All businessmen are not the same

There are assumptions about businesses in India. That they are only run by rich people. That everything they are doing at some level must be unethical. That all of them must have some secret deal with the party in power. Being businessmen, they must also be automatically profiteers, hoarders and polluters of the environment. Plus, have an apartment in London paid for with black money from a Swiss account.

Our notion of businessmen naturally comes from the media. We see magazine covers with a photo of some guy in a regal suit and it says ‘Telecom Tycoon’ or ‘Media Moghul’ and we think, wow, what a fun royal life. And inside, there are photos of their society spouse (“I plan every party meticulously”), their handsome Ivy Leagueeducated kids who have some random title (VP of Company Relations) but basically “being groomed for the top job”. They are those Forbes lists where their worth is listed — a bazillion dollars, still ranked 37th. They photograph the businessman sitting at an angle, surrounded by their family bathed in jewels and Nehru jackets under a chandelier in a really elegant drawing room.

The reality is, sure, some Indian businessmen have jumped in on an opportunity and done well. But the vast amount of their time is not spent smiling in elegant rooms under chandeliers for Forbes. It is spent in gruelling negotiations for bank loan extensions, or understanding some new convoluted technology regulation in a Delhi regulatory office where the fan doesn’t work.

When any sort of shouting happens against businessmen — whether an environmental agitation or random public protests — the narrative is always: well, they are businessmen. We are common people. They have loads of money, power and privilege. Naturally, we are on the side of those protesting to shut down the business.

Judging all Indian businessmen by the top 15 billionaires is like judging every website as if it were Facebook. The bulk of India’s businessmen and entrepreneurs are people you’ve never heard of, are not politically connected, and no one puts them on any magazine cover. They struggle daily just to keep their enterprise open, make about the same as a middle-class employee of a corporation, and often fail. After bank loans, overheads, legal costs and employee salaries, they are often more common than the common man protesting outside his or her office.

Doing business in India is insane. Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you it’s like fighting a small war every day. And that’s just to manage things nothing to do with the business: flip-flopping regulations, needling competitors, litigations, some infrastructure collapse. And then, at some point in the day, maybe the evening, they get to the actual business with its own crises: absent employees, irate customers, some online review with false accusations, stolen money, stolen inventory.

At midnight perhaps, they can put their mind to how to actually run the business.

You wonder why they do it. Why not settle into some nice corporate job where as long as you dress nicely, speak reasonably well with the apropos references, people assume business acumen. Corporate jobs have their own problems: internal politics, power dynamics with colleagues, but the buck never stops with the employee. It travels up into the ether somewhere and is lost. The employee can have one good presentation and spend the rest of the day writing a Chetan Bhagat-esque novel, consider it a good day at business and get promoted to VP the next day.

Entrepreneurs are a different animal. They have no hours, no outfits, no fancy jargons and are comfortable equally with Goldman Sachs and Maharashtra Truck Union meetings. Internationally, the real skill of businessmen is to pinpoint a need, a problem, a gap in the market, and address it. In India, businessmen realise that is only the starting point. The real skill is to be able to endure the feeling of bungee-jumping off a different cliff every day. And enjoying it.

A small businessman who runs three restaurants explained to me, “Forget a Swiss bank account. I can’t even open an HDFC Bank account. I don’t know who the media thinks we are when they say businessmen are making millions and looting the country. Just today, I had to pay three bribes, solve three internal fights, two cooks resigned, deal with a Neft issue that blocked delivery from our supplier. And it’s just 7:00 am.”

“Why do you go on?” I asked.

“I don’t know any other way to live,” he replied. “A 9-to-5 would kill me.”

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“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” ~C. S. Lewis

My wake-up call came at a friend’s wedding about seven years ago. Somebody asked me what I did for a living, and I answered truthfully: I’m a singer in a rock band. She thought it was cool, but I went into a rant about why it wasn’t.

“Creative work is definitely more perspiration than inspiration. The constant travelling and playing late night gigs is exhausting. The ‘business’ side of ‘music business’ is a joke,” I fumed.

On and on I went. As you’d expect, she was pretty shocked. But it was her words to me that made me stop in my tracks: “Wow, so much anger!”

What had happened to me? My dream of living off my music had come true. It was a childhood dream of mine, and I was one of the lucky few who were actually living that dream.

