Serving Up Knowledge with Greg Buda: The Power of Educated Bar Teams

Embark on an insightful journey with Greg Buda, as he shares the cocktail of skills that took him from the lab bench to the buzzing bar scene. Greg distills the essence of shifting from consulting to ownership, spilling secrets on the art of delegation and the necessity of a hands-on approach in cultivating a vibrant, educated team. His passion for transforming complex ideas into palatable knowledge serves as a beacon for anyone navigating the hospitality industry.

This episode serves up a blend of strategy and storytelling, as we examine the underestimated power of service training and the magnetic pull of a meticulously curated digital presence. Our conversation ventures beyond the bar counter, exploring the nuances of creating a service experience that transcends cultural boundaries, underlining the profound impact of investing in staff knowledge. Tune in and discover how to leave your patrons thirsty for more than just another round.

Get in Touch with Greg
https://BarBisouBisou.com
Instagram: @buda.photography

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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
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Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 2: 0:16

Chris Schneider, and this week we have another fantastic guest, Greg Buda. Greg is a bit of a renaissance man in our business. He's a scientist, a photographer. He is a bar industry educator, consultant, cocktail master and bar owner. He was the director of education for the Dead Rabbit and currently he is the partner and beverage director for Bizu Bizu in Montreal. But I'm sure, Greg, that does not do your background justice, so why don't you fill in some gaps there for us?

Speaker 3: 0:45

Thanks, chris, and thanks for having me on. Real pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here. Yeah, I do a lot of weird stuff. Fell in love with the hospitality industry many years ago. I'm almost at 20 years in the industry now. As you mentioned, I come from a background in science and, like a lot of grad students, worked in bars to earn a little bit of extra money on the side. But unlike most grad students, I really got kidnapped by the industry and it never really let me go. So here we are many, many years later and can't seem to get away.

Speaker 2: 1:22

Yeah, it's funny how this kind of traps you. I had the unfortunate thing my parents had a restaurant when I was a kid. I was doomed from the time I was like eight years old to be stuck in this industry. So I completely get the getting trapped part yeah not a lot you can do there?

Speaker 2: 1:36

No, there's not, but with that varied experience. So you've obviously you've done consulting for a while, you've done a lot of training, a lot of things on industry and promoting education in the industry, and then you went into buying a bar. So what was that transition like for you? What was it like to go from kind of teaching and working in the industry to actually being an owner in the industry?

Speaker 3: 2:02

Well, look, I think for a lot of people, that's the next, the next logical progression. Right, as you know, you work your way through the industry, you pay your dues, serving tables and mixing drinks and then, eventually, you're a bar owner. And, being perfectly honest, I never thought that was the path that I would go. I, in fact, had decided pretty pretty firmly a long time ago that I never wanted to be a bar owner, because I saw what it did to the people around me. I saw that you become married to this business and live and die by its success, and I like interacting with people.

Speaker 3: 2:42

I want to travel the world. I'm interested in a lot of different things. I just couldn't see that path for myself. Thankfully, after being in the industry for a while, I was given the perfect opportunity to step into ownership without giving up everything else in my life. My two business partners, evan Demers and Robert Weeks, um, they live and work in Montreal. So, uh, thankfully I'm I'm in a position where I can help to run the bar program and, uh, train the staff and promote the bar internationally, but I'm not required to be there every day, um, which is good, because my French is terrible.

Speaker 2: 3:25

That does not help when you have a bar in a place that speaks French. But with that said so, and you kind of have gotten the ultimate bar owner scenario right, because you get to, you get to be involved, you get to do the training, you get to do some of the fun stuff, but you also get to travel and promote your bar around the world and do some really cool things there. What, just out of curiosity, when you made that jump, what was the thing that surprised you the most once you actually got into ownership?

Speaker 3: 3:54

Well, look, my business partner, Kevin, will make fun of me for saying this because he warned me. He said look, you've opened bars all over the world as a consultant and you know the process, but you will find out very quickly that it is not the same. And I discounted that. I said no, it's fine, I'm experienced in doing this. I've opened venues in multiple countries. I know what the process is, I know what to expect. But it really changes things when it's your own. When it's your own, when it's your own money on the line, when it's your own team that you're, you're caring for their uh, their wellbeing and their success and you know you feel the pain along with them when it's slow and you feel the rush when the bar is busy and you're kind of emotionally right there alongside of it all, and problems are just a little bit more personal and successes are also just a little bit more personal when it's yours.

