BUSINESS INSIDER – I’ve Taught Fortune 500 Execs How to Be Better at Their Jobs — and I Learned My First-Ever Business Lessons from Bartending

20 Apr BUSINESS INSIDER – I’ve Taught Fortune 500 Execs How to Be Better at Their Jobs — and I Learned My First-Ever Business Lessons from Bartending

Some thirty years ago, I needed to find the right bartending job to sustain my quest for an MBA from the City University of New York’s graduate business program. I wanted to work in a place that was close enough to school to be convenient, but far enough away to be anonymous and where professors were not likely to go.

The swanky Gramercy Park neighborhood was nearby, with an upscale mix of businesses and apartment buildings. Pizza shops, Chinese take-out, an Italian deli, a liquor store, three boutiques, and four Irish pubs lined my four-block walk. Any bar with Karaoke and Happy Hour “all you can eat” chicken wings and dollar pints were off the list — too much noise for too little money. But a few blocks south I found ‘Cincinnati,’ a chic restaurant with the capacity to seat fifty-four. In a four-block radius, none of the other bars or restaurants were as well situated, as elegant, or had as pricey a menu. It felt perfect.

The next day at 4:00pm, the quiet time before the dinner crowd arrived, I perched at the far end of the bar. The bartender poured me a glass of white wine. At 4:30pm my glass was empty, and even though the bar was not busy, he never came back to offer me a refill. I sensed the opportunity to build here. I finally caught the bartender’s attention and inquired whether there was a position open. He went upstairs to get the owner, and an hour later, Andrew came down to meet me.

He liked that I went to school nearby, that I had experience, and that I wasn’t an actor.

We agreed that I would shadow a couple of shifts before getting a slot in the schedule. He called Marco over, the head waiter, to set it up.

“Why would I shadow a waiter? I’m applying for a bartender position,” I said. Andrew squared his shoulders and said, “I don’t hire women bartenders.”

I thought he was kidding. This was 1982 not 1952. But he wasn’t kidding — he didn’t think that women were strong enough to lift cases of beer, or tough enough to cut people off and get them to leave.

I was stubborn and didn’t like being told no. ‘Cincinnati’ was the perfect place for me. I had to do something fast, so I offered the owner a deal: I would work the busiest night behind the bar for free. “The only thing you have at risk is whether you are right or wrong.” It was a hard offer to refuse, and he didn’t.

Walking toward home, the adrenaline from my win was overcome by dread. What had I just gotten myself into? I had never worked a place like ‘Cincinnati’ before. The Gramercy Park crowd was a different breed of clientele. I had always been a downtown, working class girl and felt most comfortable in a melting pot of color, spices, accents. These customers were uptown and drank things I never heard of: Lillet, Pernod, Chambord. They ate food you’d find in beach surf — oysters, escargot, and crab — and traveled on the weekends to elite society places like The Hamptons, Nantucket, Mantoloking. They were a species of their own. Dangerous, intimidating, unknowable. Better. And ‘better’ made me fear that I wouldn’t be sophisticated enough, smart enough, or good enough.

My fear of the yuppie Gramercy Park breed was about getting it wrong, and about being different from them. However, the prospect of letting fear take over, and failing to step behind the bar, made me even more anxious.

I showed up at ‘Cincinnati’ on Friday at 4pm. My intention was to keep people lingering at the bar past 10:30pm. The owner was looking for physical strength, but I knew he was looking for the wrong thing. I wanted to flex my management muscle. The dining room was busy, so I had people eating appetizers at the bar while they waited for tables. The kitchen closed at 10:00pm, and the last patrons left the bar at 1:00am. By 1:30am I had restocked the bar for the next day and had provided the owner with healthy register receipts. I had proven myself and overcome my own fear.

Overcoming fear involves risk. While you can’t always control the things that spark fear, you can control how you respond to that fear. You can complain, whine, and make excuses, or you can choose to do something. You can take a risk and go for it, because over-analyzing the unknown can lead to inaction — and that’s when people, relationships, and organizations can get stuck.

My first night behind that bar, engaging with the patrons, I realized that most of what I feared was in my head. I had created a story based on my preconceptions of the Gramercy Park crowd. Letting impressions, and not actual experience, create a story will distort reality.

I took this lesson with me into my business career.

Early in my consulting practice I accepted projects that cut across a broad range of sectors, and because I wasn’t a specialist in a particular market, I would be nervous about how well and quickly I could grasp the industry dynamics. Sometimes I would compete for a contract against well-known players whose consultants had a different pedigree to mine. At each turn, when I felt that doubt in my stomach, I would go back to my experience of thriving in an uptown bar. I did more and said less, worked hard and took risks.

While they didn’t all work out, some of them did. As those wins built up, the voice of doubt in my head got softer and my confidence grew. I began to believe that I could really do it, and I could do it well.

Bartending taught me that by managing my apprehension with confidence and action, I could take on experiences that my fears would have kept me from.

From the book, ‘The Perfect Mix: Everything I Know About Leadership I Learned as a Bartender.’ Copyright ©2017 by Helen Rothberg. Published by Atria Books. Copyright © 2017 by Helen Rothberg. All rights reserved.