How would you design your perfect bar team? Look beyond the obvious for a more strategic approach, says Couch co-owner Jacob Clarke.
If you’ve ever tried to open or run a bar in Stirchley, Birmingham, you’ll know it’s more than just Strawberry Daiquiris and praying someone orders the English sparkling you accidentally bought a case of. It’s grit. It’s spreadsheets. It’s long, hot, sweaty Saturday nights. But here’s the twist you didn’t ask for: running a successful bar in Stirchley is basically the same as managing the Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2011’s Moneyball. Yes, that biographical movie where Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, a baseball general manager who outsmarts richer teams by relying on stats over sentimentality. The man builds a winning team on vibes, metrics and blokes who walk to first base more than they actually swing the bat.
Beane’s philosophy is simple – find value in the overlooked. Forget the flash. Go for what works. The guy didn’t care if a player wasn’t an all-star, ran like a weirdo or had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. If they got on base, they were in. This is not an article aimed at how to cut corners, but aimed at re-evaluating how you view your bar, your brand and, most importantly, how you view, recruit and build your team. Accolades, awards and prizes do not make the bartender, but the day-to-day actions and consistencies most certainly do. The person, not the persona, is the asset. If you are looking at the reputation of a bartender, you are looking in entirely the wrong direction.
“Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins”
We all work within budgets, especially within the current state of the economy, rising costs and the issues the hospitality industry are facing as a collective, so in order to circumvent these issues, surely we have to be a little bit more tactical in our approach. You don’t build a football team entirely of strikers, so why build a bar team entirely of head bartenders? You don’t need the bartender with 40,000 Instagram followers, pineapple tattoos and the tightest of tight top knots. You need the one who can crush a Friday night service without panicking, charm the angry stag group and refill the glass washer without being asked. At Couch we’ve done away with the notion of head and senior bartenders and opted for a more collective approach where each member of the team brings a unique skill set into key areas, much like how you’d build a five a-side football team. The innovative and chaotic striker, the intuitive and quick-witted winger, the methodical and calculated midfielder, the ballplaying defender creating opportunities and the goalkeeper who doesn’t believe in exercise. For those of you who know us, I’ll leave it up to you to decide who’s who.
“There is an epic failure within the game to understand what is really happening”
Throughout my career, I have built teams and recruited bartenders based on a ‘who’s who’ approach, without any real deep consideration for what I’m actually after. Wicked at cocktails? Amazing. Won a bunch of comps? Even better. In hindsight, I reckon it just felt like the thing to do and I was just going with the flow. It’s only since opening Couch that I came to realise recruiting that way is no way to go. Some of the best bartenders I’ve ever worked with had no idea how to make a Ramos Gin Fizz but could read a crowd like an open book, turn up on time and gently persuade the hammered local that one more Top Shagga Shandy is probably not the best idea. That’s the bigger picture. That’s getting on base.
In the age of vanity projects, competition pushers and instagram bartenders, sometimes emotion needs to be taken out of the day-to-day decision making and replaced with cold, hard stats. The bar owners winning in 2025 are the ones who know their numbers better than their cocktail specs. It’s not sexy, but unfortunately necessary.
What drinks actually sell? What’s the dead stock dragging your GP down every month? What’s your break-even point on a Tuesday night when it’s raining sideways and everyone’s still doing Dry Jan even though it’s March? It’s tough love. Sometimes you have to bin delicious drinks because the world isn’t ready for a savoury Piña Colada, sometimes you have to bring back old favourites that you were emotionally through with, sometimes you have to compromise and give the people what they want. Creativity and innovation are important, but pointless if the bar is drowning. Ultimately, bars are a business first.
But the logic holds. The game is about playing smarter, not just louder. Using your ordering system like a scouting report. Seeing your stockroom as your squad. Running your team like a roster, not a revolving door. You don’t need to outspend the big chains – you just need to out-think them.
And, the next time you recruit someone, don’t ask “will they win cocktail competitions” or “will they reinvent our menu”, simply ask: “Will they get on base?”