Yet, I was angry and bitter. I felt like I wasn’t in control of my own life and my own decisions, because I didn’t own my time, my location, or my money. I felt like my band owned me, because the band always had to come first.

I realized that my dream wasn’t my dream anymore. Something that once filled me with excitement and passion had become a burden. It was time to find a new dream.

These changes are inevitable in life. You might have experienced the same when you’ve had to let go of a big and important dream.

Maybe a relationship proved to be more painful than fulfilling and you had to scrap your big dream of starting a family.

Or maybe starting a family suddenly made your dream job feel meaningless, and spending twelve hours a day at work felt like missing out on something far more important.

Maybe you were a serious athlete and an injury forced you to quit your sport.

These were things that you worked hard for, and making the decision to leave them behind can feel like cutting off the most important thing in your life. Now what?

Finding that next thing to fill the void of the Big Dream proved to be a lot harder than I expected. I experienced grief, emptiness, and a total lack of direction. I felt I was wasting my life.

Suddenly I had all this time in my hands that I could have used for other things, but I didn’t know what those other things were. Everything felt a bit pointless. The big picture was missing.

The dream used to be my goalpost, something that always showed me the direction. Without the dream, I lacked motivation and the reason to do anything.

So how do you dig yourself out of that hole? How do you find that spark again? This is what I did.

Give yourself time.

Give yourself enough time to let the old dream die first. Allow yourself the emotions of grief, anger, depression, and loss. It can be tempting to dismiss those feelings and jump headfirst into a new project, but process the death of the old dream first.

Allow yourself to just be. Take walks, write a journal, spend more time with friends. Empty yourself from your old routine and just live one day at a time.

This can be hard if you are driven and goal-oriented, but sometimes it’s good to give yourself room to clear the table. Allow yourself enough time and space so that your new dream has the space to appear.

Try new things.

Your new direction and purpose might be radically different to your old one. Give yourself an opportunity to explore completely new things. Mingle with different people, travel to new places, read books you would have never touched before.

You may find a whole new world that you never had time to discover before because you were so immersed in your old dream. This is the time to give yourself a chance to experience something new.

Don’t force yourself to the next thing. Instead, keep an open mind. What else does this wonderful world have to offer us?

Be honest with yourself.

Spend time in learning more about the person that you truly are. What is it that you really want in life? Have you changed as a person?

It’s so easy to go with what other people say or make decisions based on other people’s expectations. Maybe things broke down for a very good reason. Your old dream didn’t serve the person you are now.

Re-define the dream.

Ask yourself brutally honest questions. What does real success look like for you? What is it that truly makes you happy?

Maybe you want more time, not more money. Maybe you crave more freedom, not a more demanding job. When you become really clear about what is important to you in life, you will find the first clues about what your new dream will look like.

—

For me, it was incredibly important to let go of the old dream that didn’t serve me anymore. Feeling angry and bitter is far worse than feeling lost and empty for a while. Change is difficult, but enduring a period of pain is the path to turning things around.

Sometimes the new dream and the new direction can be found in the most unexpected of places, but that’s what starting over is all about.

It took me a while to find my mojo again, but once I did I felt like anything was possible again. Life changes, we change as people; it only makes sense that our dreams change too.

I found a new balance and a new direction when I started to diversify my ideas of success. Achieving the dream shouldn’t be about sacrifice and pain. Instead, it should be about daily joy.

What you do every day is what your life becomes about. The dream is just your idea of the future. Focusing on enjoying the every day will lead you to that next Big Dream that is right for you.

Becoming Jobs is not an easy exercise

Who was Steve Jobs? Half-genius and half asshole? A new book, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by business journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli (published by Sceptre; distributed by Hachette India, pages 447, Price Rs 699) grapples with the question again.

The earlier, the authorized biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson was an intense portrayal of the man. Becoming Steve Jobs, however, is blessed by the Apple management. A quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook which authors Schlender and Tetzeli have included in the book reveals what Becoming Steve Jobs is all about: “I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time.”

Schlender and Tetzeli have a written this book for the business community, with its focus on products and how Job’s leadership changed over the years. Isaacson’s effort, which was commissioned by Jobs himself, was focusing less on business and more on the man’s life, his struggles, tussles and triumphs. Schlender and Tetzeli have stayed away from ‘the reality distortion field’ but Becoming Steve Jobs is an equally interesting and important book that one should not miss out.

The book’s value lies in its argument that Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths.

