First of all, if you want to skip my story because you're super busy playing computer solitaire and you want to go straight to the FREE report 7 STEPS TO EARNING $100,000 AS A BAR INVENTORY CONSULTANT you are welcome to. You won't hurt my feelings...much.
However, I warn against it because I'd be surprised if you and I don't have a lot in common. I'm not sure whether you're a bar/restaurant manager or a bartender or server who has been in this industry for a long time and you've been thinking about what else you can do for a career, but for me, in the summer of 2010, I was at the end of my rope.
I'm talking curled-up-in-the-corner-sucking-my-thumb end of the rope. Two decades I had spent serving food and drinks to people for tips, and though it had been good to me, I now had a 7 and 5-year-old in school and my wife was a school teacher at the time, which meant as soon as they got home, I was off to run the bar at night. I never saw them.
I loved bartending, but my quality of life was shit. At one point I literally went into breakdown mode.
And it wasn't like I hadn't tried other things to get out of the industry, but as many of you know, it's not that easy. As a lifer in the bar/restaurant industry, we are not qualified to do much else, so starting a new career isn't exactly ideal, especially considering the pay-cut we have to take by starting at an entry level position in another field.
Finally, in the summer of 2010, just about the time I was ready to shove an arrow through my neck, my wife, still looking for a solution to finding me a new career, came across a company that helped bar owners make more profits by providing inventory services.
Hmmm...interesting...
This company was teaching people how to count and weigh bottles and kegs to find out how much the bar was losing in profits because of bartender over-pours and theft.
At the time the company was called Bevinco, a franchise company people could buy into so they could teach people like me the ins and outs of their business. In a nutshell, I would be basically using their software to help bar owners make more profits.
Today that company is called Sculpture Hospitality, a horribly muddled and disconnected name that someone must have come up with while playing beer pong. Shortly thereafter, my wife and I found a 2nd company doing the same thing called Barmetrix, who does quite a bit of business in Canada, but not as much here in the U.S.
As soon as I understood what they were doing to help bars, I told my wife, "I can do that. I can TOTALLY do that."
So I clicked around their website and eventually discovered that they could teach me to be a bar inventory consultant for the bargain price of $50,000! Ummm....sure, let me go ahead and mortgage my house and put my first born child up on the black market and I'll get right on that.
I was bummed, but it was short-lived. I had bar management experience. I had taken plenty of inventories. All I had to do was find some decent software, so later that night I declared to my wife, "I'm going to do it."
"What?" she said. "Where are we going to get $50,000?"
"No, I mean I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to figure out what they're doing and I'm going to go help bars save money."
She looked at me skeptically, but she knew it was too late, like when you hesitate when your child looks at you and asks if they can keep the stray dog that showed up at the door. They smell blood and there's nothing that can be done after that.
In my mind I was off and running already. But as with any new venture, the path which seems so straight and clear in the beginning turns out to resemble something closer to a tangled ball of yarn the further you dive into it. It took me nearly two years of experimenting with remedial software and figuring out how to land clients who needed my services until I finally started gaining some traction, but once I did, I couldn't get enough.
Once that happened, I knew I was going to make it and I bit the bullet and partnered with my brother-in-law, borrowed a lot of money and found a development team to create the perfect inventory app and online software so I could do inventory faster and have powerful analytics to help bar owners save a lot of money.
Just after my two year anniversary of finding Bevinco online, I was maintaining 8 - 10 full service clients at all times, averaging about $1,000 per month per client. $100,000 - $120,000 per year. Just for counting shit and reporting it to the owner.
Ok, it's a bit more complicated than that, but basically that's what my job consisted of: counting, analyzing, reporting. And the best part was, I was done by about 12:00 - 1:00 every day and I rarely worked weekends unless I chose to.
What's the point to all this? The point is, if you've been in the industry for years and feel like you want to stick an arrow through your own neck, then you're just like I was, as well as thousands of others who make a decent living in this industry but suddenly realize one day that the future is quickly becoming the present, and if they don't do something quickly to change their present, their future will be working in a bar when they're 60, serving white zinfandel to a bunch of old ladies playing bridge in a hotel bar lobby.
If this is you, if you're me 7 years ago, then I suggest you follow me down the rabbit hole, or at least flop down in your Lazy-Boy and consider your life for a bit. Take a second to consider your options, and what you'll realize is that you and I don't have many because we've been pigeon-holed working the only job we know how.
So, instead of trying to escape this industry, it finally dawned on me to use all my knowledge and experience to create something awesome for myself. And you can too.
Your rules, your way, work the hours you want. No more late nights and drunks spitting on you as they order.
The only difference between you and me is I spent two years crawling through the mud and shit to figure this business out on my own. Swimming in debt. I'm like Tim Robbins in the Shawshank Redemption: Crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.
To state it plainly: I teach people who want out to be me...without the crawling through shit part of course. You just get to stand up and raise your arms and face to the falling rain and rejoice in your glorious freedom.
With that said, I'm always looking for new students, but I'm only interested in those who are really serious about changing their lives. No toe-dippers who are just testing the waters.
So, if you want to see what it is I do for a living and to see if this is something you want to explore
CLICK HERE and you can download my FREE report: 7 STEPS TO EARNING $100,000 AS A BAR INVENTORY CONSULTANT
If not, I wish you the best of luck in whatever you choose to do in your life.
Hope to see you on the other side.
