E37 - How to Start A Mobile Bar Under $5k

In this episode, Sarah tells us how to start a mobile bar business under $5k. She shares her own story on starting with only $200 back in 2016 and gives us the math behind how you can start your own mobile bar business without a huge cash outlay.

If you're considering starting a mobile bar business, or maybe you've started and you're doubting your decision, this episode is for you.

So grab your favorite beverage and tune in for another golden episode of the MB.P podcast.


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Transcript

How to Start a Mobile Bar Under $5k

Dawn: Today on the podcast, I am interviewing our very own CEO, founder, and lead educator, Sarah Murphy.

My name is Dawn Christian. I am her right-hand COO and Chief Alchemist, and we are going to be telling you how to start a mobile bar in under $5k. Historically, this industry from the outside looks like it requires a huge outlay of cash with massive financing needed, and that's just not true. Anybody can become a successful mobile bar CEO. And today we want to tell you how that's possible. And so today in the podcast, we want to cover some quick tips on how you can feel more confident in starting your mobile bar before you dive into the Academy or you take one of our mini-courses.

We want to talk about some of the ways that you can build confidence in your business acumen in starting your mobile bar so that eventually you can invest in the academy and you can scale all the way up to seven figures. And you can invest in those really pretty rigs if that's what you want. And you can hire the team to help operate that fleet.

So Sarah, what are some of the barriers to entry that you see when newer aspiring mobile bar owners come to us?

Sarah: Yes, I love this question. So like straight out the gate, anybody who's listening, I want to assist you in feeling seen in your fears

if you're either thinking about starting a mobile bar or have recently started a mobile bar or questioning your decision of starting a mobile bar that you've already started. The most common and frequent barriers to success. And I mean that like maybe some people never even get off the ground because they think that these issues are so big that they're insurmountable for them.

The first thing is cash flow. One of the beautiful things about successful mobile bars is that oftentimes they're started with almost no money, and it's not easy to see that because we see the Instagram and Pinterest of the beautiful rigs, and if you've done any research those rigs are expensive.

You can do you can build them yourself for a little bit less. Who's got that skill set in their back pocket I certainly didn't. And don't to this day. And so, yeah, you could save a little bit of money, but let me tell you, those that build their own and don't have any experience while they're, they look pretty as soon as they're done, they aren't built in a way that.

Oftentimes stands the test of time. And so there's a lot of repairs that need done, or maybe they look better in photos and not so great up close. And so, if you are trying to start a mobile bar, and you think that you have to have a rig, you either think you need to develop a skill set that you don't have and potentially don't have time or capacity to learn or that you need this huge outflux of cash in order to get started, and it's not true.

You can start a mobile bar in under $5k. And the key to that is to be very strategic in how you spend your money, your time, and your attention. So that's the first thing is you don't need a whole lot of money to start a successful mobile bar. The second thing is that people oftentimes won't get started because they have never started a business before.

Most mobile bar owners, it's their first venture into entrepreneurship. And that leaves mobile bars, specifically the mobile bar companies as almost training grounds for entrepreneurs. So people are learning a lot of the hard knocks about owning businesses through the journey of owning a mobile bar. But luckily, I want to assure everybody that this is a very resilient industry and it's a perfect playground for that.

One of the reasons being because it doesn't take a whole lot of money to get started. Two, if you have invested in a rig and you've decided to start a mobile bar, worst case scenario, you sell your rig and you get out of the business. It's still an asset. Whereas if you were. I don't know, to spend $5k on the trendiest thing you can get from China and try and resell it on Amazon.

You might be left with a lot of inventory should that trend, you know, stop being so trendy really quickly. There will always be value in your mobile bar. The other thing that makes this industry really resilient is that there's never a decline for the need of mobile bartenders. There will always be events.

There always be drinks at those events. And so because the market is so strong, there's always room for new people to enter the market. There isn't a big conglomerate out there that is owning the event bartending staffing industry. It's a very fragmented industry. And so it leaves a lot of opportunity for new players to enter the market and potentially own their own corner of it. So as far as people being uncomfortable getting into this industry, because they may not have any experience, maybe they've never even bartended and they have no experience in business. This is a great place to learn, in the mobile bar industry. The third thing that we oftentimes see people afraid of when starting a mobile bar is how to stand apart

from their competitors, how do they become known? How do they carve out that sliver of the market that they can call their own? It is not uncommon for me to look at a market and see two or three white horse trailer bars in that market. And we see this

a lot where people will get into the academy or they'll get into one of our coaching containers and they will essentially address their business as being like their rig is their business. So if they don't have their rig, they can't start doing events. If their rig is booked, they can't do 2 events on 1 day.

