Description:
In this episode Nick reveals the 3 ways to create huge breakthroughs in your business. Whether you’re looking to make more money, open more locations, take more time off, whatever itis that you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll know howto make that happen after listening to this episode.
In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- The 3 ways to take your bar or restaurant business from stuck to thriving and then living life on your terms
- The ONE thing Nick did to make his dream of becoming a bar owner a reality when he had very little funds
- How ONE little change in the way you attract new customers can explode your profits
- The ONE major issue that holds any bar or restaurant owner back from achieving the levels of success they’re after and how to break through that ONE thing!
- How to change your mindset to feeling unstoppable even if you feel burnt out, tired, and frustrated – by doing this it can open any doors you want to open!
Links Mentioned In This Podcast:
Get Nick’s #1 Selling Book For Free By Clicking Here. Just cover shipping and handling.
Transcript
01- 3 Ways To Create Breakthroughs In
The Bar & Restaurant Business
Welcome to the first episode of Bar & Restaurant breakthroughs. In this very first episode, we’re going to talk about how to create breakthroughs in your bar or restaurant business. I thought that was only necessary for the title of this podcast.
Before I jump into that, I want to talk about the purpose of this podcast. It’s really to teach bar and restaurant owners obviously how to be more successful, take their business to the next level, and create breakthroughs in their business. It’s not going to be long, 30 or 60-minute episodes like it is with a lot of other podcasts out there. With us being busy bar or restaurant owners or managers, we sometimes don’t have 30 or 60 minutes to sit in and listen in on something.
So my goal for this is obviously to keep it anywhere from five to ten minutes to give you short, quick, valuable advice that you can take and apply to your business, apply to yourself, in order to take you and your life to the next level.
So what you should expect within these episodes and with the podcast is we’re going to do one to two episodes every single week, depending on, obviously, the holiday season and vacations and things like that for myself. But we’re planning on one to two episodes per week to keep delivering new content, new strategies, and new promotions for you.
Some of these episodes are going to be just me, just like it is on this podcast right now. Others are going to be successful owners from around the country that I can bring on that can teach us, teach myself and you, other successful strategies, tips, and tactics that they use in their business to take their business to the next level, and I’ll also bring in other experts within the industry to give us some valuable advice.
Throughout our email list each month, I’ll also be sending out some emails just to take people to a form where they can fill out any kind of advice that they’re looking for. If there’s anything that I’m not answering, anything that you really need to know deep down for your business or for yourself, how to create that next breakthrough for your business or in your life, you’re going to be able to ask those questions.
And if I can’t answer those, I’m going to reach out to people who can get those questions answered for you on this podcast.
So let’s get started. There are really three ways that I’ve learned that you can create big breakthroughs in your business that will take your business or your life to the next level. And the first one I’m going to speak on is about changing your strategy. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
So if we’re stuck, and let’s just use marketing, for example, or increasing sales, we’re trying to get to that next level. However, we keep doing the same marketing over and over, the same offers, the same promotions, the same specials, and if it’s not working and we keep doing that, obviously nothing is going to change.
So we need to change our strategy, but here’s the number one thing that holds us back from changing strategy that I find, and it’s fear. And I had this back when I was pretty much losing my ass and almost lost my bar was I was spending a lot of money on advertising. TV, radio, newspaper – you name it, I was doing everything – social media, email, texting. I was spending anywhere from $800 to sometimes $1,500 dollars a month and not seeing really any results for it. And I knew, obviously, that we wanted to increase our business and get more customers in the door, but we feel like marketing is a waste of money.
It’s that fear to spend money, because we feel like it’s going to be a waste. So we need to figure out how to get over that fear, but the number one thing is we need to change the strategy, and when we find another strategy – or I guess I should go back a second. How do we find new strategies? If we don’t know what to do, what do we do?
Well, the number one thing that I learned was to find someone in your business niche who is successful, model them, see what they’re doing, and follow exactly what they’re doing. You want to model what they’re doing. Model the successful people, because they’re obviously doing something right.
And you could find someone local. You could find people on the internet. You could find people all over the place, but find people that are doing it right and model what it is that they’re doing. If you can’t even just do that, find other books, find resources on different marketing strategies that you can apply to your business, depending on where you’re stuck. Become self educated with that.
Don’t let the fear hold you back. Test things on a small level. You don’t have to go dump a bunch of money out there to test things on a small level to see if things work.
So that’s the first thing. Change your strategy. If things aren’t working for you to grow your business, change your approach. And if the next thing doesn’t work, change your approach.
I continue to fail at different things all the time. I’m always testing new things, new ideas, new strategies, and new promotions. Do they all work all the time? Absolutely not, but I learn from each thing.
I look at each of these failures as valuable lessons of what not to do, or what could I still do with that promotion? What could I still do with that marketing strategy but make a little tweak in it, change something within the copy, within the offer, and see if that works.
That’s the great thing about advertising and marketing these days with the digital strategies. You can test things on a small level instead of making a commitment for billboard at $5,000 dollars a month or a contract with the newspaper or radio stations for $1,000 dollars a month. You can literally test new strategies to grow your business for $20 bucks, $30 bucks, $50 bucks. So that’s number one, change your strategy in order to create the next breakthrough in your business.
The next one is change your story. When we are stuck in our business, there are excuses we tell ourselves in our heads all the time. Maybe it’s the economy. We have no business because it’s the economy, when really, that makes us feel good telling ourselves that, but the guy down the street is just crushing it in the same economy.
