Meet Julia Tunstall

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Julia Tunstall. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Julia, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?

Being an entrepreneur and business owner is tough! It’s very easy to forget the ups and focus endlessly on the downs. But just as there are a lot of hard moments, there ARE a lot of great ones, too, and sometimes it’s important to “force” yourself to focus on them. I have a few routines I incorporate into my work that have really helped me stay positive:

1) Each day I have a reminder to write down 3 things I’m grateful for, which is a way to start my day with positivity. It’s an email reminder that comes to my inbox, and all I do is reply. 2) Each week, we have an automated Slack message that goes out to our company, asking each person to share these things:
– A big win from last week
– Something they’re struggling with
– Their main “thing” to accomplish by the end of the week
– A shout out to someone else on the team who did something great.
This has been such an awesome routine for our whole team! It lets us shine a light on successes and our awesome teammates; and usually when folks bring up their struggles, others on the team reply with supportive messages. I really feel that this little 5-minute task has helped our culture of positivity.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am the co-founder of an awesome barware and bar education brand, A Bar Above. My husband and co-founder, Chris, and I launched our company back in 2013 as a purely educational brand with a YouTube channel, a blog, and eventually a podcast. At the time, high-end bar education was rare on the internet, and it was hard for new bartenders to learn advanced mixology techniques. In 2014, we began supplementing our free content by adding online courses. As our audience grew, we began to get more and more requests for recommendations for quality barware – but we didn’t really like the quality of the products on the market. So in 2016, we launched our own custom line of barware, carefully designed in collaboration between Chris and our factories. It took off!

Now we have something really special! We’ve created a barware brand that combines super high-quality barware (made by experts) with online bar training available to all levels of cocktail lovers, both professional and enthusiast. The result is something we’re really proud of: We’re dedicated to our core goals of bar education but also reach more of the industry by providing awesome products.

Our most recent product launch is our new bitters bottles set: https://shop.abarabove.com/products/bitters-bottles
This is really special because the corks are dishwasher-safe, and the nozzles are calibrated to match industry standard bitters bottles (something that’s brand new to glass bottles!).

On the education side, we just launched our Bartender Fundamentals Course: https://shop.abarabove.com/products/bartender-fundamentals
This course is designed to meet the needs of the post-COVID hospitality industry. So many bartenders are brand new to the field, so we created this program to help bring them up to speed on hospitality and the best practices of craft bartending.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

  1. Qualities: I’d say persistence! When we started A Bar Above, we believed in the need for a free craft cocktail education… but our initial plan to sell training courses didn’t make very much money. We had to get creative to pay the bills and tried many different things, from consulting to subscription services, blog and podcast sponsorship, and more. It was grueling and disheartening, but when we found what worked, (i.e. “product market fit”) it really worked! If we’d given up when things got hard, we never would have found what ended up working.
  2. Skills: Organization & Systems Building
    My background is in business consulting, which made me the perfect partner to my co-founder, Chris. His skills are deep in the field of cocktails, hospitality, and bartending but not as strong in business. So I was able to really own the “business” side of our company: establishing operations, building a team, and creating systems that were intuitive and scalable as we grew.
  3.  Qualities: Thinking outside the box!
    Fortunately for our business (and unfortunately for my parents and every teacher I ever had), I’m not one to do what I’m told. This has served us well! We’ve been told many times that something we wanted to do was a bad idea, but often these ideas  worked out. One example: We have a 30-hour work week and flexible WFH schedule for our entire team. This has been instrumental for finding the right culture for our company, and it has resulted in extremely low turnover for our team.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

Back when I was in undergrad, I listened to an audio version of the famed “Getting Things Done” by David Allen on my long drive back to school. The book completely changed how I work and taught me his now-famous “GTD” method. I’d always struggled with a terrible memory that got in the way of my effectiveness, but by incorporating GTD and taking great notes, I learned to store information “outside” my brain. This has been completely life-changing for my productivity and effectiveness both early on (when I was the “doer” in the company) and even more so as I’ve grown into a leadership role.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Melanie Tornroth, Emmanuel Lozano

 

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