Propelling Your Bar to Success with Jason Lattrell

Prepare to unlock the secrets of bar business success with industry virtuoso Jason Lattrell as we tap into the gritty realities and marketing mastery that define today's bar scene. Jason dissects the challenges and opportunities that can make or break your establishment. This conversation isn't just about keeping your head above water; it's about thriving in a competitive market where every detail counts—from the accuracy of your online information to the allure of your marketing strategy.

Jason shares the methods to magnetize new patrons and keep them coming back, delving into the power of a consistent online presence and the wonders of technology like GPT-integrated systems. These tools aren't just fancy tricks; they're the lifelines that could save you from drowning in labor costs or getting lost in the digital sea. And when it comes to customer loyalty, we reveal how the Net Promoter Score can be your compass, steering the way to a thriving fan base that sings your bar's praises. If you've ever wondered how to transform a casual visitor into a lifelong advocate, this episode holds the key.

Wrapping up, we pivot to the art of delegation and decision-making with personal anecdotes and expert insights that illustrate the fine balance between leadership and letting go. 

Jason Littrell:
Email: jason@jlittrell.com
www.barteams.com - this is a great resource and a growing community, make sure to join and check out all of the awesome workshops and webinars. 
Who's My Rep: https://www.facebook.com/groups/723551998756472

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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

Chris Schneider: 0:00

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcaster Ultimate Resource for Bar Owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and today we're going to be doing something a little bit different. In the past, you guys have all spent a lot of time listening to me talk and I appreciate that, but I also think that it's important to bring in other folks with other insights, other areas of expertise, because, as much as I might pretend like I know everything, I sure as shit don't, and we need other people's opinions to help you guys out. Plus, I have some friends with some great stories that I think will be very helpful, both stories behind bars, working in bars, owning bars and as consultants. So today I have with us a really cool guy.

Chris Schneider: 0:45

His name is Jason LaTrell. He was a bartender in New York City for about 12 years. He spent two years at Death Co Really really smart guy when it comes to things behind the bar, but he is a genius at marketing, reputation management and tech, which those of you that have been listening to the podcast and heard my previous episodes on marketing know. I am not necessarily the best at marketing, so he's going to help fill some of those gaps for us and also talk to us a little bit about ways we can integrate tech into our workflows with our customers and really build things that maintain our reputation and keep guests coming in the door. So, without further ado, here is Jason.

Jason Littrell: 1:29

Thank you for having me, Chris. You know what? There's one thing I had to point out.

Chris Schneider: 1:32

Well, thank you for being here.

Jason Littrell: 1:34

I had to point out one thing about the introduction is that I have also been pretending that you know everything, so hopefully, that, hopefully, everything works out if your phone rings. You know, I've been telling people that you know what you're talking about, so sorry.

Chris Schneider: 1:48

I appreciate that. Jason, to start out here, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, just so that my listeners can get to know you a little bit, I think you summed it up pretty well.

Jason Littrell: 1:57

I mean, I was a shift bartender for 10. I stand corrected 12 years, as it says in my book. Thank you for reminding me about that. I'm not so great with timelines and histories. In fact, I have an app on my phone that says how long I've had things, how long I've had a job, how many pinnacle moments in my life, like when my kid was born, for instance. So it reminds me that my kid is five and a half now.

Jason Littrell: 2:19

I'm kidding, I knew that one, but I haven't. You know, yeah, I've been hustling for a long time. I'm a born entrepreneur. Now I work for a large distributor in New York and, just generally speaking, solving problems that are typically very difficult to solve. You know, the big problem that we're I think we're all trying to solve is how to mitigate and minimize the staggering failure rate of bars 80% over five years, 67% in the first year on average, depending on which study you look at and so these are massive problems. These are big problems in their entire communities that feel the impact of that. I mean nightlife in F and B in New York is a billion dollar economic impact. So consider the churn and the value of that. So if we solve 1% of that problem, that could change a lot of people's lives, and that's kind of what gets me out of bed every day.

Chris Schneider: 3:08

That's awesome. So with that, we're talking about an 80% failure rate which, to your point, it depends on which statistics you look at, because I don't think I'm waiting for someone to do a really good study that actually nails that down. I point to.

Jason Littrell: 3:23

Ohio State a lot.

Chris Schneider: 3:25

Yeah, the Ohio State studies pretty good, but it's also pretty old and I'd love to see somebody update that I got to. I got to twist some professors arms on that one, I think at some point I think they kind of look at.

Jason Littrell: 3:35

They look at different KPIs. If I were to look at certain KPIs, I would be like how many licenses are being issued, how many licenses are gone, how many are dead? And then, versus how many leases are being signed and, generally speaking, the tax revenue from nightlife, specific businesses like oh, I don't know, I don't know, it's like it's a cottage industry in New York just opening and closing bars, like a lot of people make money just by opening and closing bars and the landlord always makes money. It's criminal. So you know, it's something that we're mindful of. But you know, you control the controllables and then you ignore the rest.

Chris Schneider: 4:13

Well, yeah, and with the landlord thing. That's why I've always maintained if you can own your own building, you're in the best spot possible, 100%. Obviously, that's a lot easier to do in the middle of nowhere in Indiana than it is in New York City. So that's you know.

Jason Littrell: 4:29

Yeah, like private equity in New York is really taking over. Just recently there's this classic bar named Lucy's called Lucy's this Polish immigrant. In the 80s she bought or she opened up a bar there. She took over a bar there in the early 80s and she has herself been tending bar for the last 40 years and her building was just bought by a private equity firm like a small private equity firm I mean small for whatever private equity is and she was priced out of her own lease, you know, $25,000 a month and this is like what is now considered a prime real estate.

