Last week we featured our first interview clip with Shaun McGuire, a 20-year industry vet and bartender coach. In that clip we covered some surprising data he's uncovered about bartenders.
This week's clip focuses on Shaun's coaching. For years Shaun's co-workers and other bartenders have come to him for advice on all manner of things. Throughout the many conversations that followed he's realized that the biggest problems bartenders face almost always fall into these 5 categories:
1. Personal life and work balance. This can look like a lot of things: getting work stuff asked of you during non-work hours; relationship problems with friends or your partner; feeling like you don't have any free time.
2. Money—future financial planning. Virtually no bartenders have employer-sponsored retirement accounts, so all their saving is up to them. How to do it, where to start, how to cap spending—bartenders often have trouble with all these things. (Note: July 13's newsletter is going to be all about future financial planning for bartenders.)
3. Bad work environment. Could be a bad boss, bad co-workers, or even abusive customers.
4. Alcoholism/substance abuse. This is a big one, especially given how much access we have to alcohol in our industry, and how easy it is to have a drink, either professionally or socially.
5. Money - the amount you make. Given the data he's collected he doesn't think there are a lot of bartenders out there that aren't making enough money. But what he knows from experience (and I know from my own bartending experience) is that it can be almost magical how money disappears. In other words, it's almost always the outflow that's the problem, not the inflow. (Again, more about money management for bartenders is coming in the July 13 newsletter).
Shaun also cautioned that it's super common for folks to feel more than one of these at once, and not uncommon for them to feel all of them at once.
So, what to do? As we've all heard before, the first step to fixing a problem is to admit, name, and identify the problem. If you're unhappy as a bartender—or if you're a manager/owner and you suspect one of your employees is unhappy—use this list to see if you can trace your/your employees unhappiness back to one of these core problems. Once you know what the problem is, you can begin to address it.
And if you'd like Shaun's help doing so, head over to his website to contact him.
Check out the interview clip for more from Shaun about how these problems manifest, his coaching approach (learn more here), and also how they fit into the bartender career progression he's started thinking about (honeymoon phase—>adolescent phase—>mature phase):