And that's a really dangerous place to be because if your business is your rig then all your competitor needs to do is get a rig that looks like yours and you're done. and this has happened a number of times, somebody rear ends or t bones your rig in transit, and now you're out of business because your rig is no longer operational.

And so we don't want people to associate their rig as their business, even if it's pretty, even if it's unique, even if it's. billboard worthy, right? The rig is not your business. So when it comes to starting a mobile bar, if your rig, isn't your business, how do you stand out in a world of other mobile bars?

And we teach a lot about this in the academy. This might actually be one of our foundational core pillars in that almost anything that we ever do needs to start with at least an hour worth of who you are to the market, your core values, your mission and vision. This is the core work of any business.

And so it's not odd that we start here, but when it comes to an industry that has low barrier of entry, has a number of competitors in every market, I can't tell you how many times people have been like, Oh, we're the only ones in our market. So, we're the first in our market. Probably not. I've had people argue with me and then I could list off three or four other in their market.

They just didn't know about, but also we have to remember beverages have been at events for as long as there's been events. Somebody has been providing those beverages, whether it's a caterer, a food truck, whatever it is, that's part of your competition. Anyone who can serve beverages at events is potentially part of your competition, unless you're able to differentiate yourself through your brand, your market differentiation, and that's

I think where members of the Academy really thrive and as an example of that, we had a member of our group coaching program pay to do a little bit of market research. She's in Chicago. This is relatively recently, like 2 days ago. She shared this story with the group. She paid someone to do some market research.

And she had a whole bunch of valuable information come back. Now for anyone who's gone through any of my programming, the one thing that I say when you do market research is don't look at their pricing. You don't care. You don't care what your competitors are pricing. Please don't look at their pricing.

She probably did, but that wasn't the part that stood out. It was that when the whoever it was that she paid to do market research had reached out to the companies. It took them 24 hours to seven days to get back to her. And one of the things that we preach in the Mobile Bar Academy is that your biggest differentiator When in the mobile bar space or even in the event space.

And this is not even unique to events. I think this is probably a basic sales tenant is that the person who can get you the information that you need the fastest is in the forerunning for getting that contract. And so we in the academy talk about you need to have an instant reply upon a request with at least some pricing and some information, whether it's a FAQs page or whatever, they can get people's

questions answered and don't just assume that because it's on your website that people have read it. People don't read very much these days. There's a whole bunch of different types of people and how they like to absorb information. And sometimes people don't want it through the website they want to talk to somebody, or they want to schedule a call or they want to text right they want to get a real person that they can ask questions to.

So don't just assume because it's on your website that people are reading it. You need to be able to get back to people really quickly and so she did a little bit of market research and she realized that one of her. Differentiators was how fast she was able to get people the information that they needed in order to book events.

Now, this is someone who's been in business for less than a year and is already over six figures in revenue. So, you know, she's doing something right straight out the gate. And, you know, she credits the mobile bar Academy for a good portion of that. And she's in marketing. She has a background in marketing, so marketing is a strong suit of hers.

But when you have a really strong background in one area of business, there's a good chance that there are other areas of business that you are not super strong in. And the academy provides a stop gap in any of those areas where you're like, maybe I'm really good in marketing, but I'm not so great at operations.

Maybe I'm really good in operations, but I'm not so great at sales. And we really cover the full gamut of the business pillars so that even if you're coming into the mobile bar industry with one subset of skills, you'll be supported and all the others. If you're a great bartender, but I've never owned a business before the mobile bar Academy is ideal for you all the shortcuts, all the templates, all the calculators, all the resources and

you can get started with just those or you can actually learn how to do the things you can learn how to create a chart of accounts if you'd like, or you can just hire a bookkeeper. It's totally up to you as to what you take out of the academy and what you don't. But so we've talked about cash flow, we talked about differentiation in the market, we've talked about people who might Avoid starting a mobile bar because they have a lack of business knowledge.

And the last thing that I'll touch on as a major deterrent for people is not really understanding how to profit. It's one thing to get started in a business because you're passionate about the concept, which I think 80 percent of people who start mobile bars did it myself, included hand raised because

I saw it on Pinterest. I saw it on Instagram and it just looks so cute and pretty and different and like something that I could really sink my creative energy into a lot of the people who start mobile bars are creatives. But that doesn't equate to profit. And as a matter of fact, I have almost never seen a mobile bar that starts this business and prices themselves profitably from the get go.