Jason Littrell: 5:04

But it's just like. It's just kind of crushing the soul of New York a little bit, making it that much harder for you know, setting new rent standards, which is making it harder for for independent operators to come in and do cool things. And you know, new York is going to become a strip mall because the only people that can afford that rent are going to be your CVS is Walgreens, chases and or a weed shop, which are everywhere now. They're everywhere now. It must be extremely profitable. But I had no idea, except for the last couple of years. I had no idea what the demand for cannabis was in New York. Apparently it's astonishing, and or the profitability on these head drops is crazy, because they're just everywhere, like they're literally four on my block.

Chris Schneider: 5:53

Well, I think it's a combination of all that and just to. This is one of the interesting things to me when just kind of looking at the bar business as a whole because you know, I have people listening to this around the world and you're talking about New York City 25 grand a month just to lease a space, whereas for a lot of the country you can lease a good space for five grand a month. You know, I was, I was looking at a space close to where I am with somebody the other day and I think the lease was 2400 a month for 4000 square feet.

Jason Littrell: 6:25

It also sounds like plenty enough to collateralize a loan to purchase a building right.

Chris Schneider: 6:31

Oh, yeah, yeah, no, it's. The economics in New York City are different, and really I shouldn't say economics in New York City. The economics in New York and the East Coast and then California and the West Coast tend to be different than everywhere else. You know, and it's almost like and this is not at all where I was planning to go, but it's almost like we're seeing this bifurcation in the hospitality business where things like tip credit in a lot of these states is going away. The rents are really high, the regulation is way more difficult, and so I'm starting to notice some things that operators are doing in, say, new York, where you are. We haven't even thought about it doing doing those things here, because the economics are totally different. We, a bartender in Indiana, can still get paid to 13 an hour.

Jason Littrell: 7:23

Yeah, and probably make a living wage on tips right. Make a decent living like I.

Chris Schneider: 7:29

Know a lot of guys that are get. They get paid to 13 an hour on their paycheck and make an excess of a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Jason Littrell: 7:36

Yeah, in New York last time. You know I haven't worked the shifts a long time, but our hourly was basically only as a provision to cover a zero balance check. Yeah, it was just enough to pay taxes. And then I mean, in my lifetime, in my lifetime behind the bar, we used to get paid in cash and we used to keep up, keep a hundred percent of it. We didn't report it. Now Everything is reported, there's. There's no getting around it and and that's fine. I mean, I like to pay taxes. I don't like to pay too much taxes. I'm not something like wacky libertarian or something like that, but I like our streets paved and so I don't mind paying taxes. My kid goes to public school, but being taxed outrageously is something that's deeply offensive to me, anyway. So so marketing, yeah.

Jason Littrell: 8:20

Marketing that's where we're going right. That's what we're here to talk about is marketing.

Chris Schneider: 8:25

But, but. But let's, let's take where we were and combine it with where we're going, so we have this 80% failure rate give or take, based on that Ohio State study that we were talking about. What do you think from from a marketing reputation management side, is leading to that? Because obviously the reason bars closed is because no one's coming in the door.

Jason Littrell: 8:45

Yeah, you can't buy something that you're not aware. I call it the Amazon effect. Amazon trained us over many years on how to buy things, and, and it's an extremely effective model. So next time you're on Amazon buying something and it is the most like, if I think it's like the fourth or fifth Largest search engine in the world next time you're on Amazon, look at how they arrange things, look at how they, how they set things up and how they sell products, because they they got. I'm sure they have a large full-time team of people that just track your eyeballs Just to see where you look and how you make decisions on things, and so we can play that same game as restaurant owners and operators, and and, and just next time you're on Amazon, look at what you look at and look at what you track and look at what you do, how you make decisions on what to buy for me. I look at, I look for the most expensive version of the thing that I want, and then I look at the reviews. They look at the number of reviews. Now in order of those things, and and, and that's just my preference. So like I'm looking for the best of the thing that I want now that's typically reserved for like e-commerce and product stuff, like things.

Jason Littrell: 9:46

As far as services are concerned, I typically go to Google Maps and I say they've been cultivating and training us how to do the near me searches for a long time. So if you try, if you type in restaurant, it'll automatically fill in the near me part and It'll show you the places that it wants to show. You won't show you everything, and so this is where search engine optimization comes in. Seo is a major, major factor in how we are presented with products and services to buy, and so if you're not playing that game, you are largely invisible. The entire of the whole, the, the mindset of being like I'm bought into a, into a good location and I get tons of foot traffic, is Almost completely irrelevant. So I'd rather pay less rent and pay more on on focusing on search engine optimization so that people could find me. Then I would on doing no SEO, no digital marketing and being in a pran in time fucking square Right, because if people that like, even if they can see you, even if they're looking at you, they're probably going like statistically, they're more likely to look at their phone.

Jason Littrell: 10:46

Do some research and find out if they like you or not, and so that is your first impression, right? So the first impression for most bars, restaurants, when I, when I grew up, like was they would see the sign and they would be like is it welcoming to? Should I walk through this door? Now it's like how do they rank among the places next to it? How many star ratings, how many reviews do they have? And then they make a decision whether or not they're willing to give you a Chance.

Jason Littrell: 11:12

So if you are not playing the game on their, on their four inch screen, you're not, you're not in the same league. And so this is why you know, and you can pay for this to get it fast, or or you can play it, play the long game and do it smart and do it consistently over a long period of time. You don't necessarily have to do blog posts. You don't necessarily have to be on Instagram. I mean, instagram's a whole, nother thing. I don't know why people waste so much time on Instagram. Okay, I, if you want to get into that, let's get into that.

