Tobin Ellis: Your Labor Problem Is a Design Problem

0:00What are you doing this month to make sure your business grows? Do you mind if I make a suggestion? This month's free Restaurant Marketing Masterclass is about one thing, using AI to create an unfair advantage. And not by replacing what makes your restaurant special, but by helping you move faster on the work that actually drives growth. I'm taking my proven tactics, tools, and strategies and showing you how to use AI to sharpen your marketing, speed up execution, and turn good ideas into action without getting buried in the details. You'll be working with me personally to build these strategies into your business in real time.

0:36And because of that, space is limited. But you can sign up for free today by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com. Again, you can sign up for free today just by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com. I'll see you there. Now here we go. When you realize as a business owner, you have that opportunity during peak volume to increase sales and your only other cost that increase with it is cost of goods, my profit margin on that empty Tuesday is like 6%. But my profit margin on Saturday at 8 o 'clock at night is 60%. Why am I not trying to take advantage of that? Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators served up on the house.

1:27What if your biggest profit leak was hiding behind the bar? Tobin Ellis spent 30 years behind the stick before he started designing bars for a living. As the founder of Studio Bar Magic, he's redesigned everything from NFL stadiums to Five Diamond Resorts, once lifting a landmark hotel bar's revenue 131 % in a single quarter. In today's conversation, we get into why your labor problem is really a design problem, Why the money is made during peak volume instead of on a slow Tuesday. And why he builds every bar for the bartender first, the guest second, and the investor last. If your margins are thin and your weekends are leaving money on the table, this is the show to listen to.

2:17I started as a dishwasher in fast food and quickly jumped to the bar because it looked more fun. that was in college. And I was studying computer science and writing and logic and all these really cool heady things. But there was just something about humans coming together in a room and sharing moments and all that. And it just really deeply appealed to me. So I just kept on bartending after college and I did pretty well at most of the spots I was at in New York, DC, and then eventually Las Vegas. Very quickly, owners started asking me from other bars, hey, what you did over there. Can you come help us do it here?

2:54And before I knew it, I was running some pretty big programs around the country. And eventually I got this point where I realized the thing that no one's looking at that's preventing us as bartenders from performing better. We figured everything else out. Systems, ops, programming, playbook, deployment. It's who is designing these bars? Because they definitely have never worked behind one. And I think that's a universal sentiment been a long bartender. So that led to Studio Bar Magic started as a consultancy. And then it sort of turned into a design firm about 15 years ago or so. So I want to go back to the initial thing that you had said, which was, you know, I work in a place and it gets better.

3:36And then other people like, hey, can you do that for me? So when you began to run other people's programs and they saw the same success, what were the driving elements there outside of design? Yeah, I think it all centered around the idea that nobody was focusing on the bar. And I think bartenders, we kind of like it. You know, we get left alone. It's our own little world up there or back there or wherever it is. But at the same time, no one's really focusing on it as this business tool, this engine that drives the whole restaurant or the lobby of the hotel. And what I would do is just kind of look at what were we trying to accomplish and what were we able to accomplish, identify the gap and then figure out this was 20 years ago.

4:20Can we consolidate the workflow by batching, which wasn't really something people knew about that much back then? Can we streamline the menu? Can we add more bartenders? Do we want fewer bartenders? And after you kind of tweak all of those things and you're still trying to improve a business and really just your own business when you're a bartender. It just kept staring me in the face. The thing that is handcuffing us, the thing that is holding us back is I can't make the bartenders be faster because they're wasting all this time walking around and bending and stooping and their backs hurt. And that's got to change.

4:58So I went looking for people that did this and I couldn't really find people who shared the same views like, yeah, you know, this is why the pickup should be across from the well. And they're like, the what? The well? What's the well? The service well. The opposite of the point. what's the point? I'm like, okay, I'm in my own little world here. I don't think the way I want to design bars is at all what the people who design them think about. And that never changes. This is like, Josh, my favorite thing, or maybe it's my least favorite. I go into a beautiful new restaurant or a hotel and it's getting way better, but this is still 10, 20 years ago.