Speaker 2: 4:53

Oh for sure, and I was an owner before getting into the consulting and coaching side of things. But one thing I've noticed from my experience is that, being the outside guy that's getting paid to give the opinions, it's a lot easier to see the problems Right, because, to your point, you don't have all this emotion, you don't have all this money on the line, you're not really invested as much on the consulting end versus the ownership and then some of the things and I know I'm sure you talk to your clients about this, like I do you have to delegate. You can't do everything yourself. Well, we can say that till we're blue in the face, but then, as soon as you hit that ownership role, you want to do it all yourself.

Speaker 3: 5:38

To a certain extent.

Speaker 3: 5:39

Yeah, I think I think for me personally, I enjoy the delegation process when it's appropriate. I think my real passion in this industry is not mixing cocktails and it's not owning a bar, it's teaching. I enjoy, even from my grad student days, taking complicated ideas and making them simple and approachable for people, and I think you can apply that to a science classroom just as easily as you can apply it to a team in hospitality. So for me, I think that one of the joys of owning a bar is to bring my team on a journey with us and teach them these skills so that I can then hand them off to them and watch them succeed in doing them, without my necessarily needing to be there All right.

Speaker 2: 6:28

So simple sentences you just said, but a huge topic there that a lot of people spend a long time grasping right. How do we break down things for our staff to train them, to educate them, to take complex processes, complex standards, or even if we're dealing with individual types of liquor, complex histories, complex regions, complex information? So, and the other thing I should mention and this is nothing against any of us in the industry, but we don't tend to be the most academic people, right, if you're teaching science students, they're academic, they're there, they're engaged in the learning. Hospitality folks. We're not always the most engaged in learning, so how do you bridge that gap to get them involved and how do you break things down?

Speaker 3: 7:16

Well, yeah, that's a very common problem in the industry as a whole. I think there's a tremendous amount of information out there. There's a lot of people that have good experience that you can learn from. There is a growing library of references, both published and online, that give you quick access. But, kind of like other industries, that can become overwhelming and you don't know where to start start. And I think not to oversimplify what I do, but I think part of consulting and running a beverage program both comes down to being organized and to presenting the right information in the right order. It's not about presenting new and groundbreaking information. It's just about taking simple ideas and introducing them in the right sequence so that people can get the most out of it and apply that knowledge to their hospitality skillset. So, as an example of that, when I'm working on hospitality training programs, one of the biggest kind of problems that I see in our industry is that you have if you're lucky, if you have a training program at all. It usually consists of a new employee coming in and being handed this tome of information that's about 150 pages thick, and in my experience, that's a terrible way to absorb information. You go home and read a book. You're nervous, and then you come in and you're expected to have internalized all that and that's just us, not's given throughout an extended period of time in the right order what I mean by that.

Speaker 3: 9:09

I'll use Dead Rabbit as an example, because I was in charge of the training program there for the team. At Dead Rabbit, we specialized in craft cocktails and Irish whiskey and Irish products and Irish whiskey and Irish products. So when a new bartender comes on, the first things that they really need to know about are how to make cocktails, how to make our cocktails in the way that we make them. So bar technique and our menu is job number one, followed very closely by a working knowledge of Irish whiskey and Guinness.

Speaker 3: 9:44

They don't need to know about gin in their first week. They don't need to know about gin in their first week. They don't need to know about agave spirits they will eventually but it doesn't make sense to introduce that to them right off the bat when they have so many other things that they have to know. So for every bar program that I work with, including my own at Bizu Bizu, the whole idea is to break down what you need first to execute service for the guests. So you start them off at what covers 70% of your guest interactions and then you get into the fine details of other categories much later on.

Speaker 2: 10:17

So, when we're thinking about because I'm sure there are people that are going to listen to this and they're going to say, okay, I have all this information and I'm doing exactly what Greg said not to do. I'm just handing people a book, giving them a test, training them for a week and expecting them to know everything, which, of course, doesn't work and you talk about breaking it down into smaller chunks, how small of a chunk are we talking? Because I have a feeling this chunk size is smaller than most people would imagine it is.