Jason Littrell: 11:41

But but sticking to the theme of like, of ICO, you know like you want to be on it's, it's it's called the three pack on on Google search, and so if you're not in the three pack as in being one of the three most relevant places Based on the search that somebody has is looking for Then you are likely not going to be discovered at all. So you want to be in that three pack. So this is when, like you know, we get into putting stuff like I like to put the word margarita on every, on every Google, my business profile that I, that I used to manage Right, because people know what a margarita is, and so if you're not Establishing a connection between the thing that you have and the thing that they already want on a menu, then you're less likely to be found. So you may have this like really crazy agave blend, or like this crazy thing if it's got agave in it and it's shaken compared to a margarita, because they already want a margarita. They don't know what your thing is, so you have to draw it, you have to make this connection for them.

Jason Littrell: 12:42

Like they're six years old, they're like hi, hi, I wanted to help you find something that you really like. Can you come here, buddy? Okay, cool, hey, check this out. We have this mezcal and tequila cocktail. It's got some some fruit juice, got some lime juice and lemon juice and it's got some stuff in it and it's just like a margarita. That is the connection that you make for people and that is how you make it, because they're going to make a decision in about 15, 20 seconds and if you're not there answering their question that they're having in their mind at the time, then they will pick somebody who will and it's it's cutthroat and it's irritating, but that is the way. Is that? That is the way decisions are made.

Chris Schneider: 13:18

So a few things that are interesting to me and what you just said One is and because I wholeheartedly am on the same page as you and I didn't know that until we got into this conversation. But it's nice to know because, to me, when you look at what a bar needs to do to be successful, you always have to have about 20% of your business be new business. Right and to your point, a lot of bars tend to focus on Facebook and Instagram as marketing. Today, I want to thank you in person today. You're welcome, thank you you. But that 20% new business is not the people looking at your Facebook and your Instagram. That's the 80% of the repeat business you have to generate, which means new business, at least the way I've always looked at it from a marketing perspective comes down to SEO and relationship management, essentially on review sites, which we all fricking hate, but that's a whole different story too. You can automate it.

Jason Littrell: 14:11

Part of it. Yeah, people use.

Chris Schneider: 14:14

YXT All right.

Jason Littrell: 14:15

YXT, yeah. And then there's the other ones, like back links and citations, like people that link to you, like the review sites. Rather than going on TripAdvisor rather than going on Google my Business, rather than going on all these other sites that do reviews and are aggregators for local businesses, you can use the service like YXT and update one thing. That will update all of them at the same time and every time you update it like whether you're changing your business hours or your menu, or if you have some sort of an offer, you can change it from one place to another place via software like YXT, Y-E-X-T, and then that will change. That will change 150 different citations around the internet and they're all point to you.

Jason Littrell: 14:57

So that's not the same thing as having 150 blogs write about you, but it's kind of tantamount. It's pretty close. It's good for SEO and also you're delivering the right information and updating it across wherever they're looking, which is also important, Like how many times have you showed up to a bar and been like you guys are supposed to be open? It says on here that you're open right now. You know irritating that is for people, especially if they had to get into a car.

Jason Littrell: 15:20

Imagine that kind of car find parking and then go to a place and it's closed and the information is wrong. You will never see those people again. You will never get a service recovery opportunity there.

Chris Schneider: 15:30

Well, that's the whole point, right? Because if somebody comes to your bar when they think it should be open because Google set up was and it's not, they're never coming back, right, you have just lost that customer forever. And if it's on Google, especially now, like where you are, thousands of people may be looking at that every day. So you might turn off thousands of customers every single day without even trying.

Jason Littrell: 15:55

Much to the delight of the bar right next door, because we are lazy.

Chris Schneider: 15:59

Absolutely.

Jason Littrell: 16:00

We are lazy, lazy, lazy, absolutely. We're not going to get back in our car. We're not going to get on the train and go back to our neighborhood and be like, okay, well, we got to try again. You're like, nope, I've expanded this amount of effort, I'm going to find the path of least resistance and I will go to the place that is right. And here it is again, near me, and you're probably going to use a Google product to find out.

Chris Schneider: 16:22

Yeah, yeah, and that was a really good tip on the next thing, because I did a podcast episode not that long ago I want to say last month or the month before where I told everyone they had to log into everything and update it manually. So you've already saved the listeners like a hundred hours of work that I gave them.

Jason Littrell: 16:41

Well, it is a service that you're going to pay about a hundred bucks a month for. But, going back to, if we're talking about bar owners here, then there are never enough time. There's never enough time in the day, and the only way, the best way to expend capital is to preserve time. And so, if you can like, this is why it just astonishes me why people, more people, don't hire bar consultants and bar like marketing specialists and people who do, who specialize in specific things, because if you're recovering your time and making people accountable for the cash expenditure, then you are leveraging your capital to grow a business versus doing a million things poorly. They say that the hunter that chases two rabbits catches neither. And so if you think that you can do your own marketing and I don't care if you're doing a half a million dollars a year or if you're doing $20 million a year like you have to outsource the things that you suck at and even and you have to outsource things to people that you're even okay at, because you shouldn't there's a lot of things that bar owners do that they should not be doing. They shouldn't be doing.