Becoming Steve Jobs notes that Jobs’s negative qualities did not go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits.

The strength of the book derives from the fact that Schlender has been a kind of a tech industry insider having covered Apple and Jobs over the years for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal and having a working relationship with the man himself. Becoming Steve Jobs has relied on a series of interviews with people who worked with Jobs at Apple, NeXT and Pixar. May be one significant voice that is missing from here is that of the other Steve—Wozniacki.

The authors bring in—not that it is something new—Jobs’s spiritual life. They write that “the spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities—ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models—that escaped most others.”

Jobs, who came to India seeking spiritual awakening during his under graduate days, was tempted by Buddhism. Schlender writes that Buddhism made Jobs feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than what he deemed to be perfection from others, from the products he would create, and from himself.

Then explaining the book itself, he writes: “In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an ever-changing river. There is a sense that everything, and every individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process, and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature.”

And the book is an effort in telling how Steve became from an upstart to visionary leader—from setting up Apple to getting kicked out by his own recruit—CEO John Sculley, the Pepsicola man—and moving on to create NeXT and owning and backing Pixar. And finally returning chastened to Apple first as iCEO and then taking full control and coming up with a whole new range of products.

Schlender goes back to Joe Nocera’s Esquire profile of Jobs to tell us how he felt about getting ousted from Apple. “Apple is like an intensive love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who is not so neat.” At 30 you won’t blame Jobs for thinking that. The conclusion is that the Steve Jobs of 1986 was too raw, too self-centred, and too immature to successfully pull off the balancing act required of a big-time CEO. And that again explains the need for this book.

The NeXT did not bolster Jobs’s image but acquiring Pixar, a company of outrageously talented creative people, changed him. Pixar became the place where he really learned, albeit slowly and reluctantly and against his natural instincts, that sometime the best management technique is to forgo micromanagement and give good talented people the room they need to succeed. The authors make the conclusion that without the lessons at Pixar there would have been no great second act at Apple in 1997. May be then the best thing that could have happened to Jobs was getting kicked out by Sculley in May 1985.

So, what did Jobs learn at Pixar? His negotiating style gained new subtlety without losing its ballsy brashness. It is at Pixar that he started to develop patience—without losing any of his memorable, and motivating edge. Jobs also understood that true artists “keep risking failure just as Bob Dylan and Picasso did.”

But, then, I’m left with this question. As India Inc tries to kick start itself, I repeatedly wonder would a Jobs’s story be possible here? An abandoned baby at birth [more than an orphan]—not a teaboy—building from scratch one of the world’s most successful tech companies without any help from the government (land handouts and other freebies, licences) and the family?

10 Behaviors of Genuine People

Whether you’re building a business, a network, or friendships, you always want to look for people who are genuine. After all, nobody wants to work or hang out with a phony. On the flipside, that goes for you, as well. Bet you never considered that. 

In case you're wondering, genuine means actual, real, sincere, honest. Genuine people are more or less the same on the inside as their behavior is on the outside. Unfortunately, it's a tough quality to discern. The problem is that all human interactions are relative. They’re all a function of how we perceive each other through our own subjective lenses. 

Being genuine is also a rare quality. In a world full of phony fads, media hype, virtual personas, positive thinkers, and personal brands – where everyone wants what they don’t have, nobody’s content to be who they are, and, more importantly, nobody’s willing to admit to any of that – it’s becoming more and more rare all the time.  

To help you identify this rare breed -- in yourself, as well -- this is how genuine people behave. 

They don’t seek attention. They don’t need constant reinforcement of their own ego. Where attention seekers have a hole that constantly needs to be filled, genuine people are already filled with self-confidence and self-awareness.

They’re not concerned with being liked. The need to be liked is born of insecurity and narcissism. It creates a need to manipulate your own and other’s emotions. Confident and authentic people are simply themselves. If you like them, fine. If not, that’s fine, too.

They can tell when others are full of it. Perhaps naïve folks can be easily fooled, but genuine people are not naïve. They’re grounded in reality and that gives them a baseline from which they can tell when things don’t add up. There’s a big difference. 

They are comfortable in their own skin. In his late 70s, actor Leonard Nimoy said he was closer than ever to being as comfortable with himself as Spock appeared to be. Most of us struggle with that. As Henry David Thoreau observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

They do what they say and say what they mean. They don’t tend to overreach or exaggerate. They meet their commitments. And they don’t parse their words or sugarcoat the truth. If you need to hear it, they’ll tell you … even if it’s tough for them to say and for you to hear.

