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Hospitality industry veterans lend new meaning to term BYOB (02/04)

By ANDREW WAREING Drinks and dollars are combining with bits and bytes in Chris Painter and Drew Bennett's world.
By ANDREW WAREING

Drinks and dollars are combining with bits and bytes in Chris Painter and Drew Bennett's world. The two 30-something hospitality industry veterans know firsthand the pitfalls of starting up a business, and they are giving those starting out a chance to try their luck in a virtual world where the only thing at stake is their final grade and not their life savings.

Chris Painter (right) and Drew Bennett, took their hospitality industry expertise online to create an educational tool, which is now being used globally.
Out of this desire to teach people just starting out, they have developed BYOB: Build Your Own Bar, an online simulation for those who want to learn what it actually takes to open their own hospitality business.

"It's more than just how to open your own bar," says Painter. "There are seven simulations for starting up a night club, a resort, hotel, a themed restaurant and fine dining. Everyone we've ever known, half have told us they always wanted to open their own restaurant or bar:it's a common thing that many people who can cook a good Christmas dinner think they can open a restaurant.

"What we thought, if we could teach an individual how to open properly, how to manage properly, let them see the inside of the business; there are those things you can't teach in school but we deal with every day and we've installed into the program," he says. "It's the daily decision-making process that dictates the success of a business."

Sitting in Bennet's own restaurant, Painter describes how he and Bennett each started at the same time, opening hospitality businesses in Parry Sound in 1995. Bennett's restaurant, Drew's Place, is a bistro-style restaurant while Painter's business, one he opened with his family, Brunswick Travelodge Inn, is a hotel and sports bar-style establishment.

Each business might have a different emphasis, however each have noted similar challenges.

"A few years into it, after we got a little time under our belts, we realized there were certain common issues between all ends of the marketplace
whether it be staff turnover, management issues, financial issues, what have you," says Painter. "We thought, with the advent of the Internet, maybe we could create something that would educate the individual on operating a hospitality business."

The pair started in 1998 with a job-search/job-post Web site called winewingswaitstaff.com specifically designed for the hospitality industry. From
there, they pitched the Web site to college and university students, but they rapidly received feedback that the Web site also needed to have an
educational component as well.

Teaching themselves the intricacies of programming and graphic design, starting in 2000, the pair worked to develop BYOB. Four months ago, they set up the program with Parry Sound IT company Mylo.com and Dan Cannaughan to host the simulation and revamp the program.

The eight-week virtual simulation has been added to the curriculum of several colleges starting with the University of Guelph in January 2003. The United Arab Emirates, and Suny Delhi in New York and Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island have since picked them up and, by January, approximately 400 students were expected to use the simulation.

Encompassing the entire process of starting a business in one of the seven cities of the fictitious Friday Island, there are 20 modules students have to wend their way through from market analysis, arranging financing to setting up a menu, balancing the books, advertising and hiring staff. It also tracks the sales of the new establishment and keeps track of the use of the program and the progress of each of the students up to a final wrap-up at the course's end.

"Because the student gets to create their own menu, pick their own colours and that sort of thing, there is a lot of student buy-in," says Painter. "It is also created in Macromedia Flash so it has a lot of graphics and is very aesthetically pleasing."

How much the students get out of the program is directly related to how much effort they put into it and many of the students have put in more than a hundred hours, says Painter. It could also be applied in the future to other businesses.

"The real beauty of it, we have students literally around the world. They're talking and interesting things are happening," he says. "They're talking and the networking we're creating through this is quite interesting. Watching the students interact is quite a reward."