Being a bartender is a great job where you can make some great cash fast, but in order to be good bartender you need to know and most likely have your own tool kit. Just like any good trades person they have their own tools. If you are thinking of applying for a bartending job then you may want to make sure you have all the right tools to do the job.
Today’s post is all about YOU.
What do YOU think makes a great restaurant to work at…? Tell us in the comment section below. What makes a great place to work as a restaurant worker…?
Here’s our good friend James rocking out another video with loads of wicked bartending tips. Becoming a freelance bartender is an incrediable way to make some serious cash.
The Saratoga Institute in the US conducted a survey and it revealed that 89% of managers believe employees leave for more money. But, in fact, the survey found that 88% of employees leave for reasons other than money. What a disconnect!
In reality, most employees are leaving because of poor induction, poor training, lack of development opportunities and bad management.
Experts have estimated the cost of replacing an employee to be between 29 and 45% of an employees annual salary when lost productivity, training and advertising costs are taken into account.
When your employees start working for you, how thorough is your training process?
The first impression your employee gets will either set them up for failure or success and you want to ensure it’s the latter.
Orientation shouldn’t end with details about where to hang your coat and how to sign in and out. In order to give your staff a proper start, you should provide them with a comprehensive training package.
A good orientation and training package contains:
New Employee Form
The new employee form should contain their contact info, position, availability, payroll and tax information, workers compensation information. If you do direct deposit for payroll, you will need their banking information or a void check. It is important to get all of this information before they start their first shift, and to keep it all together in their personnel file. Nothing will annoy an employee more than not getting their hard earned wages on time so use this form to get it right.
Company Information
You should provide the company name, address, phone number, email address, and website contact information. Other items to include are business hours, a description of the bar or restaurant concept, and anything else that is important for a new employee to know. If it’s a large establishment, it might be a good idea to provide a management chart (who is the boss, who are the supervisors, who reports to whom, etc.) so that the employee knows who to go to when they have a question.
Job Description
This is something that sometimes doesn’t get passed along to a new employee, especially if they are an experienced bartender, and they are going to be bartending for you. However, it’s important to list the details of their job, so that they are aware of your expectations. Keep the job description to a single page if possible, but list their regular duties and immediate supervisor on it.
Policies and Procedures
If you don’t have a policy manual, you should put one in place. Basic policies about employee conduct on and off shift, details about scheduling, on-calls, shift covering, illness and so on can differ from bar to bar, so it’s important to put your rules down on paper so everyone knows them. Writing things down also ensures that all employees get measured with the same stick. An Employee Handbook is the ideal way to document this information in one easy place and allows an employee to refer to it at anytime.
Manuals & Menus
Be sure your employees have copies of each menu you use – lunch, dinner, happy hour, cocktail, wine, specials, etc. Ensure that they have had adequate training on the items that you sell, and that they are comfortable with the menu options and pricing. This will ensure that their POS or order training goes smoothly.
Now that your new employee has their new training package, don’t leave them on their own just yet. Proper training should contain shadow shifts in the various areas of the restaurant or bar so that the employee learns your way of doing things. Staff turnover can be decreased by ensuring that your training process is solid.
Taking the extra time from the start to train your new employees thoroughly is an invaluable step in the success of your employees and the success of your bar or restaurant.
If anyone wants these forms and templates they can visit ManageYourBar.com
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Barry Chandler is Managing Director of ManageYourBarOnline.com, the complete online resource for independent bar and club owners and operators, designed to assist bar owners manage their business more effectively and provide all the tools/downloads/templates/articles for prospective bar owners to research and plan their new bar.
Whether you are running a well-established, long-running restaurant with lots of repeat business, running a struggling restaurant with poorer revenues than you know you deserve, or have just opened a brand-new place, hiring a Restaurant Service Consultant can be a big benefit to your business.
Restaurants are notoriously difficult to run well, and even the most experienced restaurateur can sometimes use a certain degree of outside help and an objective, critical perspective. A professional Restaurant Service Consultant is specially trained to ferret out flaws in the system and organization of the dining room, and to train waiters to perform at their best.
There are two fundamental aspects of Restaurant Service Consulting. First, a consultant will do a complete evaluation of the dining room and its operations. Second, they will train the wait staff to work effectively within a well-run system.
If you’ve ever watched one of those popular restaurant makeover shows on television you’ll have a rough understanding of what goes on. The consultant will develop restaurant floor plan diagrams, analyze the seating layout, the menu, the staff schedules, even the out-front advertising the restaurant provides. A consultant will seek constructive feedback from long-time restaurant staff and even from customers to better assess the problems and concerns of all relevant parties.
