The truth is that if you have a business that you need to get done, you have to make sure that you have a solid plan for it. If you don’t, you’ll never get it done.
I’ve noticed this is true with a lot of things in life. A business plans that you have to follow up on in the morning is not actually a plan at all. It’s a distraction from the actual work that you’re supposed to be doing, so you can get that done.
Youll spend a bunch of money at the store, then youll go to sleep, and then youll wake up at 3:00 and realize youll be out of money. Or maybe youll wake up at 3:00 and realize you haven’t had a drink for a week and you’re out of money. If you start to think that your business is a distraction from your real work, youll actually start to work harder.
Most business owners know this but the truth is that it happens. If youre like me, you spend a lot of weekends at the bar and then its back to work. But if you do that as well, youll start to see your business begin to lose focus on weekends. If you also spend a lot of weekends at the bar, youll end up with a lot of money, and youll be spending a bunch of money on drinks.
It’s true that weekends are important to a lot of businesses (even my own). But when you spend way more time at the bar than at work, youre probably going to end up with a lot more money. Plus, the more you spend at the bar on weekends, the more your business will lose focus on Mondays when you’re trying to make payroll.
The best way to keep your business focused is to spend just a little more time at the bar on weekends, but spend a lot less on your business on weekdays. Most bars in Chicago are open for business from Monday through Friday, but they do close sometimes for lunch and/or for the bar on weeknights. And that means more money for your business.
But, just because your bar is open for business on weeknights doesn’t mean you should start working there on weekends. That’s because weekends are a busy time for many Chicago business owners. One way to minimize the time you have to spend at your bar on weeknights is to make the bar available to the public on Saturday nights. In fact, you can tell a lot about a bar by the number of Saturday night crowds that crowd the bar on Saturday nights.
In other words, if you operate a small bar on weeknights, you should be making more money on weeknights, but if you’re a business owner in Chicago that is operating a bar on Saturday nights, it means you’re already making less money on the weekends.
Another way to minimize the time you spend at your bar on weeknights is to charge a premium on the weekends. If you charge only $5 or $10 you can use those dollars towards the bar. If you charge $15 you can use those dollars towards the bar. If you charge $20 you can use those dollars towards the bar. That makes the bar much more appealing to the weekend crowd and thus more profitable for you.
Some bar owners tell me they have a hard time convincing their regulars to come into work on a Saturday. To see why that is, I’m going to give you a few examples of how their bars are run. One of my bar’s owners is a woman who runs a bar where customers pay only on the weekend. She is one of the few businesses in town that has no minimum sales on the weekends.