Hello and welcome to another episode of Bar Owner Tv. Last week I was out in Denver
Colorado to meet with Dave Elger from Hot Mixology to shoot a episode with him for his
show and to help him with marketing his new bar. by the way…. If you are looking for
some new highly profitable cocktails to serve check out his website hotmixology.com
Now While I was out helping dave, his lounge was closed at the time because he isn’t
open on Monday or Tuesdays, but just about every bar on the block was open and I’d
say there are about 20 bars within walking distance. A LOT of competition. Dave and I
hit a few of the bars to see what was going on. All of them were dead!
My question was why are all these bars slow? They all seemed like decent places and
not one of them had more then 8 people and this was around 8 or 9 at night. As I’m
talking with Dave and going from bar to bar the one thing I noticed is that they were all
pretty much doing the same specials and they’re all playing the price war game. Trying
to under bid each other on drinks. Great for the customer but bad on the check book.
None of the bars were unique or different besides the name of their bar and the layouts.
Today I want to discuss how to create breakthroughs in your business. I’m not going to
talk about marketing but I’m going to talk about what I actually believe is the starting
point to increasing your profits and creating that un fair advantage over your
competition.
Your greatest success and prosperity in business and in your own life will come
from your ability to create your very own breakthroughs. Most bar owners work
with a mind set that assumes success comes one small step at a time and this is very
unfortunate because with this mind set, it will take years to accomplish your goals for
your business.
Now I far exceeded to accomplish my goals because I created many breakthroughs in
my business. I started taking marketing strategies and ideas that were working in other
industries and applied them to the bar business. This was the complete opposite of
what other owners in my area were doing. I broke through the clutter of everyone else
and stood out from everyone else.
Think about it logically for just a second. You can’t be a follower and expect to ever
really become a leader in your market place. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s
fast changing high tech world. Instead you need to start focusing on completely
different ways to attract and retain customers. You need to think about how you can
accomplish more by doing less.
So lets get down to my definition of what breakthroughs really are…… Breakthroughs
are fresh, new, and more exciting ways of doing something that you are already doing.
Breakthroughs make your bar marketing produce twice or three times the results from the
same effort or even less. And breakthroughs let you change the entire bar business by
allowing you to totally change all the rules about how to attract customers and how you
promote your events.
With the way competition is these days, all your competitors are out for you. Out for
your customers. It’s breakthrough opportunities that will allow you to beat them to the
punch.
No matter what, whatever you are doing in your business now, you can and you must
find continually better ways to maximize your results. And it’s not just about more
profits, but it’s also about achieving maximum results with a minimum of time,
effort, expense, and risk….and this is something that very very few bar owners
practice or even think about.
So the big question is “How do we create these breakthroughs?” It all comes from
having the right mindset and the right attitude. You must be willing to work hard and try
new things that you may not be comfortable with. You must be open minded.
Here’s a few things that you need to do to create breakthroughs in your business:
1. You must market your business differently then everyone else
2. You must figure out how you can provide more value to new and existing customers,
but do it in a way where you still make the money you deserve.
3. You need to figure out how to get your staff to connect with customers and build a
relationship with them. People do business with people they like and trust. Build that
trust and you will see repeat visits.
4. You need to sit down with other like-minded people and brain storm on different ideas
and promotions.
