Meet Chris Schneider

About Chris

Chris Schneider bridges three worlds that rarely intersect in hospitality: hands-on operations, enterprise financial systems, and systematic education.

As a former bar owner, Chris spent over years learning profitability the hard way—managing neighborhood bars where every decision impacts the bottom line and every dollar counts. He’s worked every position in hospitality, from fast food to upscale dining, but found his passion in the neighborhood bar segment where community, culture, and careful financial management intersect.

His path took a turn when he joined Intuit as a QuickBooks Live Manager, where he managed small business bookkeeping services and saw patterns across thousands of different SMBs. This role revealed a critical insight: the businesses that succeeded weren’t just working harder—they were using better systems and understanding their data differently. He learned what financial metrics independent operators actually track, what they overlook, and how the right tools could transform decision-making.

Chris then brought this knowledge into the classroom as a hospitality instructor at Ivy Tech Community College. Teaching forced him to distill complex operational challenges into learnable, repeatable systems—an exercise that would later define his coaching methodology.

Today, Chris is the founder of The Bar Business Coach and co-founder of QuixSpec, an AI-powered revenue forecasting platform built specifically for independent bars and restaurants. QuixSpec represents the convergence of his unique background: combining multi-bar ownership experience, hospitality education, and financial systems expertise from Intuit to create technology that addresses real operational challenges while integrating seamlessly into independent operators’ existing workflows.

His coaching is built on the MCC Framework—Mindset, Concept, Culture—a systematic approach that provides the strategic lens for every bar business decision. Mindset addresses leadership and owner psychology. Concept creates the structural path to profits through menu engineering, pricing strategy, and operational systems. Culture builds community around both team and guests. This isn’t motivational theory—it’s a documented methodology that helps data-driven operators outperform intuition-based competitors by 30-40% in profitability.

Chris hosts The Bar Business Podcast, which has reached listeners across 100+ countries over 200+ episodes. Released bi-weekly, the show combines deep-dive strategic episodes on Wednesdays (20-30 minutes) with tactical quick-win episodes on Mondays (8-12 minutes), covering everything from labor optimization and pricing strategies to digital marketing and technology adoption. The podcast features a rotating cast of industry experts and includes “Party of Six,” a monthly roundtable discussing hospitality challenges, staffing solutions, and market trends.

He’s the award-winning author of “How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business” and “Menus that Sell” and has been featured in Bar and Restaurant, Beer Connoisseur, The Food Institute, and Fox News. His work has influenced bar owners across the country to shift from reactive management to proactive, systems-driven operations.

Chris’s philosophy is straightforward: the hospitality industry transforms when you stop choosing between tradition and technology and start integrating both strategically. The bars that thrive don’t just preserve what works—they systematize it, measure it, and use technology to amplify it. Traditional hospitality values matter, but they need to be supported by financial systems, operational frameworks, and data-driven decision-making.

He works mostly with independent bar owners—not chains, not corporate concepts, but owner-operators who want to build bars that consistently profit 15% or more while allowing them to spend less time working IN their businesses and more time working ON them. His clients range from bar owners “just getting by” who need systematic profitability frameworks, to those opening new concepts who want to build on the right foundations from day one.

Currently based in southern Indiana, Chris is committed to modernizing how bar owners approach their businesses. Whether through one-on-one coaching, the frameworks shared in his podcast, or the technology built into QuixSpec, his mission remains consistent: helping independent bar owners build profitable, sustainable businesses that align with their personal vision for success—not just market expectations.