As I push open the door to Idle Hands, the familiar shape of Jay Gray sits atop a bar stool, the light from a laptop basking his face in a blue-light glo, as he tends to the business of running a business. He turns as he hears me enter, and before I'm even seated, a glass of ice cold water has already been presented to me. It’s a natural reflex, perhaps, of a man who has earned a reputation for his sense of hospitality and his ability to build bars that feel like you’re walking into the living room of an old friend. 

As I accept the chilled glass and take a sip, he slams his laptop shut, strokes his chin and grins.

“So, you want to learn about how to open a bar?”

I sure do. And I still can’t believe my luck that Jay’s willing to teach.

Jay’s been a familiar and respected face in the Singaporean cocktail scene for a while now. He was previously a brand ambassador for Monkey Shoulder, and most notably, a founding member of the famed Sago House (as well as a few other concepts), the bar that came in number 32 in The World's 50 Best Bars 2023. These days, he’s currently pursuing his passion of hospitality at Idle Hands, whilst building concepts such as Club Street Laundry & Hup San Social Club in the 98 Club Street building.

Before we got into the nitty-gritty of how to open a bar, it’s worth asking the question: What exactly makes a Jay Gray bar? “I would say, guests over the drink,” he replies, “I think anyone in this town can make a decent drink. What makes a bar ‘mine’ is my main focus is on how I’ve made the guests feel.”

According to Jay, his M.O. is turning a venue into a personality forward space, where the food and drinks are complementary to the hospitality. However, he stresses that not every venue you open one opens can be driven by personality, nor should one solely rely on that aspect to drive success. Still, it doesn’t hurt to bank on it when the opportunity arises. “I think at the end of the day, people don’t buy into brands, I think they buy into people, and that’s what makes them come back.”

With that, let’s see what nuggets of wisdom Jay has for other aspiring bar owners out there.

“Guests over the drink. I think anyone in this town can make a decent drink. What makes a bar ‘mine’ is my main focus is on how I’ve made the guests feel.” - Jay Gray on what makes a Jay Gray bar.

What It Takes

Well, first thing’s first, what does one need to consider when starting a bar?

Now, some among you might already have the word “COST” in big, flashing letters in your head, but to Jay, it’s but one thing in a rather long, uncertain journey. In fact, the next words out of Jay’s mouth wrong-foot me somewhat.

“It depends on which way you look at it. I got very lucky with Sago and how it panned out. You know, it was a bit of a unicorn,” he says with a chuckle.

It’s often well acknowledged that the bigger the budget one might be lucky to start with, the more wiggle room one is afforded down the road. Jay can certainly attest to this, having lived through both low and high costs of business.

“Sago house's rent was incredibly low at the beginning and it allowed us to offset how little we had in the bank to start with. I don't recommend starting a business without thinking of all the variable AND fixed costs as it's a risky move with a more expensive piece of real estate.”

Jay Gray's preferred BYOB policy? Build-Your-Own-Bar. Many aspects of Idle Hands, just like with Sago House, was DIY-ed by Jay and his team.

Oddly enough, starting with low funding doesn’t necessarily spell doom, as Jay adds. Leaning back a bit and looking in thought, he adds that opening a venue with little to no funds did allow his team to be more agile and creative with their problem solving and adaptability.

Unless you’ve come into a rather large, unconditional sum of money, compromise is set to be the name of the game, Jay says. Rattling off a list of rhetoricals from building materials used to the amount of people in your bar team, he warns that entering the project bright-eyed and overly optimistic might not end well.

“Different styles of venues and different outcomes are very dependent on how much money you start with and what you're willing to compromise on. All these things need to be thought about ahead of time. You just can’t compromise on hospitality”

Training Your Team And Learning to Delegate

Once you’re open and you’re working in the business, it’s very hard to come back out and work on the business.”

Jay pauses, perhaps sensing my confusion. “What I mean by that is if you're doing the day-to-day, and you're steering the ship from behind the bar or from in-service, when you then come out and try and work on the business as an owner, one thing or another is going to suffer. As you’ve made yourself an integral cog in the machine.”

It’s all a matter of how well the team is trained, especially the one managing the daily running of the bar. As Jay says, a leader cannot possibly work on both the business and in it without the business suffering.

“You know, the incubation period of a new bar in Singapore in terms of people's interest is about three to six months,” he adds with a conspiratorial smirk, “Then it starts to dwindle unless you've locked in your regular guests. So, managing the amount of time I work in the business with my guests and on the business for growth is integral to success.”

