Fine-Tuning Your Bar's Performance with Strategic Metrics Analysis

Ever wondered how the pros turn a good bar into a great one? Unlock the secret sauce as we dissect Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will revolutionize your bar's performance. In our latest podcast episode, I walk you through identifying and leveraging the four critical types of KPIs—quality, delivery, productivity, and inventory. Each category acts as a compass, guiding you to make informed decisions that enhance every corner of your operation. From front-of-house finesse to back-of-house brilliance, we've got your blueprint to bar business excellence.

Dive headfirst into the power of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and understand why it's more than just a number—it's the heartbeat of your customer service. With an in-depth look at what distinguishes promoters from passives and detractors, I'll show you how even a single customer's feedback can have a ripple effect on your reputation. Then, get tactical with back-of-house strategies that transform kitchen chaos into culinary consistency. You'll learn how tracking quality comps can be your radar for guest satisfaction, allowing you to set and hit incremental targets that make every dish a signature one.

Finally, get a grip on your goods with strategies that streamline your inventory management, keeping your cash flow fluid and your waste to a minimum. Discover why days in inventory can be your financial health barometer and how optimizing this KPI could mean the difference between treading water and riding the wave of profitability. Plus, I'll share how you can strike the perfect balance between productivity and quality to keep your guests returning for more. So, saddle up to the bar and join us for a masterclass in metrics that matter, and steer your business to soaring success.

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

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

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

Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.

Chris Schneider: 0:19

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode, we're going to be talking all about choosing the right KPIs to push your business forward. So we've talked a lot about bookkeeping, about different metrics, over the time that this podcast has existed, and one thing that's really hard to do is to decide what KPIs you need to measure and, to an extent, the metrics KPIs, which, for those of you that don't know, kpis is a key product indicator it's another word essentially for a metric. The metrics that you need to track will vary some from business to business, and the reason behind that is everyone's business is going to be a little bit different and, depending upon what data you have to use to measure your KPIs and what you are worried about, where the problems in your business exist, different KPIs can make sense. But in general and what we're going to get to here as we go through, is a framework to decide which KPIs to track and then some suggestions for KPIs that I like to use with my consulting and coaching clients that really help drive their businesses forward. So one of the things that is great about KPIs and why they really matter and why it's important to pick a narrow but meaningful set of KPIs is that it helps you avoid information overload.

Chris Schneider: 1:51

One of the things that a lot of bar owners face is that they're getting pulled in a thousand different directions, and a few weeks ago we talked about time management some strategies there to help avoid that. But even if we're trying to avoid getting pulled in a thousand different directions, even if we're doing really good time management, there is an issue that exists where you're going to get pulled because a server's off or because a bartender doesn't show up or your manager's sick. You're going to have other things that distract you regardless of how well you manage your time, have other things that distract you regardless of how well you manage your time, and so by measuring a small set of KPIs that have meaning throughout your business, what you're doing is you're decreasing your workload, you're focusing on what matters and then making what you measure really count, and to do that, like I said, we need a limited set of KPIs. Now, when we're going through KPIs, there are essentially four categories of KPIs that I think work for every business and, for those of you familiar with lean management, which we've talked about some as well. This is going to seem a little bit familiar because I've adopted the KPIs from lean, and in lean there's about seven different from lean and in lean there's about seven different categories of KPIs. You measure, but for most bars, narrowing that down to four works really, really well.

Chris Schneider: 3:15

And so the categories of KPIs that we want to measure are quality, delivery, productivity and inventory. Quality is how well we're doing, how well are we serving our guests? What is the quality of the product we're putting out? Delivery is how long does it take us to make something and deliver it to the customer? So when you think about hospitality, when you think about bars, we're one of the few industries where we are producing. We're buying raw ingredients, we're producing a product, whether that's cooking it in the kitchen or assembling a cocktail behind the bar, and then we're giving it to our customers. So we need to measure that delivery of the product.

Chris Schneider: 3:51

Productivity is obviously important, because productivity is going to be a measure of how efficiently we are delivering a product to our guests. The more efficient we can be, the more guests we can serve without increasing costs. Now it's important that productivity and quality are looked at hand in hand, because what we don't want to do is create a situation where we're so productive that our guest experience and our quality suffer. And finally, inventory is important, because how much inventory we have on hand is going to dictate a lot about our cash flow and what's going on in our business. So we're going to go through these in order and kind of dive into each one and talk about what metrics work to determine your quality, delivery, inventory and productivity, and what you can do to easily be able to measure these and help drive your business forward.