Speaker 3: 10:45

Yeah, depending on the category. So for things like bartending technique, we usually break that down into a couple of levels. We don't need you to be fancy with two jiggers before you know how to use one, if that makes sense. I'm using that as an analogy, but you can break things down into pretty small, bite-sized pieces. But I think the other element that a lot of bars miss is it's not enough to just give the information. You need to test on it and you need to reinforce it.

Speaker 3: 11:15

So every training program that actually works, in my opinion, has some element of testing, whether that's a written test or an in-person test or some sort of a live service test. You're giving your team an incentive to actually absorb that information. And the second part of it is they can't just read it once and be expected to remember it. It has to be something that comes back with some regularity. So that can be reinforced, both by retouching the subjects in training form or, alternatively, by engaging more senses than them just reading a page. I like to have written material, I like to have oral material and I like to have tasting material as well, because I feel like, especially when you're talking about cocktails or categories of spirits, the more senses you can engage, the more likely it is that that information will be retained.

Speaker 2: 12:13

Oh for sure, and I think that's something. When it comes to tasting, I know there are a lot of folks out there in the industry that for some reason think that it's too expensive to give their employees taste of everything, which has never made sense to me. Because how can you describe something if you haven't tried it? Because you can learn on paper all day long about differences between types of scotch or types of wine or types of Irish whiskeys, but unless you taste it it's all theoretical and none of it's actually practical.

Speaker 3: 12:45

Yeah, I'll take that one step further and say I think that if you taste stuff and figure out what you like, you are 10 times as likely to sell a guest on something that you really genuinely like yourself. That's a very easy sell. They can read your body language and they can hear the excitement in your voice while you tell them about it. So it's it makes perfect sense that you use the likes and dislikes of your team as sales tools during service.

Speaker 2: 13:16

And how do you so about that? So we, you get in place the actual knowledge base. How do you translate that into service? So, obviously, if someone likes something, that's a pretty easy translation. But how can you get that knowledge out during the course of your normal service?

Speaker 3: 13:33

Well, look, I think one thing that I try to do with training material and I do think it's important to go one step beyond this, because having a background on these categories of spirits and cocktail technique and understanding the why behind things is very important but in a way, I like to reverse engineer the guest experience. You don't need to know the history of tequila to explain it to a guest ask that you should know the answers to and that you and I, when we were behind the bar, have experienced on the receiving end. What are guests asking? What are they interested in? What do they have trouble wrapping their heads around? Those should be the priority pieces of information that you're giving about these categories, because you're now arming your team with the information they need to interact with their guests.

Speaker 3: 14:29

So it's not about knowing everything. It's not about knowing the detailed chemistry of distillation. It's about being able to explain kind of continuing on the agave train here what is the difference between tequila and mezcal? Does this tequila have a worm in it? Why not? Why is that bad? They all have roots in history and roots in science and roots in a much deeper understanding of the category. But let's start with that. Let's start with your ability to interact with your guests at their level, and then we can grow that information from there.

Speaker 2: 15:07

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.

Speaker 2: 16:00

Now another question, and there may not be a good answer to this, but I'm going to ask it anyway because I'm curious. You train around the world, right? So you've dealt with probably more markets than the average bartender or bar owner will ever see, and obviously you have very different service standards, culture standards in a lot of these places. And when you're talking about working backwards from what the guest expects. If that's different in every market, is there a way to be able to easily identify what the guest expects when people are looking at working back their training?

Speaker 3: 16:36

That is a good question. I think in my experience the guest expectation of a service experience does change dramatically. But I've also noticed just a general increase over the last 15 or 20 years in guest curiosity. They just want to know a little bit more. They want to know what it is that they're consuming, where it comes from, who makes it. There's just kind of this growing desire to be more informed about what we're doing as consumers and I think that translates across all the markets. But there are definitely differences market to market and part of me doing my job as a consultant is to watch and ask a lot of questions to kind of get my finger on the pulse of what's going on in that that local area, because it is different than New York. Almost every place in the world is different than New York city.

Speaker 2: 17:26

Yeah, that's, I'm not going to argue that, and that's. That's something that you, something that I think comes up a lot, because it's been interesting, especially as I've had more conversations with other people in the podcast, which a lot of them are over in the Northeast New York, that sort of area. How different some of the experiences are, not even internationally, but between New York and where I am in the middle of cornfields in Indiana, the service expectations are not the same, the customers are not the same, even internationally, but between New York and where I am in the middle of cornfields in Indiana. Right, it's, it's. The service expectations are not the same, the customers are not the same. The fundamentals, though, from a from an ownership, academic perspective, are always the same. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 18:09

And it's just how you apply those. That's that seems to tweak over time. You're showing people a good time. That's the you know, the universal factor of hospitality, right, and I think there are a number of different ways to do that, but I would be hard-pressed to accept an argument against arming your team with knowledge.

