In the marketing / advertising circles its not uncommon to hire a creative team (two anyhow). With one one having stronger graphics skills and the other copywriting. I have often wondered why agencies will use this approach with "creatives" but not developers. To me it seems like a close knit front end / back end dev team would be a good match for banging out the campaign based sites that most agencies do.
I spent some time travelling when I was younger and supported myself in part by working as a waiter.
I got a job in one place in Hong Kong where the owner hired a manager who brought his own team with him - four other waiters. After a couple of months delay until his friends were released from prior contracts, he also brought in his own kitchen team too.
It only lasted a year though when owner and manager fell out and the same thing happened.
It sounds rather a likely risk though... I speculate the kind of manager that brings his own team thinks long term. When one thinks long term, multitudes of possible outcomes must be thought through. The vision has to be defended against all kinds of visualised attacks. It's complex, and often hard to explain due to the level of detail and time that is put into it.
Then some dick who thought about it this morning over his coffee wants to suggest you change direction.
It's a bit like software development. There are a bazillion things not in the code you are looking at, that the developer deliberately didn't put in; an infinity of tiny decisions. Also there lots of things that are in that it is later clear should not be in. Decisions on whether to refactor are really, really hard.
Something something technical difficulties in the relationship between craftmanship and leadership.
Tl;dr: lots managers or head chefs will bring other folks because the environment will be more predictable or enjoyable, and the restaurateur is usually as or more invested in long-term strategy as/than then lead staff.
The dining industry isn't so deep and complex. For the restaurant manager / head chef / lead chef, it's generally "how much autonomy do I get with dining room design, menu design, hiring," "what's the food cost I need to beat," and/or "what's the concept (and can I play with it)?"
If the right level of autonomy/restaurateur participation is there and they can get behind the theme/concept of the restaurant, the chef/manager takes the job. Then they get to work building a menu they like and training the staff for the experience they want.
WRT bringing a team with them, as high-stress a job as running a kitchen/restaurant can be, knowing already you work well with someone is worth its weight in gold.
Restaurateurs also are not, generally, blowing by and making whimsical changes. The margins in a restaurant, after food cost, salaries, fixed costs, are usually not super high, so if they have money in it they're thinking a lot about how to maximize the ability for that restaurant to grow its business (or increase margins).
Luckily or unluckily, there's not a ton of strings to pull to manipulate the restaurant's profit:
- The rent will be the rent. Changing locations is a huge sunk cost in both capital and customers, since existing ones won't know where you've moved to (or be able to walk down the street to get to you) and new ones won't know yet why they should stop in.
- Salaries will have a floor for the area your restaurant is in. You can pay more, but in any case once you get to minimum wage, yeah.
The main way to modulate the profit point is to play with costs on the ingredients. You see pretty quick that if you cut ingredient quality by too much, you have to start dropping price points because people won't overpay by too much for crappy food. And some venues or concepts won't support breaking out of the average price for prepared food in a region, i.e. you've gotta be doing special to charge $20 for a cheeseburger.
So, you look at how cheap you can keep ingredients for the quality you want on the other end, And how well you can build the dining experience to resonate with the target customer so they fall in love with your restaurant and keep showing up.
The restaurateur is thinking about that a lot, as much if not more than the on-the-ground leadership he/she hired.