They don’t need a lot of stuff. When you’re comfortable with whom you are, you don’t need a lot of external stuff to be happy. You know where to find happiness – inside yourself, your loved ones, and your work. You find happiness in the simple things.

They’re not thin-skinned. They don’t take themselves too seriously so they don’t take offense when none is intended.

They’re not overly modest or boastful. Since they’re confident of their strengths, they don’t need to brag about them. Likewise, they don’t exhibit false modesty. Humility is a positive trait but it’s even better to just be straightforward.

They’re consistent. You might describe genuine people as being weighty, solid, or substantial. Since they know themselves well and are in touch with their genuine emotions, they’re more or less predictable ... in a good way.  

They practice what they preach. They’re not likely to advise people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. After all, genuine people know they’re no better than anyone else so it’s not in their nature to be self-righteous.  

All those seemingly different behaviors have the same thing at their core: self-awareness that’s consistent with reality. Genuine people see themselves as others would if they were objective observers. There’s not a lot of processing, manipulating, or controlling going on between what’s in their head and what people see and hear.

Once you get to know them, genuine people turn out to be more or less consistent with the way they initially hold themselves out to be. What you see is what you get. It's sad that, in today's world, such a positive quality is at risk of becoming endangered. Not only is it harder to find in others, it's becoming harder to be genuine ourselves. 

10 Books That Will Change Your Life

Are you looking for books that will change your life?    Are you wanting to get leverage on yourself, and make real changes, but you’d love a guide to assist you?

These 10 books absolutely fit that criteria.  Read them, but more importantly, do what they tell you.  It is your acting not just your reading that will get you the best results.  These books however will give you the framework that you need to take action:

1. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

The most important book I’ve ever read, and the book that has helped me most to build successful businesses, write a book and create an authentic and fulfilling career.  It has allowed me to break through my inner resistance and create my authentic life, and live my authentic self.  Critical if you are an entrepreneur, writer, artist, or any form of “creator”.

2. Turning Pro – by Steven Pressfield

The follow up to the War of Art.  In the War of Art Pressfield identifies the enemy to living an authentic life – resistance.  In Turning Pro, Pressfield teaches you how to defeat it.

3. Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience – by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What are the optimal experiences in our life?  The vacations?  Laying on the beach?  No.  World renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his landmark book proves that optimal experience is actually the moments in our life when we are giving our very best in pursuit of self-directed meaningful goals.  Through this book learn how to channel flow, and your life will forever change.

4. As a Man Thinketh – by James Allen

Thoughts are things. We are what we repeatedly think about.  Learn to first create in your mind the life that you want, then manifest its reality through your hard work and actions.  A classic – short simple and powerful.

5. Mastery – by Robert Greene

Mastery teaches you to take the long run, and seek a higher form of success, one that very few people every achieve – the level of mastery.  Learn from case studies of some of the worlds’s greatest masters and absorb practical advice on how you can apply it.

6. The Alchemist – by Paulo Coelho

An easy to read, highly descriptive, story that teaches a powerful metaphor – how to pursue your dreams.  Learn the obstacles that will arise, and learn how to channel your courage on the path of what you value most.

7. Awaken The Giant Within – by Anthony Robbins

Don’t let the TV infomercials fool you – this book has high quality strategies that are immediately applicable to get control of your emotional self.  When you can control the inner, then the outer follows.  Get leverage on yourself by reading this book and applying the strategies you learn.

8. The Game – by Neil Strauss

A fascinating read – my advice – read it from a cultural psychology perspective.  You will see that there are certain patterns of behaviour and influence what work with people.  Learn how people think and what attracts them, and what repels them.  You will need to be a master of influence in order to achieve any dream that involves other people.

9.  The Way Of The Superior Man – by David Deida

This book is more applicable for men, but worth reading by anyone. Get leverage over yourself.  This book helps you to understand various emotional challenges that many men experience and how to gain mastery over one of the most difficult opponents: yourself.

10.  7 Habits Of Highly Effective People – by Stephen R. Covey

A practical masterpiece with easy to follow instructions and guides.  Useful for both businesses and individuals.  Learn to “put first things first” and “begin with the end in mind”.  This book is a classic in management and leadership literature, and should be mandatory reading for anyone who is in a position of influence.