Chris Schneider: 4:48

So we'll start with quality, and quality, like I said, is essentially how your guests view your establishment. Do they like it? Do they not like it? Are they complaining? Do they enjoy your food? Do they enjoy your drinks? Do they enjoy your service? And with all of these metrics, one thing I do like to do is split them into a back of house metric and a front of house metric, and the reason behind that is there will be some overlap in those metrics and how they get judged, but we separate them to help us. When we have a problem, when we see that a metric isn't performing the way we want it to, it helps us to be able to narrow down where that problem is coming from and to really focus on that issue and positive ways to solve it. So for all of these things, starting with quality, we're going to have a front of house and a back of house metric.

Chris Schneider: 5:41

Now, front of house quality metric that I always like to go to is an NPS score, a net promoter score. This does encompass through your back of house as well. This is one where it's gauging both. But a lot of times when you think about the service to guests received, especially in bars, when not every guest is eating food, that net promoter score, which is essentially a score of the quality that your guests see in the product you're delivering, is going to be more reflective of the front of house generally than the back of house. And so when we talk about PS scores, these came around in the early 90s.

Chris Schneider: 6:19

I can't remember off the top of my head the whole story behind them. Can't remember off the top of my head the whole story behind them, but essentially it's one question you can ask that will tell you everything about how your guests view your experience. And that question is the same whether you're a bar or a tech company or a daycare. It doesn't matter what business you're in, the net promoter score question is always the same and that question is based on your experience today how likely are you to recommend our bar to your family and friends? It's very simple, it's very straightforward. But you're looking for people to give you a rating as an answer to that question, between one, which is not at all likely to recommend you, or zero, even worse, and 10, which is absolutely we're going to recommend you, or zero, even worse, and 10, which is absolutely we're going to recommend you to our family and friends. Now, interestingly, with that, when you go to calculate an MPS score, we're taking that zero to 10, and we're not just making an average, because an average score here does not necessarily properly show what's going on.

Chris Schneider: 7:26

Because the thing is where you would think five would be a neutral statistic on a zero to 10 scale. It actually isn't. So zero to six are always considered to be detractors. These are not people that are going to promote your business. These are people that are going to actively tell their friends If they ask hey, should I go to Jim's bar? I know you went there the other day. What do you think of it? If they're a zero to six, they're probably going to say, well, it's not very good or it's all right, but you know, it's kind of just your run of the mill bar. So that zero to six is actually a detractor. You is actually a detractor.

Chris Schneider: 8:03

Your sevens and eights, so what most people would consider really good if you think about it. Seven, 70%, that's a C, that meant average kind of in this case. But really seven and eights, they're not promoting your business. They're not gonna go out and tell people about what a good job you do. They're just neutral. They're not gonna say anything to anyone. If someone asks, the answer is going to be oh, it's all right, it's okay, I go there sometimes. They're not going to talk about how wonderful your bar is or what you're doing. It's the nines and tens that are your promoters and they're going to talk about oh, my God, my experience was so great, you've got to go to Jim's bar. Everything there is great.

Chris Schneider: 8:44

So it's a simple question where we're looking for a 1 to 10 score, a rating between 1 and 10, but 0 to 6, there are detractors. That's a negative score for us. 7 or 8 is neutral. It doesn't impact our score at all, and 9s and 10s are promoters.

Chris Schneider: 9:02

So when you go to calculate an NPS score, rather than just taking an average and saying, oh yeah, we got a hundred of these in and the average was 8.7. That's not how we do it. We actually take the percentage. You take the percentage of total responses for detractors and you subtract that from the percentage of total responses for promoter. So for an example, let's say you had 100 surveys come in. 40 of them were negative, 20 of them were a 7 or 8, they were neutral and 40 of them were positive. You subtract 40 from 40, you get zero. So your net promoter score is zero and this score can go anywhere from negative 100 to 100.

Chris Schneider: 9:50

If you had a hundred come in and a hundred of them were promoters, the score is a hundred. If you had a hundred come in and a hundred of them were detractors, your score is negative 100. But you're looking for that number because we've taken the neutral out, because the neutral really doesn't matter. They're not going to detract from our business, they're not going to tell people that they don't like our bar, but they're also not promoting it, so they don't matter. And we're just looking at how many promoters do we have compared to how many detractors do we have, and because of that, it gets a little weird when you start thinking about what is a good store score. A good score in this case is 30. So if you have 100 surveys go out, 60 of them are positive, 10 of them are neutral and 30 of them are detractors. 60 minus 30 is 30. So that's actually a good score for an MPS score.

