Career Path of an Owner CEO at Bar and Restaurant Patrol

This question will take the longest because my path is winding. I went to college to play basketball, not for academics. I was never particularly strong in school, though I did fine. I just wanted to play basketball and didn't really want to go to class.

I also didn't want to work in an office, so I didn't know what my major would be. I switched my major five or six times. I always joke with my buddies that I never got my diploma. I think you need 120 units for a diploma, and I took 150. So, I told them I'm more educated than they are, but I don't have a diploma because I just switched majors so many times. Then I just moved on.

In 1996, I met my wife at Chico. We moved to the Bay Area that same year and I got a job serving at Claim Jumper. I just did that because I didn't know what else I wanted to do. From there, I got a job at PF Chang's, where I started bartending.

After that, I started bartending at all sorts of clubs and high-end places. I was making $300-$400 a night, which to me felt like being rich. It's not an industry I recommend, though. I call it the "quicksand industry" because you get into it, have fun, and then realize you can't get out because you have no other job skills. You can make good money, but eventually, there's a ceiling. So, I got stuck in it.

Eventually, I was managing a piano bar, which was great, and I loved it. However, I started to feel like I was in my forties and didn't have anything to fall back on. My wife and I were fighting about it constantly, and it was really hard on our marriage. She was a school teacher and left during the day, while I left at night to manage the bar. We never saw each other.

She kept asking what I was going to do. I was literally studying to become a court reporter, which I hated. I did not want to do it, but I told her I had to do something. She finally found what I was going to do: a company called Be and Co. It was a franchise company where you could spend $50,000 to buy into their franchise. They would teach you how to take bar inventory for bars using software.

You would count their bar inventory and show how much the bartenders were over-pouring, thus saving them money. She said, "I think you could do that," so I agreed. I didn't know how hard it is to start a business. I really had to grind it out. I had to walk into bars and sell my services, which I hate. I'd wake up with a ball in my stomach, knowing I had to go sell.

Eventually, I started landing some bars and had eight going. I'd visit each bar once a week to count their inventory and run reports. The hard part was I was still running my bar. I'd get off at midnight or 2 AM and then have to count bar inventories when no one else was there, often at 3 AM.

I'd get home, sleep for a couple of hours, take my kids to school because my wife was already gone, come back home, sleep some more, and then go back to work. It was just like that for two years, 80 hours a week. I was using someone else's software to count inventory.

So I told my wife, "Why don't I create my own software, and people can pay me to use it?" I hired a development team out of India, barely scraping by. I had no money. The software was horrible and had bugs. I spent two years up in the middle of the night talking to them in India about the software, trying to fix it, while still doing bar inventories. It was a grind for two years.

Finally, in 2017, we had developed the software in 2015. Two years later, we finally started getting some traction. I had started my YouTube channel in 2012 just to sell a bartending course. My wife didn't really believe in it at the time. I started selling online bartending courses for $99 each, and she began to believe in it.

I started putting out more YouTube content on how to become a bartender, how to do inventory, and how to run a bar better. I started getting traction and subscribers. One month, I got 10 sign-ups for my inventory software, charging $69 per month. This was recurring revenue. Each month, I started stacking more and more.

In 2018, I was making about $10,000 a month. I quit my bar managing job and went all-in on the online business. I kept putting out content on YouTube, my websites, and my blogs, growing my audience. I started selling more online courses. I now have about four revenue streams. I just started a new restaurant marketing software.

It just kept growing and growing. That's where we are today. I kind of flew through that, but it really was a grind for seven years, from 2011 to 2018, working 80 hours a week and staying up all night. I kind of did what I had to do because my back was against the wall and I needed to get out. It ended up working out really well for me, but it was like walking through the trenches to get there.