Bartenders are stuggling

We got this info from Shaun McGuire, a 20-year industry vet who's also recently begun career coaching for bartenders.

From Shaun's time in the industry and his time coaching, he's realized that almost all the problems bartenders face fall into 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.

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 feel sort of magical how quickly money disappears. In other words, it's almost always the outflow that's the problem, not the inflow.

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? 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, reply to this email and I can get you in touch with him.

Check out the interview clip for more from Shaun about how these problems manifest, his coaching approach, and also how they fit into the bartender career progression he's started thinking about (honeymoon phase ➡️ adolescent phase ➡️ mature phase):

Why?

To instill confidence in customers that your menu is accurate, which can increase sales.

Beer drinkers have learned not to trust menus at places with rotating selections. We’ve been burned too many times by “oh, sorry, that keg kicked yesterday” to really trust the accuracy of the paper in front of us.

One way you can combat that jaded feeling is by time-stamping your menu with an “Updated on [date]” footer, header, or subheader. It’s a simple addition that can remove any of the negative feelings customers (and bartenders) get when a menu-listed beer isn’t actually available.

How?

First off, only do this if you’re actually providing an up-to-date menu (no "ask or server about rotating drafts" or similar) and your selection rotates regularly (at least a couple times per month). A time stamp from a month ago isn’t additive.

If you are providing an up-to-date menu and your selection regularly rotates, then just add a timestamp—e.g. ”Updated August 17”—to your menu.

You could do this manually—drop it into the footer or subheader of your menu doc. Going forward, make sure editing the time stamp is a part of your menu updating process. (It's easy to forget when you're moving quickly.)

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