When you lead one of Arizona’s largest and most sophisticated beverage programs, the numbers aren’t just important. They’re everything. That’s the world of David Selby, Brand Operations Manager for Square One Concepts, the group behind Bourbon & Bones, Wasted Grain, and several growing concepts across Arizona and California.
A San Diego native with more than 25 years in the industry, David started as a dishwasher at age 15 and worked his way through pastry, private chefing, fine dining, and now multi-unit operations. That early love of precision — the weight, volume, ratios, and math behind pastry — stuck with him. Today, it’s the backbone of how he manages restaurants, teams, and a beverage program large enough to double as a small museum.
Bourbon & Bones carries more than 800 whiskeys, a 300 bottle wine list, and 2,100 SKUs spread across roughly 6,000 bottles. Every two weeks, teams of eight count it all.
But they count a lot faster now.
Over the past year, David and the team shaved eight hours off their inventory process. By reorganizing storage, eliminating “void spaces,” rewriting locations, and tightening par levels, the group cut inventory carrying costs by 24 percent while reducing labor and improving accuracy.
Even the whiskey pours tell a story. The bar moves about 4,936 two-ounce pours per month, not including cocktails. Add the signature drinks, old fashioned variations, and custom infusions, and the volume quickly becomes staggering.
And with bottles like Glenfiddich 40 running around $7,200, accuracy is non-negotiable.
At his previous restaurant group, David first learned the value of Restaurant365 for controlling waste, managing variances, and tightening inventory in a high-volume steakhouse. He brought that mindset with him to Square One.
When he joined, everything was still running through Excel. Within months, he helped transition the company onto Restaurant365, immediately reducing duplicate work and adding visibility across locations.
It paid off fast.
Recently, David needed to compare six months of produce purchases year over year. Before Restaurant365, that task would have taken two weeks of cross-referencing invoices and manually compiling reports. With R365, it took under three hours.
Unexpected costs became easier to catch as well. In one recent example, two stores were paying wildly different prices for the same product. One was paying $53 per pound, the other $72. That discrepancy would have cost them thousands. Now, price consistency checks are simple.
When Square One grew from one Bourbon & Bones to five locations, Restaurant365 became the playbook. Store two was hard. Stores three, four, and five were much easier.
Their next location in North Scottsdale is already mapped out: beginning balances, inventory lists, templates, recipes, and cost structure are ready to drop in. The incoming GM will step into a system that already works and already matches the brand.
And with expansion discussions underway in Utah, Tennessee, and beyond, plug-and-play operations are becoming the foundation for scale.
Training for a Beverage Program That Requires Six to Nine Months to Master
Bartenders at Bourbon & Bones don’t become experts overnight. With hundreds of whiskeys and a wine list that includes bottles just a shade different in label color but $3,200 apart in cost, that level of training matters.
David sees training and workforce tools as his next frontier. Helping servers and bartenders master product knowledge will directly protect margins, improve consistency, and elevate the experience.
David’s final message to operators was simple:
If you’re not fully leveraging your tech stack, you will get left behind.
The industry moves fast. Guests move faster. The only way to keep pace is to use real data to steer daily decisions, not intuition or guesswork.
And in classic numbers-guy fashion, his other hot take?
Stop splitting checks twelve ways after ordering. Do the math ahead of time.
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