5:31And you see all this beautiful FF &E and this build out's gorgeous. And then I just kind of peer over the counter of the bar and it's like 1962 back there. It looks like they spent like three grand to build it all out. And I'm like, this is the engine that drives all your revenue and profitability. You're not making money in the kitchen. You're making it in the bar. Why does that happen? Why don't we care more? And why doesn't someone dial this in? I would like to answer that question for you. I mean, it was one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show, Tobin. It's because I think that everybody's looking for the most obvious gaps.

6:05What they're looking for, they're looking for the problems in their business. I think that where you come from, and it's this contrarian perspective that made me want to have the conversation with you. You're asking a very different question than most people are asking. You're asking, how can I generate more revenue on a Saturday and Sunday? Not like, how can I fill an empty bar on a Tuesday? That's the gap. That's really the opportunity. What you're looking for are the inefficiencies that are bottlenecking you when you have the greatest opportunity to make more money. And the reason I want to call it out is because you see the same ads I do on Instagram.

6:39Nobody's selling busier on the weekends. Everybody's selling. We're going to take your slowest days and make them busier. But by and large, it's a really expensive value proposition. How do you get people to come in when they don't want to come in? I think I learned it as a bartender first. But when you realize as a business owner that you have that opportunity during peak volume to increase sales and your only other cost that increase with it is cost of goods and everything else is staying static and you realize, wait a minute, my profit margin on that empty Tuesday is like 6%, but my profit margin on Saturday at eight o 'clock at night is 60%.

7:18Why am I not trying to take advantage of that? And I mean, you know, this and people who really kind of geek out on optimizing how a restaurant or a hotel lobby works, they do as well, but There's so many operators, no one ever taught them this. It's like, let's just get through it. We're in the weeds. Let's just get through it. And it's like, well, what if the weeds were fun? What if the room was still flowing and had a rhythm? And what if the register and the drops were higher? Because we thought about not, well, what's the obvious basic macro view of what a bartender does? Well, they ring things and they make drinks.

7:52What if we looked at the micro, the granular and went, well, but how do they move their bodies and what do they need to grab and touch? And what happens when we set them up better for that? And it's easy now because you just chef kitchen because they all know they get it. They care. Their knees is tight as can be in the kitchen. The bar really never got that same structure until maybe started about 15, 10, 15 years ago. So I want to talk about your approach because you've been doing this for long enough now that I'm sure that when you started, it was helpful. And that over time, it's only become dramatically more helpful.

8:30That when you look at the things that you were prescribing 20 years ago, which you've been able to layer on top of that in the years since, has just made it more and more effective. And so when somebody hires you to come in and design, what was your approach initially and how has that evolved over time? Well, I think luckily I was so deep into high volume and high end bartending. I was, you know, I'd put 25 years in behind the stick and also about 10, 12 years of a lot of consulting. I had two different teams traveling the country, opening up hotels and restaurants and things. We were pretty dialed in all those places.

9:08So it always came from a perspective of if we don't improve their sales mix summaries or their P &Ls, we're not getting more phone calls. You don't hire us because you want a place to be pretty. You want it because you want it to perform. And so we kind of knew that from the beginning. And we got very, very lucky. So in 2006, we were called to do some light work at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs. Five star, five diamond, massive property, more than 100 bartenders, 119 bartenders union. And we redid the lobby bar, which was a landmark resort, meaning it was really hard to make changes.

9:44It had landmark status. And when we finished quarter to quarter, we increased revenue 131%. It's a number it's burned into my brain because we went with our instincts. We knew what they needed to do to improve service, hospitality, ticket times, throughput. We knew these things. And so we went, oh, let's rebuild the engine around what we know they want to do, what they've been trying to do, but they can't. And when that result hit, it was like, okay, we're onto something here. So we've really just kind of refined that over time, trying to, now there's a lot more questions. There's a lot more in the programming phase early on before schematic design, where we want to nail down every variable.

10:23Before it was more gut and instinct. And now it's all codified and it's a very, it's just a lot more listening. Before it was a lot more telling, like, well, this is what you want to do. You want to put this here. Now we go, what are you trying to achieve? And is it stackable glassware? Are you using, give me all your specs. What do you have? What are you buying? Let me see your menu. We don't have a menu. Can I talk to your bartender? We don't have a bartender. Okay. What is the, let me see the PNL. What are you saying? What is your assumption that you got a loan off of for your beverage revenue?

