Marla Poytinger had the feeling that something good was about to happen. It was fall 2023 and things were looking up for her company, Milwaukee-based Bars & Recreation Inc., the operator of several immersive activity bars in the area. It had taken up until then for the dust to settle from the COVID-19 pandemic –
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A self-serve pour wall at The New Fashioned will have 50 beverages on tap, including Sprecher Root Beer.[/caption]
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The New Fashioned will replace Punch Bowl Social in downtown Milwaukee’s Deer District.[/caption]
On to something
The company that’s now known as Bars & Recreation includes axe-throwing bar AXE MKE and build-your-own mini golf bar Nine Below, both located on Milwaukee’s East Side; private-suite karaoke bar Amped and live-hosted game show experience Game Show MKE, which share one location in downtown’s Brewery District; axe-throwing and giant shuffleboard bar NorthSouth Club in the city’s Walker’s Point neighborhood; and Splash Studio, a now-virtual take on the company’s flagship paint-and-sip concept.
And as what will be Bars & Rec’s first move outside the city, a fifth location will open later this year in West Allis.
Marla Poytinger co-founded the company in 2012 with her husband, 
Marla and David Poytinger stand behind the bar at Amped.
‘Team Bars & Rec’: Company leadership, including (front row, left to right) Kevin Muscott, director of facilities, logistics and technology; Steve Davis, director of experiences; Lauren Upson, director of food and beverage; Ruth Lawson, director of marketing; Marla Poytinger, chief executive officer; David Poytinger, chief innovation officer; and Erin Hochevar, vice president, with a group of sales, marketing and operations employees. Credit: Valerie Hill[/caption]
What’s in an experience?
Digging deeper into what made the Splash Studio concept so popular, the Poytingers saw it wasn’t just the guided painting sessions and wine that had brought customers through the door; it was bigger than that.
“People were craving this artistic expression and a place for adults to come and express themselves and have fun,” said Poytinger.
They distilled it down to a few core attributes they figured they could replicate, and that became the blueprint to build out their immersive entertainment empire over the next few years, starting with Nine Below in 2016, followed by AXE MKE in 2018, NorthSouth Club in 2019, Head Space Trivia, which was a pandemic-era virtual game experience in 2020, and then both Amped and Game Show MKE in 2023.
So, what are these so-called “pillars of success” that set the Bars & Rec experience apart?
“It’s a little bit of a secret sauce,” said Poytinger. She later added that the company tries to emulate best practices from the likes of Universal Studios and major cruise ship operators.
One of the main ingredients of that secret sauce is what Poytinger calls “blow-your-mind” customer service.
“We actually use the words ‘taken care of,’ not just waited on, so you really feel like you are 100% loved,” she said.
It’s a practice that came out of Splash. Whenever a customer seemed hesitant to tap into their artistic abilities – or lack thereof – David would bring them a drink and offer some words of encouragement for stepping outside their comfort zone and trying it anyway.
“It was a little bit cheesy, but also it resonated with people,” said Marla Poytinger. “And when we saw that, how important that was, it was sort of like, OK, there’s something that we can do that’s different than just traditional service.”
Another key ingredient is accessibility. Generally, Bars & Rec concepts are geared toward adults, with corporate groups currently responsible for generating 70% of total revenue. With its audience in mind, team building is a central offering at all Bars & Rec locations, meaning all activities are able to be done wearing business attire.
On top of that, Bars & Rec upholds very specific criteria for what fits the “immersive entertainment” bill. Virtual reality, for example, would not pass the test.
“That’s interacting through a screen. … We want people to have true authentic social engagement,” said Poytinger.
A major turning point
Like many businesses that were mandated to shut down at the outset of the pandemic, Bars & Rec harnessed what it saw as a silver lining in a time of crisis. With nearly all operations and revenue halted for months, the business was forced to look inwards at the systems and processes that were working – and those that needed improvement.
“There’s that wonderful Winston Churchill quote, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste,’ and I think looking back, that’s really how we were able to survive,” said Poytinger. “We saw the potential future if we fixed the company for the better. We had this unique possibility of building going forward in a way that we couldn’t have done if COVID hadn’t happened.”
Prior to the pandemic, Bars & Rec was scaling at such a rate that hiring became somewhat haphazard. The opening of NorthSouth Club – just seven months before COVID hit – was an exciting milestone and huge investment for the company at the time.
“We were growing, growing, growing, just sort of plotting along and putting people into positions because we needed them to work. But it wasn’t necessarily their highest and best use,” she said.
Plus, the company’s previous structure – which separated each location into an individual enterprise, with its own employees and general manager – had become inefficient.
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Groups playing games of deck shuffleboard at NorthSouth Club.[/caption]
For instance, a Nine Below employee who also picked up shifts at AXE MKE and NorthSouth Club would receive a separate paycheck from each entity – paychecks that Poytinger would have to spend extra time printing and signing. In addition, GMs were given a range of responsibilities that were far too wide for one person, said Poytinger. On top of managing operations and staff, they were also expected to handle inventory, place orders and ensure the facility was clean and well-maintained. This left limited capacity for relationship and culture building across teams – much less across the company at large.
It was clear there were cracks in the foundation that needed repair.
In 2019, Splash Studio Inc., Nine Below Inc., Axe MKE Inc., and The NorthSouth Club Inc. all incorporated under the newly formed parent company, Bars & Recreation Inc. Under this structure, each unit remains its own business entity, but all staff is employed by Bars & Recreation through a management services agreement.
With the framing of a new internal structure already in place and the worst of the pandemic in the rear view, Bars & Rec set out to rebuild a team that would carry the company forward onto stabler ground.
