Is Your Taproom in Survival Mode or Creative Mode?

My 6 year old son loves Minecraft. Until a couple years ago, I was fairly unfamiliar with it. Welcome to elementary school. Now I cannot escape it. And the movie starring Jack Black was actually better than I expected.

Which brings me to the blog I never imagined I would write.

If you play Minecraft, you know there are two modes: survival mode and creative mode. In survival mode, the default, you start with nothing. You gather resources, manage hunger and health, defend yourself, and every block you place costs time and risk. In creative mode, you have unlimited resources. You can fly. There is no danger. You can just build.

By default, we’re naturally in survival mode. Shit, it’s tough out there. Cash flow pressure. Staffing challenges. Rising costs. Competition everywhere.

Survival mode is when you are constantly reacting. Watching the bank account. Cutting where you can. Making short term decisions just to get through the month instead of intentionally designing what you want the taproom to become

A brewery is in survival mode when it is operating reactively instead of intentionally designing experiences and thinking about long term growth.

You may be in survival mode if…

• You are brewing what feels safe instead of experimenting

• Avoiding events because they feel risky

• Scheduling the absolute minimum staff just to get through the shift

• Making pricing decisions purely from fear

• Marketing only when sales dip

• Constantly putting out daily fires without fixing the actual problem.

At that point, you are just reacting.

Take staffing as an example. Let’s say you cut back from three bartenders to two. No one can walk the floor. The manager is stuck behind the bar. No one is assigned to proactive guest engagement. No table touches. No education. No recommendations. No one available to solve small issues before they turn into bigger ones.

Guests start to feel like transactions instead of people.

That is not being lean. Lean is intentional. Lean means you looked at your numbers and scheduled in a way that still protects the guest experience. Being short staffed is when you are trying to save on labor and hoping nothing goes wrong.

That is survival mode.

And here is what we consistently see in the data: when engagement drops, spend drops. When no one is walking the floor and connecting with guests, average check declines. That is not a theory. It shows up in real taproom performance across the country.

You are never fully escaping survival mode. There will always be pressure. Competition is real. Resources are limited. Costs are not going backwards anytime soon. The shift is choosing not to let that pressure dictate every decision. It is choosing to build anyway.

Creative mode is about being intentional. One simple exercise I like, from The Workshopper Playbook, starts by defining a clear problem. For example, how might we increase weekday taproom traffic between 3 and 6pm? From there, generate as many ideas as possible without filtering. Happy hour pricing. Beer and appetizer bundles. Remote worker specials with strong WiFi. After school parent meetups. Teacher appreciation hours. Mini trivia that wraps by 6 pm. Gym partnerships. Social media flash specials.

Then rank each idea by effort and impact. What is low effort and high impact? Start there. If you want a more structured way to map this out, I recommend diving deeper into The Workshopper Playbook to see their full impact versus effort matrix.

Now let’s think about the after school parent meetup. Parents are already out for pickup and often have a gap before dinner. You are not asking them to create new time. You are asking them to change where they go after school. The effort is minimal. Designate a section. Offer a simple snack special. Promote it consistently.

The impact is not just a one day bump. It is consistent weekday bodies in seats.

Switching to creative mode does not require unlimited money. It requires doing something you are not currently doing. Being intentional. Testing new ideas. Designing experiences instead of defaulting to defense. Don’t become stuck. Don’t be satisfied with being satisfactory.

You cannot eliminate the challenges. But you can decide whether you spend all your energy bracing for impact or building something better within the constraints you have.

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