Tell me about the venue.
A few lines on where the bar is and what's going on with the numbers is enough to start.
Bar consultancy · Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Margins you can defend.
I help independent bars cost everything, tune their margins and engineer their offering to deliver more revenue — and keep more of it.
78%
Beverage gross profit held at Eau de Vie, Sydney, as venue manager and licensee.
−3%
Cost of goods since onboarding at InterContinental Fiji — at a 24% beverage cost.
≤2%
Unknown stocktake variance at every venue since 2018 — often within 1%.
10+
Years in some of Sydney’s most awarded bars, and now running a resort’s.
Figures from the venues I’ve run as manager and licensee. Client case studies will follow as engagements complete.
What I do
Six things, usually in combination.
Every one of them starts with a costed picture of the bar.
01
All services, in detail Costing
Every product, prep, batch and cocktail costed ex-tax and per serve, in one database.
02Menu engineering
Sales mix against contribution. What to keep, re-price, re-cut or drop.
03Bar operations audit
Stock control, pars, ordering, waste and prep, with a prioritised fix list.
04Cocktail programme development
A list built to a target GP, with the specs, preps and batching to run it.
05Staff training
Spec certification and product knowledge, tested against the venue’s own list.
06Purchasing ↔ POS bridging
Codes, price flows and sales imports so the two systems agree.
How an engagement runs
Look, fix, keep.
01
Look
A costed picture of the bar: every product, prep and drink; the sales mix; where purchasing and the POS disagree.
02
Fix
An engineered list, a prep and batching programme, pars and ordering, and a team trained to the spec.
03
Keep
Spec cards, prep sheets, order sheets and margin reports that stay current, because they all come from one database.
The toolkit · Deluge
One database. Every document.
Deluge is the costing platform I built and bring to every engagement. Every document the programme needs — spec cards, prep and batch sheets, order sheets, costed menus, margin reports — is derived from one database rather than maintained as a separate file, so nothing goes stale when a price moves.
- Spec cards and prep sheets the team reads on their phones
- Order sheets built from pars, printed for the stocktake walk
- A margin report the owner can read in one sitting
Library · Cocktail list sample data
Negroni stirred · 90 mL $24 78.1%
Scarlet Swizzle swizzled · batch $23 74.6%
Paloma built · 220 mL $21 71.9%
Espresso Martini shaken · 120 mL $24 69.3%
House Sour shaken · prep $22 76.4%
The list's money · theoretical 74.5% GP
About
Jesse Williams
Bars Manager & Head Mixologist at the InterContinental Fiji Golf Resort & Spa. Before that, Venue Manager and Licensee at Eau de Vie, Sydney, and ten years across the city’s best bars — the Baxter Inn, Shady Pines Saloon, the Oxford Tavern, the Unicorn Hotel.
I built Deluge because every venue had the same problem: costings that lived in a spreadsheet and went stale the week after they were done.
More about me