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August 14, 2018

How To Stop Your Bar From Losing Money

Making a profit as a bar owner requires you to do more than just serve up drinks on a nightly basis. You also need to pay attention to details that you may not believe could affect your bottom line. When your bar is losing money, you may be able to recoup lost profits by keeping these simple but important tips in mind.

In today’s competitive bar and restaurant market, you need an online presence to boost awareness of your brand.

Avoid Overpours

You trust your bartenders to follow drink recipes to the letter. You may not suspect them of accidentally or purposely overpouring customers’ drinks.

However, overpours eat away at your profits and end up costing your bar money. Even overpouring a drink by a half of an ounce can rob your bar of money it needs to stay afloat and thrive in the local market.

So how can you prevent overpours? If needed, you should retrain your bartenders to make sure they know how to make the drink recipes your bar serves. You should also supervise them or appoint a supervisor to act on your behalf to make sure the bartending staff is measuring and pouring drinks according to the recipes.

Disallow Freebies

Free drinks also take away from your bar’s profits. Customers enjoy receiving freebies on their birthdays or other special occasions. However, as a bar owner, you may not be able to sacrifice the money involved with doling out drinks at no cost to the customer.

If your bartenders have a habit of giving out freebies, it is time to end this behavior once and for all. Disallow free drinks and instead make sure that every customer is charged accordingly. By ending free drinks for customers, you can start making back some of the profits that your bar has lost in recent months.

Make Sure Prices are Accurate

Another important tip to recoup lost money involves making sure your staff rings up food and drinks correctly. Making the mistake of undercharging a customer means your bar absorbs that lost money. Repeated undercharges take away from your bottom line and put your bar on a path to failure.

You should make sure your staff knows all of the prices on your menu and rings them up properly for every customer every time. By ensuring the accuracy of the prices as they are rung up, you can guard against lost profits and help your bar avoid becoming a failure.

Establish an Online Presence

In today’s competitive bar and restaurant market, you need an online presence to boost awareness of your brand. Many customers now go online to check out a bar’s reputation or menu before deciding whether or not to visit the establishment in person. If you do not have an online presence, you effectively are allowing customers to pass you over in favor of your competitors.

You do not have to build a fancy website to establish that online presence. Creating an account on Facebook or Instagram can be all it takes to get customers to notice you and your menu. You can upload photos of your drink and food selections as well as a copy of your menu to bring in customers and to maintain a presence on the Internet that could make all of the difference in your bar’s success.

Improve the Atmosphere

Finally, you should match the atmosphere of your bar to the clientele that it is bringing in on a regular basis. If your bar has outdated décor or tacky furnishings, you may want to update it to make it more appealing to the people who come in to order drinks and food from you.

You also want to consider what kind of music you play in the bar and how loud or soft it is while it is being played. Music that is too loud or not loud enough can be enough to turn customers away at the door.

The temperature of your bar also affects how happy customers are and whether or not they will come back. By keeping the temperature at a comfortable level, you make your bar more appealing and help it be more successful.

These simple measures can have a big impact on your profits. They could help you make up for lost profits and bolster your bar’s reputation with your customers.

TAGS: bars, management, helpful tips, business
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