Speaker 2: 18:33

I think knowing about what it is you're serving can never be a bad thing. No, it definitely can't, and I've talked about this before and I think you would agree. Stories sell, and so it's one thing to say, hey, you should try this tequila, it's really great. It's another thing to say, hey, I know the guy that owns this place. I went down there once. We made tequila with them. It's fantastic. You got to try it A hundred percent. Um, now, now, with that, I know one of the other objections that people have to training. Uh, really comes down to money, right, and we kind of touched on that earlier. But a lot of folks it's not necessarily time, it's, it's, it's some of its lack of knowing how to do the training, but a lot of people don't want to invest the money in their people.

Speaker 3: 19:15

Yeah, that's a really touchy one for me because I disagree with it so so, so strongly.

Speaker 2: 19:22

But let's talk about why you disagree with that.

Speaker 3: 19:24

So strongly a common sentiment amongst owners that, especially in competitive markets or markets that are maybe growing, where they're not as established and uh as, when they're not as established as a community the way that big cities like new york or london might be and what you get is the sentiment that why would I give my team all of this stuff, all of this knowledge, all of this training, when they're just going to leave and go to another job and take that information with them? If you create a good environment for these people to work and you're providing constant training and education, who would they leave you to go work for? That's a great question. So if you actually are investing in your team the way a lot of other places are not, then you're creating a draw for staff, not a reason to exit, and I know that. You know in a lot of places money needs to be the number one consideration for an employee, but I think in hospitality there are a lot of other ways you can get paid. And when I'm thinking of you know, one of the things that I teach about is finding that balance in your business between the money and the people. On the one side, you have a business and if you don't pay attention to the numbers and if you don't look at the factors that contribute to the financial success of the bar or the restaurant, then your business will fail and all of your good intentions are worthless.

Speaker 3: 21:16

Looking at the money side, we focus on three big things quality, efficiency and consistency. Getting butts in seats, getting them happy, getting them gone, giving them a good product while they're in your four walls, and doing that as efficiently and consistently as possible. But the other side of it is all about people. This is hospitality. You can't take people out of that equation. And, yes, they're the guests that walk through the door and that experience ultimately is for them. But your team are the delivery agents of that experience and they are the reason that people come in. It's not for the lights and the music, Right, Some people might argue. It's for the food and the drinks. I think that's part of it. But if you have a terrible service team, it doesn't matter how good the food is.

Speaker 2: 22:14

People are not going to enjoy being there. Well, and I mean, a lot of people in the industry probably don't want to hear me say this, but most bars are interchangeable. Right, there are your outlier bars that are way different, but I've always been more of the neighborhood dive bar guy and most neighborhood dive bars in the US. I can take one in rural Indiana and one in California and one in New York and there's subtle changes, but they're not that different. What makes them special is the people delivering the service.

Speaker 3: 22:41

Yes.

Speaker 2: 22:42

Right, because a Bud Light is the same everywhere.

Speaker 3: 22:46

Yep, I couldn't agree more. And I think that when you're looking at the people side of the bar business, money is the easy one. It's a transactional affair between an employee who gives you their time and you as the employer who gives them money for their time or gives them the situation where they can earn tips for their time and service. But that contractual arrangement allows your team to just walk out the door, clock out and then forget completely about the industry. And for some people that's fine. But I think, at least in the world that I operate in, the other two elements, which would be environment and opportunity, are the ones that really keep people around. You create a work environment where people are looking forward to coming into work because they literally have a good time being there for their shift. And yeah, there are slow nights and, yes, there are difficult guests, but overall it's a fun business to work in and if you create a fun environment, people are going to want to come back for that.

Speaker 3: 23:47

And then the opportunity thing like there's a lot of cool things you can do in this business and especially owning a bar in Montreal, which is a very it's an up and coming city. It's a wonderful city, but the hospitality industry there exists in a bit of a bubble. Kind of missions with this bar is to try to get, uh, my team and the greater city to kind of think outside of the city lines and participate in the global industry. I want to, I want to bring my staff all over the world, I want them to to experience these places themselves and get cool ideas and bring them back to make our business better. Um, and I hope they, I hope they see the value in that, even though it might not be a big paycheck, it's still a life experience that you can't really substitute.