“I have noticed that one the days that I’m not physically here (Idle Hands), sales drop by like more than 50%.” There’s a flash of sheepishness as he continues: “That's what you call a personality-based business, and that's my own doing because this bar was just for me in the beginning.

So now I'm training people to be brilliant behind the bar but also be brilliant with people so I can step away and be productive without ruining the guest expectation. But these things will take a while. Hence, in a nutshell, time is a resource. So make sure to be clear about what percentage of your time you will dedicate to which areas of your business, and who you have invested in to help you with that.”

Club Street Laundry and Hup San Social Club.

The conversation shifts to Jay’s other concepts, Club Street Laundry and Hup San Social Club downstairs.

“Now, I like being in control of my marketing, but it's a full-time job so we employ talented people to manage content. However that's where I'm going to allocate my resources for club street laundry, managing the marketing team. I will not, however, be allocating my knowledge of cocktails nor directly assisting June (HHSC’s bartender) to execute her cocktail program, especially since you do not need two people working on that aspect of the business.”

Overlaps of roles will certainly occur, but it’s essential to have one person in charge and to report regarding each aspect of the business. This is exceedingly important when it comes to finances, Jay says, stressing the need for a CFO or otherwise someone who's in control of money. He grins at some inside joke as he says that this someone must be an accredited accountant.

“Not someone who thinks they know numbers, not someone who thinks they can run your books, not someone who's owned a bar before and helping you out,” he adds cheekily, “That clear role and responsibility of time management, not only allocation of resources, means that when the team is in service, they are focused on the task at hand, not thinking about other things like finances or publicity.”

“It sounds very corporate-y and nonsense, but over two successful venues and three failed venues, you learn where money needs to be spent and what's more important than being on the ground all the time,” he laughs.

"So I'm training people to be brilliant behind the bar but also be brilliant with people so I can step away. But these things will take a while. Hence, in a nutshell, time is a resource. So make sure to be clear in your head what percentage of your time will you dedicated to which areas of your business, and who have you invested in to help you with that.”

Of Place and Space

 “You cannot have the immediate ambition of, I'm going to go worldwide and market to everyone. You need to spend your time serving your community because they're the ones who are going to feed you.”

Jay brings up the idea of “a capture rate of guests," a concept intimately linked with your choice of location. 

“If you're in a location that has a community of elderly people nearby, you're probably not going to be seeing much guest retention. Likewise, if you're next to schools and things like that, you're not going to be capturing much more than the average disgruntled dad or mom coming in for a drink.”

As Jay puts it, for a successful bar one must prioritise a location with high foot traffic and easy access, avoiding the need for customers to travel far. Of course, this is assuming one has secured a long-term lease, ideally for at least three years, with a fixed and affordable rent. 

While he believes that any aspiring bar owner should aim to keep their annual rent expenses below 10% of total revenue, Jay grins and shrugs, adding that “In Singapore, it's almost impossible for that to happen. It ends up being more like 16% to 19%, which is incredibly hard to make that work with, let's say, 30% wage costs. So, again, you're looking at real estate, you're looking at a community that you can feed, and who can feed you.”

The founding team behind Sago House, (from left to right) Jay Gray, Desiree Silva and George Abhishek.

In a rather unexpected turn, Jay adds that one mistake he thinks was made at Sago House was “buying into the hype of the awards”.

He continues: “I don't mean that as a bad thing, but the minute I started to see the tide turn was when we'd have people come in, take a photo of a drink, sit there for two hours, then leave. Taking the seat of our regular guests who’d been with us from day one. With limited capacity and high demand due to award publicity… it can become a real problem.” 

“They might enjoy the service and the drink, but their whole goal for that evening is they're in town for three days, they're going to try to hit as many bars as they can. It's impossible to run a business based on fair weather commerce, right?” he added. 

 “You cannot have the immediate ambition of, I'm going to go worldwide and market to everyone. You need to spend your time serving your community because they're the ones who are going to feed you.”

To Theme or Not to Theme

A great example of a themed bar, fellow Singaporean bar The Dragon Chamber pays homage to the the Chinese secret society dens of old Hong Kong.

When asked about the idea of themes, or rather, bars with specific themes to them, be it in design or menu, Jay chuckles,  “I'm not a huge fan of themes."

Well, that’s that then!

But Jay goes on: “Concept and theme are very different things. The problem that I see in the market is that a lot of places are opening and sometimes it can be hard to understand what they are.