Jason Littrell: 17:49

You know, like I think marketing is probably one of those things that they should have their hand in, because their voice and tonality and cadence should be from the front and center, but it'd be like going back behind the bar and bartending. It's like you don't do that. You have people for that, you have experts that do just that and it's just. It's just astonishing to me, like it's a very clear thing, like our mentor, sean, told us this book, the Goal, and I read that book and it's just about basically efficient. It's about efficient production in a factory, and every bar, in restaurant is a factory, you know, we it's, and it's kind of unique to to a lot of businesses in that it does its own production, does its own sales, it's on marketing, its own distribution and and to think that you might be an expert in all those things at the same time is is ridiculous.

Jason Littrell: 18:45

So you know you're spending your money on something, you're probably spending your money on the wrong things and you know if, if, if it were my money and I have been a bar owner it sucked, I cannot recommend it. But one of the biggest lessons that I learned is that I should have been reinvesting that the money, the little money that I made into people who really knew what they were doing, so that they could do it well.

Chris Schneider: 19:08

Now to touch on something you mentioned during that.

Chris Schneider: 19:12

You said you need to make sure that your tonality, your color, like everything is consistent across your marketing.

Chris Schneider: 19:22

And let's let's talk about that for a little bit, because I feel like for a lot of bars because they don't necessarily have the time to do everything they have, you know, a server that is really good at TikTok and they have a bartender that has a following on Instagram, and so these pieces kind of go out to folks that really know what they're doing on platforms, because pretty much every bar has someone working there nowadays that has some social media presence.

Chris Schneider: 19:49

But at the same time, when they, when they divide that up, it loses potentially some of the brand voice, some of the consistency to it. And I am a big, I'm really big on what I call a cohesive concept that everything from your website to your online reputation management, to when they pull into your parking lot, to your front door, everything about that experience from when they first touch you online until they're leaving in their car from your parking lot has to feel like it's one cohesive experience, because if it doesn't, people get confused. So how can you make sure, especially if you have different people doing marketing, that you are maintaining that consistent brand voice online and not confusing people by seeming like you're coming from different directions and not speaking as one person.

Jason Littrell: 20:41

Okay, there's a lot to that, and what I would say first of all is that you should not be doing your own marketing. You should be empowering other people to do your marketing for you and your customers. This is called it's a concept called social proof, from a field of science called behavioral economics, but it's called social proof, and what other people say about you is more important than what you say about you, and so to get people to listen to you, they're going to need to trust you on some level. So they have to know, like and trust you to buy anything from you. But if they're going to listen to anything that you say whether it's an email, an Instagram message or whatever they have to have some sort of an understanding that they have a reason to give you their attention for however long that is. And so that is why reviews and ratings are so important is because that is the first indication of like. Do I trust these people? And they're literally co-opting somebody else's decision. They're co-opting somebody else's opinion to decide whether or not they're interested in the possibility of entertaining, of spending any of their time at your place. Well, like, they're not going to pay attention to you unless they've already, like established some sort of level of trust, and the very best version of that is a friend saying hey, meet me at this place. The second best version of it is like hey, you should check out this place. I had a great XYZ there. That's the second best. The third best is like I'm here, where should I go drink? And then that's when SEO kicks and all that stuff.

Jason Littrell: 22:03

So just to preface all of this, like the entire sales and marketing conversation should be encapsulated in a box or encapsulated into a concept that is like outside the door, before they've walked into your bar restaurant, it is a marketing conversation. Once they've walked in the door, it is a sales conversation. So everything that happens inside the door is sales and so like. That's why I kind of developed this fast friends framework on which guides people through the sales process. It's all commonly understood as steps of service, but it really is geared towards making people comfortable, building rapport extremely quickly, providing epic level of service that people will remember and then guiding them into leaving some sort of a social proof element, like as in a rating and review, and you're not always going to get that the first time, but statistically about three quarters of people will give you a review if you ask them to and if you make it very easy for them. So, anyway. So you know, like, getting people, like reviews are you know. Like you know, reviews are pretty much the the bet. Like you know you're talking about your 20, like 20% of people have to bring a new friend, a new business coming in is the lifeblood. If you, if you're down to 10%, you'll still survive, you'll. Just, your growth rate is just going to slow. If you're at 0%, then you were dying, you weren't dying, and so like and so like. If, like, if people don't have a positive impression.

Jason Littrell: 23:23

You know, we talked about the net promoter score before. The net promoter score is the kind of tried and true survey. It's a quick survey, it takes less than a minute to do, and and everybody who owns any kind of business should probably be doing some version of the net promoter score survey but just to run through it really quickly, it's a scale of one to 10. How likely, then? It's one question how likely would you be to recommend this place to a friend or a family member? That is the question, and it's kind of. It comes in different versions. Sometimes it's one to five.

Jason Littrell: 23:53

But breaking down the results of the net promoter score are nines and tens are your promoters. They're people that are rabid fans. They love you to pieces and they want to tell their friends about you. Ones to five or ones to sixes are that's service recovery. They don't like you, like it's not that like one means that they actively hate you, but that six means that, like that, you are not even important enough to talk about. You know, sevens and eights are are neutral and they can be nudged one way or the other, right. So sevens or eights are like are, like they can be nudged into, into very happy customers that are they're willing to wave their arms in the in the street, put up a post about you, leave a review. They can be nudged in that direction. But otherwise, if they're not nudged anywhere, they will probably fall into the one to six category. They're probably fade away into people that are, you know, potentially actively against you. So getting that survey could be done verbally.

