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Looking to elevate your cocktail game, streamline your bar operations, or simply unlock the secrets of the perfect pour? You've come to the right place!
At Überbartools™, we're passionate about all things bar-related, and we're dedicated to sharing our knowledge and insights with you.
Innovate Or Perish... The Do or Die of a Bar
The old adage “a rolling stone gathers no moss” applies today to any bar and restaurant business.
The advice suggests: continuous movement or innovation keeps businesses nimble and responsive! Failure conversely; a perishable outcome!
Rolling stones require energy, lose momentum and one quickly finds oneself standing on the Titanic end of inaction, waiting for the orchestra to play your competitors new song!
Far too many bars find a niche, work it, and yet fail to tweak, refine and on occasion pivot due to management's false feeling of comfort and safety!
Competition, rapid change and instant learning translates desire into needs, a process of forward motion called “Kaizen”.
To canny business people, Innovation translates opportunity into profit (the new black) for liquid/hospitality entrepreneurs!
Today’s consumers have short attention spans, are easily confused and become unmoved!
New, intriguing, fresh become the new mind grabs oiling attention; winning action, attracting $!
Innovation or Perish!
We’re not advocating for a moment that it’s only Innovation that’s the key to business success, it’s more about the back end process of developing at the margins, new ideas, tinkering with what’s successful now and how that will look with a fresh twist!
Helping customers translate their unsatisfied desires into new wants, allows us to engage and connect very differently with people.
Translated desires turn into new curated drinking experiences, ultimately keeping folks talking, happy; returning to your point of origin!
Warning: Innovation by and of itself is NOT a cure-all as innovation requires stewardship, focus and planning to ensure action, success and profitability!
Innovation is the story of forward momentum, anything less, is turning a business into a perishable. Innovate or Perish!
Today’s Innovator becomes tomorrows Perishable... better get moving!
Speak easy move fast.. Speed Behind the Bar
There’s been much debate amongst bartenders concerning the pros and cons of speed behind the bar.
Speak to any bartender working a club, Vegas Strip, high volume bar and they’ll quickly tell you speed‘s king!
If you’re working just for tips, as many do in the US, speedy drinks equals fast tips!
With many bartenders regarding themselves as guns... delays in making a drink is costly so, it’s all guns blazing or go hungry!
Like most traditions behind a bar, they didn’t happen overnight... they evolved over time.
On that basis, it’s possible that Prohibition era American Speak Easy bars are the likely modern starting point of the need for speed behind the bar!
The rationale: Speak Easy owners/bartenders never knew when they could be raided by authorities… seems logical then, if you wanted to sell plenty of drinks, make money, that a heighted sense of urgency was required... speed was critical!
During Prohibition drink quality and craftsmanship were not deemed particularly important, so speed was the catalyst to drinking quick and serving fast!
Whilst at Uber we don’t agree that fast drinks will necessarily be good in terms of quality, flavour and balance, we realize there’s plenty of room to cater for all styles and sorts of bartending/customer needs.
Customers waiting to be served is money potentially left on the table; drinks poorly executed represent money leaving a venue as a guest potentially swaps to a cheaper drink category or leaves disappointed altogether!
Speed behind the bar has consequences... it comes down to juggling between speed, care and quality… pick any 2!
Worm of Mouth
The Rule of Thumb - The Power of 3
Our lives are consumed by the number 3!
We win, loose, judge, consider, select, discard, all based on this number!
Some examples:
3 is also crucial to a bar business as it’s the key to growing, winning and operating profitably!
When one considers the impact of the power of 3, the thought changes to “drinks philosophy”! Don’t worry this is not a conversation about the pros and cons of Pre or Post prohibition style drinks , it’s an understanding based on building a model inclusive of supporting engineering process and metrics.
The Bar Rule of Thumb…
There’s a direct relationship between guests spend, individual drinks sold and contribution margin towards a venues costs.
A great guide to understanding in easy terms the impact… consider overhead and expenses in terms of 3 drinks sold to one guest.
Remember a drink purchased by one customer, and then repeated, may not always mean a bar is making a profit.
