The key to measuring the success of your club is by understanding your data. Yet, most venues don’t look at their data to get an accurate gage of how well their club is performing. The problem is few venues have a system in place to analyze this data, and even fewer have the necessary time and resources to comb through the information to make sense of it all. As a result, venues are operating blindly and wasting time and money on areas that may not be working.

To get a true sense of how your venue is performing, you should be able to rattle off:

•  How much money you made or lost over a given time period
•  Which days of the week are your busiest
•  What type of liquor you sell the most on a given day
•  How many tables are reserved a night
•  Which promoters are bringing in the most guests
•  Which servers are upselling the most and making the most tips
•  What types of promotions or events bring in the most traffic

If you don’t have an answer to these points, it’s time to put a system in place. The good news is, there are systems out there, like Vēmos, that are designed specifically for nightclubs and automate data and analytics for you to help you run a more profitable nightclub. Don’t cut yourself short by only turning to your point of sale (POS) system to provide this data. While it’s true that most POS systems collect data, it’s oftentimes presented in convoluted ways. It’s nearly impossible to get a glimpse of your club’s employee performance, promoter performance, individual guest sales, or trending liquor sales.

The best systems are fully integrated solutions that collect data from any area of your club and analyze and present it in one central spot. Stop using separate systems for each area of your venue. You shouldn’t need to use a different system for guestlist, reservations, events, ticketing, and general admission. Not only is this inefficient, it’s also really hard to understand your performance as a whole. A system that combines all of this into one dashboard is able to:

•  Identify the audience you want to measure (servers, promoters, customers, overall club performance, or all of the above)
•  Provide insight on trending liquor sales, which helps with inventory planning
•  Report key information on individual guests – average spend, total spend, group size, favorite liquors, and top purchases – so you can better serve them with a personalized experience
•  Present the results you chose to identify in easy-to-read charts and graphs, which removes the manual labor of you combing through all the data

With this type of system, you’re able to easily review the data that’s presented, benchmark it against your goals, and optimize your results to work in your favor. If something isn’t working – such as a certain type of liquor isn’t selling well or a promoter isn’t providing results – then fix the problem. Data is the true power of a sustaining business. After all, the more you now, the more you can do.