Unless of course they've taken the pricing in packaging lesson in the academy to which I usually receive messages oh my gosh, I never would have priced my bar this high. My competitors are all at like this level. How am I ever going to make money at this level? Right? So even if they take the lesson, they then are shell shocked as to how much they have to charge in order to make money in this industry, but that's also why there's a ton of

churn in this industry, people just don't price themselves profitably to get started. And that's because they're trying to be affordable. They're trying to compete with their competitors, and in many cases, if a competitor has low pricing, and they've been in business a while they're able to do that through economies of scale, and we talk about that in the academy, but it basically means that they're big enough now where they can buy things in bulk, and they can reduce the cost of things.

And people just getting started they don't have that, and their investing hugely and a lot of stuff that a mobile bar that's been in business for longer has already invested in. So if you're a new mobile bar and you've got a ton of startup and you're having to buy all the equipment and

pay for the insurance. You're brand new your insurance is probably going to be a little bit higher based on the fact that you're an unknown entity. I mean, maybe not higher for the entire year cause you're not doing as many events, but as you are in business a little bit longer and you've never filed a claim

like you can oftentimes see a little bit of grace in those rates. Anyways, you have a ton of expenses. Whereas if I've been in business for five, six, seven years, I don't have those startup expenses. I'm buying things in bulk because I have more predictability of events and some of the costs that I'm incurring for things is lower.

I have, set staff. I've created operational efficiencies that new mobile bars just don't. So my prices can be lower. So if you're a new mobile bar and you're trying to compete with those lower prices you're in trouble. It's a race to the bottom at that point. And we solve that in the academy by making it really clear as to not only what people's real expenses are for starting and owning this business, but how much they will need to charge in order to make the kind of money that makes being in this business worthwhile and having that knowledge has saved a lot of mobile bar companies.

Dawn:

Absolutely. And the number of testimonials that we get, or the number of messages that we get to hello at that. People are just like, I had no idea and you saved my ass. Right. Or I had no idea. And now I'm thriving. People are so thankful for the Academy and the wealth of information that's in there.

Also, the wealth of resources. You have calculators. We have templates. We have contract templates. We have email templates for follow up sales funnels for post booking. We have. So much stuff in there that just saves you a ton of time and energy and money on having to learn all of that on your own.

Sarah: My favorite testimonials are the ones that we get that say something along the lines of, I should have joined this so long ago, or I have an MBA and I'm still learning stuff that's in the Mobile Bar Academy. Those are the ones that really tickle me because it is affirming to know that There's something in the academy for everyone, no matter what stage of the business that they're in, no matter what stage of business education they're in.

Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. And Sarah now feels like a really good time. We are going to give you guys the cost breakdown behind how to start your mobile bar for less than $5k because Sarah loves math. And so we decided today to bring math to this podcast. And Sarah, you wanted to touch on your own story around how you got started.

So I know, you know, you didn't start with a fancy rig. You did end up with a beautiful fleet, but you didn't start with a fancy rig. Can you tell us about the alternatives? Like if somebody's coming into this what was your experience and what can people do to be creative other than just buying a horse trailer?

Sarah: I'll start by saying that I had every intention of starting with my mobile bar which was a camper bar. That was the goal, right? I was doing it the same way that a lot of people who get into this industry doing it, they're like, that's my differentiator. I need a rig. Also, like many people who get started in this industry with a rig, the wait time was extensive.

We were originally quoted to 12 weeks for the build. It was a local builder who had done many builds before they're no longer in business. It took over nine months to complete. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a place where I could wait. I had been laid off from my job at eight weeks postpartum. I was expecting to be able to go back to work.

I was the breadwinner for my family and. I went to have coffee with my boss at the time to kind of talk about the reentry process. And instead of having that conversation, he basically said that they were downsizing, and he offered me a severance, but I was beside myself, and I thought really long and hard about what my next steps were going to be.

I'd always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but I had always just done kind of like little side hustles here and there, something on the side that could, you know, make a little bit of money, but also be a creative outlet for me. And now I felt like my back was up against the wall and I had about six months of severance to figure out either where I was going to work next or what I was going to do with that time.

don't remember exactly how it happened, But I drafted a website one night and my husband is very supportive in a lot of ways, but he was the king of, that's not really a viable option when it came to my business ideas. So, the mobile bar was like one that I was particularly passionate about.

And so I created a website just to like show him and see like what it could look like. And I just picked a name. I called it Bar Magnolia. I don't even know why I picked that name other than I'm a Northerner and we had recently relocated to the South. And I didn't love a lot about the South, but the one thing that I did love were the Magnolia trees in his mother's backyard.