Each Rule of Thumb has its own drill down with arising impact:
A One drink Philosophy
The focus is on SPEED! Quality, consistency, possibly service may take second or third place as it’s all about VOLUME. Being brilliant at getting it out quick is key as guest churn is high! This business may be characterised by consequences such as rising wastage, lack of care and possibly high staff turnover! If this game is not won through unbelievable costs controls, process and execution, it’s easy to just tread water! Let’s face it whose in business just to pay wages!
A Two drink Philosophy
The focus changes from slinging it out to looking at ways to drive profitable revenue opportunity, by encouraging the guest(s) to stay longer/spend more. Quality, consistency, guest experience becomes something to focus on. Less money can be spent on driving the numbers, more emphasis on customer retention. As spend per guest rises, the contribution margin required to cover remaining venue costs gets closer and closer to break-even.
A Three drink Philosophy
The focus here is detail: heightened guest experience, service levels, quality, perception of value, consistency. Greater investment can be made on the bells and whistles encouraging guest retention, larger spend! Supporting processes and activities will be built around engineering this business outcome, with rising profits to show for the effort.
Defining what your business is or aspires to be; measure by the Bar Rule of Thumb, it’ll change the way your business runs!
To your success!
The Parody of Serving vs Skill
It’s ironic that some bars place greater emphasis on expensive baubles to serve wine and beer in versus providing quality bar tools for bartenders to make cocktails with.
Maybe this is the reason: pouring beer or wine into a glass requires a little skill... however if a bar wants to underpin a high asking price, presenting beer or wine in expensive serve ware adds value; creating some magic in the process!
Conversely bar tools provided to a bartender tends to be cheap, inaccurate, poorly made… making the bartender’s skill even more critical to crafting a successful cocktail.
Bars tend to invest in bartenders for their knowledge, skill and salesmanship… these attributes become the public hero in a cocktails crafting whereas the hidden knight are the tools used to guarantee the cocktail’s outcome?
When a bars goals is to make, serve and sell more than one high margin cocktail to each guest... it makes business sense to invest in the right tools to help the bartender get the job done; keeping the guest happy, thirsty and spending!
What do you think?
Provenance, Read the Fine Print!
Provenance is the event horizon authenticating a product’s journey from start to finish.
History, heritage, pedigree; serve as the assurance to guarantee consumers favourable experiences.
With consumers increasingly becoming more curious about health impacts of food and drink, will more attention flow towards greater product transparency...?
The WHERE (it’s from) will become less important than the WHAT (it’s made of!)
Grab any soft drink can, beer bottle and most packaged food, flip it around to discover a long list of chemical ingredients. Everything is there to be seen from how much sugar, fat, preservatives etc. etc. is used.
The broader thought: informed consumers make better decisions!
If you’ve got an allergy, a health issue.... diabetes, heart disease, weight or cholesterol issues: read a product’s “discovery label” to decide whether that product may have harmful impacts!
Taking this thought one step further: will activist consumers make demands on regulators to enforce stringent labelling transparency on more product categories?In the not too distant future, could pressure be forced on the Wine industry to declare contents and chemical composition of Wine? What would the spill-over effects be on the Spirit industry?
Under these circumstances can the most pure Spirit brands still advertise as being the most pure, the most natural if a chemical analysis is forced onto its outer packaging.
Could new Prohibitionists (the anti-liquor lobby) force greater alcohol restrictions and higher taxes in the pursuit of their self-righteousness?
Here’s a thought: governments (in a democracy) require Legislation to restrict or prohibit things, however it’s the public service at the behest of Government who can proscribe regulations (declaring something to be or not to be) bypassing the legislative process and public scrutiny!
When the day comes for the Wine and Spirits industry to become label transparent, marketing fundamentals relied upon for hundreds of years will also change from amazing storytelling, mystique, provenance and pedigree to that of plain old cardboard facts?
Yuck!
Is Loyalty Dead?
Marketing has always taught us that business success is sustained by loyal customers, generating long term profitability!