Chris Schneider: 10:49

Now, obviously, the higher up you are, the better you are. 50 is really freaking good, really freaking good. And so if you think about how do you get to 50, that would be say you have 75 promoters, 25 neutral and 25 detractors. 75 minus 25, that's going to give you the 50. And that's a really, really good score. Most bars if you ran an NPS score survey for a few weeks, gather the data are probably not hitting 50. Now the world-class, the best in market bars, are going to be 70 plus. So if you can get 30, you're doing better than most people. If you can get 50, you're kicking ass. If you're getting 70, you legitimately have a world-class organization. So think about that with NPS Corp.

Chris Schneider: 11:36

But this is something that I really believe, firmly, firmly believe. Every bar should be measuring. You should find some way to ask your guests this question and you should ask it every chance you get to gather this data, because this individual score we're going to talk about eight total KPIs, but this one in particular is probably the most important KPI you can measure for your business. The other thing that I would ask you don't have to ask this question to generate an NPS score or, I'm sorry, a net promoter score, but it's a good question to ask because it helps you identify where there are areas of improvement in your business, which is to ask why. So, based on your experience today, how likely are you to recommend our bar to your friends and family on a scale of one to 10? And then, once they give you that answer, whatever that number is, ask why? Because if they are a promoter, it'll help you understand where you're absolutely succeeding and where you're producing great results, and if they are a detractor, it will help you understand where your service, where your food, where your drinks are not living up to what your guests expect.

Chris Schneider: 12:50

Now we also need a quality score for back of house, and that's, honestly, a little bit harder because, a your back of house folks are not normally interacting with your guests and, b not everyone that has an issue with your food quality is going to complain. So how can we come up with a metric then that, knowing that not everyone's going to complain, knowing that your kitchen staff isn't interacting with your guests, there's not that sort of feedback that you can get? How can we do it? And what I like to go to is quality comps on food. Yes, not everyone that has a bad experience or doesn't like your food is going to complain about it, but the amount of food you comp is absolutely an indicator of the quality of food coming out of your kitchen, because I think everyone can see the worse the food is, the more mistakes you make, the more you're going to end up comping.

Chris Schneider: 13:48

Now, one of the things that is required to be able to even begin to measure this metric is that within your POS system, you have different types of comps set up, and so, for all my clients, when it comes to financial management and when we're setting up charts of accounts and things like that setting up POS systems I like to see four different types of comps in a POS system. A marketing comp so you have a person that's a first-time guest. You give them a coupon next time they come back in for a free appetizer. That's a marketing comp. When they come back in, you're comping it off for marketing purposes. Employee discounts Most everyone is going to give their employees a discount of some kind, especially on food, and so those should be separate from all the other comps and discounts.

Chris Schneider: 14:36

You have one thing that's essential in my mind to split apart, because it does not actually represent anything about the way the business is running itself is owner's comps. So, as an owner, we all do this. I know I used to do this when I owned a bar. Eat food and you don't pay for it. It needs to go into the POS system, it needs to be comped and it needs to be booked to you as the owner. Because, like when we talked about prime cost a month or two ago, one of the things I pointed out is prime cost is not always a great indicator, because comps are contra revenue accounts. They're decreasing your revenue and if the owner is eating a bunch of food or comping a bunch of drinks, then you don't have the data, and I'm sorry. And if you don't have the data separated, there is no way that you know what's comps, because something was wrong. What's comps? Just because the owner ate it.

Chris Schneider: 15:45

And so the fourth category of comps that's important in this situation is quality comps. So, again, and just to go back over this, all POS systems, when you do your accounting, all of that, you should break your comps up into multiple categories marketing, quality, employee discounts and owner's comps. And what we're looking at for this metric is quality. So quality comps on food, and, like I said, the one issue with using comps as an indicator of quality is that not everyone that has a bad food, not everyone that doesn't enjoy their food or has a problem with their food, is going to complain and get comped. But those comps, again, are representative of your overall food and as that comp value goes up and down as a percentage of your food sales, you will be able to gauge whether you're comping more or less, which is an analog for the quality that's coming out of your kitchen. Now, obviously, you can also look at your NPS surveys, because when you ask that, why question if they say, well, the food sucked, and you see a bunch of complaints about food, that's going to let you know that your back of house quality isn't where it needs to be, but as a simple metric to separate back of house from front of house and to give us a analog of how well the guests are perceiving the quality of the food. Comps works really well. And I should also mention that in a perfect world those quality comps are going to be less than one half of 1% of your total food sales.

