The 5-minute weekly email newsletter that keeps your bar ahead of the curve

In our last 2 newsletters we've featured advice from Shaun McGuire, a bartender extraordinaire and service industry expert who coaches bartenders on work/life balance, finances, etc. (Learn more about that part of his life on his website, philosophicallydrunk.com.)

That last point—finances—is the focus of Shaun's advice this week, specifically how bartenders, servers (and anyone else, really) can go about wrangling their finances.

In short, if it feels like you just can't get ahead of your spending, this week's interview is for you.

Darian Everding manages London Underground, a craft beer and whisk(e)y bar in Ames, IA.

Along with so many others in the industry, Darian has seen more angry, disruptive customers than before the pandemic. Ours is an era of rage, a recent article from the New York Times wrote, and the data bears that claim out: London Underground has had to ban more customers in the last year than in all of the previous five years combined.

So how do you teach staff to deal with these situations? The answer for Darian is communicating with staff and using de-escalation training:

Digital beer menus are attention-grabbing, easy for customers to read, and way easier to manage than the old fashioned chalkboard. This makes life easier for your bartenders and makes the entire ordering process more efficient, which drives a significant increase in beverage sales.

But questions abound: how do I create a digital beer menu? How can I get it onto a TV? And can I update it in real-time?

TV Menus from BeerMenus make it extremely easy.

You know the scene. A keg kicks and your heart drops: you have to update your beer menu.

What comes next goes something like this: you go to the office computer and head to Google to find the new beer's description. You search and search, finally find a description you like, then copy and paste it into your Adobe, Canva, Word, or Google Docs menu document. You're done...except now the formatting is screwed up. You fiddle with it until it's finally ready. You push print and take a deep breath.

You're done.

Until you have to do the exact same thing the next day.

It doesn't have to be that way! Read on to learn how to create a professional beer menu template that automatically includes beer descriptions.

Megan Rickerson of Someday Bar has deep experience with hospitality advocacy. One of the most important take homes she's shared with us is that you just have to get started, and once you do it's all down hill from there.

But how do you actually get started? What's the first thing you should do?

Here's advice from Megan on that front: