Making a tangible profit is important, sure, but so is building a robust customer or guest experience.
By this point in our series, we hope you’ve started to narrow focus on the words “efficient” and “intelligence” as centers for your alcohol business goals. Utilizing technology to create better business practices and improve insights clearly saves you countless hours of labor and allows you to institute operations that result in increased profits, which brings us to our third and final word: profit.
Word 3 – Profit: (noun) a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.
The obvious desire for an alcohol business is profit in finances – to make more money than was spent within a given timeframe. And automation certainly helps with that! Invoices are paid electronically for the exact amount owed, on time, and detailed purchase reports help you learn buying behaviors that are hurting your margins, allowing you to quickly switch gears and save more money with every alcohol purchase. Of course, automation technology is a small investment, but the return on that investment is significant. In fact, Fintech retailers who participate in automated payments with all their alcohol distributors report returns as great as 200% more than their original investment within the first 30 days of use.
But what if we took this idea of alcohol profits and gains and broadened our focus to more than just money? What if we focused on earning a profit in other, less tangible areas? Stable finances keep the wheels of business churning, but as we saw in 2020, it takes more than money to withstand unknown hardships. Nationwide chains with the financial backing of widely recognized brands were forced to close, reopen, and adapt the same way as mom-and-pop family businesses. Every operator needed more than just money to survive this pandemic, and now that a wide-spread vaccination is on the horizon, it’s going to take a lot of loyalty and a little bit of grit to reopen and thrive with guests seeking a reprieve from the couch.
As discussed in the first blog in this series, alcohol operators looking for success in 2021 need to create time-savings for themselves through efficient business practices. Efficiency will drive optimum operations, and alcohol categories that don’t waste time on deliveries or invoice reconciliation will thrive, now more than ever. But when we dive deeper into all that retailers get when they utilize a service like Fintech, we see that they gain more than money. Intertwined with better margins are opportunities to enhance their guest experience. Analytic details and high-level data highlight which products are in high demand, allowing retailers to plan menus and promotions that support the experience that is not only expected by guests but supports their overall brand identity. Especially now that enjoying a drink anywhere beyond the kitchen counter requires more from the consumer (masks, social distancing, limited capacity, etc.), businesses should strive to provide the exact right experience.
Beyond that, the time-savings afforded by this technology give managers, bartenders, owners, and everyone in between a chance to actually get out of the back-office and visit with regulars. To learn about what people are interested in now that our expectations of service have changed and create an inclusive, safe environment. Having the time to really get back to what makes your alcohol category special will be a difference-maker for both financial profits and other gains as an ambassador for your brand and your community.
In the words of famed industrialist and entrepreneur Henry Ford, “Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.”
Give your alcohol business a reason for existence: your customers.