Here’s where Steve Davis, director of experiences, enters the picture. The Waukesha native joined Bars & Rec in early 2021 after spending the prior decade working as cruise and activities director for Royal Caribbean, a role that placed him both as the “face of the ship” – on stage hosting shows and on screen for the morning television program – and behind the scenes managing a crew of as many as 250 entertainers, producers and other activity staffers.
That all came to an abrupt halt in 2020 as the pandemic decimated the cruise industry, resulting in thousands of furloughed workers, including Davis. Out of work for about a year, he came across an Indeed job posting for Bars & Rec and was later hired. Today, Davis oversees 55 crew members, including each location’s general managers, hosts and bartenders, in his role of maintaining a consistent, top-notch customer experience across the Bars & Rec footprint.
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The right pieces to the puzzle
As part of its rebuild strategy – led by key corporate personnel like Davis and vice president Erin Hochevar – Bars & Rec reoriented its organizational structure, increasing the size of its executive team in order to lighten the load for its frontline crew members, those who interface directly with customers.
“We took a lot off of the plate of a general manager so they could focus on on-site operations, so they could focus on the customer experience, focus on what we consider the real important stuff to help the company grow,” said Davis.
Now with more support staff working behind the scenes, the operations team is smaller in scale compared to pre-COVID. While it may be more efficient, said Poytinger, it’s not necessarily better for the bottom line – at least in the short term.
“In some ways, I think it’s more expensive because we have these higher-level people who are more experienced,” she said. “But that’s OK because they get so much more done. And they can carry a really heavy workload without getting burned out.”
With an eye on elevating the customer experience, Bars & Rec also adopted a new mindset around what it looks for in a job candidate. Instead of prioritizing bartending experience as it had in the past, the company started recruiting people with backgrounds as camp counselors, cruise ship employees and theater kids – those who possess that “joie de vivre (French for joy of living) and can give guests that blow-your-mind experience,” said Poytinger.
New hires can be trained in skills like bartending and catering – and at a high level thanks to the recent addition of Lauren Upson as director of food and beverage – but personality is innate.
And as far as entertainment goes, it holds a lot of weight.
“The people on my team on the cruise ship were the ones that could make or break a customer’s experience,” said Davis. “They’re the entertainers. They’re the ones that have that personality that makes you feel like you’re their friend by the end of the cruise. That’s really what we’re trying to harness here with our team.”
The new approach has guided Bars & Rec in hiring almost all new operations employees since 2021, said Poytinger.
But as much as it’s about hiring the right people, it’s also about keeping them.
Along with a suite of employee benefits – including health, dental and vision insurance coverage, a 401(k) match, and paid time off for all – Bars & Rec offers an internal incentive program that Davis came up with in 2021, known as Steve’s Bar Bucks. On an employee’s birthday or work anniversary, or if they publicly receive positive feedback – either from customers or peers through the company’s online portal – they are rewarded $5 in gift card credit for uniforms, merchandise, food, snacks and activities at any Bars & Rec location. Last year, the company gave back nearly $3,000 dollars in gift card credit to employees.
“We talk about taking care of our customers, and we expect (employees) to take care of our customers. But they can only do that if they are taking care of themselves,” said Poytinger. “We’ve got to fill up their cup before they can then go and give that energy to our guests.”
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Amped and Game Show MKE are located in The Brewery District.[/caption]
Getting there
Bars & Rec has been profitable since “day one,” according to Poytinger, who claims reinvesting that profit back into the company is part of what’s kept it on a slow-and-steady growth trajectory for the past decade. However, the pandemic called attention to just how vulnerable the company could be by – up until then – leasing, rather than owning, all of its locations, said Poytinger.
In 2022, Bars & Rec made a series of three real estate purchases in the span of about four months, starting in February with the southern portion of a commercial building in downtown’s Brewery District – now home to Amped and Game Show MKE – followed by a warehouse in Walker’s Point, utilized for storage and as a makeshift research and development facility for testing and refining new concept ideas, and lastly, the former CasTech Inc. building in West Allis for Bars & Rec’s next yet-to-be-announced concept.
Transforming the vacant factory has so far been a massive undertaking for Bars & Rec, which last year secured state grant funding and hired Brown Deer-based LF Green Development to carry out a complete environmental cleanup of the property, including in-ground hoist removal and water and soil testing.
The West Allis building is now ready for buildout but, given the timing with The New Fashioned and 2024 RNC this summer, the concept won’t open until September.
“It was a huge project for us, but also I felt like I was ready to do more – not just the interior of the building, but to take a whole building from the ground up and learn what it’s like to be a developer,” said Poytinger.
She said the West Allis project is a test for what could someday be a future arm of the business, taking troubled or blighted properties and turning them into entertainment destinations that add vibrancy to the surrounding community.
The New Fashioned site offers a similar trial, largely thanks to the shortcomings of its previous operator, and not without its own set of operational challenges.
“People are skeptical of that space, and I get it. It was not good. (Punch Bowl Social) just didn’t have a pulse on the community,” said Poytinger.
Offering activities such as bowling, dartball and all-season street curling as well as a menu featuring old-fashioned flights, custard and butter burgers – led by Benson’s Restaurant Group as the venue’s exclusive restaurant and catering partner – it’s now up to The New Fashioned and its local operator to change the minds of skeptics, and stand out in the minds of visitors.
“We have to really show that we’re different and that we’re making better decisions and that we’re local, which is not an easy task,” Poytinger said. The goal is being the “number one stop on your itinerary anytime you have people in town.”
That’s exactly the kind of operation the Bucks had in mind for the site.
“We were really looking for someone who could not only utilize and take over the space but really activate it, and the difference is they’re local, which we love,” said