Does this concept now significantly change when emotional relationships can be terminated by something as heartless as a text… does this devalue the very meaning of loyalty. Is it Dead?
Regrettably for business owners and managers who still think that “this, begets that and therefore one shall be fruitful and forever multiply” will be in for a rather rude shock!
When the fundamentals of human relationships have changed, then by default, the effect immediately impacts the hospitality and service industries; the people who try to capture, package and amplify broader societal trends!
Think about it, consumer attention spans are plummeting, competition for eyes, throats, backsides are at all-time highs… good gets lost in a maze of distractions; mixed signals turn customer facing interactions into forgettable “transactional” pallor!
Does this mean that an experience lives and dies on its merits, just in that moment! It’s now or maybe never again that an upset, disappointed, underwhelmed customer , judges your business and walks away silently!
How then does the "merit of the moment” impact a guests experience of value (or the perception of it), service levels, staff friendliness, overall attentiveness; determining whether the guest stays for the next drink, possibly a meal?
More importantly, how other than anecdotally do we measure these sometimes unseen/unheard customer pivot points?
There is no one answer, however the smart money suggests a combination of evolving strategies, dependant on the hour, day, week , season, event and occasion!
A likely merger of operational imperatives, continuous and at times repetitive staff training, seamless POS/CRM/smart technology, exemplary staff/consumer interactions, accurate tools to replicate, scale, measure and execute become the must dos to be successful on a moment by moment basis; of course flair, ingenuity and a point of difference are still important engagement tools too.
When you do not have your customer‘s loyalty other than in the moment this then becomes a powerful wake-up call, the catalyst to always be on top of your game: never relaxing, not taking anything for granted ever again!
Get ready now to excel, excite and explore daily! Your business will thank you!
Loyalty now lives in the moment!
Coffee, Tea or Botox?
Have you worked out the connection yet?
The answer is Nestlé... the Swiss-based Global Behemoth.
So then where or what’s the relevance of this Company to the lessons we in hospitality must learn?
Nestlé as a group invests in Innovation, R&D, Premiumisation at an industrial level.. they’re more like Google in owning the good stuff we need to live our lives! Swiss sensibility and deference will never allow for such blatant self-aggrandisement, however why we think this firm is one which holds a key making them the Über of Über... they invest massively in products associated with RITUAL!
Take away Wall Street financials and shareholder info, this Company is totally invested in the most important products tied to ritual, a possible exception, alcohol!
From baby food, children’s beverages, water, coffee, tea, wellness etc. there are multiple rituals attached... quaint customs, social mores and Nestlé is there by our side... and we say that in the most positive way!
We have a lifelong involvement with Nestlé and don’t even know it... and yes, man’s best friend is a happy customer too!
Back to the question then. Why is RITUAL so important to the bigger picture and how can we learn and benefit?Ritual equals connection, emotion, engagement and an experience which combines to create a bond so sticky it lasts. Of course, over many products and categories this effect multiplies! So, what’s the consequence of all of this? A powerful enabling driver of long term profits, sustainability, creating more investment in innovation, employment, community engagement,overall shareholder/stakeholder wealth creation and satisfaction galore!
Whilst “Provenance” or historic romance is oft used in the Liquor industry.. nothing beats the customer’s connection to ritual. I doubt very much that Nestlé reduces it’s customer facing commercial propositions to “Cost Per Shot” conversations rather than a more noble value proposition involving the total return (life time value) that ritual generates!
Ritual provides permission to collect and engage. Name, rank, email address; all given happily, effortlessly, by grateful customers!
Longer term after the dust settles, in the broader disintermediation wars of product and distribution supply lines, guess who’ll be in the position to do it all to your door... and they’ll have a pretty complete understanding of all your wants and most of your desires too!
As either front or back of house facing hospitality businesses, whether we’re enablers or providers there is a value to investing beyond the brief moment... and this is possible when the centre of our universe is our respective customers/guests, by working backwards from that point one can engineer a business loop, that creates fun, occasion, destination and ritual and the end game, you’ll be in business a long time!