From Operator to Owner: How to Stop Working "In" Your Restaurant and Start Working "On" It

This is the question our clients should be asking us.

They should be asking what they can do to take back their time, energy, and creativity to spend more of it leading their business and less of it managing their business.

But no one ever does.

Instead, most of our clients come to coaching with a litany of pain points that present as:

• Burnout
• Overwhelm
• Imposter Syndrome
• Self-doubt
• People-pleasing
• Decision debt
• History repeating, inside their business and inside their relationships

If you find yourself swimming in a sea of suffering, experiencing any of the above as a leader in the food & beverage industry, it may be the case that relief lies in your ability to set clear boundaries with yourself and your team to deliberately spend less time operating your business on a daily basis and more time envisioning how to develop it over the months and years to come.

Transition from Operator to Owner in a Restaurant

The transition from operator to owner in a restaurant or food business can be a tricky one.

We go from being skilled labourers, experts in preparing food or drinks and providing service or hospitality, to suddenly being leaders charged with managing the people who do all the preparing and providing.

Except they don’t.

Because quite often, and in small businesses especially, owners and leaders sitting at the very top of the food chain still spend a lion’s share of their time operating on the front lines of their kitchens and dining rooms.

Only now, instead of a good service marking the end of a complete day, there’s an endless sea of ownership-minded tasking that still needs to get done. Payroll needs to be paid, training needs to be codified, scheduled, and delivered, a new location may need to be scouted, contracted, and concepted, and god help you if you also manage all your social media accounts!

One possible diagnosis?

You're spending too much time working in your business and not enough time working on it.

If that hits, the not-so-simple solve is to spend more time in your visionary role. More time being creative and curious, and delegating or releasing some of the tasks that are keeping you stuck.

If you're too busy grinding out service, inventory, accounting, training, posting on socials or fixing the toilet (again), you're too busy operating to make space for vision work.

So what happens is the only thing that can ever happen when you rinse & repeat this cycle: you stay stuck.

Working “In” vs Working “On” the Restaurant

To get unstuck, you have to spend less time working “in” your restaurant:

• Tending bar
• Preparing food
• Serving guests
• Designing playlists
• Leading pre-shift, etc.

Instead, you have to spend the essential time that’s necessary to truly work “on” your business in ways that will take it to the next level.

This next level could look like anything you envision:

• Opening a new location
• Building strong systems and foundations in your current operation
• Training team members and instilling a values driven culture
• Driving growth in traffic and revenue with a content marketing strategy
• Reaching for stars and acclaim

But the trouble is, far too often, you’re spending an inordinate amount of time in daily operations, piling onto your physical and mental load while shortchanging your creativity and capacity to lead the bigger, more consequential vision work that is required to take your business from good to great.

And in so doing, you risk swimming in that sea of suffering ripe with quite so many pain points.

Let us throw you a lifepreserver 🛟

Here’s how you know if you need one…

Signs You’re Too Involved in Daily Operations

If you’re still reading this, you probably don’t need me to tell you what it looks like to be overindexing on ops, and under indexing on your vision work, but let me spell it out for you so there’s no room to wiggle out of self-identifying as an ops addict.

If any of these scenarios sound like you, I’d argue there’s a case to be made that you’d feel better, lead better, and ultimately, get better results in your business, if you make an intentional decision to step away from hustling on the floor to spend more time doing the quieter work to brainstorm a vision and action plan to achieve your next level of growth:

The Chef who doesn’t have time to give feedback to a cook because she’s working a station for the 3rd this week because the restaurant’s shortstaffed.

The GM who can’t schedule ritualized 1:1 meetings with his direct reports because he’s too busy responding to guest issues and managing catering sales.

The Director of Operations who doesn’t have annual goals to work towards with each of her managers because she’s been mired in employee conflict mediation.

The Beverage Director who still doesn’t have a written bar training program because Gen Z team members keep quitting without notice and he keeps getting stuck behind the bar.

The Owner who says, “I don’t have control over my time.”

Why This Is Holding Your Business Back

It takes two types of leaders to make a business—or for that matter—a family, or a partnership run.

A visionary and an operator.

The visionary is the idea guy, the keeper of the light, the one who sees the whole board and is always (re)calculating her next move. The operator is the muscle, the get shit done gal, the doer who executes and achieves the vision.

It's clutch to know your type and choose your partners in work and life wisely.

Which begs the question: are you a visionary or an operator?

Now it's totally possible and maybe even likely that as a leader, you do both vision work and operate in your business, your family, or your partnership.

For example, I consider myself a visionary, but I'm operating my business daily when I coach my clients, tag our expenses, and write you these blogs.

Same goes in my household when I meal prep, make beds, vacuum, plan date nights, holidays, travel, pick up prescriptions, take the cat to the vet...you name it, I'm probably doing it—at least some of the time.

But I'm also doing something else.

I'm holding a vision of what's possible for our business, my family, and my partnership beyond the daily grind…

...and ever since I found coaching, I'm articulating that vision on the page and crafting an action plan to execute it.

How to Stop Working "In" Your Restaurant

Coaching is the single most transformative modality I've ever found to move beyond just bumbling and stumbling into the next thing, the next job, and the next person after that, and actually deciding on purpose what I want and trusting myself to draft a clear road map to chase after it.

This is the work we do inside our 1-on-1 Leadership Coaching Program that offers private mentorship to help you hold the most intimate and important work you'll ever do in this life—live in a way you're proud of so that each night when your head hits the pillow, you feel satisfied.

How do we do this?

By coaching you to practice conscious leadership skills, build high performing habits, then guide you through our vision plan workbook that ultimately shakes out into a very satisfying spreadsheet that holds the light of your vision in trackable columns and rows.

Think of it this way…

A vision plan is like painting a picture with words.

It's a visionary's Crayola box filled with detailed descriptions and clear commitments to your goals, dreams, aspirations, and even revenue targets.

Whereas an action plan is an operator's wet dream filled with action items they can assign deadlines and responsibility to, measure progress, and giddily check boxes.

But here's the rub: sometimes we get so busy operating our businesses, families, and partnerships, we can't see the picture from inside the frame.

And when that happens, and especially for those of us who see ourselves as visionaries currently too time-strapped to articulate a clear vision, painful feelings like resentment, blame, shame, anger, avoidance, and fear can muddy our vision even further.

If you're seeking mentorship to help you step outside the frame to grasp the full picture of your life clearly, that's where we come in.

How to Start Working "On" Your Restaurant

After reading this piece, if you can hear yourself admit, “I’m too busy working in my business to work on it,” I’m relieved for you.

Because the fix is within your reach!

It requires healthy boundaries and time blocking strategies, leading with transparency on why it’s vital for you to intentionally spend time out of the business to work on it, and the willingness to have hard conversations where necessary.

And you don’t have to figure out how to do that alone.

Maybe you didn’t have the language or awareness to name that this is what was happening before reading this piece, but now you do.

And now you don’t have to settle for feeling burned out, stuck using broken systems you don’t have time to change, and guilty for stepping off the floor or out of the kitchen to dig into the work it takes to grow, scale, and strengthen the foundations of your business.

This is where investing in industry mentorship with coaches who have walked in your shoes comes in.

At Salt & Roe, we teach F&B business leaders how to take back time and implement boundaries to do the vital work of developing their teams and organizations, instead of just operating them.

We’d welcome the chance to walk beside you on that journey.

Let us help you lead.