Speaker 2: 24:42

Well, I think that gets to something. I had a conversation on the last podcast with Sean Finter and we were kind of around the same thing. But where it kind of comes down to is not all employee benefits are monetary Right, everybody here is employee benefits. They go to health insurance, they go to some of these things, and there are great bars that can't afford them, but there are a lot of great bars that can't. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw employee benefits to the side. You still need a reason for your employees to come into work.

Speaker 3: 25:12

Yeah, and I think one of the lessons I took from Dead Rabbit and, to their credit, jack and Sean, the managing partners of the bar, were good at this especially toward the end, as the business started to grow and we expanded to Blacktail and other locations in the US the mentality was like all these people have something unique that they can offer.

Speaker 3: 25:37

So, rather than forcing them into a position, let's allow their interests to benefit the company and benefit them at the same time. And I'll use myself as an example, because at the beginning of my tenure at Dead Rabbit, I was just kind of getting started with my photography company and still learning how it all worked, both the business side and the camera side and they gave me the opportunity to take all the photos for the bar and I improved dramatically in the time that I was there, but I wasn't great at the beginning, but they still gave me that opportunity to develop my company. They promoted me via the Dead Rabbit social network and it did a lot of good for me. I really appreciate that investment in something that wasn't strictly within the job description of a bartender or a training manager there. Right.

Speaker 2: 26:32

Yeah, and I think that's really to. If you can give employees opportunities like that, right, because it just it makes the environment better. And to your earlier point, when people are happy to come to work, they do a much better job, right, they're going to be better employees. Um, now let's let's one quick question on photography, because I know everybody likes to take pictures of their food. Everybody likes to take pictures of their food, everybody likes to take pictures of their drinks. If there was one thing you told someone that owned a bar about what not to do when they're taking pictures of things, what would that be?

Speaker 3: 27:09

Oh, my goodness, I'm going to have to think for just a second here. I think there's a diversity of experience with social media and photography and videography. I think cell phones these days, the cameras on them are incredible and they give you a tremendous tool that didn't exist years ago. I know it can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If you have a beautiful Instagram page, if you really curate what goes up imagery wise on your, on your online presence, it can be a tremendous benefit to your business. But not everybody is equipped to do that. So I guess my my answer to that would be you know, if you can't do it well yourself, self outsource it, because it is important.

Speaker 2: 27:56

No, and it, and it really is. And I think that if I go on Bizu Bizu's website and I look at the photography, I'm going, damn, this stuff's good, right, everything is well staged, it's there and it looks good. And so many other websites I go to and I look and I'm like, okay, that's a beer on a bar, that's all right, but there is, because I cannot quantify it at all. But there is definitely something there that splits the oh my God, that looks good from the pictures out there.

Speaker 3: 28:26

I don't know Definitely, and you mentioned you interviewed Sean Finter recently. I I'll I'll take one of his lessons for this and that you know you can look at all of the points of contact between a guest and your business and our inclination is to think they all start at the front door, when in fact a lot of it is the way they interact with your business online ahead of deciding to come.

Speaker 2: 29:02

So if you make sure that your website is put together and inviting and your social media account is consistent and in line with your vision and your concept, then that's a great place to start. No-transcript any city. I don't know where I am or what's going on. It's the front desk of the hotel and or Google usually both, cause I want to check the front desk against Google, you know because it's just I definitely look for.

Speaker 3: 29:37

Google ratings, uh, if I don't know what I'm doing, but that gets in. My opinion, that gets trumped by recommendations from people that I, that I know and respect. So, as much as I can, I'll fish around for, for recommendations from industry people. Um, and then I'll completely disregard the Google review, cause I know someone's missing something. Well, that's true, right? Uh, I'll completely disregard the Google review because I know someone's missing something.

Speaker 2: 29:57

Well, that's true, right. I feel like all the review sites, for those of us, especially from the ownership end, it's a very much a love hate, right. They do some great things for us, they annoy the crap out of us and it's just kind of something we have to live with.

