There's More to Offer Than Music & Dancing
Many bar operators like to keep their patrons entertained with a variety of eclectic means and don't mind spending a few dollars to do so. In fact, major sporting venues have been employing these kinds of halftime entertainments for years and finding great results. If your bar can offer unique and appealing entertainment, chances are very good that you will have plenty of clientele. Better yet, if your bar develops a reputation for providing great entertainment, customers will always be dropping by your bar to look at your latest entertainment options. Consider the following:
Trivia nights. A handful of questions, a few slips of paper for answers, a running score, and $50 worth of vouchers for food and drink to give away—it all makes for a big night of entertainment. More venues are seeing the value of trivia competitions—luring customers in with the offer of freebies. These contests vary from huge nights run by live presenters to computerized interactive trivia games, where patrons compete against bars around the country via satellite. Either option does one important thing: brings people back.
Food tasting. People love food, and if you offer free appetizers or snacks with your beverages, you will draw a crowd.
Theater. Traditional theater (or mystery theater) gives customers a chance to look at something and encourages people to stay for an entire performance.
Karaoke. The Japanese tradition of karaoke has come on in leaps and bounds in North America in the last ten years, but there's still a big difference between quality karaoke and most karaoke. It's far more than simply putting up a bunch of old songs with some fuzzy video. Your karaoke enthusiasts need variety in the music selection. Hire a good karaoke host who can keep things moving and draw a big crowd of listeners.
Board games. A Scrabble or Monopoly night might be a simple idea, but it also works! Quieter nights of the week are an excellent time to try out a board game tournament. It instills a sense of community amongst your patrons.
Stand-up comedy. It's more than possible for you to find four or five stand-up comedians who will keep your audience laughing without costing you more than a hundred bucks total. Live comedy is a great draw, and it tends to keep an audience planted until the finish. Try an open-mike night and see what you find!
Live Entertainment. Eventually all bars consider live entertainment. Few things draw in crowds like a live band. However, knowing which bands to book is not always easy— or affordable. If you have a small bar, consider open-mike night and opening your doors to local bands that need a venue to practice. This will bring some entertainment to your bar at no cost—and entertainers often bring their friends along. For more ambitious booking, you may need to contact managers and publicists of more established entertainers. Prepare yourself by having the stats of your bar—how many customers you can draw, and what the crowd is like—ready. You should give the manager or publicist the reasons why your bar is a great place for the entertainer to perform.
Celebrities. Even celebrities will sometimes appear at smaller venues if there is a good reason for them to do so. If a celebrity will be in your area, contact the their publicist and give them the most compelling reasons you can for appearing at your establishment—be it a charitable cause or some other motivation. Celebrities tend to draw a crowd, and if your bar gets a reputation for celebrity sightings, you can expect a good crowd on any given night. Be sure to give them the ultra VIP treatment, and ask for an autograph that can be prominently but discreetly hung behind the bar.
This article is an excerpt from the The Professional Bar & Beverage Managers Handbook: How to Open and Operate a Financially Successful Bar, Tavern and Nightclub, authored by Douglas Robert Brown, published by Atlantic Publishing Group. This excerpt has been reprinted with permission of the publisher. To purchase this book go to:
New bar managers, especially those who have never owned a business before, often find the process of caring for money matters quite daunting. There are a number of ways to make the process easier:
Signage. From how far away can your bar be seen? If you can't be seen at least a block away, consider increasing your outside signage. While this is not a small expense, there's no point in hiding the fact that your bar is nearby. If you talk to your distributors, you might find that one of them is prepared to subsidize the cost of your signage, in return for mention of their product.
Sometimes the only element that separates successful bars from those that fail is in the small professional touches of excellence. This extra effort implies that tremendous thought has been made all around to attain the highest level of quality possible. Professional bartenders and courteous cocktail waiters/waitresses can be found in any well-managed restaurant. However, it is the small, un-demanded touches and extra procedures that separate good lounges from superb ones. Described in this section are some simple, inexpensive suggestions that will give your bar the extra touches—the finesse—that will separate yours from the rest.
Your market and competitor research will likely reveal that most bars that are successful pay a lot of attention to customers. In fact, great service is one of the surest ways of drawing repeat customers. To draw more patrons to your bar on a regular basis, you do not have to spend a lot of money. However, you do have to think like a customer; you will likely notice a few things that need to change at your establishment:
There are many bars that go out of business each year. This is because the market for new bars is a challenging one. If you are in an area that has new bars opening all the time and a clientele who is always seeking the latest thrill, you need to work extra hard to ensure that your establishment stays exciting enough. There are many small details that can mean the difference between a bar that is merely surviving and one that is prospering beautifully. In this chapter, you will learn the small details that can push your success higher than ever. Not all of these tips are expensive. Many take only ingenuity and some effort, but the results can be spectacular!
Sensitive pricing can make or break your operation. Pricing decisions should never, ever, be made arbitrarily. It is crucial to achieve that fine balance between pricing for optimum profits and making customers feel that they're getting value for money. Of course, you want to sell the drinks at their optimum sales volume, but if you tip the balance by raising the sales price too high, the sales volume will actually drop. So will the profits.
Simplicity over pretention. While bars that employ top-notch mixologists offering creative drinks will continue to attract more and more customers, you can also expect a trend towards simplicity. As David Wondrich put it in Nation’s Restaurant News, “The biggest trend I see is bringing mixology down to the fun/dive-bar level.” Expect to find well-made, “sophisticated” drinks in friendlier, “less sophisticated” surroundings.
Going mobile. Google projects that mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most common Web-access device by 2013.The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets makes it imperative that Websites be mobile-friendly. As many of these devices either do not support or have trouble playing Flash content (which has become a staple of restaurant, nightclub and bar sites), you would be well-served to optimize your site to take advantage of the rapidly growing number of mobile users who rely on their iPhones and iPads to find where to go for a drink or a bite.
Electronic cigarettes. Electronic cigarettes are becoming more and more ubiquitous. These electrical devices, which produce a flavored aerosol mist that simulates tobacco smoke, have become popular both as a way of quitting tobacco and as a way for smokers to kinda feed their habit in places where actual smoking is prohibited. Expect e-cigarettes to become a more common sight in bars and nightclubs in 2012. Also expect them to be sold more widely in drinking establishments. Not only do these devices provide an added revenue stream, they may actually have the added benefit of keeping smokers inside and drinking.
When you design your service area, it's important to realize that every step a bartender takes in the serving of a drink is costing you money and making your customers impatient. Where does your staff need to walk to get a clean glass? How far from there to the ice bins and then to the spirit dispenser? And where are your soda guns in relation to the bottles? Is the cash register yet another trip away from the customer? Even if your bartender has to take only four or five steps between each of these posts, consider how far that means your bartender has to walk in the course of serving 500 drinks a night! This is bad enough for a solo bartender, but when two or three people are working behind the same bar and sharing facilities, it can be an unproductive nightmare.
The way your bar operates depends on many factors, one of the most important being the "machinery" of the bar. Sometimes, no matter how efficient your staff, the bar just isn't set up to allow maximum productivity. Avoid that happening to your bar.