Thought for Today (Warren Buffett)

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

- Warren Buffett

How to Start a Bar/Club (STARTING A BUSINESS)

                         How to Start a Bar/Club

Friends, laughter, celebrations, entertainment--fun! These are the things that might come to your mind when you think about owning your own bar as you imagine rooms filled with friendly conversation, music and people enjoying themselves. If you're thinking of opening a sports bar, you might envision an exciting game on big-screen TVs with everyone cheering and having a great time. Owning a bar sounds like the perfect life to many potential entrepreneurs, but it's not always fun and games behind the scenes.

Owning your own bar/club can mean long hours, meticulous attention to detail, giving up vacations and weekends, and sometimes dealing with unruly customers. But if you have a clear vision, do your homework and learn the ins and outs of the business, it can also translate into a rewarding and financially successful enterprise.

The Stats

Although people still gather to socialize in bars, just as they have for hundreds of years, other factors have come into play for the industry as well. Problems with driving while intoxicated have changed the drinking patterns of people in United States. The growing concern with health and fitness toward the end of the 20th century took its toll on the bar industry. Keeping tabs on this industry requires a look at the alcoholic beverage industry as a whole--what people buy in the store doesn't differ much from what they buy in a bar. The distilled spirits industry generates around $100 billion in U.S. economic activity annually, according to the Distilled Spirits Council, a national trade association. 

You have some pretty tough competition out there. But you're not just competing with the other bars in your area these days. You're competing with every entertainment option from which your customers can choose.

What You Can Expect

Successful new bars can be in the black within the first six months, and they can go on to recover their initial investment within three to five years. However, like many new businesses, the statistics for bars aren't in favor of the startup. Why do they fail? The first reason is they didn't have enough capital to keep the business going. The second reason is a lack of knowledge about the business.

From a personal perspective, you need to ask yourself if you're really the type of person who wants to own and run a bar. Of course, you don't have to run it if you own it, but you'd better make sure you have a team of good, trustworthy managers working for you if you plan to be "hands off." In the beginning, you will probably have to be greatly involved whether you plan to be an active owner or not. If you're the kind of person who would rather deal with paperwork or sit in an office where you don't have to talk to people, this business is not for you. You will need to be out there talking to people and shaking hands. Getting to know your patrons, even if it's just to say "Hi," can go a long way for your customer service.

Another thing you should consider is the time commitment and hours of operation. If you're an early riser, you might not enjoy having to work until 3 or 4 a.m. at your bar. If you have a family, you need to discuss how owning a bar will affect them. Many days you will have to be at your bar from the time you wake up--say, around 10 or 11 a.m.--to the time you go to sleep--say, around 4 or 5 a.m. As you can see, this could take its toll on your family life. Eventually, you'll probably be able to have a saner schedule, once your managers and staff are well-trained, but it may take six months to a year to reach that point. If this could cause problems for you or your family, you may want to reconsider the idea of owning a bar.

If we haven't scared you away yet and you're ready to go for the bottle-in-the-sky dream, read on!

What's Your Bar Type?

Before you get started on the actual nuts and bolts of creating your dream bar, you have to decide what kind of establishment you'd like to own. Let's take a trip through the various kinds of bars--from neighborhood bar to large-scale club--and see which one is right for you.