And so I just kind of picked it I was like Bar Magnolia, Southern thing that I actually like. And he looks at this website and he's very quiet and he's clicking around and he looks at me he's like, I think this could work. And I was like, oh my God. Okay. Now what? Right. And we did it a little bit more reserved than a lot of people would in that we both have business backgrounds.

And so we decided to do a soft launch. And by that we decided to invest in a very inexpensive bar and put a little bit of money into going to a wedding show. All we had were business cards and my sister and a name and a very basic website that we created. And we just wanted to see if people thought it would be a good idea because it was back in 2016.

It was a very new idea again I had a lifetime in the restaurant industry my husband's classically trained chef. And so we took a more culinary approach to our cocktails, a little bit of a more escalated experience there, which again was kind of new.

Most Events had caterers do the cocktails and it was batched cocktails. No love there whatsoever. Just booze just to get drunk. Right. And so we paid for this bridal show. We spent 72 hours painstakingly prepping for it. My husband and me went to the local restore. It's like the Goodwill for furnishers stuff, house stuff.

We found a desk that we thought could be a good bar. We turned it around. We painted it all white put framing on it and we stuck a bicycle wheel on it. Now, when I tell you we stuck a bicycle wheel on it, we literally drilled a hole and stuck a bicycle wheel in it. It wasn't affixed. It literally was just for show.

Anytime someone walked by and kicked it or knocked it, it would fall off, right? Like this was just to see like, aesthetically, would this work? And we did the wedding show. And we got a whole bunch of inquiries. People raved about it, but there was, it really helped us figure out like the questions people had because people would say there are certain questions like, well, how does this work?

What does this mean? And it really enabled us to really hone our messaging the kind of things that we needed to answer on our website. And back then mobile bar was not a term that was commonly known so we had to continuously explain what a mobile bar was. And at the end of it, we had, I don't know, like a hundred different names and stuff.

And so we started doing outreach and we secured a $3k event from that wedding show. Our very first wedding show. We had nothing. We had no uniforms. We had like no contract. We had nothing, but we had someone who's like, sign me up. I'd like to book you and the investment for that entire experience in the bar

was $200. It was $200 for the wood, the paint, and the desk. Now that thing was so heavy. And we ended up having to build like three different iterations before we got an iteration that was kind of friendly for actual events, that was light enough to be packed and moved by me. But, the point being is that we started with very little money, very little investment, and we just tested the idea first. And then as your business grows, it will tell you what's needed.

So, when she's like, I'd like to book, we knew at that point we needed a contract. And then when we had the second inquiry, it was like, okay maybe we should start investing in an onboarding process, right? And your business will literally tell you as you grow and as you scale the things that are needed and you can invest at that point, but then the business is paying for itself.

You know, the deposit is paying for that next little investment. and we'll share the math if you have $5k to get started you can build a six, multiple six figure, even seven figure business. And that's what we want for people is financial freedom, the ability to be their own boss, the ability to control their own schedules.

There's nothing easy about being a business owner in general. And there's certainly nothing easy about being a mobile bar owner, but if you're going to be working anyways, If you've got to spend your time making money and putting effort into a thing from now until whenever you're able to retire, shouldn't it be for yourself, right?

Shouldn't it be, you know, investment in something that you own entirely? And that's kind of, I think what my biggest takeaway working with entrepreneurs is that they're willing to work really hard, but ideally they're working really hard for themselves. And so If you've got that spirit, but you don't have the cash flow if you can even get just $5k, you know, whether it's on a 0% APR credit card or borrow it from grandma or whatever it is, you can get scrappy, you can start babysitting on the weekends and saving up or whatever it is then you can start a very successful mobile bar.

Dawn:

I love that story more every single time I hear it. Just sheer resilience. And I love that the math that we're going to give you guys is all encompassing. So where Sarah started with, you know, $200, that's entirely possible. And then, like she said, you know, as you grow, your business can support that growth, right?

And so eventually it will buy you rigs. Eventually it could buy you all these things that we're going to present here, but they're not entirely necessary. Some of them are absolutely necessary, like the licensing and the insurance, but the CRM might not be entirely necessary. It might be something that you buy after you booked 2 or 3 events so that it can pay for itself.

And so now I would like to share with you the math that we have created behind starting with less than $5k. So 1st and foremost, of course, we recommend that you invest in the academy because the academy is going to save you so much money for the long haul, and it's going to continue to pay for itself again and again.

And so the academy at an annual rate is $1908 okay. So monthly that breaks down to $159 a month. And that's the monthly tuition. And we again, have people who have been with the Academy for over four years, five years now, because they know this investment is non negotiable for their business.