10:54And let's reverse engineer that pro forma to figure out if your design is even capable of performing what you told your investors you were going to do. And if it's broken, then we'd start there and we fix that first. And then we design the engine to deliver that result. So I guess it's just a little more financial and planning and a little bit less. I know how to get back there and make this rock. So I'm just going to trust my gut. I think it's a little bit of both now. And I think that, you know, half the battle is probably asking the right question and being able to articulate it in the right way.

11:26And so when you ask somebody like, what is your goal? What does a good answer sound like? Oh, well, the bad ones are fun. The bad ones are fun. we want to be the best place in town or we just want to be super busy or we want everyone to have a great experience that's how you start the conversation and then you just ask them to define and refine well what do you mean by the best experience who's the star in this restaurant which department is the star is this a chef driven restaurant is this a bar with really good food is this the neighborhood spot you want people coming back three five six times a week popping their heads in is this the big night out it's your job to help them define their vision in a more operational sense, then they may have, they probably haven't done it with the bar and they may not have done it with the concept.

12:10You try to kind of help them achieve their dreams by grounding them in reality so that you can focus in on one area that you go, this is what we're going to go after. We're going to go for this. Let's do this fun, wild, awesome thing that no one else ever thought of and get them excited about innovation and differentiation. Cause you know, that's in today's consolidated market. Was it like 54 % less drinking since 2023? All the things that are happening that are scary. Let's give them something they can hang their hat on. It's a flag that says we're another restaurant or bar, but, or and we're doing this and set them up to be able to execute that because that's where all the gold is.

12:52The goal is an execution, not an aesthetics. Everyone, we have tons of talented architects and designers. So we know we can have a beautiful room. But to me, the definition of a beautiful bar isn't what it looks like when it's empty, but it's how it feels when it's full. Can it perform? Can it flow? Are people nodding? Is there like a vibe? And can you build and maintain that vibe? I would assume that from a bartender's perspective, there's a checklist. Like bartenders need, when we build out this well for a human being that's actually going to use it, there are like 10 things that they're going to need.

13:28What are those things like in your mental checklist? When somebody sends you, right? What member of your team sends you a design for a well, what are you checking for to make sure it has? Well, I think that's been well established, luckily. And I think that's where we kind of leapt off from that. So about it was in 2012, I started working with the largest manufacturer of bar equipment in North America, Perlic, and designed an ergonomic high-speed cockpit for them. It's changed the way the industry looks at equipment. It's sold millions and millions and millions of dollars worth. But more importantly, it's helped bartenders walk up into their station and go, this, this is how it should be.

14:06And so there's basic adjacencies between sinks and ice bins. And as a bartender, you think about things that food service consultants and architects and even owners don't. Well, which way do I want to put a separator for an ice in? Well, which way does a bartender scoop? And most people who don't bartend, they wouldn't be able to answer that question. I don't know. Well, we don't scoop front to back. We scoop left to right. And 90 % of humans are right-handed. So I know they're going to grab the ice scoop. Probably they're going to grab the glass with their left hand. Their dominant hand is going to grab the ice scoop.

14:37Now that's already informed adjacencies and what side things need to be on. So you're just looking for the basics, right? They need a glass. They need ice. They need product to put in there, liquids. They need garnishes. But now they need lots of garnishes and lots of bitters and tools and freezers and refrigerators. And it's become this much more chef-like, kitchen-like environment back there. The Mies has grown like crazy, and it's much more temperature controlled. And that's a huge change. So what we're looking at first is, what is your program? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to be aspirational, world's top 50 cocktail bars?

15:09Are you a Hotel Five Diamond five-star service model? Are you a neighborhood corner joint? What are you trying to do back here? because you cannot put everything for every bar in one station. It won't work. You force the bartender to take steps, and that's always been the problem. So we're trying to optimize for the workflows and say, for this bar and for the next 10 years, what can we build that will have those desired lines to grow with their business, but always keep the bartender neutral spine, zero step, neutral reach envelope, healthy, fast, facing the guest, head up, comfortable, and adding to that smooth vibe in the room because that's the big difference between back of house and front of house.