“Employees Only (another Singaporean bar), for example, has a very clear concept. It is a New York-themed sort of bar with a restaurant. It's art deco. It makes sense. They've developed their brand identity over 10 plus years and they know what they're about.”

Jay says that new places often open up and fall into two broad categories: Those that try to emulate a previous success, or those that try to pave something new and fill a gap in the market. That said, it’s all a rather grey area where success isn’t guaranteed, change is a constant, and you’re fast running out of novel concepts in the bar world.

“Suffice it to say, you won't always nail it on the first try,” Jay says, “You probably have about three months to sort of renovate your ideas. If you're open and honest with your guests, and be like, hey, we're just trying out this new menu, let us know what you think, and the next week, where the menu goes, people won’t complain.”

As a sort of small tidbit, Jay says that he generally tries to avoid adopting a definite theme now at Idle Hands because he hates being restricted: “Try not to box yourself in too heavily by having a really, really dense or linear sort of theme, because once you do that and if people don't like it, to rebrand is very hard.”

It’s not so much about just coming up with a good theme that makes sense, novelty be damned, he adds. You must also ensure that your target audience understands what you're about so they can either dress or prepare themselves to visit if they want to.

At the same time, he cautions, it's important to retain adaptability and an open mind even if you have a theme.  “If people are going to bring their friends back to the bar because they like something that you did, you want to make sure you're still doing it.” Jay argues, “I think when it comes to menu conceptualization and stuff like that, it’s important that you take with one hand and give with the other. For example, ‘oh I'm sorry we don't do that cocktail right now, but I can make you something very similar.'"

“But you also need to make sure you're not taking away anything from the experience. If you've got a rock and roll dive bar and then all of a sudden you pivot to an underground hip hop concept, for example, obviously the guests who like rock and roll are going to be like, the f**k happened?” he grins. 

A theme shouldn’t become a shackle for you. One does not need to be hung up over the theme of one’s bar and having it achieve peerless perfection. Jay assures that the dynamics of one’s bar will change, elevating or evolving over time.

“You can't pivot heavily unless you close and reopen, but you can change elements of what you do, how you serve things, do you serve water at the table, do you have a self-service station, all those sorts of things,” he says. “It’s up to you to determine what matters.”

Getting (And Keeping) A Crowd 

“The best thing to do is ask your guests, hey, why do you like this place?  It's important that it comes from you because you're the founder and people invest in founders.”

Perhaps the most important question of the night: “Now, I’ve gotten my  bar up and running, how do I get people through the doors? How do I keep them returning?”

Jay seems to have seen this question coming. He proclaims with no lack of certainty that advertising, media coverage and traditional word-of-mouth are but broad tools that help, but won’t go far in retaining customers.

“It’s all about social media, but specific social media. Your actual tools are messaging and broadcasting apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.” He continues: “It’s about updating people consistently and in real time and also having useful information for them, something that the guests need or want to hear about. Make them invest in your success, and become a part of the process”

“You must have a source of information that is not just, hey, come down. You need to find out what your audience is into, why they like you, and tell them why they should keep liking you.”

This blurs with a concept of finding out why your customers like your bar, Jay says. Communication is very much a two way street, and something that many people tend to overlook. To fully understand your cliente, you need to have a direct line to them.

“The best thing to do is ask your guests, hey, why do you like this place?  It's important that it comes from you because you're the founder and people invest in founders. They don't always invest in team members because they come and go.”

Find your niche and do it well, says Jay. Whatever it might be and whatever you might change from week to week, reach out to your guests and keep them informed. “However trivial you think it is, don't just post on Instagram. Post it directly to the source. It doesn't have to be 100, 200 people. It just needs to be 5 to 10 people who you're communicating with regularly who will bring 5 to 10 people with them.”

Granted, you should also have the right amount of honesty that stops just before over-informing your guests. That means don't tell them about the bad things, or too much personal going-ons that makes the conversation a little awkward.

“I'm terrible at being too honest, I wear everything on my sleeve,” Jay laughs. 

“You need to be able to have an open dialogue with your guests as they are the best source of information for your failings. They know what you're good and bad at, and they’ll see it far more clearly than you as a business owner can.”

He nods absentmindedly to himself as he stares at the crowd coming in, giving nods and smiles to regulars as they greet him through the door. Just as I begin to get up to leave, he turns to me with a noncommittal shrug and a smile: “I think it's each to their own. All you can do is try to have the right systems in place and do your best.”

And what he adds last pretty much sums up starting a bar, I’d say.

“There’s no silver bullet for this.”

Interview and words by @Definitelynotthreeracoons