I’m just back from the Irish Pubs Global Inaugural Conference which took place in Galway, the west coast of Ireland over the last week. Details here at their website, I recommend you check them out.

Now what a conference it was. It brought together Irish Pub owners from around the world, from places as far away as Dubai, Belgium, Scotland, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Uganda, France…amazing places you’d never think there were Irish Pubs but every corner you turn you’re going to find another Irish Pub somewhere. But what this conference did was it brought together all these bar owners, these Irish Pub owners under one roof. For the first time really and a bit of the conference that I was allowed to be a part of, I was allowed to be speaking at the conference on the topic of how to use social media to fill your bar.

But the three big take-aways I got from this conference, and there were some amazing speakers and we had some great times and great connections were made over the few days there, but three big take-aways for me, the first one was from Dave Magrogan. Now Dave Magrogan is a motivational speaker, he runs Irish Pubs, he is a former chiropractor, an amazing guy and he runs a motivational company called Rhino Living and he also runs Kildare’s Irish Pubs. Rhino living is a concept that says, you’ve got to take the bull by the horns, you’ve got to charge ahead and the fortune favors the brave. He uses his own pubs as an example by saying he started 15 Irish Pubs and concepts in the last 6 or 7 years. Three of them failed but now he’s got 12 and he said he’d rather start at 15, have three failed and have 12 left than start at 3 and have none left. He said by replicating the successes of each pub as went forward he was able to model his success of the previous pubs, but he charged ahead at a pace that might frighten a lot of people. So he said, while he remained realistic at the same time he didn’t rationalize his way out of moving forward and growing the business and that was a huge take away for me and certainly impacted how I now started to look at my own business. Any of us could look at our business that way and see how could we charge ahead of business and really power ahead of the competition and stop being afraid of the what if’s and think what if it works out and that was one huge take away for me.

The second was that, a number of speakers all touched on this. My own speech touched on this a bit. Marketing and promotional people were talking about marketing and getting PR for your business, talked about this as well, about community and about building up a sense of community in your business. There was one speaker there, very well known in the Irish pub industry around the world who received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the conference, Mel McNally from McNally Design is the brains behind the Irish Pub Company. The Irish Pub Company set up back in the 80s in association with Guinness and they used to build Irish pubs all around the world.

They would ship the pub in a container to different destinations around the world, send a team there and create the pub from scratch all based on existing Irish pubs in Ireland. What they’ve done over the years, they’ve built more than 600 pubs, they’ve got a very clear vision of what an Irish pub should be and in my opinion, what any pub should be. They have a few key examples of things that really make an Irish pub an Irish pub, things like behind the bar is visible from 80% of the bar. As soon as you come in the door you have to be able to see the bar, there has to be a greeting area, a standing and gathering area near the bar where people can just stand and mingle. It was all based around community and how you must leave space in the bar for community, how you build certain snugs that allow people to mingle together in groups.

Community was a big factor in this, I really recommend you look at how can you foster a community attitude in your business, how do you adopt that community. From my own videos I recommend building a community online and using that as an easy way to contact and connect and take those people offline into your bar, that was a big take away for me , about building community. We’re hearing more and more about it, the harder it gets to make money in a bar or restaurant, the more I’m going to be preaching about how you’ve got to build up this core group of followers who you can keep delivering the goods to and providing the service that they want.

The third and final take away for me from this conference was from Patrick McDermott from Stocktaking.ie an Infantry Control Company, who spoke about knowing every cost in your business. There’s no way you can manage your business if you don’t ever know what the cost is. Take a simple lunch meal that you’re serving, take any meal from your menu today have a look at it and ask yourself, do you know the cost of that? Does anyone in your business know the entire cost of every ingredient? Do you have recipe cards in your business? Do you have what I would refer to as a kitchen bible, which is a breakdown of every ingredient for every dish along with a photograph so that even if the head chef is off duty then the rest of the chefs know what to prepare and what the costs are. So that’s very important. That old adage of to measure is to manage. It really does ring true.

So it was an amazing, amazing conference. I’m delighted that it was such a success and I’m even more excited by the fact that the next Irish Pubs Global Conference is going to be held in New York. I’m going to be part of this conference, I’m going to be helping organize the conference and I’m going to be speaking at the conference and I want every one of you to attend this. It’s going to take place in April 2011 in New York. The dates are yet to be finalized but I’ll certainly be giving more information about that. Whether you own an Irish Pub, a non Irish Pub, a restaurant any kind on food and beverage operation, I recommend you attend the Irish Pubs Global Conference in April. We’re going to have an amazing line-up of speakers. I look forward to sharing that information with you as it becomes available. So until then, the best of luck analyzing the cost of your business and finding ways to build a community.

Cheers!

