Page 12 - Beverage Master February March 2020

Craft Beverage
Tie this financial outcome to the consequence of
hiring poorly and you’ll quickly see that spending
some time working on these processes are a major
benefit.
Give Your Employees
a Sense of Ownership
At Perfect Plain, we share our financials with
every member of our staff upon request, and we
remind our staff of this at every meeting.
We have a three-person peer interview panel –
the final interview for all potential new hires – and
if our peers don’t say yes to them unanimously, we
don’t hire them. We are the first bar in our region
to offer comprehensive health benefits to all full- even or turn a profit.
time staff.
We give each bartender $25 per shift to do the
right thing without having to consult a manager to
void. A spilled beer, a birthday celebration, etc.
Why do we do these things? Simple. We ask that
our staff have a sense of ownership. We want them to match your revenue goals and future potential is
to treat their job like it’s their own place. Every
business owner wants that, right?
10 February - March 2020 BEVERAGE MASTER
BM120120 Main Pages .indd 10
Well, ask yourself: What are you doing to provide
a sense of ownership? It’s easy to request that your
staff act like owners, but too often it’s a one-way
street. We expect that but provide nothing to make
them feel like owners.
I challenge you, even if it’s just one or two steps,
to empower your staff with some ownership-type
information and responsibilities. I know it seems
awkward.
Let’s use sharing the financials as the example.
The feedback I get most often when I present a
brewery owner with this fact is some kind of con-
cern that if they see the business being successful,
“everyone will ask for a raise.”
Research has proven this point to be false. Let me
tell you what actually happens. Your bartenders
and brewers probably see the daily sales reports
coming through, and if you’re doing well, they see
big numbers, right?
Do they know how much insurance costs? Do they
know about your $2,000 power bill each month?
Do they know how expensive supplies and mate-
rials are? I’ve experienced that when you share
financials, more often than not your staff is sur-
prised at what it truly costs to operate a business.
When they only see revenue, and not the profit
and loss statement, they likely thing profits are
much higher than normal.
And at the end of the day, I offer this: If your com-
pany is doing so well that a staff member asks for
a raise down the road, I can think of a LOT bigger
problems you can be having as a business owner.
Don’t Undersize Your
Brewhouse to Save Money
A sound business plan will outline a range of top
line revenue needed to make your brewery break
It’s surprising how many people go through the
laborious process of calculating these sales num-
bers, then you realize that because they’re trying
to save money the first thing they do is downgrade
the size of their brewhouse. Fitting your equipment
a must.
1/27/20 3:56 PM