Even the already well-trained wait staff and kitchen personnel can suffer undue stress and become disorganized if the way the system works is flawed or poorly organized. The Restaurant Service Consultant knows what to look for and how to find bugs in the system. Only when an effective plan is in place can the wait staff be trained to work within it.
Properly trained employees will ensure a more consistent style of customer service, making fewer errors and giving diners a more positive overall experience. Pleasant dining experiences mean repeat business, excellent word of mouth, and, ultimately, greater revenues.
A huge component in poor restaurant performance is problems with communication. There are often gaps in understanding between the priorities and expectations of management, front-of-house staff, and the kitchen. A Restaurant Service Consultant is well-trained in hashing out these kinds of stumbling blocks and creating concrete solutions to improve communication among everybody.
Some restaurants have serious deep-rooted problems that need major work. But even an established, well-run restaurant can gain a great deal from professional Restaurant Service Consulting. Sometimes practices become entrenched and a restaurant fails to change appropriately with the times. Some owners might be resistant to change, or feel embarrassed or awkward subjecting their restaurant to outside scrutiny. But there is no shame in bringing in a helpful outside professional to suggest improvements. It is common in the corporate world, and it might be just what your restaurant needs to operate to its fullest potential!
Bartending is more than just pouring drinks and flirting with customers. It is a highly skilled vocational trade that requires professional certification and some degree of training. Many bartending schools exist to provide this. What should you look for when seeking a bartending school?
The first thing you need to do is make sure you only look for bartending schools that are properly licensed and have the proper credentials. A reputable school can provide this information to you, and will not put pressure on you to sign up for a course. They will have affliliations with hospitality industry organizations. Treat your search for a bartending school like you would treat choosing a college or university. Visit the establishment, meet with the staff, ask to see the schedule of their training course and inquire about what other kinds of services they can provide. Remember, serving alcohol professionally carries legal risks and obligations, so it is crucial that you train through a reputable program.
The most important task of a bartending school is to teach students how to make basic and more advanced drinks and cocktails, what is known as the fine art of mixology. Students must learn proper form and techniques, as well as speed and efficiency—not unlike culinary training. A proper bartending school will be set up like a real bar, to to give as close an approximation as possible to an actual working bar environment. check out the facilities. Is the classroom and bar area clean? Do they have the appropriate layout to replicate a real bar? There should be a proper bar sink, an ice machine, soda dispensers, blenders. It should be stocked with a wide range of glassware that would be used in all different types of bars and clubs.
Are the instructors professional, knowledgable, friendly and helpful? Does the school have proper bartending textbooks? What do they offer students other than the requisite training in drink-making? Most schools will provide students training in the way the hospitality industry operates, and the different areas you can enter (such as hotels, resorts and cruise ships). If someone is serious about the hospitality industry they may be interested in restaurant management and learning how to run a small business. A good school can provide training in this. Ask the staff what other opportunities they provide, such as financial assistance packages. Does the school have a job placement program? A proper school should be able to make your job search process go a lot more smoothly.
Whether you are new to the hospitality industry or are already working in the industry, a quality bartending school can be of value to you as you seek to acquire new skills or build on existing ones. Hospitality is an exciting industry with the possiblility to not only make a lot of money, but to move forward and possibly become a manager or even an owner. Finding the best bartending school will make you a better-equipped, more marketable employee.
It used to take hours, a day or even a few days before a customer’s experience was shared with his/her friends and family. A bad meal or a great experience might have been discussed that evening or at work the next day. That was before the mobile phone which meant that customers could text their experience to one or two friends. Maybe even take a picture of a great dish with their camera phone.
But this limited and delayed communication is nothing compared to the speed at which hundreds or thousands of people can be updated about your experience thanks to the arrival of Facebook and Twitter.
Web-enabled Mobile Phones and PDAs have made it extremely easy to install these social media applications.
Think about what this means for your business for a second and think why every touch counts:
A customer waiting for attention from the waiter instead decides to update his Facebook Status with the message that “I’m in The Mill Pub and can’t get service. Hate that”. This message then becomes visible to the customer’s network of hundreds or thousands of friends. Could this have a negative effect on perception and even on bookings? Potentially.
A similar incident became widely publicized in the US recently when the high profile wine blogger and internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk when he attended a recent conference in Miami. His poor experience in a high profile hotel affected him so much he video blogged about it, as did a few other high profile internet folks with the result that hundreds of thousands of people learned of their experience within 24 hours. The results were huge and the hotel went into fire-fighting mode to try and offset the negative publicity.