15:51Bars are in the middle of the vibe, in the middle of the front of house. We can't scream and yell and throw pans and run around and look like we're in the weeds. We have to be calm, collected, smooth, and happy. Well, if a bartender's bashing their thighs and their knees into their equipment or they're running laps because the bar wasn't designed for a bartender, it's very hard for them to do that. That's what we try to do is figure out more is it more stations? Is it bigger stations? Is it smaller stations? Are they deeper? Are they shallower? We put multiple heights into them because that's the way the human body works.

16:25It needs objects at different height. It's a ton of stuff that other people probably don't know how to think about or they don't want to. And we don't want to bore them with all that. We just do it. We optimize so that when the bartender walks up, the first time they see their station, they walk in and hopefully they scream out an explicit, you know, the F word like, yeah. And And they're just so excited when they see it because they get it instantly. That's the number one goal. We design and build bars for bartenders first, guest seconds, and investors last. Because that's the order the money moves and that's the order the experience happens.

16:56I want to talk about operations. This is something everybody leans on. And I think that the reason that we do is because I think it's a lot easier to say, if we just optimize the flow, we'll be better. When sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, it's a product market fit issue. Is it the program, their current beverage program doesn't really align with the culinary program or that the current beverage program doesn't align with what people in that market care about? And you've done enough consulting work at this point that you're able to tell, right? Are we going to optimize this bar and it's going to be like moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic because there's a bigger issue that needs to be fixed?

17:37How do you delineate between the two? Because I actually know through the research that I did that you've turned to people that say, you know, I want this bar redesigned and you've turned to them and said, well, what you actually need to do is redesign the offering first. Yeah, we've had to say no a few times and it's never something you want to do. But when you realize that someone they don't have any realistic expectation of what they can execute and you try to guide them towards that and they're resistant, it doesn't help anyone for me to help you spend the capex to redesign your bar that you can't operate.

18:12The goal is that you'll be able to operate better. But ultimately, if you're mistiming the market or you're not reading the market and you have ideas that you don't have the right staff, you don't have the leadership that can definitely execute it. And I think this is most visible typically when people talk about cocktails, because that sort of came the whole buzzword of the bar industry for quite a while now. And it's, you know, everyone's got master mixologists and everyone has the best program. But we all know we walk in. I can look at a bar when it's closed. I can tell you by the way the bar was closed in 30 seconds, how they're executing.

18:51You can't hide it. And if they're not going to execute at the level that they want for the bar, typically the job is to try to say, well, listen, you know, this is beautiful. This is cool. we can do this cool, fun stuff for you. But sometimes people want some of the European designs. And it's my job to explain to them, well, let's give you a hybrid design because this isn't Europe. So we don't do a lot of ops consulting anymore. It's mostly just design, but it's always threaded into the design. Like we're not just going, oh, this is a beautiful design. These are the little details that can make a huge difference to a scaled enterprise, especially if you own three, four, five restaurants and bars.

19:29And you start looking at labor costs, cost of goods, shrinkage, all that food cost waste, and start thinking about how do I actually optimize for all these little things that we never looked at before? Because that's the beauty of the bar. When you go looking at all the dark corners of your business to try to figure out where you can squeeze a little bit more juice out of the business, it's the place that one of the last places a lot of people look and they don't know what to look for. So when someone shows you all those gaps and all that leakage, all that invisible leakage that you didn't realize was there, you can't unsee it.

20:03And then you're like, wow. So when we talk about these, you know, 131 % increases and people like, you didn't do that. Like we did because no one else ever tried. It was so easy because there were so many gaps and so many pain points and bottlenecks and issues. It made our job really easy. And that's available to anybody out there. If they just know what to look for and then how to fix it. I want to talk about a very contrarian position you have that I absolutely fell in love with because I experienced it firsthand, which is the labor problem is a design problem. So I ran nightclubs in the early 2000s in Hollywood, back like in the heyday of nightclubs.

