The Barstool MBA: We begin with a murder. Really.

(Learning about business can be fun! I'll explain more below, but today I launch an exciting new series with friend, digital entrepreneur, and bar owner Dan Maccarone explaining what the bar business can teach you about your business. It'll live on Medium, and here.)

by Dan Maccarone and Bob Sullivan

A screeching ring pierces the otherwise silent 4:30 a.m Sunday morning. Dan rolls over and sees his then-wife wife, Mel, groggily hit accept on her iPhone, then listens to one side of a conversation that escalates quickly. She hangs up.

Co-author Dan Maccarone

“What was that about?” Dan asks, hoping against hope he could turn over and go back to sleep.

“That was Josh. He’s freaking out. A guy was just shot right outside our bar.”

It’s August of 2009 and we were two months in as bar owners. Welcome to the business.

Josh, the bartender closing that night, had every reason to freak out, of course. Taz, the guy who had been shot, was a regular at our bar, Destination, in Manhattan’s East Village. He was also a doorman at a different bar across the street. He’d been off that night and Josh had ever served him a couple hours before the shooting. He was pronounced dead that night. Two other patrons were wounded.

This was ridiculous. The East Village in 2009 was about as safe as you could get — a far cry from the violence of its drug days 15 years before. And here we were in the middle of the night dealing with a situation beyond our wildest imagination. This was the first of many experiences owning a bar that taught us: you have to be prepared for anything.

There’s a lot you can learn in a bar, and a lot you can learn from the bar business — even things you never wanted to know, like how to react to a murder outside your front door.. We know a fair share about bars, and business. Dan co-founded interactive design firms Hard Candy Shell andCharming Robot, which has helped launch and re-launch products with dozens of brands you know, including Hulu, Saturday Night Live, Billboard and Gawker. More to our point here, he’s also owned two NYC bars, making him the “industry insider” for this series. Bob is a business journalist who’s written two New York Times best sellers. He’s also a musician who plays about 100 bar gigs every year. He’s the “outside observer.” From behind a drum kit he’s seen bars and businesses thrive and fail because they’ve hit or missed on some basic things.

Together, we think we’ve found a series of principles you can apply to your business, or your life, and we plan to share them during the next few months. Today, we’ll kick off the series with some thoughts about taking control of your brand…even in the most challenging circumstances.

When Destination opened, Dan was still running Hard Candy Shell. The bar was supposed to be a side project, but quickly turned into a second job when the day-to-day challenges of running a bar became obvious. Steering two very different businesses concurrently, it quickly became clear that the parallels of the everyday bar world and the professional world outside of it were striking. Owning a bar made it clear that business hours and after-hours were two sides of the same coin.

CHAPTER 1: “THE EXPERIENCE IS YOUR BRAND”

At Charming Robot, we begin every project by saying “The experience is your brand” to our clients. It means this: Every touchpoint a person or customer has with your brand matters. Whether that’s browsing in your physical store, navigating your website on an iPhone while in line at Starbucks, complaining to you on Twitter or any other point of interaction. How your product or company addresses customers’ issues and allows them to accomplish their goals is paramount to creating a successful brand.

With a bar, these points couldn’t be more obvious. If you think about it, from the moment a customer walks into a bar, consciously or subconsciously, they are forming an impression of the establishment. From the decor to the beers on tap to the person behind the “stick,” everything matters.

The Bartender/ The Face

The bartender is the ultimate face of the establishment and could well be the most important factor. One bar group I know- they own Whiskey Town,Whiskey Tavern, Whiskey Brooklyn, The Whiskey Annex, The Little Whiskey& The Big Whiskey in Manhattan- requires their bartenders to introduce themselves to each new customer. This creates an immediate personal relationship. And gives the customer an immediate positive acknowledgement.

How often have you walked into a bar where the bartender is pounding away texts on their phone or lazily reading the paper barely registering that you’ve walked in — never mind that you want a drink? There’s nothing worse to create an immediate barrier and show you disrespect.

Unless you own the bar. Then there’s nothing worse than having people walk in who want to spend money, but walk out before ever dropping a dime — all for want of a hello. Bob sees it often from the corner where he’s playing drums. In the time it takes to finish a single song, a group can walk in, look around, feel ignored, and decide to walk out.

But the opposite is also true. Mel McNally is the architect and founder behind the Irish Pub Company, which has helped open or redesign more than 1,000 bars around the planet. We’ll talk more about his design principles later in this series, but chief among them: the main bar should be constructed so the bartender can always see the front door easily. That’s so she or he can smile the moment would-be drinkers approach the door and even think about entering the place.

When hiring bartenders for Destination, the goal was to find people who we could trust as the face of our establishment. The brand thesis was that apartments in the East Village are tiny and everyone deserves to have a living room; our bar was going to be just that. We needed people who you’d want to spend an afternoon hanging out with. Folks with friendly, approachable attitudes who could inspire good conversation, keep the day moving and, most importantly, keep you refilling your drinks (it was a business after all). We needed a staff who could not only turn a bar with just a few patrons at stools into a warm environment but could also as well hold their own with the demands of a bar four people deep on a Saturday night — ensuring that people already a few gin & tonics in could easily order their next cocktail without feeling ignored while 20 other people needed to be served.

Whether you’re Bloomingdale’s or The New York Times or Nest, that experience of how consumers interact with the product is just as important. Is there a friendly, helpful tone to the sales people? Is the article you’re trying to read easy to get through (no one hates having to close overlays more than Dan); can you easily set up and use the product when you take it out of the box? There’s a reason all Apple gadgets arrive with an unboxing experience that feels luxurious. People love their Apple gadgets before they ever turn them on.

Whether or not you know what you want to drink or eat when you stroll into a bar, the bartender should quickly assess how to help you and deliver in a fast and friendly way. The same is true of any other business. If a client emails you, you may not need to respond immediately, but you’d better not wait two days. In a workshop Dan gives on smart product design, he often asks participants to describe the best shopping experience they’ve ever had. Amazon comes up again and again because of its one-click purchase feature. What’s easier than that?

The first impression sets the tone. Think about the last time you connected with a firm for the first time. It only has a few seconds to prove it has about you and your needs That’s established in those first few seconds when the bartender introduces him or herself, or when you return that first email from a potential client, or when someone arrives at your site and has a clear idea of who you are and what you do.

The Aesthetic...the Consumed...Read the rest of the this post on Medium. Next week: The power of the well-timed free gift.

FYI, Dan Maccarone is the co-founder of Charming Robot, a digital product design agency in NYC. He also hosts the podcast Story in a Bottle, chronicling the stories of tech and media professionals. Follow him on Twitter@danmaccarone.