Chris Schneider: 17:22

What I always tell people is that my targets for comps are half a percent for marketing, half a percent for quality, half a percent for employee discounts and all that. It's a percent and a half. Now, industry average is a little higher than that. You're getting more in the two to 3% range. But if you can keep it at a percent and a half, you're doing really well. And if you can keep it at a percent and a half, you're doing really well. And if you can keep those quality comps under a half a percent, that's going to put you towards a top level operator and what we would expect to see out of a bar that's doing very, very well.

Chris Schneider: 17:56

But of course, with all these metrics, I should also say this very clearly I'm giving you targets that I go for. But let's say your quality comps were 5%. I would never encourage you to say, okay, we're at 5%, our goal is half a percent. Long-term goal, yes, but in the short term we're at 5%. Let's get to four and a half. Let's get to four and a half this month and next month let's get to four and the month after that, because we'll have some momentum going, we'll be bringing that number down. Let's get to three and the month after that let's get to two, and then let's get to one, and then let's worry about getting to half a percent. But you don't want to set goals that are unachievable. You want to give yourself a timeline where you can actually get this done and produce great results for your guests and your bottom line.

Chris Schneider: 18:52

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. So that covers the quality section of our KPIs.

Chris Schneider: 19:47

Now let's look at delivery. So for delivery, again, we're one of the few businesses where we buy raw product, we manufacture those raw ingredients into a product and then we serve it to the guests. We're doing essentially the manufacturing and the sales all in one building. So, for delivery, what we're measuring is that production time. How long does it take to go from raw ingredients to the product that's going to the guests? And the best analog for that is ticket times. So, both behind the bar and in the kitchen, what we're going to use for our delivery metric is average ticket times. They show how quickly things should be made and obviously, again, we can have these step goals to get us more and more efficient, and both behind the bar and in the kitchen. One way to measure these ticket times is to use a KMS, a kitchen management system. Some people call them bump systems. You'll see them there. The TV with the buttons under it you push it moves a ticket off the screen once everything is completed.

Chris Schneider: 20:50

Now for a lot of bars that doesn't work well, because then the servers don't know whose drink is whose. So you're using printed tickets and that means that for the front of house metric, for that average bar ticket time, it's not necessarily easy to measure because unless you're using a kitchen management system behind your bar, which basically no one does, you're going to have to figure out a way to do it manually. And the way to do it manually and I know this sounds terrible, but you take some time, you do it, it's not the end of the world is to use a stopwatch Hit start when you see a ticket print. As soon as those drinks are up, hit stop, measure that time. It's manual, it's annoying, but it generates the data that you need. If you aren't doing it that way and you do want to really go all in on tracking metrics and specifically looking at the delivery metrics and ticket times in great detail, using a KMS behind your bar is not a terrible idea. Obviously there's expense associated there and you have to decide that it's a good thing Both behind the bar and in the kitchen.

Chris Schneider: 22:02

When we're talking ticket times, one thing to understand, or to make sure that you pay attention to, is that not everything has the same preparation length. A well, vodka and soda is infinitely quicker to make than a mojito. By the same idea, in the kitchen, if you're making a salad, it's usually a lot quicker than frying up chicken wings, especially if you're using jumbo wings. They just take 15 minutes to cook, and so, regardless of what your goal is in the kitchen, I would normally say 12 minutes is a goal ticket time. Behind the bar, I like to say five minutes is a goal ticket time, even lower if you can get there. But if you have an item that takes 15 minutes to cook, your goal of 12 minutes, you're not going to hit it on that item. So, just like anything else, it's important to consider your actual product mix when you're looking at your ticket times. If you're selling a shit ton of wings and wings are 50% of what you served in a day and you go oh my God, my ticket time was 14 minutes. Well, yeah, wings take 15 minutes. So you were under what the wings take on average. Is it a good number or not? It's hard to say, without looking at the product mix for that day, and so this is just something that you should be aware of, but it's also just really important to understand.