20:43And one of the greatest gifts that God ever gave me was a bartender by the name of Gail. Gail was just a mercenary, just a high volume bartender through and through. She handled not only the bottle service that was going out one side, but she also had a dedicated well that she was able to serve. And in years, I never found anyone that could do more volume than Gail. So I worked with Gail. Gail informed how we redesigned that bar again and again and again, optimizing for all of the other bartenders because she was vocal, right? Because she was an operator, because she knew what it needed. when I built out my bar in Hollywood, which again, much smaller, it went from 6 ,000 square feet to 900 square feet.

21:24I put her in the center well, and I knew that she was going to handle all of the volume. And I built it based on all of the comments that she'd given me in the past. And after the first shift, she quit and she loved me and I loved her. And she was like, fuck this bar. And it's because it was just too hard for her to work in. To your point, the problem was built around, she could make the same money with less effort anywhere because she was high volume. And what we saw was like, again, like a week after opening, we had to redesign the wells and we redesigned it to her spec, which then we optimize for everyone else.

22:01But it's because like the best people on the planet will only work behind the bars where it is most comfortable because they're going to make money no matter where they go. And that's what I learned 15 years ago, longer than that, candidly. But that's also what you espouse. Yeah, well, that same era, while you were in Hollywood, I was in Vegas and I was working at the busiest nightclub in the world, busier than space in Ibiza at Pure Nightclub at Caesars Palace. And we were doing million dollar days. And that volume, you can make that kind of money as an operator, bartender, bar back porter isn't around that much anymore.

22:41And so the volume that hid a lot of the problems in our industry, especially in the bar industry, it's gone. And so now those problems are exposed. And so now when you've got profit margins for restaurants that used to be comfortably 15, 16%, if you were good, you could probably cap close to 20. And now you're talking five or four, you think about how do I cut costs is usually everyone's first lever they pull. How do I cut costs. And you're also trying to market and promote like crazy. And you think social media is the answer. And what happens is you're shortcutting the long game, the guest experience, because so what do you do?

23:17You cut labor is a huge cost. So you cut a little labor in the kitchen. You go low deployment on the bar and then you get hit. And then the people come in and you get one crack at them now and they don't have a great experience. The drinks aren't great or they take too long. The bartender's red face flustered running around and you lose. So is that a labor problem? Or could you have actually designed the bar? Like here's one that people think sometimes is crazy. There's this thing I call the, I call it, what is the belly principle? And the idea is, and I talked about this last week with someone, when a human being's belly touches the bar, they are ready to be served and they expect service.

23:52Everyone knows if you're too deep, if you're back and waiting, you shouldn't expect to be served. But the minute my body touches that bar, where's my bartender? So why are you building a 60 foot long bar and putting one or two bartenders back there, whatever you're doing. Do you think about the geometry? I always ask operators, the shape you're picking, the volume of that shape and the location of that bar. And maybe the answer isn't one giant shotgun bar up against the wall. Maybe the answer is two outlets to spread the drinking so that, and the consumption and the ordering, the point of sales so that there's not a weight and people don't have to go up a flight of stairs.

24:26And what if you shaped one of the bars around one bartender's body so that 10 guests can come up and the bartender doesn't have to move and they're all around them. These are conversations people are not used to having and they're like, I never thought of that. Studio Bar Magic's job is to help you think about all of the possibilities of the good and the bad of your business for the long-term and have these conversations about shapes of bars and heights of counter and all this crazy granular stuff that would only come out of the mind of someone who has been on both sides of that. I work the slowest TGI Fridays in the world And at the same time, I worked at the same exact time.

25:04I also worked across town in D.C. at the busiest bar TGI Fridays in the world. Same menu, same company, same D.O., same everything. Dead as a doornail, five deep all night, every night. And the learnings were incredible. And then I went and did clubs and hotels. And so I take all of that experience and I've hired people who have had the same backgrounds. And we talk about the truth about operations and execution behind the bar. the same way a chef would talk to their team in the kitchen. But we don't talk about that in the bar. We talk about clarifying cocktails and fanciness and smoking and bubble guns and things like that.

