Run a tighter bar.
Straight playbooks for independent operators, pour cost, labor, cash, menu pricing, and the weekly numbers, from people who have worked the bar. No filler, no theory, just what moves the money.
How to Raise Menu Prices Without Losing Customers
Your costs went up, your margin's gone with them, and you know you need to raise prices. You're just scared to. You picture the regulars noticing, grumbling, walking. They won't, if you do it right. Raising ...
Read →How to Calculate Labor Cost Percentage for Bars and Restaurants and What to Do When It Runs High
Labor is your second-biggest check after product, and labor percentage is the number that tells you whether it's under control. Most operators either don't know theirs to the point, or they run it in a way t...
Read →Bar and Restaurant Prime Cost Formula: The One Number That Tells You Everything About Your Operation
You watch your pour cost. You watch your labor. Fine. But those two numbers move against each other, and watching them apart is how you fix one while the other quietly blows out. The single number that tells...
Read →Restaurant and Bar Menu Engineering: How to Design a Menu That Sells Your Most Profitable Items First
Your menu isn't a list of what you serve. It's the best salesperson in the building, working every table, every shift, without a paycheck. Most operators treat it like a price sheet and leave money on the pa...
Read →Why Some Bars Make Money and Others Don't
For years I did inventory audits for other people's bars. I would come in, weigh the bottles, run the pour cost, and show the owner exactly where his money was walking out the door. I put a lot of those plac...
Read →5 Steps to Bar Inventory (4 of Them Happen Before You Count)
Counting inventory is easy. You look at a bottle, you write down a number. Anyone can do the counting part. Preparing to take an easy inventory is the harder part, and it is the part that decides whether the...
Read →Why Your Best Server Isn't Your Best Server
Every owner has a top server or bartender on the sales report, and most treat that number like a trophy. Here is the catch I learned watching bars for years: a high sales number can mean two completely diffe...
Read →The Real Reason Your Bar Pour Cost Is High and How to Fix it This Week.
Your pour cost climbed a few points, so you did what everybody does. You watched the bar tighter. You had the talk about heavy hands. Maybe you put the jiggers out for a week. The number barely moved. What y...
Read →Why Pour Cost and Shrinkage Affect Your Bar Inventory (and What a Healthy Number Looks Like)
Every bar loses a little product it never sold. A splash over the line, a foamed pour, a bottle that breaks. That's shrinkage, and a small amount is the cost of doing business. The problem is most operators ...
Read →How to Fix Draft Beer System Issues and Stop Pouring Profit Down the Drain
Draft beer is one of the best margins behind your bar on paper, and one of the quietest leaks in practice. A half-barrel should give you around 124 pints. A system that's fighting you gives you 95, and you p...
Read →How to Calculate Beverage Cost (and Why the Count Matters More)
The formula for beverage cost is not the hard part. It fits on a napkin, every site has it, and it has not changed in decades. The hard part is the number you feed into it, because that number comes from a p...
Read →How Restaurant Inventory Control Software Works (It's Not About the Bottles)
Most people hear "inventory control software" and picture a better way to count bottles. It is not that, and if that is all it does, it is a fancy clipboard. The word that matters is control, and control is ...
Read →