Chris Schneider: 23:28

Anytime you're talking metrics, anytime you're talking about things that are not the way they should be from a financial or metric or KPI standpoint. Sometimes things are not where you think they should be. You're not hitting goals because they're wrong and you're doing things wrong and you're not delivering your product as quickly as you could, but sometimes it's a function of your product mix. So always, when you go to root cause a reason why you're not hitting your goals, make sure that you are spending the time to look at all the potential variables, because it is always plausible and sometimes even likely, depending on what KPI we're looking like and what your business is like that you're missing a metric because your goal is not reasonable for what you're doing, maybe on a day, maybe in a week, maybe in a month, and it's very also possible for a metric to not particularly be valid this week because you had a different product mix, and then, two weeks from now, that metric is, or that goal is, absolutely valid. Things change over time, so just always consider that there are different ways. That are different reasons. I should say that you may not be hitting specific goals.

Chris Schneider: 24:53

But again, for delivery, we're looking at average bar ticket time, average food ticket time five minutes as a goal behind the bar, 12 minutes as a goal from the kitchen. And the other thing with both of those is that's measuring the time from when the ticket comes in to when that item is up and ready for your server to run. If your server doesn't run it, it's not going to show up in your ticket time. So there is a need sometimes to just stand in a place and watch what people do, watch how it's working, because if your ticket time is 12 minutes but you know food doesn't get in the table in 12 minutes, it's probably because your servers aren't doing it. Sitting in the kitchen and just watching how servers come in and out of the kitchen can be a very valuable thing to do.

Chris Schneider: 25:43

Now for our next metric category KPIs regarding inventory. So inventory is really important to manage A on the food side of things, everything we have is inventory perishable, it's all going to spoil, it's all going to go bad. On the bar side of things, not so much. But when we talked about inventory a few weeks ago. One thing that I know I hit on multiple times was that inventory is literally like cash sitting on the shelves, and you can hurt yourself with free cash flow and free cash in your business if you have too much product sitting on the shelves that isn't getting used regularly.

Chris Schneider: 26:23

So, for inventory, what I like to measure as a KPI is days in inventory, and there's a somewhat complex calculation to get there. That's a whole nother story, but essentially it's looking at inventory turnover and then relating it to days in a month to say, okay, you have 14 days worth of inventory on hand. You have 21 days worth of inventory on hand. You have 21 days worth of inventory on hand. And I should also mention, as we're talking about this, when you calculate out days in inventory and there's plenty of resources online that show you exactly how to calculate this, or feel free to get ahold of me, I can walk you through everything but when you calculate days in inventory, it's important to understand that you end up with 21 days in inventory or 20 days in inventory. It's important to understand that you end up with 21 days in inventory or 20 days in inventory or 10 days in inventory. Whatever that number is. That does not mean that every item that you have in your inventory has a 10-day supply or a 20-day supply. It just means that, overall, the value of your inventory compared to the value of your purchases suggest that that inventory should last 21 days or that inventory should last 14 days.

Chris Schneider: 27:26

Ideally, the goal for your inventory turnover should be to get it as low as possible. Just-in-time inventory having the inventory you need right when you need it is one of the most effective ways to free up your cash flow is one of the most effective ways to free up your cash flow. But for a lot of bars, a good goal, especially initially when we start working on things like days in inventory is 21 days for front of house. Which front of house days in inventory? We're looking at booze, beer, wine, liquor, and 14 days back of house where we're looking at food. The reason why that back of house one you want to drive down. I mean, if you can, seven days is great, front of house, if you can get down to 14 or 10 days, that's better. But back of house is particularly important because, like I said, everything is perishable. So days in inventory when that gets larger implies that you have much more ability to waste money due to spoilage. So we want to keep those numbers down as low as we can and, as I mentioned, money sitting on the shelf is not helpful. Spoilage is definitely not helpful because that's just expense in your cost of goods sold that is not yielding any revenue whatsoever. So days in inventory is really a crucial metric all around for the financial management of your bar.

Chris Schneider: 28:51

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Chris Schneider: 29:30

Now for productivity. We need to figure out how productive our folks and frankly, I like to look at sales per labor hour, but I like to break that up. Frankly. I like to look at sales per labor hour, but I like to break that up. So for front of house, gross sales per front of house labor hour, that metric is going to be wildly different from bar to bar. But once you understand what the average is for your bar then you can optimize that for your bar. Because a lot of things when we think about average sales per labor hour, your type of concept is going to determine how many people you have working. The volume that you have will determine your sales. There's all these different things and it's hard to say. You know, like with delivery, when I say, okay, your bar ticket time should be five minutes, that's a really good average run-of-the-mill goal that works for most people. But with productivity it's much harder. But sales per front-of-house labor hour is a great front-of-house metric and once you track that for weeks and months, patterns will emerge. You'll understand where you are, what your average is and then you can work on lowering that down.