I’m just back from the Irish Pubs Global Inaugural Conference which took place in Galway, the west coast of Ireland over the last week. Details here at their website, I recommend you check them out.

Now what a conference it was. It brought together Irish Pub owners from around the world, from places as far away as Dubai, Belgium, Scotland, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Uganda, France…amazing places you’d never think there were Irish Pubs but every corner you turn you’re going to find another Irish Pub somewhere. But what this conference did was it brought together all these bar owners, these Irish Pub owners under one roof. For the first time really and a bit of the conference that I was allowed to be a part of, I was allowed to be speaking at the conference on the topic of how to use social media to fill your bar.

But the three big take-aways I got from this conference, and there were some amazing speakers and we had some great times and great connections were made over the few days there, but three big take-aways for me, the first one was from Dave Magrogan. Now Dave Magrogan is a motivational speaker, he runs Irish Pubs, he is a former chiropractor, an amazing guy and he runs a motivational company called Rhino Living and he also runs Kildare’s Irish Pubs. Rhino living is a concept that says, you’ve got to take the bull by the horns, you’ve got to charge ahead and the fortune favors the brave. He uses his own pubs as an example by saying he started 15 Irish Pubs and concepts in the last 6 or 7 years. Three of them failed but now he’s got 12 and he said he’d rather start at 15, have three failed and have 12 left than start at 3 and have none left. He said by replicating the successes of each pub as went forward he was able to model his success of the previous pubs, but he charged ahead at a pace that might frighten a lot of people. So he said, while he remained realistic at the same time he didn’t rationalize his way out of moving forward and growing the business and that was a huge take away for me and certainly impacted how I now started to look at my own business. Any of us could look at our business that way and see how could we charge ahead of business and really power ahead of the competition and stop being afraid of the what if’s and think what if it works out and that was one huge take away for me.

The second was that, a number of speakers all touched on this. My own speech touched on this a bit. Marketing and promotional people were talking about marketing and getting PR for your business, talked about this as well, about community and about building up a sense of community in your business. There was one speaker there, very well known in the Irish pub industry around the world who received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the conference, Mel McNally from McNally Design is the brains behind the Irish Pub Company. The Irish Pub Company set up back in the 80s in association with Guinness and they used to build Irish pubs all around the world. They would ship the pub in a container to different destinations around the world, send a team there and create the pub from scratch all based on existing Irish pubs in Ireland. What they’ve done over the years, they’ve built more than 600 pubs, they’ve got a very clear vision of what an Irish pub should be and in my opinion, what any pub should be. They have a few key examples of things that really make an Irish pub an Irish pub, things like behind the bar is visible from 80% of the bar. As soon as you come in the door you have to be able to see the bar, there has to be a greeting area, a standing and gathering area near the bar where people can just stand and mingle. It was all based around community and how you must leave space in the bar for community, how you build certain snugs that allow people to mingle together in groups. Community was a big factor in this, I really recommend you look at how can you foster a community attitude in your business, how do you adopt that community. From my own videos I recommend building a community online and using that as an easy way to contact and connect and take those people offline into your bar, that was a big take away for me , about building community. We’re hearing more and more about it, the harder it gets to make money in a bar or restaurant, the more I’m going to be preaching about how you’ve got to build up this core group of followers who you can keep delivering the goods to and providing the service that they want.

The third and final take away for me from this conference was from Patrick McDermott from Stocktaking.ie an Infantry Control Company, who spoke about knowing every cost in your business. There’s no way you can manage your business if you don’t ever know what the cost is. Take a simple lunch meal that you’re serving, take any meal from your menu today have a look at it and ask yourself, do you know the cost of that? Does anyone in your business know the entire cost of every ingredient? Do you have recipe cards in your business? Do you have what I would refer to as a kitchen bible, which is a breakdown of every ingredient for every dish along with a photograph so that even if the head chef is off duty then the rest of the chefs know what to prepare and what the costs are. So that’s very important. That old adage of to measure is to manage. It really does ring true.

So it was an amazing, amazing conference. I’m delighted that it was such a success and I’m even more excited by the fact that the next Irish Pubs Global Conference is going to be held in New York. I’m going to be part of this conference, I’m going to be helping organize the conference and I’m going to be speaking at the conference and I want every one of you to attend this. It’s going to take place in April 2011 in New York. The dates are yet to be finalized but I’ll certainly be giving more information about that. Whether you own an Irish Pub, a non Irish Pub, a restaurant any kind on food and beverage operation, I recommend you attend the Irish Pubs Global Conference in April. We’re going to have an amazing line-up of speakers. I look forward to sharing that information with you as it becomes available. So until then, the best of luck analyzing the cost of your business and finding ways to build a community.

Cheers!