25:42And that stuff's fun, but that stuff doesn't pay the bills. So better conversations about what does it mean when I say you have a design problem, not a labor problem. I'm not just trying to throw out something to catch your attention. It's let's just reframe how you're looking at this and see what problems can design solve that you don't have to stay up sweating about every night when you see those reports. And then how do you triage? Restaurants are problem factories. There are always new problems to attack. It's very much a game of whack-a-mole. And so let's assume that most of the people listening, they already own places that are open.

26:20So like the opportunity to design, but I know that you guys go into a lot of active businesses and you help them with design. How do you know when it's time to do that, when you've explored all of the other alternatives. And then again, especially when we're looking at any level of CapEx, right? And what is an incredibly small, like low margin business. How do you figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze? That's the first stage of conversions and hotel conversions are up now. I believe it's now, it's grown 20%. It's almost 50, it's 40 some percent of all new quote unquote new hotels. They're just old buildings that got converted into hotels.

26:58And the same is true with a lot of restaurants, especially in dense markets like New York and Philadelphia and LA. There's no more land to build. You're not demoing a building. You're taking the bar and you're redoing it. So before someone decides to not only invest the CapEx, but shut down the bar, probably the business for at least a few weeks, we have very in-depth conversations about that part of it. So there's no surprises like you need to, oh yeah, we'll close for 48 hours. No, you're going to be closed for probably two to three weeks because someone's going to need to resaw the floors and retrench something or things are going to go wrong.

27:32So let's plan for that. And then if we don't need to do it, great. But then what we do is we also do forensic plan reviews. And by forensic, I mean, we look at the plans and we do that evaluation you asked about. We figure out how much revenue are you probably leaking right now and how high are your labor costs if they shouldn't be and on and on and on. And we let them do a calculation on their own to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze. We don't ever come in and say, if you hire us and we redesign your bar, you're going to make a bunch of money or even an exact number. That's not our job.

28:01We say, I look at these designs and these plans. I do these reviews and say, this is what I see. Here's where the opportunities are because here's where the gaps and all the blockages. Here's how we would unblock that. Here's how we would fix those gaps. Here is what other clients have. You can talk to them. Here's their phone number. Here's their email. Here's the sales mix summaries. Here's what happened when they did this. There's just a limiting mindset that tired, busy operators working on razor thin margins all have ingrained, which is they'll spend the money to open a new place. But once it's open, the faucet gets turned off and there's no more spending money.

28:37And I think the savvy operators are the ones who time it well. They get as much out of the engine and out of the room as they can for as long as they can. And then they realize I'm losing cash every day. We're just leaving dollars on the table. guests are walking out or they're only ordering one drink or they're not coming back, that's a bigger problem and it needs a bigger solution. And those are the ones that usually come to us. What can an operator do for$200 to redesign their bar? Buy the book I wrote. That's about it. At least get yourself educated to what you should look out for. What are some strategies and techniques and tactics to improve bar design so that you can be better informed before you allocate capex, but you're not fixing your bar on 200 bucks.

29:19That's the wrong mentality to win. And it's not the mentality that usually the most successful restaurateurs and hotel operators and asset managers have. They know you got to invest. It's amazing how like, you know, a single question can change the trajectory of your career. I had a buddy of mine come to my bar on like a Saturday night. It was the first time he had been in and he was in from out of town and he had been around. So like, yeah, I'm from Southern Louisiana. So you can imagine And they're really high volume bars in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So and that's the culture we came out of.

29:52So, you know, he was there on Saturday night and I followed over the next day and I said, how was your night? And he goes, well, you know, I came in stone sober. I left stone sober. So I would argue unsuccessful. And we both laughed. And then I was like, well, you know, why was that the case? And he goes, it was just too hard to get to the bar, man. Like it was, you know, I was trying to meet people. I was trying to have a good time. I was trying to dance. I was trying to party and like I couldn't do that and wait for like 40 minutes to get a drink. So like, you know, I waited to get the first drink and then like I waited again to get the second drink.

30:26But after that, I just got tired of waiting. And to your point, like it flipped a switch in my mind, which was, I mean, he's not alone. How many other people would spend double, triple, quadruple with me if they had the ability to get a drink faster? And then, you know, we tried to come up with all of these different ways to get it done. But again, it was that paradigm shift between not how do I get this dude to come in on a Tuesday when I'm slow, but it's how many people aren't giving me as much money as they would like to because of the inefficiencies in my business. My partner and I, and she's a 25-year Manhattan in Las Vegas bartender.

