When we bought the Windsor it wasn’t just losing money. It had no identity. The window had a giant 4×8 banner across the bottom half — “Gaming Café, Pizza, Beer Special, $10 Go Bears.” Above it were a few neon beer signs. From the outside, as a passerby, that’s all you’d know about us. They…
I want to start with a confession. For the first two years at Windsor, we had no idea who the distributor was for Malört!Malört. Our best seller. The thing we’re known for. We spent two years not knowing who distributed it, buying it through a wholesaler at a markup we didn’t need to pay, and…
I want to start with something that sounds simple but took me an embarrassingly long time to fully internalize.Every dollar you overspend in a bar doesn’t cost you a dollar. It costs you two.Here’s what I mean. If I have an unexpected $300 expense that I didn’t budget for, I can’t just pull $300 out…
I’m just going to say it upfront — buying The Beer and Now when I did was probably impatient. I probably should have waited, but there’s this other side of me that wants to jump on any opportunity when I can. But if you’ve been reading along, you already know that I am a lot…
There are two kinds of bars.The first kind is a place people end up. The night started somewhere else, things wound down, someone said “let’s grab one more” and you landed there. Those types of bars get the overflow. Not necessarily the last resort, but definitely not the reason someone went out. The bar didn’t…
Every bar owner has an origin story. Mine starts with a limousine, a fire, and a walk around my neighborhood at midnight while my wife and newborn were asleep. But what good would this story be if I didn’t give a 20 year lead up to it. SMALL BAR, DIVISION STREET, CHICAGO When I was…
I’m Al. I’m roughly 40 years old, married with two kids, and I work full-time as a Focused Improvement Manager at Mars Wrigley. I’ve spent 14 years in manufacturing, traveling to factories in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Canada — helping teams solve their most expensive, most complex problems. I would never consider myself the best…