Jason Littrell: 24:51

My preference is that it's done digitally because if that means that you're collecting some sort of information about your guests and it can be automated, you can automate the ever loving SHIT out of that which I really like, which means you can do it at scale, but the easiest, the easiest way to do it is to just ask. You're like hey, listen, would you ever come back here? You know you could do that, but again, like being being a nerd, my process would be something a little bit more sophisticated than that, and what I like to do and hear me out here, is I like to issue restaurants a new phone number that can be tracked with your CRM, right, and so every time the phone rings, you don't answer the phone and they automatically get a text message back. Right, so they get a text message back. Hey, sorry, mr Call, what can we do for you? 24, 7, 365, doesn't have hangovers, doesn't have, doesn't go to weddings, doesn't take personal time off, right? So 24, 7, 365, the phone rings, it doesn't, it doesn't even ring in the bar and and it automatically sends them a text back saying what can I help you with? And it's typically one of like three or four questions.

Jason Littrell: 25:58

When I was a marketing director, it was like the same five questions Like what do you have? That's gluten free? What do you? How do I get there? I forgot something there. And then like how do I book an event? And, like you know there's like one other question I forget what it was, but the vast majority of it was how do I book a reservation, right? Um, and so that is a buying question. That means that they are interested in buying and because they've called you, it is a very high level of intent, right. So they've looked at your Google maps. They're like, okay, cool, they have selected you and and giving you a, a chunk of their attention, and said I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to call these people and I'm going to try to book something or serve or complain or whatever else. It is Um, but in any case, that person has probably already had a meaningful interaction with your bar and um, and so it is reasonable to assume that, because they have called you, that they have had some sort of an experience, and so if they've had some sort of an experience with the bar, you can text them in 24 hours and be like hey, listen, you know we, you know this is the owner of the bar, or this is the bar manager, or this is um, this is a robot, and we wanted to know how you're, how your interaction with the bar was, cause we know that they call them.

Jason Littrell: 27:07

They. They did have some interaction. We texted them, they called us. That was an interaction. So maybe they got what they want, maybe they didn't. We want to know either way. So, hey, you know, can you just let us know, by replying one through five, how did it go? Would you come back, um, and that is a net promoter score survey, and so you can take that information, receive the value that they sent you and then automate that based on on that, on that level of of of experience.

Jason Littrell: 27:32

Now the tricky, nasty thing that you um, you don't usually talk about is if it's a four or five, or if it's a five, then you send them immediately a Google review link to the leave your Google Right. So every phone call that you get in, coming in, um, is going to get some sort of request for a review, and if it's a service recovery thing, then um, then you can set it up to automatically call them back. Like, hey, listen, I saw that you didn't have a good experience here. We want to fix it, we want to make it right, um, and you call them immediately and that's a service recovery mechanism. Um, otherwise, it's a positive experience. Like, hey, would you mind telling other people too, like would you mind leaving us a Google review? Um, and then you know it's.

Jason Littrell: 28:08

It's probably probably not a good idea to incentivize people, but people have incentivized people for leaving reviews. Um, and it is against the terms of service to incentivize people to leave a review, especially positive review, because it makes the results contrived. Um, but yeah, so that's kind of where my my nerd brain marketing thing comes in. Um, so we're automatically picking up every phone call, we're automatically texting everybody back and we're asking everybody who's ever interacted with the bar for a review. And then in the process, somewhere they've opted into marketing and so you can send them offers, you can send text messages and, of course, we make it very easy.

Jason Littrell: 28:42

Uh, or when I was doing this um, we made it very easy for um for people to opt out. So it's not creepy, um, it's not for every bar, but there's a way to do this Um, passive I call it ghost marketing. Um, where you're like doing passive, organic marketing based on inbound intent, like you're not like reaching out to people, like you're not cold calling people. They're already reaching out to you, they've already shown some level of interest and we are just simply trying to create, create some momentum from that. So what do you think about that?

Chris Schneider: 29:09

Well, and to your, to your point, somebody that's calling you has high intent, right they're. They want something from you. You don't call somebody for no reason, so you, you do establish that intent. Now, to be real honest with you, I had never even thought of setting up a system like that. Um, and some of that is that, you know, I live in a small town, I call my water company and Judy picks up the phone, cause she's the only person that works the front desk.

Chris Schneider: 29:34

Uh you know I mean it's. I live in a total. Yeah, it's, it's.

Jason Littrell: 29:39

It's a different world compared to New York city for sure you can set parameters around it so you can have the phone ring like before it happens, like that kind of stuff, um, but the really real crazy shit that's happened in the last like year is that you can connect that to GPT. For have it read your entire website, have it read every review that's ever written about you, and then that way it can answer any question that anybody possibly has about your business. And then, and then beginning sales conversation about like hey, listen, would you like to book a review? Um, or like would you like to book a seat? Would you like? Are you, were you looking?

Chris Schneider: 30:08

at the car.

Jason Littrell: 30:09

What were you looking at that we can help you with. Did you want to buy a gift certificate? And then you can have an endless conversation that goes back and forth forever until somebody like, buys or dies or opts out, whichever.

Chris Schneider: 30:21

Well, and the thing too about that is how often? And the answer is, of course, all the time, because labor. We have to maintain so tight on labor right, just to be able to make money in this business. You don't have extra people standing around that can just answer the phone. If you're a busy bar, your phone might be rigging five 10 times an hour during your rush time.

Chris Schneider: 30:48

The idea that bartender steps away from the bar during peak to answer the phone. You're in some trouble. You now have server tickets. You're behind you have guests that aren't getting the service they need. You're in some trouble.

Jason Littrell: 31:03

Yeah, it's like leveraging this technology is not necessarily about cost savings, as it is about providing better service. This is how people like to be communicated with. By by the way, people enjoy immediate responses. They far prefer text messages over calls. You're right, we were talking about the value per second of peak hours for a bartender to make drinks, and then how rare those hours are.

