We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristina McAlpin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kristina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

As I continue to grow Top Shelf Events, quality control is always a top priority for myself and my company. As any company grows, the quality of service can sometimes deviate downwards. As a company that has continue to grow for the past 11 years, I take pride in the quality of service my staff and I provide. It is easy for calls and emails to slip through the cracks. At Top Shelf we aim to give 100% to each client start to finish. I believe being present in the company is the best way to control the service you give. A lot of owners tend to step back and let others run their business once they start to see a profit turn. With Top Shelf, I have chosen to remain present. It is often that I hear about my competitors loosing business simply from not answering the phone, or emails, and just not being present in the company. To remain successful and to be the clients first option is to be present. No one will run your business like yourself so its important to show and and get the job done the way you intended it to be. After years of training, I am proud to say that I do have a few employees that show up and do the job as if they are me. These kind of employees are few and far between. A few events where I was not able to be on site, I did have some lower quality events. This taught me that sometimes I need to book less events so I can be present at the other ones. A happy customer is more important that the bottom dollar. I would have restless nights knowing that a client didn’t received the top shelf service we are known for. When that happened, I made it my mission to train and create the best staff in the industry.

My Advice to anyone trying to maintain a level of quality service is to answer every call, even if its a spam. Answer every email, even it if comes in late at night. These things do not go unnoticed to the client. The world we live in tends to not answer calls, take days to return an email. So when you are on top of it and actually take the call on the first ring, the client remembers that. I know when I’m looking for a service for anything, the first thing I do is go to google. I google people in that particular industry and start making calls. Usually the first human I talk to gets my business.

Kristina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Kristina and I own a bartending service called Top Shelf Events. Through out college I spent many years bartending. After graduating college, I decided to sell my things and move to India for a year or so as I had one friend there. With all intentions of mostly traveling, I decided to stay grounded in South India and take a bartending course. I bartended for years in America but I had a desire to just see how they do it in India. Plus they had a flair course that I was completely intrigued with as I knew zero flair tending. After a week in the course, it turns out I knew more about bartending than the instructors did (excluding the flair as I knew none of that). So, after a couple weeks in, they asked me to travel around the country and do cocktail trainings at different schools. Of course I looked at it as an opportunity to travel for free around a country I had great desire to see.

While taking this course, I met my great friend Sherry. After taking the course, we both continue to keep in touch and began to build a life long friendship. A couple years passed. I was back in America and then decided to start Top Shelf Events as I felt the international experience I gained would be a great service to the area. Being in catering, you come across all sorts of people. Being cultured serves a great advantage. While starting Top Shelf, my friend Sherry finished up his 1 year bartending in the Maldives. He then made his way back to his state Punjab. At that time, Sherry and myself came up with the plan to open a bartending school in North India. We call it IIBTChindigarh. I am proud to say that this school is now celebrating its 10th year in business. I travel to India every few years to teach cocktail training classes and visit with the students.

When I came back from India, I picked back up at the bar where I worked at before I left. I learned so much traveling abroad that some of my customers would ask for me to work their house parties. After a year of so of doing this, I decided I should get license and insured because I was dealing with alcohol and so many things could go wrong. Once I became official I worked my very first holiday party for one of my customers company. Working for a company, they required you to have all of the documents showing you were legal. This party opened me up to a career of professional bartending. While bartending throughout college, I never thought I could make a career out of it. I am happy to say that top shelf has grown so much that I actually don’t bartend any more. I do all of the behind the scene things that make each and every event go very smooth. I do remain present at most events. As much as I enjoyed making drinks, I am very happy that I have come to a place in my company where I no longer have to do that particular role.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

Top Shelf Events absolutely started a side hustle. If you would have asked me 10 years ago where I saw this company going, I never would have thought It would have evolved to what it is now. 75% of my business comes from the wedding industry. When I started the company, weddings were nowhere in my radar. It first started out doing friends and family weddings. Word got out that we gave exceptional service and it wasn’t long before I was doing strangers weddings. After 5 years of working other jobs along with Top Shelf I decided it was time to give my company 100% of my time. This was a huge milestone for Top Shelf. I often found myself sacrificing my company to work for other companies while trying to grow my business. Quitting everything and focusing on my own business was the only move to growing the success of the business. Doing that absolutely paid off and I am excited to continue to grow my business.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

My most effective strategy to growing my clientele is building relationships with planners. With Weddings being 75% of our business it is likely you will only serve the bride and groom once. Where as the planner, you will work with them over and over. Of course I aim to please the couples but at the end of the day I rate a day of success on what the planner says. If they feel everything went smooth without a hitch then I know we did our job right and will continue to work with that planner.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.topshelfevents.biz
• Instagram: @topshelftally
• Facebook: @topshelfevents

Image Credits
Kylene and Ryan Studios