At some point, every person imagines what it would be like to own a restaurant. They know the type of food they would like to serve and the type of staff they would like to employ.
The problem comes when someone without any experience actually takes the plunge and buys a restaurant. It happens fairly frequently which is one of the reasons why restaurants are one of the businesses most likely to fail.
Enter Micha Cornelius. He is the director and owner of the Bartending Academy of Mill Creek (soon to become the Bar School of Mill Creek) as well as the executive chef of the Cafes Inc. chain which includes the Sawmill Cafe in Mill Creek, Mukilteo’s Speedway Cafe, Crystal Creek Cafe in Bothell and others.
Cornelius, a former restaurant owner himself, is also a restaurant and bar consultant. His clients range from those who have just purchased a bar or restaurant for the first time and haven’t a clue what happens next to established restaurateurs who have a feeling that something isn’t right but can’t quite put their finger on it.
“When the food costs go up and the liquor costs go up — that’s when I get the phone call,” Cornelius said.
He is always amazed at how many people are tempted to buy a restaurant or bar when they have no background in the business. His own background is solid. A graduate of culinary arts and business in his native Berlin, Germany, Cornelius opened his own restaurant, Micha’s Place, in Tacoma in 1999.
Cornelius sold that restaurant when his wife April was expecting their first child because he knew from experience a business owner must be onsite up to 80 or 90 hours a week if they want to be sure the restaurant is run properly. He wasn’t willing to make that commitment to a business while starting a family.
His next venture in the industry was to help open up a couple of nightclubs in Tacoma. That was when he made his first big connection with the bartending school industry. Short-staffed one busy night, Cornelius tried to help out behind the bar at one of the clubs.
“I didn’t know any American drinking habits and I’m a pretty simple drinker,” he said. “They started throwing all of those drinks at me and I didn’t know what to do.”
Determined not to have that happen again, he sought out classes in bartending. A successful stint at the Bartending Academy of Tacoma went so well that he soon became an instructor. By the time his wife changed jobs and they moved to Mill Creek in 2010, Cornelius was ready to open his own bartending school franchise.
Currently, his bartending school is graduating 250 to 300 students a year. Cornelius is an exacting taskmaster but his students have an 82 percent placement rate upon graduation and they are set for what can be a very lucrative career.
“A good bartender makes more money than an attorney does,” Cornelius said. “$7,500 to $8,000 a month easy.”
Those highest paying bartenders are the ones who work in the night time hotspots. But a good day bartender could be bringing home $3,500 to $4,000, Cornelius explained. And these figures are from working only about 110 hours a month.
The drawback to the career is that bartending jobs, particularly the lucrative ones, are fast-paced and high stress. Many bartenders burn out quickly. But so do bar and restaurant owners.
“If you own a bar — you’re going to be an 80 to 90 hour a week guy. Every minute you’re not there, someone is stealing from you,” Cornelius said.
This stealing isn’t usually in the form of actually taking money out of the till and putting in a pocket. It’s more subtle.
In his role as a consultant, it’s Cornelius’ job to help restaurant and bar owners find out where the profits are going when they’re not going into the till. When a bartender pours a friend or a good tipper an ounce and a half instead of an ounce, that’s stealing.
There are also the cash payments that go straight into the tip jar and those servers who eat all the time yet have no voids or personal tickets to cover their meals. It’s not uncommon for employees who are dating to steal together, Cornelius added. Then there are the instances of kitchen waste. If avocados are used on one sandwich, the chef will have to find other ways to use the perishable to prevent the whole case from rotting.
“If you use one item, you have to find at least two other applications for that one item,” Cornelius said. “I go through the menu. I look at the drink menu, the (point of sale) system and find weaknesses.”
One common weakness is for business owners to forget to raise their prices when costs go up or to incorrectly figure what to charge for an item in the first place. Cornelius figures the item cost to make a specific beverage or menu item and then figures what the cost it should be to get a fair return on it. It can be a real eye-opener to a business owner who doesn’t know his costs. Another error he sees business owners make is to confuse revenue with profit.
“People have a misconception about revenue,” Cornelius said. “I don’t care how much revenue you have. You can have a million dollars in revenue and still just make $10,000 in profit. It’s not about the revenue. It’s the profit.”
That’s why it is so important to know what your business expenses are and where every dollar is going. He has seen restaurants with business expenses around 92 or 93 percent of revenue. But all of the business expenses together should not add up to more than 85 percent or you won’t make enough money to survive, he explained.
Brooke and Randy Baker of Chanterelle restaurant in Edmonds have used both of the services that Cornelius offers — bartending school and restaurant consultation. When the longtime successful restaurant owners added a bar to their restaurant, they started by getting some of their existing staff trained at the bartender school.
“During our initial meeting with Micha at the school, we found out about his consulting services, and we later had him out to our restaurant at a time that was convenient for us,” Brooke Baker said.
The couple hadn’t had bar experience in 18 years so they found Cornelius’ advice on setting up the new addition extremely helpful. They learned about popular products, trendy cocktails, computer programming and pricing.
“Of course the liquor distributors had some valuable information for us, but they all have vested interests,” Baker said. “Micha provided information without selling anything, which was refreshing and valuable.”
It’s this non-biased opinion, based on experience, that bar and restaurant owners have found so helpful. And they need every bit of help they can get if they want to keep their business from turning into a statistic.
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