Herding Cats – An SBS Partnership Interview with Chris Schaefer, Corp Dir Restaurants, Noble House Hotels & Resorts

Noble House Hotels & Resorts, Ltd. is a fully integrated hotel ownership and management company overseeing a portfolio of some of the most prestigious resort and boutique hotel properties across North America. Noble House is unique not only in the quality and exceptionalism of their properties and teams, but also in their dual role as an owner and operator in most of those properties. We sat down with Chris Schaefer, Corporate Director of Restaurants Noble House Hotels & Resorts, and discussed his insights and experience working with Strategic Beverage Solutions over the last 4 years.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

In 10 seconds can you describe what kind of guest experience I can expect in your hotel bar? On the internet that’s how much time you have when someone visits your website. It took 6 seconds to read that sentence – you have 4 seconds left…. No wonder effective digital marketing strategies focus on pictures and video to get their messages across. But not all pictures are the same. Some speak more clearly and with greater appeal then others. Walk through the pictures below. Which bar looks like the right place to go at the end of a business day, with friends or business associates who may or may not stop by?

Which one would you pick? Your answer defines what market segment you fall in. Maybe your answer might depend on what day, time or circumstance you are in. But each one of these picture makes it clear what the intended guest experience will be. That is because a picture is worth a thousand words.

THE NON HOTEL GUEST OPPORTUNITY IN HOTEL BARS By: Scott Martiny

The primary customer for a Hotel F&B outlet is hotel guests, but the bar/restaurant experience is also becoming a preferred choice for a growing non hotel guest market segment. Whether it be an end of business day crowd or transient visitor crowd, or even an end of day local residence crowd, a lot of these potential customers don’t want to go to a destination restaurant, or to a party bar – they want the same experience as your hotel guest.

Hotels & Resorts have always faced the challenge of targeting the needs of a hotel guest for a place to relax at the end of a long business or travel day – and yet still be able to pull non-hotel guests into their bar/restaurant venues.

It’s Not a Restaurant/Bar Strategy Any Longer – Its Bar/Restaurant?

There are plenty of success stories in the Hotel/Resort F&B world where world class destination restaurants and or high volume active lounge venues are pulling the majority of their customers out of local nonhotel guest markets. There are operators who execute those business venues/models very effectively – such as Sbe, Noble House, Kimpton, Sage and others. But the vast majority of hotels and resorts are missing the business wave which comes when your bar is a living room bar.

Strategic Bar Solutions (SBS) travels the United States visiting hundreds of hotels performing F&B Assessments.  The goal of these visits are to bring an experienced bar business eye to a hotel bar situation and deliver feedback to property GM’s and F&B leaders.   Every property situation turns out to be different.  Opportunities are not consistent and the strategy to go after an opportunity is often driven by the specifics of a local situation.   We don’t look at blowing everything up and starting from scratch.  We aren’t fixated on creating perfect cocktails and the world’s best flatbread.  We focus on spotlighting available chess moves that will move F&B revenues up and costs down. One chess move we continuously find that makes sense for F&B within the hotel is the execution of an inbound marketing strategy.  The need for executing a bar inbound marketing program is dictated by two factors:

• Its tough to compete against all of the bar options in your local market, but Living Room concept bars are proving to not only be preferred by your hotel guests, they are a unique and preferred choice of a lot of potential local and transient customers.
• Hotel marketing programs are often world class, but the bar in the end is just an amenity.  When you have a bar and a market situation which can pull in nonhotel guests, the lack of inbound marketing limits the connect potential with a customer constituency that could double your F&B revenues.

Margin Management – A New Way of Looking at Your Bar Business By: Scott Martiny

Beverage cost is an industry performance metric owners, asset managers and general managers look to in assessing bar performance. A budget target is set and tracked against in P&L reporting. Whether automated inventory tools or simple excel spreadsheets are utilized, the resulting numbers are generated and woe the beverage operation that is tracking over its budget target.

But a funny thing happens along the way. Numbers jump up and down from one month to the next, often in ways that could not possibly reflect actual improvement in or degradation of performance in the operation. “It must be the accounting, or the inventory process, or an event we had” are some of the usual explanations. An operation with a major improvement opportunity can get celebrated for its success because the numbers are fine or a good operation comes under pressure because the numbers are not. There is no opportunity in the budget process to define what the numbers should be and they often just end up being the same as last year. No process occurs to reflect on what the number should be given all the givens and how changing business mix and purchase costs factors could affect the numbers positively or negatively.

Making the Leap – A New Banquets Beverage World By: Scott Martiny

Some things never change, so the story goes. You can put banquets bars on that list. For decades now it’s been 8 bottles of liquor, and a couple of bottled beer and wine choices. It was boring then and it’s still boring. But most times we drink for free, so what should we expect anyway? For the event sponsor, however, they still get the invoice, and they still erupt, absolutely certain there was no way we all drank that much.

30 years ago there was no way to approach a banquet beverage bar setup differently. It’s challenging to setup a bar, take a starting and ending inventory, manually calculate consumption, then the invoice all in the course of one evening. Add to that the competitive pressure to win events which makes price a big decision factor, and it’s no wonder banquet bar programs are a race to the lowest common denominator.

But some things have changed. Technology is now providing new options which, if embraced, can dramatically change the way you approach your banquet beverage service offering. In so doing you can improve your overall competitiveness in securing event business while improving your beverage revenue yield per event. Beverage monitoring technology allows everything about banquet beverage service to be reconsidered. Now you can know exactly what and how much is poured, when it’s poured. That capability unleashes the chains which have traditionally bound banquet bar operations to status quo.

Driving ROI Results with Beverage Monitoring Technology By: Scott Martiny (May 2012)

Five years ago Beverage Monitoring Technology began to get traction in the hospitality industry. Early products were expensive, clunky looking and had survival issues; yet proven business impact was possible even with these early products. In the end ROI Results scorecards on these systems were inconsistent. Great successes and unfortunately just as many “no results” stories have been told. The key then and today is having a solid integration with POS, and surrounding the technology deployment with the right consulting services package that insures success.

The Perfect Bartender By Scott Martiny

We’ve all sat there sipping a drink we know had extra liquor value in it, or looked at the check when the time came to pay a bill and noticed drinks we did not get charged for. Did you think someone decided to have this happen or perhaps it was just a mistake? What choices do you make as a customer when these gratuitous events come along? An interesting study recently uncovered facts about what really happens when the customer gets a heavy pour or free drink.