Jason Littrell: 31:32

If you're taking somebody off the floor to feel these conversations, then somebody is going to get pissed. It's either going to be a customer that you're sitting in front of or it's going to be a customer at the end of the line. This is a solve for both of those things. The technology exists. It's there. There's tons of services. I'm sure if anybody listening to this has probably spent six minutes looking through their Instagram feed, they're probably getting served ads for this stuff. My advice take it, because what is your time worth? What is the cost of you not being out there training your staff, improving the profitability of your peak hours? If you talk to Chris or me, then we can probably tell you, if we look at your P&L, exactly how much it'll cost you.

Chris Schneider: 32:15

Now, how hard is something like this to set up?

Jason Littrell: 32:19

The software that I used in the past is called High Level. You can either sign up for your own account or there are numerous other people that have built out their own proprietary automations and systems on top of it. My system was completely nasty. I spent years on it building out the conversation flows so that every plausible question could be answered, so that everything so I didn't feel like it was salesy, didn't feel like it was pushy, it was like the cadence was genuine and also building it offers that made sense for clients. I was a marketing director for a small vegan restaurant group in New York for a while. I had a lot of time to build this stuff out and conceptualize. I picked up the phone a lot, answered the calls like finding out what people were asking, and I built a whole system around that. But a lot of people serve this space. A lot of people have really interesting things, but if they can't explain it to you, like you're six years old, then they don't know what they're doing.

Chris Schneider: 33:21

In short. What you're really saying without saying. It is when people listen to this and they're like, hey, that's cool, they just need to call you.

Jason Littrell: 33:28

I would certainly delight in pointing them in the right direction.

Chris Schneider: 33:35

And, by the way, we'll make sure, when this gets posted, that down in the show notes will have all your information, plenty of ways for people to contact you. That way they can get ahold of you and talk through some of the stuff with you if they want, because this is the kind of stuff that my brain just goes well, you just answer the phone, man. But your solution is so much more elegant. It's so much better than just answer the phone, because if you're a bar that opens at four because you're just doing happy hour and late night, now you have a way that that person that calls it two in the afternoon gets all the answers they need.

Jason Littrell: 34:17

So there's like this push-pull with operators. Like for a long time I was a great craftsman, I knew how to make a drink, I knew how to make drinks at scale, I knew how to train people how to make drinks and I was a good bar consultant. As it came to, as it applied to making a creative cocktail menu and deploying a creative cocktail menu for a launch and for seasonal launches and stuff, then it came into the conversation about like okay, well, so that's the proactive approach. Now how do we merge that in with a reactive approach, with how people actually make decisions? Because I've worked at I was just thinking about this today actually like the first and last bars I've worked at are the only bars that are still in business. So the first bar I ever worked at was a place called Hoolies in Oklahoma. It's outside of San Diego, and they just celebrated their 25th anniversary.

Jason Littrell: 35:03

The last bar I worked at was Death Company and that was I don't, I can't remember. I'm not great with dates and years and stuff like that, but I want to say it was like I don't know the early teens that I left that bar. That's when I started doing bar consulting, event production and like kind of wackier stuff and so, like I was just like, okay, how can I be a craftsperson but also meet a demand and how can I enter the conversation that's already happening in my customer's mind? Because I'm tired of being extremely good at what I do to an empty room, you know, and I'm tired of taking money out of bars that I know are statistically going to fail, like as in likely 67% chance that this bar is gonna fail in the first year. And that happened again and again and it was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking.

Jason Littrell: 35:46

They used to say that one of the biggest reasons for bars going out of business was undercapitalization, but in my experience that's not the case.

Jason Littrell: 35:55

It's just either just poor management, just a very abstract view of what the bar is, what it does, who it serves. These are more in my mind, more pressing issues than undercapitalization, because typically, if you ask your friend's family and fools, as they say for money to open up a bar, then you have some sort of a horizon, like whether it's a three month horizon, which is not at all enough time, or a six month horizon for cashflow, or preferably more like a 12 month horizon for cashflow. Then that's how long it takes, that's how long you can operate without making any money, by the way, that's what I'm talking about with horizon but if you don't know what it is that you're making and who you're making it for, and creating a straight line between where you are now and where your customer wants to be, then that is the biggest threat to your business Is not knowing what it is that you do, who you do it for, and then that impacts every single decision and getting from where you are now to where you want to be.

Chris Schneider: 37:02

So anyways, and Reva, I will step up. I totally agree. No, no, no, you're good because I completely agree with you. I think undercapitalization is a huge issue. If you do things right and you're undercapitalized, you will fail. But if you don't do things right, it doesn't matter. You can have millions of dollars sitting there, it doesn't make you profitable, it just makes you go bankrupt slower.

Chris Schneider: 37:25

Yeah, right, but to me, one of the biggest issues when people get in the bar business and it's unfortunately because we have a lot of folks that get into this industry that don't have big hospitality backgrounds but one of the big issues I always see is people want to make a bar. That's what they want. And one of the things that sometimes people get mad at me about because I say this a lot is no one gives a shit what you like. No one freaking cares at all. Right, and so if it's about what you like, well, if what you like is the same as what the market likes, great. But if you're weird because we're all freaking weird and you like something that doesn't make sense to other people, no one gives a shit and you will fail because you're not meeting the market where they are. Mm-hmm.