The effects will be felt for a while because two of the bloggers posts are on the first page of Google for anyone searching for Mondrian Miami. Can you afford an impact like this? Could you survive it?
So the next time you sit down with your staff or plan your training schedule, don’t forget that every touch counts. Every time.
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Barry Chandler is Managing Director of http://www.manageyourbar.com , the complete online resource for independent bar and club owners and operators, designed to assist bar owners manage their business more effectively and provide all the tools/downloads/templates/articles for prospective bar owners to research and plan their new bar.
For any bar, restaurant or nightclub owner that thinks social media is a passing fad not worthy of their time, the numbers coming out of a recent study (2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study published by Opinion Research Corporation) should come as a wake-up call.
For starters, almost 60% of Americans currently interact on social media web sites and 25% interact more than once per week (2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study).
Also, you would think that the last thing people would want is to have businesses invading the platforms they use for communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it turns out, the exact opposite is true.
According to that study, 85% of Americans using social media think businesses should have an active presence in the social media environment. What’s even more interesting is that those users actually want the companies to interact with them while there.
It seems that users are actually receptive to the idea of your bar getting involved on social media platforms and interacting with them while there.
Out of the 85% of users who want companies to have a presence in social media, 34% want companies to actively interact with them and 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request.
So, what do your customers want your business to do on the social media sites?
These numbers could not be clearer: your bar’s customers are practically begging for bars like yours to get involved in social media…they actually WANT YOU TO MARKET TO THEM in this new medium.
Here are 5 things you need to know to market your bar/restaurant with social media marketing.
It’s a lot to learn, but with time and the right tools, you can really use this new medium to make your bar stand out from your competition.
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Brian Horn is an internet marketing consultant specializing in several niche industries. He is also the creator of the newly released “Promoting Your Bar with Social Media” system SocialMedia4Bars.com that walks bar and nightclub owners through the process of creating a social media marketing campaign.
Thank you for allowing me this opportunity! I really appreciate it!
Let’s start off by telling us a little bit about your web properties. What is the purpose of each, and when & how the idea for each one came to you?
Well, let’s see. I started a blog called BartenderConfessions.com where I would document all of my stories and adventures as a Mobile Bartender.
Every weekend I get hired to work at weddings, corporate events, birthdays, etc to be the bartender. I make great money and have a total blast doing it! So basically, all of my “stories” on my blog turned into valuable tips and my readers kept asking for more. Before I knew it, I was writing my first book on how to make a living as a Mobile Bartender.
That book is about 80 pages and can be found at BartenderBlueprints.com from there, my customers kept asking for more, so I released another book Called Tip Attraction that shows you all of the best tips and tricks for increasing your cashflow behind the bar.
And then, I decided to create an At-Home Study Course complete with DVD and CD-ROM of swipe files on EVERYTHING a bartender needs to know to build a successful business as a Mobile Bartender.
How long were you a bartender before becoming an entrepreneur?
I would like to say I have always been an entrepreneur first. Starting with the Lemonade Stands as a kid, and graduating to bigger and better business ventures as I got older, I only bartended because I liked the quick cash and I enjoyed having the ability to increase my income relative to my performance level.
But I would have to say that I was working in the service industry for about 3 years before I decided to convert to a Business Owner.
How long were you ‘trying to be an entrepreneur’ till you got some traction and now the success that you are starting to have?
Well, it was just three very short months after that before I quick my old job and did mobile bartending full time. BUT, I was still having tons of problems and learning many lessons the hard way. For example, I was not charging enough; I didn’t know how to say no, I wasn’t taking deposits, etc. It took about another year to realize the errors of my ways and build up a system that allowed me to maximize my income and leaving me more time to do other things!
What makes you such a good business person in this industry is your passion and understanding of bartending? What do you love about this industry and what do you believe it can do for young people starting off in life?
Well, it is easy to say… the money! But in reality, it is actually the people! To be a successful bartender, it isn’t about mixing the best drinks, or being faster than everyone else, it’s about creating an experience for your guests. As a Mobile Bartender, it is impossible to become bored with your job because each event is a brand new experience with a whole new group of people that you get to meet and interact with.
Not everything is a nirvana. What are some of the pitfalls that you have seen from people who are not careful?