Or, it’s no money. I don’t have the money to do this. Maybe it’s to improve something within the business. It could be a remodel. It could be certain kitchen equipment, whatever. You say that there’s no money there, but you know that it’ll really help your business. And if we keep telling ourselves these things, we’ll never accomplish that.
There was a time in my life when my dad actually walked into – this was before I owned my first bar, Casey’s – he walked into the office and started screaming, “I’m going to sell this fucking place. Nobody cares about it,” and this and that. And that’s when I looked up to him with a little smile and said, “Hey, let me buy it.”
And he said, “You want to buy it?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “All right, $250,000 dollars.” And I said, “OK, great.” And he said, “So you got the money?” And I said, “No.” He said, “Well, how are you going to get it?” I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll find a way,” because my goal was to be a bar owner!
I didn’t want to work for tips. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be a business owner, a bar owner. That was my passion, and I knew without a doubt that I would go out and find that money. And that’s what I did.
I reached out to my attorney. I reached out to a buddy. They gave me money. I paid them 10 percent on their money. I had credit card loans from real estate, and lines of credit that I had built up. And luckily, I was able to bring enough to him to where he financed the other 30 to 40 percent for me.
But again, if we want something bad enough, we will go get it. And it all comes down to being resourceful. I didn’t have the money to go open up my own bar, but I went and found the money to do it, to get to where I want to be.
The other one is no time, and I hear this from a lot of clients. “I don’t have time. I’m doing this. I’m doing that.” If we don’t have the time, there are two ways to fix this.
Number one, get up an hour or two earlier, or number two, outsource all these little $10 dollar, $15 dollar, or $20 dollar an hour jobs that you’re doing, such as the scheduling or the ordering or even the bartending or the cooking. Pay somebody else to do that stuff, because if you’re doing that, all this little work that isn’t growing your business, you’re working in the business and you’re becoming the employee. Of course you have no time to grow the business.
So either A, get up earlier and find the time to focus on growing your business, to educate yourself, to find a mentor, to work with them, whatever you need to do to grow the business and get more customers in the door. Or, outsource those things to other people. And again, if you don’t have the money to pay those other people – that’s the other excuse, “Well, I would, but I can’t afford it.”
If that’s the case, you’re going to be stuck where you’re at. So I would go find a loan. I would go find some money from somebody who could offset that cost to where you can take that time and model somebody else or work with somebody else who can help you grow that business. So it’s all about being resourceful. If you don’t have the resources that you need, go find them – and YES, you will find them if you want it bad enough.
The third one is change your state of mind, and this is an important one because this is the driving focus. It’s how you feel, your passion, your emotions. If you think about it, if you feel scared and worried on a day to day business about life or business, if you’re down and out about your business not doing well, how easy is it going to be for you to be motivated to try new things, to learn new things, to want to grow your business? It’s not. It’s pretty much impossible to make that big change, that big mental shift.
And I’m going to tell you how to get there, but think about it like this. If you were making a shit-ton of money, say you could write a check for anything you wanted, you’re successful, you’ve got a healthy family, your kids are going to whatever college they want to, you could write a check for anything you want to, take them on vacations, you’re going to feel pretty good in life. You’re going to feel unstoppable. You’re going to feel like you can do anything, accomplish anything, and you can.
Those are the two big differences in your state of mind. So if you’re feeling down and out, how do you change your state of mind to get to that unstoppable level? There are two ways that I’ve learned that you can do this.
Number one, read books, listen to podcasts on self improvement, listen to other people who can help improve your life, who can educate you or help you get out of this state of mind of, “Oh, I can’t do this. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the money. I don’t have this. I don’t have that.”
Find the right people who can motivate you, inspire you, with their stories or their clients’ stories or other people’s stories who were down at the ground level, who might have been where you are and now where they are, successful and feeling unstoppable.
Listening to that stuff will inspire you to say, “Hey, if this person can do this in a worse state of mind than I was in, I know I can do this.” So a couple of books here: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill is a great one. I’m not going to name the books here, but anything by Tony Robbins or Brendan Bouchard. They both have podcasts. They both have books. Get anything by them. That will also help you.
And the second thing is focus on your perfect life. So think about this. If you just sit back right now after this podcast and take two minutes, think about your perfect life. Like I said, you have all the money you want coming in.
Your business is running itself. You don’t have to be there. You could leave for 30 days. The place is running itself. Your managers are taking care of it. Your kids are in whatever school that they want to be in. They’re driving the car that they wanted. You’re taking vacations or whatever you wanted – your perfect life.
How many hours a week would you be working? What kind of house would you be living in? What would be different now? If you just sat back, closed your eyes, and thought about that, that’s going to inspire you, and that’s going to motivate you to want to get there.
And that’s what’s going to start making you change your strategy and change your story to think of, OK, how can I find the resources in order for me to be able to change my strategies. And that’s all going to come with changing your state of mind.
Now, if you create a breakthrough in either of these, change your strategy, change your story, or change your state of mind, you will create breakthroughs in your business. But if you’re able to do this in each of these, you’re going to be able to do that much faster.
So I’m hoping this podcast was a great first episode for you guys to start thinking about how do we create breakthroughs in our business. If you need more strategies, resources, again: barrestaurantsuccess.com.
And if you want to get my new book, Bar and Restaurant Success for free, click here. Just cover shipping and handling.
We’ll see you on the next episode.
