Episode 1322: The Business Behind a Profitable Bar with Chris Schneider

A packed bar can look wildly successful from the outside while quietly losing money behind the scenes. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Chris Schneider, Bar Business Coach, who shares why many bars struggle not because they lack customers, but because owners often lack the financial systems, pricing discipline, labor management, and business acumen needed to protect margins. He explains the importance of prime cost, hiring for attitude rather than experience, creating a memorable guest experience, and making dozens of small operational improvements that collectively improve the bottom line. Chris also explores how AI can support back-office operations, why owners need to rely on data instead of instinct alone, and what he would change first when turning around a struggling neighborhood bar. Key Takeaways: → A bar can be packed with customers and still lose money if pricing, labor, entertainment, and other operating costs are not properly managed. → Hospitality businesses often struggle when passion and operational experience are not paired with strong business and financial skills. → Prime cost, which combines labor and the cost of goods sold, is one of the most important metrics bar and restaurant owners need to monitor. → A clean, well-maintained restroom can strongly influence how guests perceive the overall cleanliness and quality of the entire establishment. → Delivering an exceptional guest experience can generate more valuable word-of-mouth marketing than many traditional advertising methods. Chris Schneider bridges three critical areas in hospitality: operations, financial systems, and education. A former bar owner, he learned firsthand how to be profitable by managing neighborhood bars where every decision impacts the bottom line. His experience at Intuit as a QuickBooks Live Manager exposed him to patterns across thousands of small businesses, revealing that success comes from better systems and smarter use of financial data. Chris later taught hospitality at Ivy Tech, where he refined his ability to turn complex challenges into repeatable systems. He now coaches bar owners using his MCC Framework—Mindset, Concept, Culture—to improve profitability and operations. He hosts The Bar Business Podcast, reaching listeners in 100+ countries, and is the author of multiple industry books. Chris helps independent bar owners build profitable, system-driven businesses that align with their vision. Connect With Chris:Website: http://barbusinesscoach.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barbusinesscoach/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbusinesscoach LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-schneider-74732021/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsyvnkceZSVsRMTJdnB4SuQ

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be with Chris Schneider, the founder of The Bar Business Coach, a bar financial strategy coach and hospitality fractional CFO with more than two decades of industry experience.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  He's also the award-winning author of How to Make Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business, Menus That Sell, and he hosts the Bar Business Podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for having me here, Seth. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. So, let's go back in time a little bit. How did you originally get into the bar and hospitality business?

• 1:44Speaker 02

  You know, in a lot of ways, I was born into it, and that's what you hear from a lot of folks that are around. But I was eight years old when my parents bought their first restaurant. My parents had five restaurants over the course of my childhood and early adult life, went to college, studied restaurants, because that's what I'd done my whole life, got out, worked for somebody else for a couple of months, and said, you know what? I don't like working for other people. Ended up buying a bar when I was 22, and just kind of went from there. So, really, it's just something that's been in my DNA since I was a very little kid.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  What did you learn, actually? What are some of the things you learned actually working in sidebars that you couldn't have learned from a college course or a textbook?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  You know, I think the biggest ones really come down to what people see from the outside and what's reality on the inside are not always the same. And I think for hospitality, a lot of people that get into hospitality as a business, whether we're talking bars or restaurants, they're doing it because of the glamour of the industry, and the glamour is not what it's about, right? And a lot of times, you'll see these folks that go and they win the big awards, they also lose a lot of money in the process. And I will tell you, my parents had one of the best restaurants ever in Indiana, won a bunch of awards, lost a huge amount of money in the process. When I got out, I said, you know what? I don't want to do this. I went into the neighborhood bar business because I realized that's where the margins