Well, there are many pitfalls in Mobile Bartending! For starters, you have to stop looking at yourself as a bartender, and realize that you are a business owner and a marketer. You have to worry about staying organized, having great communication and sales skills, and being able to market and promote your services. I have forgotten to show up at an event (only happened once!) I have not had enough staff for the week, and I have mis-charged my clients.
Do you think that aside from businesses that market online, that regular Joe or Sue can use the internet and social media to get exposure and land profitable jobs?
I have had countless customers come to me and say they did everything I told them to do and they still have zero clients. When I ask to see their website, they look at me like I’m crazy. So that is a big one: have a presence on the Internet! Everyone uses the Internet to search for their needs, so get on their and take advantage of it!
What would your suggestions be on how someone might do this?
Well, I have laid out all of the steps necessary to get started in Mobile Bartending. I want to give my readers as much as possible to help them on their way, so I created the Bartender Blueprints Free Online Course. You can check it out here: BartenderBlueprints.com
With the web going social over the last few years how does a Restaurant business know where to spend their efforts online…? How do you get your restaurant to be involved in these online ‘cafe-shaped conversations‘? Where do you find what real restaurant connoisseurs are discussing about your local dinning scene?
Obviously, there are acres and acres of people who are living and moving around locally in proximity to your business. They use the internet to search for credible word of mouth opinions of restaurants. (Who has time to try every fad business that springs up?) With the modern convenience of search engines accessed from handheld phones and Wi-Fi available in establishments that invite any laptop users in makes your online presence even more important (as print media takes a nosedive). The new tool used by millions of consumers are the plethora of restaurant reviews sites.
There is no doubt that when used wisely by a business, online restaurant review sites bring 3rd party credibility which translates to CONVERSATION, which usually will bring in new customers. Isn’t that really the goal? To bring new customers, right? So how does a restaurant biz use these online reviews sites to their advantage?
The first thing you need to do is determine which ones are showing up in the first few pages of the SERP’s. With so many review sites now business can handle monitoring them all, but you want to be sure to know which ones are being found by searchers online.
So we did a little research. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction and save you a little time or at least get your “marketing/brand management” creative juices moving.
What I’m about to share with you is just the result of a little poking around and putting everything in a spreadsheet to make connections and see relevance. You can decide what you want to do with this info.
I used Google (there’s no arguing why right?), and typed in “Top Restaurant Review Sites”, and then “Top 10 Restaurant Review Sites” and took notes on all 1st page search results. Then using these two keyword phrases added modifiers to the end like: “New York”, “Miami”, “San Francisco”, “Los Angeles”, “Montreal”, “Toronto” and “Vancouver”. Noted all results in a spreadsheet to see which ones root url’s kept showing up on the first page results. Then went to alexa.com and quancast.com for traffic statistics of each site in this final list.
Here are the TOP 11 RESTAURANT REVIEW SITES in North America. (Why 11? Because I am tired of “Top 10” Lists 
They are listed in the order of how frequent they showed up on all search results for my searches.
SIDENOTE: This could be totally different for your searches – especially since many localize search results today are showing different results depending on your IP address.
Beside each website, I’ve noted their approximate monthly unique visitors in the United States – No pity party against Alexa and Quantcast for missing Canadian stats. We Canadians are always forgotten 
Anyways, DRUM ROLL PLEEEZE…
What I suggest you do is the same for your local area using your local modifiers (location) and even (type of restaurant). Find what review sites keep showing up in the first page results and then make a plan of action to get your business involved in those online conversations.
One business I know invested in a laptop and Wi-Fi for their restaurant and had their servers at the end of the service ask how their table found everything…? If they seemed like they enjoyed themselves they let them know that if they were willing to add a review to a “such and such” site on the laptop before they left that the restaurant that they would give them a $25 gift card which they could use during their next visit.
Huge win-win! This idea contains Robert Cialdini’s “reciprocal agreement” strategy and gives the customer an ethical bribe, secures future business…all I can say is “Wow!”.
The customer is most likely going to give it a great review. They will secure a return visit through the gift card. What a brilliant way to make getting tons of positive online reviews from your customers before even leaving the premises. Totally awesome idea!
At minimum you want to monitor these review sites and whenever someone reviews your business (good or bad) be sure to add a comment, thanking them for their review. This alone can swing many new customers to your restaurant over others. Also, learn how to handle yourself if you happen to get a negative review by reading “How NOT to Handle an Online Reputation Management Crisis“.
That’s my 2cents for today!
Let us know what you think below…? How do you manage your brand online? How are you dealing with local online reviews of your restaurant? Do have any tips that are working for you that could help another restaurant…? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.