How to staff a bar for a concert night

A concert two streets away is not one busy night. It is three separate rushes with gaps between them, and the staffing mistake most bars make is treating it as a single long shift. Here is how to work out the shape of the night before it happens.

Start with the crowd, not the venue

Capacity is the ceiling, not the number. A 3,000 seat hall on a midweek touring bill might sell 1,200. The same room on a Saturday headline date sells out. If you staff every show at the room's capacity you will be overstaffed most nights and blame the model rather than the input.

Three things tell you what a show will actually draw, in descending order of how much you should trust them:

• A counted number. Community platforms publish real registration counts. If a listing says 340 people are going, 340 people are going, give or take the usual no shows.
• Capacity and sales signal. When a ticketing source exposes how well a show is selling, that maps onto a fill rate. A show selling hard runs close to 90 percent of the room; a soft one runs nearer a quarter full.
• Category typical. With nothing else to go on, the kind of event is the guide. A pro sports fixture is a five figure crowd. A club night is hundreds. A neighbourhood meetup is dozens.

Then work out your share of it

You do not get the crowd. You get the fraction of it that walks past your door, in a window when they want what you sell. That fraction depends on things only you know: which side of the venue you are on, whether you sit between the venue and the station, whether there are ten other bars on the same block.

You do not need to guess it in the abstract. Take two or three nights you already remember, look up what was on nearby, and compare your covers to the crowd figure. Two or three data points give you a ratio that is yours rather than an industry average. Apply that ratio going forward and correct it as you go.

Split the night into three rushes

1. Pre show, roughly two hours before doors

   The heaviest and the most profitable. People have time, they are in a good mood, and they leave in one wave. Order driven, fast, and it wants your quickest bartender on the well. This is the rush you most often under staff because it starts earlier than it feels like it should.

2. The dead hour, once the show starts

   Near total silence. This is where the rota goes wrong: keep everyone on and you pay four people to restock, send everyone home and you have nobody for the third rush. Stagger the break here, and use it for the glass wash and the restock you would otherwise do at close.

3. Post show, from the encore

   Arrives all at once and is far less patient. Lower spend per head, higher volume, more pressure on the door and the toilets than on the kitchen. Needs bodies rather than finesse: an extra runner and a second till beat an extra cocktail specialist.

Turn that into a rota

Work backwards from the two rushes rather than forwards from your usual opening. Set the pre show peak against the doors time, not against the start time, and the post show peak against the curfew rather than the advertised end. A 9pm start with an 11pm curfew means your two busiest hours are 7 to 9 and 11 to midnight, and your quietest hour of the entire week sits between them.

• Staff the pre show like a Friday, whatever day it falls on.
• Cut to a skeleton during the show and do the prep you would otherwise do at close.
• Bring everyone back fifteen minutes before the curfew, not after it.
• Put your fastest person on drinks and your most senior on the floor for the post show wave, not the other way round.

Get the notice to make it possible

None of this works on the day. Calling someone in takes notice, and a good rota takes a week. Gigwake lists every event within 5 miles of your door 7 days ahead, ranked by the crowd each one brings, with a range on every one and a line on what that range rests on. Enough to build the rota around the night rather than react to it.