Speaker 3: 30:13

It's just kind of something we have to live with To a certain extent, I think being honest with ourselves about the fact that for most people, when you have a good experience, your first inclination is not to write a review, but when you have a bad experience, you need to tell the world about it. So there's a kind of a built-in bias to these reviews against you from the start. But, that being said, there are a lot of tools that both you and I have learned about how to promote the you know the positive review side to balance that out, but I'm not an expert in that.

Speaker 2: 30:47

I just look for it when.

Speaker 3: 30:49

I can Right.

Speaker 2: 30:52

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 e-book and audio book 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. So something else to ask you real quick, because I know there are people that are listening to this and they're going hey, greg's a cool guy. I want to talk to him, I want to get some of his insights and advice. How can people get a hold of you? Where can folks find you?

Speaker 3: 31:47

Well, I'd say the simplest way right now would be you know, go to Bard Bizou Bizou's website, bardbizoubizoucom, and all my information is on there. I'm happy, bard bizu bizu's website, our bizu bizucom, and all my information is on there. Um, I'm happy to you know to share my email. I also have a uh uh an Instagram page for my photography company, uh Buddha dot photography. It's my Instagram handle, so easy way to reach out.

Speaker 2: 32:09

Cool.

Speaker 3: 32:10

We will.

Speaker 2: 32:23

We will make sure to link all that in the show notes. That way people can bother you if they feel like it. I'm happy to hear from anybody. Well, and I and I think you know it's your experience when we, especially when it comes to training, is really unique, because so many of us, training is a component of what folks do. But I mean, there can't be many bars in the world, honestly, that have a director of training or director of education, and so that's a whole different body of knowledge than almost anybody around has. And going back to our earlier in the conversation where we were talking about chunking down training and all those things that it takes to actually get people to learn something versus just exposing it to them and then they forget is so different than where most folks are.

Speaker 3: 33:06

I agree and I think to your point. There's a big difference, first of all, between knowing something and being able to teach it. Those are two completely separate skill sets, and I also think in our industry there's a big. It's not about knowing everything. It's about knowing how to organize information that's out there and how to find it if you don't have it, being an encyclopedia on everything that a that a staff member could possibly ask. It's about how do you, how do you structure their growth within the company and how do you, how do you organize your resources so that they can find and extend their learning on their own? Um, so that you're a, you're a facilitator as much as anything else, and I think that's for me, that's very important, and most of the work that that I do in the education sphere is in the background, where nobody can see. It's organizing material, it's putting systems in place that you'll never consciously be aware of. You just receive the product of that system.

Speaker 2: 34:12

And as far as putting those systems together, I mean, obviously, if you're listening to this and you need help putting them together, give Craig a contact. But is there any like one individual trick to put those systems together that stands out from the rest?

Speaker 3: 34:26

Being organized, be organized. For almost everything in the business. Spreadsheets go a big way. Spreadsheets go a big way. They get you very far from everything, from financials and scheduling to keeping track of your sales and analyzing what it is that your guests are buying, to setting up a training program and organizing the information on that. Spreadsheets need to become your best friend.

Speaker 2: 34:52

Absolutely, because I will say right now, without a doubt, back when I was in college. Absolutely Because I will say right now, without a doubt, back when I was in college I'm like, why am I using Excel? I want to pour people beers. And then I got out of college and I went oh shit, I need to learn. Excel Spreadsheets can do everything if you figure it out. And yeah, they really can. It's amazing.

Speaker 3: 35:32

But, with that said, it's about time for us to wrap up. Do you have anything else of knowledge and systems in this industry that you can go down? But sometimes people in our positions kind of lose sight of the point of it all, which is that this should be a fun business revolving around people and people having a good time, and that has nothing to do with the type of bar you have. It has nothing to do with the type of bar you have. It has nothing to do with alcohol. None of that is a requirement to showing a guest a good experience, and I think remembering that all of these things lead to that final outcome is, for me, the most important.

Speaker 2: 36:11

That is a very good note to end on, because that is something people need to focus on more. The guest is the end goal of everything, and taking care of them is the end goal of everything. Um, so with that, guys, we'll go ahead and wrap up for this week. I will put all of greg's contacts that we talked about down in the show notes so you can get a hold of him. Um, obviously, if you're looking for help doing training, tips on photography, whatever, give him a shout. He is is a great guy that I have known for a while now and is exceedingly helpful and a wonderful steward of knowledge in our industry. So that will all be down there and with that I will let y'all go. We'll talk again next week.

Speaker 1: 36:53

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