Hospitality Start-ups Can’t Afford a Management Team. But They Can’t Afford to Do It Alone Either. How Do We Close the Gap?

If you’ve spent your working life in hospitality, you know what it is to have a team around you: your role, your shift, and a support network to hand over to at the end of it. It’s always been a team effort. But if you’re moving into hospitality for the first time, building your own venue, you might assume you’ll simply hire a manager to run things day to day. Then the numbers arrive, and they aren’t forgiving. Who takes on that role for barely more than minimum wage? No one.

Building It Alone

So here you are, building this alone, running this alone, day to day. Maybe that’s a little dramatic. You can build a team and train them well enough that everyone can do a bit of everything: open the doors, set the till, prep the food, serve the customers, place an order, cash up at the end of the night. Easy. Or is it?

Getting to that point is rarely easy for one person. You’ve created the vision for the business, secured the premises, written the menus, dealt with suppliers, ordered equipment, sourced furniture, booked food hygiene courses, started on house rules, recruited staff, and built the rotas. Your head is full, not just every waking minute, but while you’re trying to sleep too.

Training People With What’s Only in Your Head

Then there are the systems to put in place: how people book or order, how that gets relayed to the team, whether everyone does everything or has a set role each shift, what the order of service actually looks like. You have to train staff on all of it, because they aren’t mind readers, and however much it might feel like the easier option at times, you can’t do it all alone. So you train everyone the best you can before you open, and you launch, and the list keeps growing. You’ve worked harder than you knew you could, finding minutes in the day you didn’t know existed, and it still doesn’t feel like enough.

The Person You Really Need

What you could really do with is a deputy manager, or a restaurant manager: someone who could write the opening checklist while you ran to the cash and carry, train staff on the job while you recruited the next one, chase the bin company about a missed collection while you adjusted your par levels, and hold the standards and lead the team while you kept adjusting and improving everything else. Someone on your level, taking some of the weight, with enough experience to see when a new system needs building before it becomes a problem.

Closing the Gap

That’s where a consultant with real industry experience comes in, bridging the gap between what a full-time manager would cost you and the risk of never getting your service, operations and training properly bedded in, because the day-to-day essentials always come first. New business owners need to recognise that while a £30k management salary might be out of reach, not investing in the service, operations and training that could save your business isn’t really an option either.