How to find new revenue streams at your biz

More than 20% of last week's survey respondents won a $50 VISA gift card.

If you haven't yet taken our under-2-minute survey about this newsletter's content, do it now—we'll draw another 2 gift card winners before next week's newsletter!

And thanks to everyone who filled out the survey last week—the answers so far have been very helpful. Gift cards for those who won are en route to inboxes now!

Covid forced most of us to scramble and figure out new business models to make it through. (For instance, at BeerMenus we experimented with a carryout and delivery marketplace.)

It was tough, of course. But a positive way to look at it is it helped us all become more flexible.

That flexibility can still help now, specifically by helping you identify alternative revenue streams—ways you can bring in more money in addition to your typical business model.

Nick Wendowski from Stone's Beer & Beverage Market has experience with exactly this kind of flexibility, so we picked his brain about how to identify where to look for alternative revenue streams. Here are takeaways:

• When trying to open up new revenue streams, think about the systems and assets you already have in place. Is there anything within or related to those that you can leverage to open up a new revenue stream?
• For Nick, considering this led him to actually become a distributor for a local craft ice cream maker. He didn't go out trying to figure out a way to distribute for an ice cream maker, but when he considered what he had—a delivery fleet with refrigerated trucks—he realized it was an obvious match.
• Another way to find new revenue streams is to figure out if there are any areas of your business where: 1. you're getting some interest or "pull," and 2. where you're not necessarily proactively trying to grow that segment.
• For Nick, an example of that is being a distribution partner for local universities. He never would have thought of proactively reaching out to universities to distribute to them, but when one reached out he thought "you know what, other universities could probably be good fits too." And thus a small but meaningful university-servicing business opened up to him.

Check out the interview clip for more from Nick on finding new revenue streams at your business:

❓ Why?

Because there are QR Menu flows that suck and actually make things worse for customers.

To be clear, we're talking here about the experience of what happens once a customer scans a QR code. I.e. you can have a bad QR Menu experience even if everything pre-scan is great (you have enough codes, staff is good about introducing them, etc.).

Here are the 3 biggest offenders of a bad post-scan QR Menu experience:

1. Customers are brought to a PDF. Hands down this one's the worst. PDFs are hard for customers to deal with because in order to enlarge the menu (almost always necessary on a phone), they have to pinch to zoom. This is tough to do, especially for folks on the less-tech-savvy end of things. It just so happens these are the same people for whom enlarging is most important.
2. The menu doesn't include item descriptions. It's tough to stay on top of website content, so businesses just include item names rather than researching, vetting, and pasting in item descriptions. This means the menu doesn't do any salesmanship work. As with a paper menu, it's best practice to include descriptions for everything you sell.
   
3. The menu doesn't include all items. Similar to the last one, but even more egregious. Updating website content can be time consuming, so instead of having to update every time a beer or cocktail changes, folks just say something like "Ask your server about our rotating drafts."

All of these harm sales because it makes the ordering process harder. Best case scenario it takes longer to decide what to order. Worst case customers just don't want to deal with the QR Menu at all. Which, depending on your service setup, can really throw a wrench into things.

❓ How to do it?

You could create and stay on top of a manual QR Menu experience. Here's what that could look like:

1. Create a menu page on your website. Most website builders offer an easy-to-use and professional-looking menu template that allows you to avoid using a PDF, meaning your menu will be mobile-friendly.
2. Add your menu content. Be sure to include all your menu items and descriptions.
3. Grab the URL from that page and create a QR Code for it. There are many options for this. Here's one.
4. Distribute your QR Code everywhere in your business and train servers and bartenders on introducing it to guests.
5. Every time your menu changes, go to your website and make the updates. You don't want the menu to be outdated, and you want to make sure you're including everything on your menu, including descriptions.

• After closing a production facility in Maryland earlier this year, Guinness is opening a new taproom in the heart of Chicago. With the many brewery closures we continue to hear about, it'll be interesting to see how this goes over.
• Good Beer Hunting wrote an awesome article about New Glarus Spotted Cow. As a Wisonsinite I feel seen.
• And in the olympian-does-a-funny-thing department, world class runner Jakob Ingebritsen ran a 5 minute 22 second beer mile at his bachelor party. The crazy thing is his time isn't even close to the world record (4:28.10).