Tell me about the venue.
A few lines on where the bar is and what's going on with the numbers is enough to start.
Bar consultancy · Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific
Margins you can defend.
The programme never lives in one place. Product lists, costings, menu drafts, spec cards, recipe books, engineering, reports — seven files, seven versions of the truth. Every price change and every recipe tweak makes another document wrong. With more than one bar, multiply it.
I cost every drink from top to bottom, engineer the list and set the team up to run it — for hotel and resort bars, small groups and independents. Every engagement starts with a profitability health check, then setup in Deluge.
24%
Beverage cost held at a luxury international 5 star resort. Cost of goods down 3% since onboarding.
78%
Beverage gross profit held at Sydney's pre-eminent cocktail destination, Eau de Vie Sydney, as venue manager and licensee.
≤2%
Unknown stocktake variance at every venue since 2018 — often within 1%.
11+
Years in Sydney’s most awarded bars & pubs and Fiji's highest rated 5 star resort.
Figures from the venues I’ve run as manager and licensee. Client case studies will follow as engagements complete.
The app · Deluge
One database. Every document.
Deluge is the costing and publishing app I built running hotel bars and bring to every engagement — not sold on its own. Products, preps, recipes and menus live in one database; spec cards, prep sheets, order sheets, costed menus and margin reports are derived from it, so nothing goes stale when a price moves. After setup, your team keeps running on it under licence.
- Spec cards and prep sheets the team reads on their phones or the bar tablet — one shared link or the bar kiosk, no staff accounts meaning no time spent on admin.
- Order sheets sectioned the way a stocktake walks the shelves, quantity column blank
- A margin report the owner can read in one sitting.
- Works alongside the POS and purchasing system you already run — price lists and till reports come in as spreadsheets and analysed by an AI powered system.
Library · Cocktail list sample data
Negroni stirred · 90 mL $24 78.1%
Scarlet Swizzle swizzled · batch $23 74.6%
Paloma built · 220 mL $21 71.9%
Espresso Martini shaken · 120 mL $24 69.3%
House Sour shaken · prep $22 76.4%
The list's money · theoretical 74.5% GP
What I do
Six things, usually in combination.
Every one of them starts with the health check — a costed picture of the bar and what is quietly costing it money.
01
All services, in detail Costing
Every product, prep, batch and cocktail costed ex-tax and per serve, in one database.
02Menu engineering
Sales mix against contribution. What to keep, re-price, re-cut or drop.
03Profitability health check
Where every engagement starts: a few days on the numbers and in the bar, with written findings, a fix list and the money attached.
04Cocktail programme development
A list built to a target GP — classics through clarified, carbonated and kegged serves — with the specs, preps and batching to run it.
05Staff training
Spec certification and product knowledge, tested against the venue’s own list.
06Purchasing ↔ POS bridging
Price lists and till reports into Deluge, matched to the menu, so the two systems agree.
How an engagement runs
Look, fix, keep.
01
Look
The health check: a costed picture of the bar — every product, prep and drink; the sales mix; where purchasing and the POS disagree — with written findings and agreed actions.
02
Fix
Setup in Deluge: an engineered list, a prep and batching programme, pars and ordering, and a team trained to the spec. No licence fee while we set up.
03
Keep
Spec cards, prep sheets, order sheets and margin reports that stay current, because they all come from one database — and your team keeps running on it under licence.
About
Jesse Williams
Bars Manager & Head Mixologist at Fiji's highest rated luxury, 5 star resort. Before that, Venue Manager and Licensee at Eau de Vie, Sydney — forty technical cocktails, six hundred whiskies — and ten years across the city’s best bars: the Baxter Inn, Shady Pines Saloon, Bar Planet the Oxford Tavern, the Unicorn Hotel.
I built Deluge because the programme never lived in one place. Product list, costings, menu drafts, spec cards, engineering, reports — six files, six versions of the truth. Every price change and every iterative recipe adjustment made another costing or document wrong. With more than one bar, multiply that problem. One database fixes that.
More about me Notes
Answers to the questions operators ask.
What GP should a hotel bar run?
Beverage cost versus gross profit, what a defensible number looks like across several outlets, and why an average of percentages will lie to you.
How do you cost a cocktail properly?
Ex-tax, per serve, with every prep and batch behind the drink carrying its own yield loss — and why a spreadsheet loses the chain.
Menu engineering for a cocktail list
Sales mix against contribution per drink, the four classes every list sorts into, and how to re-price and re-cut to a target GP without guessing.