Bar owners or managers face an almost universal challenge: hiring the best staff. It’s not about filling shifts nowadays. Your cooks and servers all play a part in the customer’s experience. Choosing the best talent for those roles and your cocktails are equally important to your business’s success. Even a novice bar manager will tell you how crucial staff can be. Here are 5 useful tips to get the best employees.
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5 Tips to Finding Better Talent for Your Bar Business:
1. Attitude is Important:
Your staff is your bar’s face. If a server or bartender approaches a customer with a negative attitude, the customer will leave, never to return. If you feel your staff is not performing well, ask yourself if you can trust them to run the bar for you. Staff is bound to mess up, but it’s their recovery that matters. If their attitude is affecting other employees, do something about it before they bring the whole business down.
If you hire a great pro with a bad attitude, your cocktails will look nice, but your clientele will flee. Work ethic, team dynamic, and personality are much harder to teach than how to pour a drink right. Part of the process is finding job candidates. The other part is training them. As competition for great employees increases, bars now need to make more effort and tell a better story about the value of working in a team.
There’s an imbalance between demand from bars and supply of quality staff. The people you hire have the greatest effect on the bar’s overall culture.
2. Know Your Market:
Knowledge of the bar industry is important, but it’s not the only factor. Comprehension of best practices, industry standards, and good suppliers should be second nature to a decent bar manager. Do you know what the market in your area is like? Who are your main competitors? Is the bar you manage just another place to go, or is there a gap you can fill? Why might someone go to your bar instead of the one down the street? Bar managers need to understand the competitive landscape they inhabit.
3. Hire the Right Bartenders:
You cannot afford to hire fresher as bartenders and then train them to deliver. This will eat into your revenue and you will never get the desired results. The bar industry is a vibrant industry that faces a lot of attrition. If you are strategic in terms of looking for the right people, you will be successful. It is always a good idea to have at least 2 experienced bartenders and 4 fresher.
This helps maintain the standard and helps you prepare the next rung of the leadership. A good bartender is a big reason why some bars are successful, while others shut shop within a few months. Investing in the right bartender is probably going to be one of your toughest decisions.
Train Employees to Upsell:
Upselling customers is a great way to boost profits in your bar. This is where profits are made and success stories crafted. Upselling involves influencing customer preferences so that they end up making a choice that is beneficial for your establishment. It is also about the staff reading the body language of consumers.
For example, if someone is celebrating a promotion, a staff can garner the public opinion of the group and suggest a far more expensive bottle than the one the customer had originally intended to purchase. Peer pressure, wanting to show off and winning over loved ones are reasons people fall easy victims to upselling.
A bigger bill means better tips. People usually fix their tips at roughly around 10 to 15 percent of the total bill. Upselling helps boost employee morale as they get more tips and earnings from the same. By training your staff to upsell, you will be contributing to a better working environment.
4. Build Positive Relationships with Staff:
Experienced bar managers know that success isn’t possible if you don’t manage your staff wisely. To establish an open and positive rapport, try to build positive relationships with them. A frustrated staff member affects performance, morale, and customer experience. While it’s often claimed business shouldn’t be personal, this is changing in many industries. When bar managers form relationships with their staff, they establish a personalized connection with someone who will become a reliable, long-term employee and attract people to your bar as well as keep loyal patrons coming back. Take the time to interact with your staff.
5. Believe in your Staff:
It may seem easy to be a bar manager, but it’s definitely not. If you decided on this job because you thought it was glamorous, you might want to reconsider your decision. However, if you are running a bar because you want to, stay confident and passionate and project this mentality onto your staff. Encourage them and believe in them. They will reciprocate and this will reflect on the customer experience in turn. Your clients will keep coming back. They will visit you whenever they’re thinking of a place to go out because of the positive, laid-back atmosphere you’ve managed to create.
Final Thoughts:
The right employees and attitude are very important for smooth operation, but getting a reliable bar POS system is just as essential. Your bar needs a firm grasp of cash flow, inventory management, and data. Moreover, an outstanding POS system will expedite and ease the bar management process. You can’t afford to dispense with a solid POS system.
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