• 3:09Speaker 02

  are good. There's nothing glamorous, there's nothing fancy about it, right? You're slinging Draft Miller Lite over a bar for the most part, but that's where the margins are, the labor works, and you can make the business work.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  So, when did you realize that many bars, for example, they don't have a customer problem? You say they've got a business management problem.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  So, I realized that, honestly, watching my parents lose a bunch of money getting awards, and they had, I mean, they had the best service, they were in the Fine Dining Hall of Fame, they had phenomenal food service and all of it. And it's not to say they were bad business people, they weren't. But it is to say that frequently, and I think this is something special about the bar and restaurant industry, people get into it without any other knowledge of the industry, right? They go, this looks fun, anybody can do this. And so, you have people that have great ideas, a lot of passion, a lot of people that have come up in the industry and, you know, worked their way towards the top, but a manager knows very little about business. And when that person becomes the owner and the operator, they're not really going to succeed.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  So, it's something that I've always recognized, and I think for whatever reason, hospitality is one of the industries where business acumen and business ownership do not always line up.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Interesting. What prompted you to become the Bar Business Coach?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  So, part of it was, in all honesty, COVID. Part of it was, I was tired of working till 5:00 in the morning. And so, I had been in the bar industry up to a little bit before COVID and got out of it because I, the one bar I had at that point, I had a bad landlord issue, which is a whole different story, but something I see a lot in this industry. And COVID hit, I said, you know, do I really want to get back in this industry and work till 5:00 in the morning? I said, really, I don't. I said, but I have some skills, I have some knowledge that I could share with people and help them be more successful, and that's what pushed me to do what I'm doing today.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And why can a bar look like packed Friday and Saturday night and still lose money?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  That is a great question, and that's something I see so often. And the reason why it can look packed is because it's full of people, right? I mean, it's, you think about a lot of businesses out there, if you're in a product business, your other customers are not seeing your other customers, right? In the bar industry, every customer knows how busy you are.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And a lot of folks will come in and they'll say, oh, this bar is packed, they must be making huge money. And frankly, that's often not the case. And so, it can be everything from poor business models to the wrong prices, but a lot of what I see, you know, you go to a bar every Friday night because they have a great band. Well, maybe that band is charging them so much that it's eating out their margin, and yeah, they might have 500 people in the building, but they may not be profiting a single dollar after all the costs associated with having those 500 people in the building.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So, what's, I mean, are most bar owners aware they're struggling before the cash problem becomes serious?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, no. So, that's something that I think because of the way the bar industry works and the restaurant industry works, where you have people coming in, you see these crowds, you have people, quite frankly, a lot of times, telling you how great you are, right? It's the best industry possible for your own ego. And so, it's really easy to delude yourself and to see all these positive outward signs, whether it's awards, guests telling you how great you are, just seeing your room packed, watching people have fun, and assume that all that is translating to your bottom line, which sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. And unless you're willing to really dig into the data and understand where your business

• 7:03Speaker 02

  sits, it's really hard to tell from those outside signs what's actually going on.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So, can you walk into a bar and 15 minutes, spot signs that it's like poorly run?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Sometimes, right? I mean, some things are just blatantly obvious. If you can't get a drink refilled after you finish it, well, clearly, that's a problem, right? If the servers are not well-trained, you can see that, that's clearly a problem. But a lot of these signs are not on the hospitality side because most people in this industry are very good at that. They're in the P and L, they're buried in fixed costs, they're buried in pricing, in menu design, in things that are a lot more hidden. And so, something I like to tell people a lot, and I actually lose some clients sometimes because of this, is that when people are looking for this magic lever in the hospitality industry, you say, I need to increase my bottom line by 3%.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  There has to be one thing I can do. That's normally not the case. Normally, it's not one thing to make a 3% change, it's 30 things that are worth a tenth of a percent that all add up to that 3% change, and that requires real work and time to get things fixed, and it's not always obvious what those things are.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  You talk about prime cost. What is that and why is it so important?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  So, in hospitality, prime cost is essentially the sum of our labor and our cost of goods sold. And the reason why we like to look at those together, unlike some other industries, we're going to separate out that labor, they're intrinsically connected, right? The number of servers I have on, the number of bartenders, the number of people I have in a kitchen, all are involved in producing that product in the moment. So, in the industry, generally, we're looking for something between 55% and 65% of all our revenue is going to just labor and cost of goods sold, which is a lot higher than most industries. And so, if we can't optimize our labor and our costs, you know, particularly food costs lately with the way inflation has been the last couple of years, it's been brutal.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  If we can't optimize those, there's no way to protect that bottom line margin because for most bars and restaurants, the bottom line is only 5% to 10% of what's coming in the door. In a fantastic situation, maybe you're approaching 20, but there is no 40% bottom line in hospitality like it's possible in a lot of other industries.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  You started talking about people. You've said that owners often hire for experience and fire for attitude. Why is that backwards?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Because in hospitality, it's about experience for your guest. Right? If you go out to a bar or restaurant, most places have pretty similar products. Right? Our product differentiation is not huge in this industry. What is difference is the service and the experience you have.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  And so if you hire for experience, a lot of times you're getting an employee that's worked for a lot of people. And yeah, maybe, you know, if we're talking bartender, they can make a bunch of cocktails. But they also probably have a lot of bad ingrained habits. And they may not be good with people, right? They may not present your establishment in a way that's going to communicate with your guests in the best way possible. So if you hire for attitude, if you hire that person that walks into the room and lights the room up, that everyone just wants to be around and like, you can teach them how to make a cocktail. Right? Our business is not rocket science. It's not that hard to pull off. But without the right attitude, no amount of experience is going to make

