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KEN GILLIE HAS the look of someone more accustomed to board
meetings and pinstripes than dungarees and weighing kegs. But don’t let his calm professional demeanor fool you. Below the surface he’s tenacious, a beverage consultant with forensic-like skills and a passion for safeguarding his clients’ hard-earned profits.
“I personally find it challenging to tolerate when well-intentioned people invest their time, sweat and in many cases life savings building a business only to have their aspirations undermined by employees looking for a quick buck,” says Gillie. “Most bar owners find it emotionally devastating when presented with conclusive evidence that their handpicked staff is at the heart of their financial difficulties. There’s no other way to look at it than as a betrayal.”
Even after 14 years in the business, Gillie finds staying motivated is not an issue. He started working for Bevinco in college as an auditor; ironically before he was of legal age to drink. In 1999, he had earned enough to purchase a franchise in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. According to Gillie that’s when his real business education began.
“Working directly with restaurateurs and bar owners at that point was a real eye-opener. Many of them were seemingly unconcerned as to what financially was happening behind their bars. Not surprisingly their beverage operations generated substantially less gross profits than those in which the owners were more actively engaged. One thing I learned during those years was that being content with whatever amount of money drops down to the bottom-line is a prohibitively expensive proposition.”
After 4 years Gillie sold his business in Toledo, purchased the franchise rights for all of Illinois and began working with operators in Chicago. The move to a bigger city brought with it clients with larger venues and more substantive challenges. He soon came to realize though that despite their larger size, a bar is a bar and they all share the same difficulty protecting their margins.
“As I matured and became more proficient at my job, I started focusing as much—if not more—on how bar and restaurant owners were using the operational reports I was producing for them, rather than concentrating solely on the results of the audits. Eventually this led to my clients with holding their managers accountable for their on-the-job performance.”
He says if there was ever a breakthrough for his business, it was realizing the long-term financial impact of implementing a management incentive program. Most of his clients now give their managers bonuses if they’re able to lower losses due to shrinkage to a pre-determined figure.
“The results have been amazing,” states Gillie. “It motivates managers to accept a high degree of responsibility for the actions of their staff. As a result we now rarely have to conduct individual bartender audits or in-depth investigations anymore. Our incentive plans also include such critical items as achieving labor cost targets, increasing revenue over previous periods and maintaining realistic ‘comp’ figures.”
RECESSION DEPRESSION
GILLIE CONTENDS THAT the recession has been kinder to the bar business than most. Many American industries have suffered drops in revenue of 40% or more. Other than his high-end hotel clients, sales on average are down 10% for the majority of the bars and restaurants he works with. This observation though comes with a caveat.
“In this business, when sales continue to decrease, internal theft is sure to increase. While this has prompted a growth in my business, it spells trouble for bar and restaurant owners.”
The one certainty in this down economy is that consumers have far less discretionary income to spend on socializing. The trickle-down effect means that at the end of the night bartenders are walking with less cash tips. While some may adjust their lifestyles to accommodate the drop in take-home pay, others resort to making-up the shortfall by ripping off the house.
“Here’s where Bevinco clients have an advantage over their direct competitors who rely on pour cost to uncover theft behind their bars. Determining an operation’s pour costs is important as it reveals the ongoing profit margins. But pour cost is wholly unreliable at detecting whether the staff is stealing.”
In addition to determining a bar’s ongoing cost percentages, Bevinco’s auditing services also include a variance report that analyzes inventory discrepancies on a brand-by-brand basis. It directly compares a product’s usage to its sales. The predictable result of behind the bar is that products are depleted without a corresponding sale. The report indicates how much of each product is missing, assigns a wholesale cost to those losses and shows how much more revenue the operator would have earned had the product actually been sold and not stolen.
Gillie adds that theft is not solely attributable to the bar staff. “One of my clients was suffering inexplicably large losses despite the bar’s rather healthy sales figures. By conducting a series of daily audits I was able to pinpoint the losses were occurring on weekdays when revenue was relatively light. I decided to review the security camera footage and found that during the middle of the night, one of the business partners was stealing stacks of cases of beer to another bar that he owned outright. That pretty much ended that partnership.”
Having spent the better part of his life in this business, Gillie doesn’t foresee a career change in his future. “I find it enormously gratifying to help people. For example, in a recent article in Nightclub & Bar Magazine, one of my long-time clients credited me as having saved him from losing his business. That makes it easy for me to get out of bed in the morning.”
Likely his client would say the same thing. 
CELEBRITY PRODUCED SPIRIT brands have amassed a dismal track record over the years, one marked by poor quality, flashy packaging and lightning-quick exits from the marketplace. However, even the most jaded of consumers will be most favorably impressed with CRYSTAL HEAD VODKA, a Canadian import developed by actor/musician/writer Dan Aykroyd. It’s a rare exception to the rule in which the product is every bit worthy of its striking, attention-getting bottle.
Crystal Head Vodka is crafted in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a small, isolated city located on the most northeastern point of the Canadian seaboard. It’s quadruple-distilled in a column still from a blend of select Canadian grains and pristine glacial water drawn from a deep underground aquifer. The vodka is then subjected to rigorous, two-stage filtration—three passes through activated charcoal and then triple-filtered through polished crystals known as Herkimer Diamonds. It is bottled at 80-proof, pure and unadulterated by additives.
As stunning as the crystal, skull-shaped bottle is, the vodka is even more so. It has a soft, impossibly lightweight body and clean, barely discernible notes of grain. The vodka raises nary a trace of heat as it glides past the palate and disappears into a cool, crisp finish. It’s a top-notch experience from beginning to end marked with delightful hints of anise and grainy sweetness.
So why the skull-shaped bottle? Delving into the unexplained and supernatural rank among Dan Aykroyd’s passions. In this case, 13 crystal skulls have been found over the past few hundred years in locations scattered across several continents. Each is between 5,000 and 35,000 years old and possesses absolutely no physical indication as to how it was made. Stranger still, in fabricating the skulls they appear to have been cut against the natural axis of the crystals, which defies the limits of their physical properties.
It’s an enthralling mystery for an equally captivating spirit.