How to Find the Right Manager for Your Restaurant

What Should You Be Offering and Expecting From Your Manager Hires?

The following is an excerpt of an interview by contributor Joe Erickson with Gary Turner and Scott Wise. Turner is president of Hospitality Pro Search, a management search firm serving restaurants, bars, hotels and country clubs. Wise is the owner of the four-unit Scotty's Brewhouse in Indiana, in its 10th year with units in Muncie, Bloomington, West Lafayette and Indianapolis.

In this article, Gary and Scott discuss their approaches to finding good managers. With the contraction of the restaurant industry, competition for top managers might not be as keen as it was a year or more ago; however, when you vie for talent against successful chains like The Cheesecake Factory®, which can afford tremendous perks to the best and brightest, you need to be smart and strategic in filling your key posts.

Joe: What are some of the greatest challenges operators face when looking for management?

Scott: The greatest challenges I think that everyone can agree on is money. You've got to pay the right price to the right people, and I think the independents are always fighting the chains that have the deeper pockets. The Cheesecake Factories and the Applebee's® of the world are successful for a reason. They've obviously done things right. So, what I try to do is watch what they're doing and try to make it applicable to my situation.

For example, the amount of hours we ask from our managers is always an issue. I didn't want to be the company that worked its managers 80 hours a week and they didn't get any time with their family or away from work. I recall reading a couple of years ago that Cheesecake Factory gave all of its GMs (general managers) BMWs to drive as one of their perks.

Well, I don't have the money to give away a BMW to every GM, but what I did for our management team is tell them, "I'm going to make it so that once a month you only have to work a four-day workweek. You get three days off. There's no vacation time involved, and I don't want you to work 15 hours a day on those four days to try to keep up with work. I just want to give you an extra day off once a month to have a three-day weekend, or wherever it falls in the middle of the week."