Jason Littrell: 38:14

So crazy, so crazy, it seems. So it's like, seems simple, saying it all out, but, like, these are questions that that people don't really discuss in their pitch meetings. So they say, like, like, I worked at a fancy bar and people assumed that I knew what I was talking about. I didn't, I still kind of don't and and then. But it like there was a certain time when people were offering me money to open up a bar and Thankfully we never really came to terms Because I didn't know what I was doing and the expectation of me doing what. What they wanted me to do, which was to be the face, which is to be the, the, the creative and, basically, to pack the bar every night. That was my responsibility. Their responsibility was to bring money and to bring some level of expertise. But they, that model somehow still sees the light of day, because I see a lot of places that are like this drink is really epic.

Jason Littrell: 39:07

Now let's Try the same one in 10 minutes. No, let's see. Let's see if that turns out. Okay, let's try it again in a week. Let's see if that turns out Okay, okay, cool, like um. You know it's, it's just bizarre. It's a bizarre business. I don't get it. I don't get it.

Chris Schneider: 39:26

Well, and I think that's one that's. That's one of the things that you and I have talked about before. As you mentioned Sean Fender earlier, who's kind of our mentor and our coach. One of the things that you see, a lot of people not realize is that, because of how expansive this business is, because of how much is going on, there's no way that you can actually do it all. Right, you can't hit everything.

Chris Schneider: 39:50

And Knowing your weak points, knowing where to delegate like you mentioned earlier and knowing then like hey, I can find this guy that can help me with this piece, I can find this guy that can help me with this piece, right, as much as I've talked about marketing on the podcast, I'm sure every single person that's listening to me talk about marketing, if they needed to have someone help them with SEO and inbound Traffic, would call you, not me, because you're the better pick for that right Now. There are, I'm sure, things where I would be the better pick, probably if we get into numbers and bookkeeping and all I was like don't point your spreadsheet at me, oh.

Chris Schneider: 40:31

What I have, a spreadsheet for everything. But that's the point right. We all have strengths and weaknesses and to make a bar successful Especially when you get into high volume big cities, when and you have some expendable capital there to grow and Indy to make your bar bigger and better getting the right people to fill the right spots and to help you out is one of the best things you can do to make your business move forward.

Jason Littrell: 41:01

Yeah, and that's, and there's a lot of consultants in the business.

Chris Schneider: 41:06

It is, but most industries have a lot better Books, written materials out there, consultants out there, better Ted talks I mean I've never I've listened to Ted talks on everything from puppies to friggin space robots, and Not never have I heard one that deals with bars.

Jason Littrell: 41:28

Well, I think I mean I've got a theory on that. I think that that we have a. We have a difficult time isolating with the important part, that what the important problems are. And so, like you know, having been a bar manager, having been a bar owner, like I was Sacrificing the important for the urgent a lot, and that's kind of what led me to to Building out a decision matrix. It's called the Eisenhower decision matrix.

Jason Littrell: 41:52

This is how, literally how Dwight Eisenhower, or former president of the United States, made decisions and it was like into four categories, like is this not important, not urgent? And it basically went into, it went into the dumpster Is this important, not urgent? Then it goes into this list of things to do is it important and urgent? That it's like Okay, drop everything and this is what we deal with right now. And then it's in like the important, not urgent stuff was a hundred percent delegated. And so like, if you don't have like a systematic approach to like where you are now, where you want to be, and how you make decisions and how you deploy those decisions and distribute those decisions, then you were kind of lost. And this is what, and the manifestation of that, of that level of Understanding how the business works comes in the form of being exhausted at the end of the day, at the exhausted at the end of a very long day and not having felt like you've accomplished anything and so like.

Jason Littrell: 42:45

So I literally give a lot of clients. If they want it, I'll give you the link to it so people can make it for themselves. But I put a template together that has like a bunch of videos that says this is how you use this. But if you want to, you can copy in a copy the to a free template, trello template for your own business, and like you literally like Create a card, for this needs to happen. And now is it important and urgent, is it not important? Is it urgent? And then you can like assign people to do things, like you can assign your manager to do things. You can say you can put a deadline on it, you can put a little checklist on each card, and each card is it's it's called Kanban, and so the idea is that they move from left to right and to Eventually getting done. And that's when you look at a glance from the outside, looking in from the bird's eye view, of like what is actually? What are we doing here and then, and then you could be like, in the context of everything that's happening here, is it important that I take this meeting with a supplier? Probably not because you have office hours, because you're organized, but it's like you know how it is, like the a million things that pop up all the time. And this is only compound. You're only compounded when you have, when you're operating, multiple units at the same time.

Jason Littrell: 43:51

But even if you have one Simple system with one bar, with five hundred square feet, fifty four seats, fifty seats, whatever it is, it's important to have a decision matrix of like what do you? Of? How do you make decisions, how do you prioritize things, and and that way you're not sacrificing the important things that move your business forward. And you know, ultimately you have to build profitability into every action that you take, and and that way you're not. If you're, if you're kind of Rationalizing and and doing things that just don't matter, then you're not necessarily doing your business any favors, and neither Are your managers, because they don't have a clear direction on where they should be. You know what's direction they should be rolling, but you know, having an integrated con con bond system, that's like okay, check your board.

Jason Littrell: 44:36

This is what I want you to do today, and then before that, with hiring, it's like this is your job description. These are the things that I want you to do. These are where the boat. This is what the bartenders do, this is what the managers do. This is what I do. This is what the GM does. I'm gonna dish things off to you. If you don't have a difficult time understanding what I'm asking for, then I then ask me and I'll tell you a little bit more about it. But otherwise I just expect it to get done. I'm not gonna micro manage how it happens, and a lot of times people have a very difficult time letting it go. That, that control over the minutiae. But that is the flavor, that is the sazone, that is the, that is the. The beautiful part of bars is is is people working together the way they like to do things, as long as it gets accomplished in a reasonably articulated way, and I think that's kind of where the magic comes from, like letting people do what they do within reasonable parameters.

