brandona33 said:
I commend your venture, and am envious of it as well. Not an expert, but thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.
1. Someone mentioned location/near a University. While that parcel may be pricier, we have a pub like this that sells only micros, 36 on tap. They have a beer tour where you drink 35 and you get the 36th free and in a souvineer glass. In an area where you can get a pint for $2, the cheapest thing on tap is $4.50 and the place is always packed. Then drink 24 bottle, from 15 different countries, you get a sweatshirt and your name on a palque on the wall. THIS PLACE IS ALWAYS PACKED! Mostly college kids running up thier credit cards. Menu is cheese/crackers, ham/cheese sandwich, or pizza. So a gimmick like that could help the process of establishing regular buisness
2. Surround yourself with a great staff. In the 1st year, cash will be tight. You want people who care about your success because it leads to thiers. Money well spent if they make consumers feel good and come back.
Best of Luck
See, that's kinda what my concept is. I want to have every Texas beer I can get on tap. There are five Texas breweries, each with four to five beers. I'd like to have about 30 taps, and have about two dozen of them with Texas beers, then use the last half dozen for the hardcore standbys that you have to have at a pub, stuff like guinness and dos equis. Then all the other american microbrews, european beers, and majors would be bottles. And we'd have a basic food menu like pizzas and sandwiches.
Where I work now, we have a mug club, where you spend $75 to get a pewter mug which is numbered on the bottom and has our logo on one side. You can get your name, nickname, catchphrase or whatever engraved on the other side.
Pretty cool idea in theory, but the execution is a major pain in the ass. We have over four hundred of the bastards now, and we've got them all hanging on hooks from the ceiling behind the bar. I'm the only bartender tall enough to reach them all. Everyone else has to stand on a milk crate or step ladder to get them down.
Also, we're running out of room to add more mugs, and hanging them from the handles is bad news, as the handles have a tendency to break off with too much use. Finally, the soft pewter gets scratched and dented easily, and after a few months of use, the mugs look pretty beat up.
Oh yeah, and people will come in and try to scam using mugs by either trying to use a friend's mug or just flat out making up a mug number to use. We actually had an incident a few weeks ago where someone was using a mug at a table, and someone else tried to use the same mug at another table. I had the waitresses go ask them who's mug it really was. Turns out, it was neither of theirs! They had both gotten the number from a mutual friend who told everyone they knew they could use their mug when they went up there.
Wow this turned into a big rant, but the point is, if I do some kind of club, I'd rather do something like what you mentioned, where if you drink every tap beer, you get some kind of souvenir, like a special glass, or a plaque or shirt or whatever.
That's the best thing about the situation. I have tons of experience actually working a bar, and I know what works and what doesn't. I think the best strength of my place would be that it would be ridiculously efficient, and would let the employees focus on doing their jobs, instead of getting bogged down in time-wasting inconveniences such as what I described above.
In fact, my current idea would be to open a place small enough that it could be run with just two bartenders, and one busser. No waitresses required. My friend that I first started talking to about this last year said that he knew two bartenders that went into together on a place and opened it for a mere $60k! Another guy I know that is GM at the place next to where I work told me he knows another guy that opened a beer/wine bar for only $30k!
That's chump change! I'd rather do that than try to open a $400k brewpub/restaurant monstrosity. I think that's why most places fail. The owners bite off way more than they can chew and the place is unable to pay for itself fast enough. Such a small investment could easily be paid back in a year.