Chris Schneider: 30:43

And then, for back of house, look at food sales per back of house labor. Now I will tell you, having looked at books for multiple bars and looked at industry averages and owning bars myself, that food sales per back of house labor hour For a lot of folks. When you calculate it it's fricking scary Because you have one guy in the kitchen all the time and you realize you're only selling about 60, 70 bucks per labor hour in your back of house and so your labor is way high to produce that food. And so that metric again is going to be different business to business. A lot of that food sales per labor hour it's going to depend on how much food is as part of your business, how large your business is, all sorts of metrics or different inputs to that metric. But you want to measure it and you want to try to increase it and, like I said at the top of the episode, you got to be very careful as you start to push productivity that your quality is not suffering, as you start to push delivery, that your quality is not suffering.

Chris Schneider: 31:53

And there's a reason why I talk about them in this, what I will sometimes refer to with my clients as QDIP list quality, delivery, inventory, productivity. And the reason it's in that order is because, let's be honest, quality is the most important. Delivering your product is the second most important. After delivery, inventory is important and then, after inventory, productivity. Productivity is the bottom of the list because, in theory, if you have the quality right and you have the delivery right, the productivity comes with it. The inventory doesn't really affect these. It's not as tied in with the other ones. But productivity is the last metric. I worry about optimizing, because often if you optimize your quality and you optimize your delivery, the productivity comes along with it.

Chris Schneider: 32:37

Now for all these metrics. We've just talked about what metrics to measure, or really an example of eight metrics you could measure. But we have this framework of quality, delivery, inventory and productivity that we're putting metrics in and then we're dividing each of those categories by front of house and back of house. It's going to be up to you and your business and your business's needs to pick the right metrics and it's going to be different sometimes. So just be aware of that. If you decide to measure these exact eight metrics for your business, I can tell you from experience you will get the data you need to start to problem solve things.

Chris Schneider: 33:15

But that's the point here. This is just a way to get data. This is a way to organize your data. This is a way to understand your data. This is a way to understand your business. You also have to do something with that data and if you go back, there are a few podcast episodes, I believe from last year, that we talk about problem solving, root cause analysis, things like that. That is where those comes in. This is to identify the issue and then you have to take that issue, run with it, figure out what's going on, experiment, problem solve, do all of those things so that you can move that KPI, move that metric in the right direction and make your business better, make your employees experience better, make your customers experience better. And that's why measuring KPIs in a logical way, measuring the same KPIs all the time and picking a simple set of KPIs that will help you understand your business is one of the easiest ways to drive your business forward. If you want to talk about not working in your business, but working on your bar. Working on your bar is understanding KPIs and understanding how to improve them in a way that makes everyone's every stakeholder, every person that interacts with your bar, ever makes their experience better and puts more profit on the bottom line. And as a final note and this is part of the wonderful power of doing this.

Chris Schneider: 34:47

We've talked before about visual management, about actually making these public and on a board for your employees to see. That's important. At least your managers need to see KPIs like this on a regular basis, regardless of which ones you pick. If you track the eight we just laid out, if you track the four categories, any KPI you're tracking, it needs to be in front of people. Because one truth of business that is never going away if you measure something, it gets managed, and if you manage something, it gets done. So the sheer act of showing people and managing things like ticket times, sales per labor hour, days in inventory, nps scores or comps, is that those metrics, just by the nature of you applying some time to them, some effort to understanding them, those metrics should get better. So that about wraps us up for today.

Chris Schneider: 35:43

If you enjoyed the insights in today's episode, please make sure to like, subscribe and leave a review. If you want to gain more insights and learn more, interact with other bar owners. Go on to facebook. Join our facebook group, bar business nation. We're having some great conversations there. You can also schedule a free coaching strategy session with me to explore how we can collaborate and optimize your success. I'm really passionate in this space. So if you want to talk about how to develop metrics, how to measure your metrics I always enjoy having those conversations. You can find links in the show notes for Bar Business Nation and to schedule a strategy session. And with that guys I'm going to let you go. I hope you all have a great day and we will talk again later.

Announcer: 36:26

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