Chris Schneider: 45:21

Well it is, and one of the things I always notice is that there are a lot of bar owners out there that say, well, no one will do this as well as I will, and of course they won't right well, they're right.

Chris Schneider: 45:31

I own the bar. It's my money, it's my investment. I have to get out there. I'm worried about this all day long. It's my entire life. You're an employee. Of course you won't care as much as me. Of course you're not gonna put in the same time as me as the owner. But if that employee can do it 70, 75, 80 percent as well as you can, there's no reason not to delegate it. Right? You can't expect perfection out of your employees, but you still have to delegate things to them.

Jason Littrell: 46:03

Yeah, and I mean that's another thing is like because we handle the production, the distribution, the marketing, the sales of the product that we make, it typically comes up to very few people to handle every element of those businesses. Like, you know, if you're making an organizational chart of your business, like if you look at a Fortune 500 company, there's like there's like the CEO, ceo, vp's, managers and then employees on the bottom, like all those boxes still have to be full. But the thing is with a small bar, restaurant is there's usually that one person's name is usually on a lot of those boxes because the work still has to get done. And you know, that's why I like this decision matrix is because you can decide what is actually relevant and important for the goal of the business. And the book that I'm referencing is called the Goal by a la who.

Jason Littrell: 46:55

Allow you and rat. It was recommended by Sean and it's like I was just like. This is dynamite, this makes so much sense and it's about the theory of constraints. So it's like if your, if your goal is to be profitable, eg to serve as many people in a profitable way, to make them happy and want to make them want to come back, then you can find out the steps that go along the way. And if there is a blockage in one of those steps, then that becomes the priority because downstream it will, it'll alleviate a burden and so, like, if you're like, okay, well, we need to make money to stay in business, then profitability has to be built into every decision that you make.

Jason Littrell: 47:33

And that's not like and this is a I mean, I don't want to get too wild with this, but you know, we have this scarcity mentality and service and hospitality where we're just like we have to do everything. We have to do it right now. We cannot leave until it's done. But what we didn't, what we rarely stopped to think about, is is what we're doing important and doesn't?

Jason Littrell: 47:53

and doesn't matter for for a thing, for if we solve this one problem, does it solve other problems too. So I don't know, there's a lot of heady theoretical stuff going on in my head right now. But you know, if you don't have this clarity in what you're, what the purpose of your place is, then you're going to have muddled indecision and and, and you're going to be making poor decisions all the way downstream. Every other like if it's not in service of this one goal or one mission of the bar restaurant, then it probably doesn't matter, it's probably not as important as you think it is right now and every other decision, if you don't have that clarity, it's probably not going to be as good.

Chris Schneider: 48:36

Absolutely, and you know what we've been recording now for a while. So we got to get this wrapped up a little bit, but this has been a really good conversation and that's a really good note to kind of wrap us up on. But before we do, do you have anything else you want to say, anything that you want to put out there for the listeners?

Jason Littrell: 48:57

No, just everything that I've ever learned I've been putting onto barteamscom and kind of loading in there to try to help the community and I also have a Facebook group called who's my rep. So if you've ever looked for a rep that you're they you're like, oh, who's my supplier rep, and it's probably mostly in the US, a little bit of UK, but. But yeah, if you're looking for a wine, spirits or beer rep, then join our Facebook group, facebookcom slash group slash who's my rep. It's not a clever title, but barteams and who's my rep are my big shout outs right now. Other than that, I work for a big company and I can't really talk about a whole lot.

Chris Schneider: 49:35

So we will put the link for bar teams in the show description. We'll put the link for who's my rep in the show description. If you are in the bar business nation Facebook group that I have. I'm gonna put a bunch of stuff about barteams in there because I'm working with Jason on making sure that we're just loading that up with content and doing some really cool panel conversations and different things, moving forward to make sure that there's more resources available to bar owners Because, like we said a minute ago, it's there's not as many resources for our industry as others and there needs to be.

Jason Littrell: 50:09

Yeah, I'm also in bar business nation the group, so feel free to at me if you have any specific questions. I'm happy to respond to you there. I'm on more. I'm on Facebook more than I care to admit.

Chris Schneider: 50:20

I think we all are. But we don't have to get into that. I don't want to talk about it, I don't either. But but seriously, guys, check out bar teamscom, check out who's my rep, check out bar business nation. All that will be in the show notes. As always, we'll also include a link for a strategy session with me, if you want to schedule one. We'll include a link to get a hold of Jason as well, so that you have all that contact information and with that Jason. Do you have anything else you want to say before we?

Jason Littrell: 50:52

thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. Say goodbye to everyone. Am I the first guest?

Chris Schneider: 50:55

Thank you for being here.

Jason Littrell: 50:57

Amir.

Chris Schneider: 50:57

You are the first guest ever. I have done 52 episodes. This is episode 53. And you will be the person that gives them a break from listening to me talk.

Jason Littrell: 51:09

Kaboom, amazing. Thank you for having me. What an honor. Thank you.

Chris Schneider: 51:14

Hey, well, thank you for being here. This has been fantastic, and we will have to do more of this in the future, because obviously I think you and I could do this for about three, four hours and still have shit to talk about, right, well, we?

Jason Littrell: 51:27

may have something that we can announce pretty soon, if we seem to be good at talking to each other. So let's figure that out.

Chris Schneider: 51:35

Yeah Well, and let's just say, for those of you listening, because we're not going to give it away, but check out Bar Teams, because you will see it on Bar Teams. But on that note, I'm going to let you all go for the week. Have a great week and we'll talk again later.