• Neighborhood bar. Conceptually, the neighborhood bar is still an American version of the English pub. You'll find them everywhere in the United States. If you own this kind of place, you can expect to know many of your regular customers. As on the TV show "Cheers," you may find yourself taking phone messages for customers or cashing their paychecks. It's because of the friendly "home away from home" atmosphere that neighborhood bars are successful. Some of these pubs open as early as 6 a.m., and they sometimes close earlier than other bars--depending on the clientele. This type of bar is perfect for small-scale entertainment options, such as darts, pool tables, video games and jukeboxes.
• Across the country, this is probably the most popular type of bar you'll find. There are a lot of neighborhoods out there, but you might find that there is room for one more in your area. According to the experts we interviewed, the startup cost for this kind of bar ranges widely, depending on the size and concept, but mostly on location. You can buy an existing neighborhood bar in a small town for $20,000, or you can spend a million dollars building a brand-new one in a big city. Not coincidentally, the amount of revenue these businesses produce varies greatly, depending on your bar's location and capacity.
• Sports bar. Depending on the establishment's capacity, sports bars can be a specific version of the neighborhood tavern, or they can take on a life as big as a club. You may have the latter in mind, but your market research may point to the former. It's important to do your homework!
  Generally, sports bars offer some kind of menu options, such as sandwiches, burgers, pizza, sandwiches and appetizers. Since the main attraction is sporting events, sports bars have televisions in view of every seat, sometimes all tuned to different channels. Audio and video technology comes into play, with some owners spending a large percentage of their revenue on keeping up with the latest in technology--from satellites to big-screen TVs. As with neighborhood bars, startup costs and revenue potential vary widely, depending on the size, concept and location.
• Brewpub or beer bar. Studies have shown that although consumers are drinking less alcohol, their tastes are becoming more discriminating. As a result, microbrews are more and more popular. In a brewpub, you can brew your own beer right on the premises. In a beer bar, you can offer a large selection of different types of beer, including microbrews produced elsewhere. It's often easier to get a liquor license for a brewpub or beer bar than a full-scale liquor license, since you don't need a fully stocked liquor bar.
  Most brewpubs only sell their own beer options on tap (draft beer), with a few selections of bottled beer options, too. Since you're creating your own product in a brewpub, you also have the ability to control what you make and sell--from quality to quantity. The startup costs of a brewpub can be quite high--from $100,000 to $1 million--because of the brewing equipment you need to have. If you produce a popular beer, you have the opportunity to grow into a very successful operation.
  Beer bars tend to have lower startup costs, which can often mean obtaining a less expensive, fixed-price license from your state government. Beer bar startup costs range from about $20,000 to $100,000, depending on size and location. The revenue potential depends on the geographical location and drinking trends in the community.
• Specialty bar. Specialty bars, which concentrate on one type of libation, from wine to martinis, or theme, like cigar bars, are gaining popularity. Although some specialty bars focus on only one drink category, there must be a wide variety available within the genre. Take martinis: They have become very popular due to the variety they offer. The traditional martini still has a solid appeal if made with quality vodkas and gins, but other mixes, like sour apple martinis, have expanded the martini-drinking base, especially among women. But even with their increased popularity, martinis are still looking up at wine.
  Beyond the traditional glass or bottle with a nice dinner, for many, wine is the drink of choice. In fact, women order wine more often than any other alcoholic beverage. Wine bars offer guests the opportunity to taste a variety of different kinds of wine and the ability to learn more about their qualities.
  Specialty bars tend to stay small and intimate in size and are located in more sophisticated neighborhoods. The costs and revenues you can expect to find when opening a specialty bar depend mostly on the type of product you serve and your location.
• Club. Like the neighborhood bar, nightclubs can take on a number of different personalities. You can open a small cocktail lounge with a jukebox or a tinkling piano in the corner. A medium-sized club might look like a neighborhood bar during the lunchtime hours, then spring to life with a popular band at night. Or if you have a big enough budget, your club might be a large dance club where the most fashionable people and hippest celebrities hang out every weekend
  Whichever path you take, you must be prepared to spend a great deal of time and money on promotion to create your "buzz." Clubs can make plenty of money if they're managed properly. Most successful clubs draw on a city population of 500,000 or more. If you're in a small town or suburb, you may not have the customer base to open a large dance club. Market research is key.

Target Market

As we've discussed, the bar/club industry can be a pricey undertaking. Because of the high failure rate, you may come across desperate bar owners willing to take a low purchase price just to get out of the business. You'll also find that startup costs for bars vary depending on size, location and target market. So we can't give you a concrete amount for what you can expect to pay to start your business.

We spoke with one entrepreneur in California who spent $25,000 taking over someone else's bar business. Another bar owner in Florida spent several million dollars starting his club (and he didn't even build the building!). The numbers vary all across the board. Your bar's size, location, type and concept will make your startup costs as individual as your business.

However, the chart below will give you some idea of what you'll be looking at--from the low end to the high end. Again, you could buy an existing bar that would nullify all the numbers on our low-end chart or start a large-scale club that's off the map from our high-end numbers. You'll have to do some research to find out what your bar will cost based on your concept, size and location.

Here are the startup costs for two hypothetical bars. The first, Night Owl, is a tavern with a maximum capacity of 100 people and serves only beer and wine with a limited menu. Night Owl has annual sales of $327,416. The second, Neverland, is a 1,000-person-capacity nightclub with a full-service bar. Located in the downtown area of a metropolitan city, Neverland has annual sales of $976,132.

