Don’t Drink Your Profits
Bar Restaurant in Spain
When you and your staff are working you need to drink, but make sure that you are not drinking your profits away.
If you drink alcoholic drinks and you allow your bar staff to do the same over a week it comes to a lot of money and simply stated, is really bad business.
Here’s how we get around the problem
Drink the odd alcoholic drink when you are invited by a customer, but make sure it’s a weak G&T or a shandy or something similar. You don’t want to get drunk whilst you are running a business.
Staff: We don’t allow our staff to drink alcohol whilst they are working.
They are at work and getting paid for it. We do allow them to accept a weak alcoholic drink if a persistent customer insists, but we make it clear that it must be a Tinto de Verano or a small shandy.
Drinks for Ourselves and Our Staff
We drink mineral water and sometimes Fanta or Coke and if we were to use the small 33cl bottles, it would mount up over time, so we buy the big 2L bottles from the cash and carry and we use these solely for staff
If you follow these tips, you’ll make a lot more profit and be sober enough to run your business well.
Drinks Mean Big Profit (Spain)
There is a lot of profit on drinks in an English bar in Spain. Today I am going to talk to you about Fanta/Kas orange and how to maximize your profit on soft drinks in general.The buying process is very important if you want to have a good mark-up. A lot of bar owners just buy from the first lorry that pulls up and order 3 cases or 4 cases or whatever they feel they need based on the amount they have shifted in the last week.
When you operate like this you are vulnerable to potential profit loss in the following respects:
- You have failed to research the market for the best wholesale price and therefore could be giving away profit by buying at a higher price than necessary.
- You are loosing potential profit by not buying in larger quantities.
OK. So how do you buy at the best price?
When you run a bar you must look at prices all the time and know in your head what you should be paying for Fanta or a Coke. Sometimes it’s cheaper to buy cans in a big supermarket than it is to buy directly from say the Coca-Cola delivery guy.
Most of the time though we do actually buy from a lorry, but we check the prices offered by various distributors and go with the best deal. Here are some buying tips:
- Be prepared to haggle with the delivery guy. Ask what deals he has this month. It could be that if you buy 10 cases of Coke, you get 2 cases of Fanta free etc.
- You may find that one lorry is offering coke cheap, whilst he/she is expensive on say Fanta, so you have to be a good buyer and buy only what’s competitively priced from any specific supplier.
At the moment we are paying 17p for a bottle of Fanta and if we were to just stick it in any cheap old glass, we would only be able to retail it at around 65p.
So how do you bump up your profit margin?
OK. Serve it up to your customer in a really nice stylish glass, put loads of ice in, cut a disc of fresh orange and put it on the rim of the glass and finally pop a nice fat, bendy straw in the drink. A Fanta Orange presented like this you can sell for 90p.
Always try to see your service from the client’s point of view, always respect the client and you will build up a good business.