Okay. The next thing is the licensing and LLC around $400. Equipment, uniforms, up to $500. You could probably come way down on that, but let's say $500. Worst case scenario. A portable bar, if you're going to renovate a dresser the way that Sarah did, this number could be less, but we're going to say about $500 for your portable bar.

And of course, if you decide to start with no portable bar and you're just a mobile bartender, then that number is zero. A website. We like Squarespace for this. Wix is another great one. Easy to get started on. $276 for that. And that's annual. That's an annual number. So, you have it for 12 months.

Google Suites. $72 and that's again an annual rate that's going to enable you to have a legit email and a legit business email box that you're not, you know, whitehorsetrailer@gmail.com we want to professionally present ourselves. So Google suite $72 for the year. Canva and branding, which you can have someone else do your branding. Etsy has really great options to get someone to design a logo for you. The prices on that are actually insanely low. I was just looking at that for my own business. But with Canva to do your own branding, you're looking at about $156 for the year. an ABC permit, you're looking at about $50. And insurance, you need general and liquor and potentially some others, depending on where you're located.

That's going to be about $756 for the year. Now that number, of course, is going to vary greatly depending on what you're insuring. This is to insure a portable bar that does not drive down the road. If you're insuring a horse trailer, that number is going to go up exponentially, we've seen some pretty crazy high numbers.

And that's why again, it's important that you wait for that rig until your business can afford it because otherwise you're in the negative every month because you're just because you're paying for insurance on this rig. Right? And so all of that totals to $4,898.

And that's an estimate, again, all inclusive, everything done exactly as it needs to be done right up front. And so you could save yourself some money there, but that's how to start a mobile bar business for less than $5k so that you can be your own boss, you can set your own schedule, you can leave your nine to five, and you can be putting money back into the business.

Sarah: Yes. And to be frank, when I created the list of things that you need in order to get started and about what the costs are it was with understanding that some of those things are optional if you're getting started and you already have a bar mat and shakers and bar spoons started with like a white button down and jeans as the uniform.

I already had that stuff, right? And so there's so many ways that you can get started with what you already have, or even borrowing a bar set from a friend, like get scrappy, get creative and don't let the cash outflow that you think is required to start this business, keep you from getting started.

Well, this has been absolutely awesome. Sarah, are there any final words that you have for newer aspiring entrepreneurs or even mobile bar owners who are already in it? They've already laid out the cash. They're waiting on a rig. What gold do you have that people can really take away from this, aside from all the gold you've already given?

I think the biggest takeaway for me is that after working again with over a thousand mobile bar owners and seeing so many of them start and then sell or start and then close, which is probably something that's seen in a lot of industries. Before you start a mobile bar before you start any business, really, but we're speaking about mobile bars here.

Sit with yourself and ask yourself, how bad do you want it? How badly do you want to be your own boss? Do you want to be in control over how much money you make? How much time are you willing to put into starting something for the first 18 to 24 months? Because this is a creative endeavor. But it's a difficult one.

No business is probably easy. And if you are looking for passive income, or if you are lulled into believing that mobile bars are passive in any way, then this is not the industry for you, but what I can tell you is that as a surefire industry, and I say that in like, if you are committed to success, you are guaranteed it

in the mobile bar industry. I have no doubts. There is nothing that you could bring to me that will tell me I just can't make it. Like people won't pay my rates or nope. I'm not going to hear that because I've seen in my field, numerous examples otherwise. And so this

is a guaranteed industry. You will and can succeed and make great money. If you're willing to do the work of getting yourself through at least the first two years. The first two years are critical in this industry because you're building operational efficiencies, you're investing in team and systems, you're getting your name out there and your brand recognition, you're solidifying your brand.

These are all really important, but it is going to take about 24 months of just so many hours. And if that's something that you're willing to do then you're guaranteed success in this industry. And I don't say that lightly. If anything, I like to leave myself a lot of outs, you know, cause I don't know really anything, but I know this and I know that the mobile bar industry is a proven industry.

It's a proven business model. It has lots of room for profitability. People are willing to buy it in every market. And if you're looking, you know, for an entrepreneurial venture that will enable you to work for yourself, then the mobile bar industry is a great one to be in.

Dawn: And if you're looking to do that more efficiently, more cost effective, and with the proper tools, shameless plug, you should be in the mobile bar Academy.

It is the number 1 resource the world's largest resource for new aspiring and even seasoned mobile bar owners. Sarah, thank you so much for all the gold that you gave us today. This is probably one of my favorite episodes that we've ever recorded because it's just loaded with awesome information and I look forward to coming back to the podcast again with you.

Sarah: Awesome. Do it soon.