31:02Now we're worked at Wet Republic for 10 years, busiest day club in the world. We spent half the year in Brooklyn where I have a design studio and we just went out to Crown Heights to watch the Senegal-France World Cup match. We found the Senegalese restaurant. We were so excited. We reserved seats at the bar and we get there and they've got one bartender behind the bar and they've got people spilling out into the streets. And I knew I'm like, order beers two at a time. Don't even order a drink. And there were so many people waiting for drinks patiently and trying. We're trying to cheer this poor bartender on.

31:32But it was like and I said, well, only two things happen. By the next time Senegal plays a match, this place will be dialed out. They'll have it all figured out. Or this place is just no one's going to come back. Not for anything. They have such an opportunity here. By the second half, they were putting cold tubs of beer up in the back, put a server behind the bar to start handing them out and ringing them up. And they figured it out. And understanding that the bar is the engine that lubricates the whole thing, right? Like, I don't care how good your Branzino is. If I got a dusty, empty glass and nothing to wash it down with, it's a terrible Branzino.

32:05It's not a great experience. We are compadres here, food and beverage. And I think food gets enough attention and it's good that it does. It's great, but it gets plenty of attention. Aesthetics get plenty of attention. Beverage is the redheaded stepchild of the hospitality industry. And it's ironic because of how much it can do for someone's business. And truthfully, just how centric it is to the guest journey and the whole experience. I mean, how many guest touch points start and end at the bar or the bar affects them, right? Because the server can't get their drinks out of the well from the service bartender.

32:37They're having a terrible dinner. It's such an important department. And when you realize what you did, that it's about removing friction and that friction comes in many forms. And when you have an expert who can understand and speak in a very real way about how to remove that friction and make it the smoothest experience possible for everyone and including the bartender, it's amazing what happens because probably Gail also wanted to work somewhere where she didn't have to go home and ice her knees or her back every night. And that's a really big part of bar design that's probably the most exciting thing we've seen in my lifetime is ergonomic bar design and not a marketing buzzword.

33:20Like, I don't know if you see anything like that or you hear about it or if there's any buzz, but I can tell you that within the next few years, I would guess if you're not designing bars for bartenders to be healthy and happy and behind them ergonomically, you're going to have a lot harder time in what is already very difficult labor market. Because you're right. They are. I have people who call me because their bartender, they'll say, well, the head bartender we hired or the beverage director wants your stuff. I don't know why, but they do. And every time it's like, because I work behind your design in Vegas or in New York or Manhattan or Brooklyn, and it's so much better.

33:55I love it. So they insist upon it. I think it's really hard to articulate what you learn over an extended period of time in a way that people can actually put it into action. And I read your book and I found it to be incredibly actionable. Talk to me about the process of writing the book, why it took so long, your aspirations around it, and how you think it turned out. Yeah, I bought five books on bar and restaurant design in about 05 or 04 because we were trying to get into the design part of consulting. And they all were the same. They were these weird places that were usually not anywhere in North America that I never had heard of.

34:33Tiny little poach's size stamps, four floor plans, couldn't see anything, no equipment, nothing that helped me be better at what I did. And all a lot of pros and a lot of artsy photos. And I just thought, these are coffee table books. This isn't what I was looking for. So I decided right then and there that, well, the world needs this book, so I'm going to write it. And I think I at that point I designed like two or three bars. And so I did an outline and I got into like chapter two and went, oh, I don't know that dimension. I don't know what that's called. I don't know the answer to this. So the world needs this book, but I'm not qualified to write it.

35:06So I went out and I spent 17 years designing bars, got really busy, did like the Bills NFL stadiums and high end hotels and famous chef restaurants and all everything, dive bars. And I finally made, I didn't get a break. I made the time about three years ago to start really putting some meat on the bones because there's a lot of bartender led bar design now, which is super exciting, but there's a lot of just things, just wild West still. And I'm like, you know, maybe as an industry, a global industry, We should just start codifying this, putting some terminology and some dimensions and help people understand what we're trying to do back here as bartenders.