• 10:46Speaker 02

  that guest really feel welcome in an establishment.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  You recently wrote that whether an owner still loves their bar can ultimately affect the P and L. Can you explain that?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think this is true of all businesses, but it seems to come up more in bars than other business owners that I know. Because we work really long hours. It is a brutal industry. Right? I don't know many other people outside of hospitality where it's common to get a phone call from your employees for some crisis at three o'clock in the morning.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  And so you have to be in love with what you're doing. Otherwise, when the phone rings at four o'clock and you have to wake out of bed and go into work and fix some problem that is an emergency, it's really hard to do. And so if you don't have love in the bar or restaurant you're running, if you, if that does not bring you joy, it just becomes mentally impossible, emotionally impossible to put yourself in the right mindset to be able to maintain and continue with that business long term.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Chris, you made the argument that the restroom is the one of the most important rooms in a bar. Why?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Well, for a couple of reasons, and this is actually one of my favorite things. Cause I think we all know, we've all been to that bar restaurant where you go into the bathroom and it's just kind of messy and maybe it smells a little bit off. And the first thing most everyone thinks is, I wonder what the kitchen looks like. Right? So the bathroom in a lot of ways is an analog for how the cleanliness is everywhere else the guest cannot see easily. The other piece is particularly when we're talking about bars and on the divy or bar side of things, attracting women sometimes is hard.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  And women will go to a bar that's a little divy that has a very clean restroom and enjoy it. But if they go to a bar that's a bit divy and that restroom isn't very clean, they probably aren't coming back. So particularly when it comes to maintaining women as regulars, it's almost imperative that you have a restroom that is clean, smells fresh, looks good, is well stocked.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Because they're going to judge you everything else you do based on that.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in a bar in the last month where the men's room, one of the, the doors wouldn't lock on one of the stalls. The other one that was missing the toilet seat.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Oh, that's not good.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. I have not gone back.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Where can, um, we think of bars as a lower tech business, but where can AI help make a bar more profitable?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  So I think bars in, intrinsically hospitality, right? It's a person to person interaction. And when we look at the front of the house, when we're talking to bartenders, the servers, a lot of people have tried to put AI there. They've tried to put robots there. That's never going to work. But where AI and tech can help all businesses is in the back office. Right? Especially when we're talking about folks that admittedly, like we were talking about earlier, maybe don't have the best background in financial management. Well, if we can use AI to do some financial analysis for them, that's helpful. If we can use AI to help build training materials so that you can produce more faster, that is helpful. So in hospitality, it's really always going to be a back office thing.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Because the second I put AI between me and say, you Seth, as my guest, you're not going to enjoy that anymore because it's not the experience you're paying for. But if I can use AI to free up time I should be, or I was spending in the back office to spend more time with you as the guest, I can build more connection and drive more revenue.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  If I handed you the keys to a struggling neighborhood bar today, I give you 30 days to turn it around, but you can't spend any money on advertising. What are the first five things you change?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Well, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at, does this make sense? Right? So I think one of the things that's very true of bars and restaurants, you walk in and your brain instantly is coming up with some image of what it is. And if you walk into a place that says it's an Irish pub and there's nothing Irish in it, it's just not going to feel right. So the first thing I would look at is, does that feel right? Right? And just because if you're walking in the door, that's what you're going to see. The second thing I'm going to look at is what is the service? Right? What are we doing to provide that guest an experience they can't get anywhere else? And then how can I train the whole team to do it?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Because while you may not give me a single dollar to spend on marketing, a lot of traditional marketing in hospitality is not helpful. What is helpful is if I can make sure that every guest that comes in the door has the best experience possible and they go tell their friends, that's better marketing than anything I can pay for in this industry.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  You have helped so many bars. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  My biggest challenge is probably what it always has been, which is for whatever reason, the bar industry has stubborn people. And I am one of them. And a lot of folks, and I see this in, in bars particularly because we're, we're a stubborn lot. I think that's true of a lot of small business owners. They're against change. And sometimes a little bit of change is required to grow a business. Right? If you do things the way you've always done them, you probably will get the same results you've always had. And so stubbornness is the thing I bump into more than anything else. And also along with stubbornness, people that rely on their gut too much.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Right? Guts are great. You need to rely on how you feel about a business in a lot of ways. But if the data doesn't support what you feel, you need to look at the data and say, okay, maybe this is true.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  What I honestly, what I like best about what I'm doing is helping people. I mean, that's, that's, that's what I really get out of this. At the end of the day, I am a hospitality guy. I love service as something to do. And so while I might not be serving people across a bar anymore, I get to serve the people that serve the people across the bar. And so that's really what keeps me passionate about it and what keeps me getting up every day is knowing that by what I'm doing, I can help people have a better life.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  For our folks watching and listening who are in the hospitality industry, where is the best place for them to send to learn more about you?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  So easiest thing to do is go to my website, barbusinesscoach.com, the podcast, Bar Business Podcast. It's available everywhere where there are podcasts. Obviously I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, all those places you can hit me up. But starting with the website is probably the easiest place to go.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  All right. Well, this has been Seth Green for Sharkpreneur with Chris Snyder from Bar Business Coach. Chris, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me on Seth.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 17:55Speaker 03

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