Bar Marketing
When I picked up this flyer, I cannot remember where, I knew that I needed to write about it. Even though “Dive Bar” appears to be a lame club, and I will probably never go there, this flyer illustrates something very important about running a bar or nightlife business.
The most important asset for any bar or club, businesses whose models are built upon providing a particular social environment, is their staff. Bars, and even most restaurants, are not about the food, the decor or even the programming, they are about the people that hang out there. And the people that hang out at a particular establishment is largely influenced by the business’s front end staff.
This is a fact that I have seen go unnoticed too often by bar and restaurant entrepreneurs, especially those that get into the restaurant business after achieving success in other industries. These newbie owners can too quickly view their wait staff as commodities. To an extent this is understandable, there are a lot of restaurant workers, and in our post-industrial economy, hospitality employees largely make up the new working class. But this assumption is fundamentally wrong.
It is a subtle phenomenon, but restaurant and bar workers make up a very particular social group in any regional economy. It is a tight knit community that keeps close tabs on business formation, success and management. If one owns a nightlife establishment it is an absolute necessity that they be able to keep their staff happy. A happy staff can be retained long term and has the ability to put any particular establishment on the going out map. First, other restaurant employees will visit their friends at work and spend good money. It is amazing to contemplate how many dollars flow through this cash economy. This has always been an issue when judging the success of entertainment and nightlife driven economic development strategies. So much of the activity is cash based that it is extremely hard to measure accurately. Fifteen to twenty percent of the cash, tips, is also never recorded in a business’s books.
Second, restaurant work provides individuals with a particular lifestyle. A lifestyle that affords them to work on cultural hobbies and production. Having local trend setters as one’s customer base is key to establishing the free press and word of mouth that a restaurant or bar cannot survive without.
Bar and Restaurant Employees B.A.R.E. = Trend Setters = Free Marketing
Even tough “Dive Bar” does not seem like an establishment with the best food, decor or programming, it does have a management team that understands bar culture and what is necessary for business success in this highly competitive industry. This is a key concept that I always try to drive home when working with bar and restaurant owners that are new to the industry.
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