Expenses	Night Owl	Neverland
Rent (security deposit and first month)	$3,250	$6,125
Leasehold improvements (heating/air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, painting, carpentry, sign, flooring, smoke detectors)	$18,000	$65,000
Equipment/fixtures	$43,000	$212,000
Licenses/permits	$35,000	$45,000
Beginning inventory	$22,000	$38,000
Phone/utilities deposits	$150	$375
Payroll	$5,550	$18,730
Grand opening marketing	$1,000	$3,000
Legal services	$425	$1,150
Accounting	$250	$650
Insurance	$450	$2,350
Miscellaneous expenses (add roughly 10 percent of total)	$12,907	$39,238
Total Startup Costs	$141,982	$431,618

Planning

Calling your bar an operation fits because of how much operating it takes to keep it running. Someone will have to mind the store every minute your doors are open and some minutes when they aren't, and your place will need some sort of monitoring during the off-hours to prevent vandalism or break-ins.

Many compare running your own business to raising a child. If true, then a smooth-running, problem-free, profit-making bar compares to parenting a happy, well-adjusted, self-assured teenager preparing for adulthood. But don't worry, the bumps in the road hold the best lessons. And as with parenting, you succeed with consistency and concern instead of rigidity and blame.

The Road to Success
The groundwork you lay to operate your bar includes the systems you use to track liquor and food. How much does the customer owe the server/bartender, and in turn, how much do they owe you? Also, what liquor and food do you sell the most? The systems you choose depend on the type and size of bar you have.

In most bars, only the bartenders and servers handle money. Cashiers or takeout staff may also have cash-handling responsibilities. Factors to consider when choosing an accounting system include the level of sales you expect, both from alcohol and food, and the efficiency needed for your staff to operate at its full potential. Also, look for holes that your accounting system might leave open for theft at all levels, not just servers and bartenders. No one thinks they are hiring a thief. Many people who might steal if the opportunity arose do not consider themselves thieves, either, so they don't come off as such.

If you use the cash-and-carry system, where the drink is ordered by the server verbally and then paid for before the bartender or server rings it up, you might find many "forgot to ring it up" drinks, as well as a few given away for free. It is the nature of the system. If your inventory controls are so tight that you will notice when too much has been used, or if your manager, who shares in the profits anyway, is your bartender, then you can use this system without much fear.

Finding Your Perfect Location
Your choice of location will depend on how you want your bar to look, what you want your bar to contribute to the community, and the kind of clientele you want to patronize it. Then you need to decide whether you want to buy the location or sign a lease. Again, that depends on your budget. Finally, you need to figure out how to fuse your concept with both your name and your location to your best advantage.

People who know this industry well have polar opinions on the concept of location. Some owners and experts we talked to put enormous importance on the bar's location while others refuted its significance altogether. It all depends on what you want your bar to be and what your strengths are as an owner. If you want your bar to get impulsive neighborhood traffic in a particular area, then you should be closest, and most obvious, to them. If you'd rather spend the time and money saved by more affordable real estate to develop your establishment's concept and create your own buzz and destination, your actual location won't matter so much.

You should consider factors such as safety, parking, accessibility to customers--even the history of the site--when choosing a location.

Your Bar: The Place to Be
The word "location" can refer to two different things--what area your bar is in (downtown, uptown, suburbs, etc.) and where you are in relation to your customers. Are you on their way home from work? Or do they have to make it a point to get to you?

Michael O'Harro, a National Bar & Restaurant Management Association board member, explains how he took a bar location nobody wanted in Virginia and made it work. "It was in an alley," he says. "It was a 15-foot-wide alley, and we were 128 feet away from the street. No one would go up the alley--[people] were afraid of it. So the building sat empty for 50 years. But the bar at the end of the alley was spending $20,000 a month in rent, while my rent was $500. I figured I had $19,500 to put toward marketing per month. I made the alley fun and chic. In the alley, I put down Astroturf that I purchased from a football stadium. I had signs, lights and banners. It became the alley. Nobody knew it was there, and then all of a sudden it was the hottest alley in town."

On the other hand, you can have an incredible spot and still not be successful. For example, if you are lucky enough to have the only sports bar right outside your town's athletic coliseum, you should be rolling in cash at least during every in-season homestand. But if your staff is stealing from you, operating procedures are badly managed, or your service isn't up to par, you could quickly find yourself out of business--grade-A location and all.

