*(At the end of this article, grab a FREE copy of my latest book, The Bar Auditor’s Handbook: The Undergound Playbook for Earning $150/Hr. as a Bar Inventory Auditor, which shares the exact blueprint system I used to build my 6-figure auditing business)
I have no idea who you are, how happy you are with your current career right now or how you got here, but what I do know is that in the summer of 2010, I was at the end of my rope.
I’m talking curled-up-in-the-corner-sucking-my-thumb end of the rope.
After spending two decades working in bars for tips and managing uninspired employees, I took a look around and suddenly realized—as many hospitality workers do—that the path I was headed down was aimed directly at dead-end brick wall with very few options that would help me avoid the endless late nights and relying on 18% gratuity to pay for my retirement.
Be honest:
- Almost nobody wants to work in a bar/restaurant forever.
- Almost everybody has to work weekends or late nights.
- Who wants to be told they can’t ask for weekends off because it’s too busy?
I don’t mean to be overdramatic here, but in 2010 I had a 7 and 5-year-old in school and my wife was a school teacher at the time, which meant as soon as they got home, I was off to run the bar at night. I never saw them. My kids were growing up fatherless and my quality of life was in a downward spiral.
At one point, I literally went into breakdown mode. I’m talking on the verge of divorce. I’m not going to go into the full story of how one hot August afternoon in 2010 I chucked a stenograph machine right through my sliding glass door which caused a large chunk of glass to be lodged in my forehead. Just know that after attempting a handful of other careers and business start-up ideas, the reality of being pigeon-holed in a late-night career hit me hard. I had a family now and as we all know, as lifers, once you go into the bar and restaurant industry, it’s not that easy to get out.
Finally, in the summer of 2010, just after I hurled the stenograph machine through the glass and just before I was ready to shove an ice pick in my eye socket, my wife, still looking for a solution to finding me a new career, came across a company called Bevinco that helped bar owners make more profits by providing inventory auditing services.
Bevinco (now called Sculpture Hospitality, a horribly confusing name that must have been decided upon during the latter stages of a beer pong tournament) was a franchise that trained its franchisees to become bar inventory auditors and help bars save money by using their software to count and weigh bottles and kegs to find out how much the bar was losing in profits because of bartender over-pours and theft.
Shortly thereafter, my wife and I found a 2nd company doing the same thing called Barmetrix, and as soon as I understood what they were doing to help bars, I told my wife, “I can do that. I can weigh bottles and count shit. I can TOTALLY do that.”
So I clicked around their websites and eventually discovered that they could teach me to be a bar inventory auditor for the bargain price of $50,000 – $60,000!
$60,000!!? Who has $60,000 lying around to invest? Doctors? Bankers? Certainly not bar managers.
So instead, I spent the next 18 months working my ass off, experimenting with remedial inventory software. I practiced taking hundreds of inventories before turning my attention to finding clients who needed my services until I finally started gaining some traction. Once I did, my momentum was unstoppable.
I went from bar to bar, simply having conversations with dozens of bar owners/managers, discussing their pain points and asking them questions.
As a result, my portfolio of accounts grew rapidly, from dive bars to sports bars to lounges and clubs, all the way to corporate giants like P.F. Chang’s and Outback Steakhouse. With the blueprint system I had developed, I was landing clients like crazy.
My income soared. There were literally thousands of bars that needed help, and I had yet to come across one bar that had met someone like me.
There was absolutely ZERO competition.
Thus, Bar Patrol was officially born and it was thriving.
In 2012, I partnered with my brother-in-law, borrowed A LOT of money and had Bar Patrol App built by a brilliant development team. I now had my own cutting-edge app and online software that was bringing faster and more accurate results than ever to my clients.
18 months after my August 2010 meltdown, I was maintaining 8 – 10 full service clients at all times and because I had become so efficient, I was earning about $150 per hour and $8,000 – $10,000 per month.
The money flowing into my life was beyond my wildest dreams. Entrepreneurship was good!
Subsequently, I started vacationing with the family and I was able to go to barbecues at friends’ houses on the weekends because I wasn’t in a bar working until 2:00 a.m.
And the pride I felt about my career was (and still is) absolutely surreal.
I don’t say any of this to brag. Quite the contrary. After spending years of gloom looking for another career, the gratitude I feel is beyond description. For once in my life, I finally felt successful.
What’s the point to all this?
The point is, if you’ve been in the industry for years and feel like you’re stuck, just like I was, as well as thousands of others who make a decent living in this industry but suddenly realize one day that the future is quickly becoming the present, and if they don’t do something quickly to change their present, their future will be working in a bar when they’re 60, serving white zinfandel to a bunch of old ladies playing bridge in a hotel bar lobby.
Where are you in your life right now? Where are you headed? Do you have the freedom to do the things you want?
I imagine you and I are very similar, the only difference being that my pain become so great that I HAD to do something to change my life, so I spent 18 months crawling through the mud and shit to figure this business out on my own.
To sum all of this up plainly: I teach people to be me…without the crawling through shit part of course. You simply get the benefits of learning from my experiences.
If you are like me—and countless others—who feel that restless pain I’m talking about, and you have always despised the idea of working in an office, sitting at a cubicle clacking away on a keyboard…
…then you might want to find out a little more and see if becoming a bar inventory auditor is the path for you too.
If so, I’m offering my latest book: The Bar Auditor’s Handbook: The Underground Playbook for Earning for$150/Hr. as a Bar Inventory Auditor for FREE to those who find this page.
In it I provide the EXACT blueprint system I used to build a 6-figure bar auditor career.
So, if you feel like following me down the rabbit hole to see if this is the right career path for you, and you want to make more money working fewer hours and no weekends.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY OF THE HANDBOOK
This is the 8-step business plan I used to build a 6-figure business within just a few months.
Or, if you just stopped by for a casual read while sipping a Lynchburg Lemonade on the front porch, I wish you the best of luck in whatever you choose to do in your life. I really do. Just don’t choose mediocrity or you too might chuck something large and heavy through your sliding glass door one day.
Cheers, until next time,
Dave