35:46So I wrote the book, hoping it would help architects, designers, operators and owners, bartenders, food service, equipment dealers and consultants, everybody. If you have never designed a bar, if you've never worked behind a bar or that's all you've done is work behind a bar. I hope that if you read this book, you go, that's awesome. I never knew that. I can use that. I'm going to use that. And that was the goal. A lot of drawings, a lot of technical stuff, but a lot of just higher conversation. Why are bars not designed by bartenders? And are they? Well, the ones that are, what's the difference?

36:20The outcome, I mean, the reception has been great. We were just at BCB. It's a bartender convention in Brooklyn and it was the number one selling book, which is cool. It gives you good feedback. But probably one of the coolest things is when I get random DMs on Instagram at five in the morning from another country and people just, bartenders just say some really meaningful, powerful stuff to me. Cause that's quietly and secretly. That's what I wrote the book for, but it genuinely was for everyone. But bartenders are my tribe. And I think that I don't think there's a bartender alive that could read the first 10 pages of that book and not be cheering for it because it's about, it's not right.

36:57Not caring about the bartender experience, but saying you care about your employees is that's not right. Let's fix this. Here's how to do it. Here's a better path forward. and if it inspires a few bartenders to design their own bar or an owner operator to go, you know what? This makes a lot of sense. We're going to do this. There's your how do I fix my bar for under 200 bucks. It's 65 bucks and hopefully it will help a lot of operators and designers and architects build better bars for the bartender first, the guest second, and then the investor will reap the rewards. That's the goal. I'd like to end with this question specific to the book but also kind of specific to your practice in general.

37:34What I found is that everyone that does well, especially in the consulting, coaching space, all of that, typically they're working off a thesis. Sometimes it's contrarian, sometimes it isn't. But they believe something about their niche or their industry that no one else does. And I saw it come through in the book, but I would love to hear you articulate it. What is your thesis on beverage and bar design? the people who should be designing and building bars should have access to the insights of people who work behind them, if not the direct access to those people, that more bartenders should be involved in bar design because those are fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters tearing their bodies apart back there for scraps and tips and just trying to make ends meet, most of them.

38:24And if you haven't bartended, you have no idea how physically, emotionally, psychologically difficult and taxing that job is to do it well. And for those who do it well, they deserve better. I wish I had better. If we can prevent repetitive strain injuries on the next generation of bartenders, that's a huge win in the hospitality industry. And I think every other department has come into its own and it gets lots of attention and resources. I think the bar is one of the last ones, if not the last one too. And I'm just so excited that I can be a small part of that change. And that's it. I just want to see people set it on both sides of the bar, have a better experience, the guest and the bar staff, and then ultimately the owner is going to win too.

39:09And without the volume to hide behind and the declining volumes and people now competing against bars all the way around the world because of social media, I want to give operators this opportunity to dig into these dark corners and fix their businesses in ways they never thought possible so that there are more beautiful bars for all of us to enjoy and not fewer. Better bars with better experiences, better drinks, better times. Human beings have always gathered together in revelry and shared strange potions and elixirs and berries and fruits and all these things that make them feel funny so that they can feel a little more light and human and maybe step out of the doldrums of the concrete jungle and step into a world like KRS once said.

39:51And I just want to be part of that in whatever way I still can, even if I'm not behind the wood. Now I'm crawling under it and designing it on the screen. That's my joy and my passion. And I really appreciate you having me on your podcast, which also doesn't talk about this subject much. I feel very privileged and I thank you for that. That's Tobin Ellis. Learn more about his work designing high-performance bars and to grab his book, Bar Design Essentials, visit barmagic.com.

40:21Hey, it's Josh. I wanted to take a hot minute to thank you for listening to today's episode and to ask that if you are getting value from Full Comp, please like and subscribe and be sure to leave a review. Those reviews matter and they help other independent owners and operators find the show. Also, if you want to take the stuff that we're talking about in these episodes from idea to execution, head to joshcopal.com. There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum. I know you're busy, and so don't take your time for granted.

40:56Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.