Naming Your Bar
When it comes to naming a bar, experts generally fall into two major schools of thought. The first says your bar is your dream--your hard work--so you should name it anything you want. The second approach to naming says your moniker is the first and greatest form of advertising for your drinking establishment. A name like Bill's Bar & Tavern doesn't really tell the public anything about your business, but The Haystack, Romp and 3rd & Vine give customers something to connect you to. You wouldn't consider going to bar called Romp if you just wanted a quiet drink. Likewise, you wouldn't travel up and down 4th Street looking for a place called 3rd & Vine.

O'Harro advises that your name should exemplify your concept. "First, I would try to figure out what my concept is going to be," he says. "Sports bar? Discotheque? High energy? Low energy? Singles bar? What exactly am I going to be? Then, what's the name of this business going to be? I would do tremendous research to try to come up with a name that literally fits with the concept."

When coming up with different names, don't stop until you love at least three. In your brainstorming sessions, keep these three questions in mind:

1. How well does the name fit the concept you want to create?
2. What types of customers will the name attract?
3. What will people expect based on the name?
    

It's time to start planning how you're going to get people into your bar to enjoy it. Just like any other aspect of operating your bar, marketing is an ongoing process. Many bar owners think marketing is the most fun and exciting aspect of running a bar. The entrepreneurs we interviewed agreed that advertising in the media didn't bring as much reward for the cost as it does for many other types of businesses. Generating a buzz for your bar will mostly come from word-of-mouth and the special promotions you set up.

"The only cost-effective way to advertise a bar is word-of-mouth," says Bob Johnson of the Beverage Management Institute, in Clearwater, South Carolina. "When you don't have word-of-mouth working for you, you are in serious trouble. It's not necessarily terminal. There are still ways to get some advertising and marketing out there without spending a ton of money. But anytime you reach into your own pocket to buy advertising for a bar, it's not good.

"Word-of-mouth advertising is priceless," he continues. "It means everything is right. Everything is happening. The bar is alive. Your employees love working there. They are talking and saying great things about the place, and that is passed on to your customers. The customers love being there, and they tell other customers. If you can get to that point, it's just priceless."

So what are some ways to generate word-of-mouth buzz? You can get involved in community events and charity functions to gain exposure. You can launch a direct-mail campaign with a newsletter for regular customers, develop a website, and use any other creative marketing techniques you can dream up.

A great way to promote your bar is to create special internal promotions. If you fully developed your bar's concept, your promotions and events will seem so natural you may even take them for granted. R.C. Colvin, a neighborhood bar owner in Niles, Michigan, got into the bar business because he loves to play pool. "We have pool tournaments several times a year that bring in people from all over. We [also] have a couple of hayrides every year, and people get a kick out of them," says Colvin.

Staging Promotional Events

Once you have established what your promotions will be, it's time to start making them happen. After you bar is up and running, you'll have a better idea of what nights need a little boost. Most bars are busy on Friday and Saturday nights, with Thursdays coming in third place. You might decide you need to pump up business on Monday or Tuesday, so pick one day and keep it going until you have established enough regular business to move the promotions to a different day. Of course, you'll still do your holiday promotions, like July 4th, Super Bowl, Cinco de Mayo, etc., on the appropriate days.

Here are some ideas to keep in mind when you're working on promotional events.

• Prepare. Work out a budget. If your promotion continues for more than one day, budget for the entire time you want it to run. A good goal to shoot for is to make a profit that's three times the cost of the promotion.
• Make a schedule. Design a planning calendar at least eight weeks before the promotion. Depending on the size and magnitude of the promotion, you may want to start advertising it at this point, too. Never advertise an ending date, though, so you can cut it early if it doesn't do as well as you planned or you can extend it if it really takes off.
• Maintain the energy level. On the day of the promotion, don't stop the action to give away prizes or make announcements. You can turn the music down, but don't turn it off. This will keep the energy level high and consistent. If you absolutely have to turn off the music, never keep it off for more than 10 minutes, or you risk people getting impatient and leaving.
• Party all night. Schedule your prize giveaways, contests and entertainment to run throughout the night. If you have a grand prize to give away or a finale planned, don't do it until after midnight so your guests stay in your bar as late as possible.
  Promoting your bar can be fun and creative. During a promotion and after it's over, ask your customers and your employees for feedback and critiques. Of course, your sales will give you a lot of the information you're looking for, too.