“Restaurant management is great if you like variety in what you do, you like to work very hard and you enjoy working with people,” she says. It's a fairly easy field to enter without investing in an education; however, you can move faster and not start at the bottom if you have an education. Restaurant management can be very satisfying; managers deliver a tangible product and receive immediate feedback, hopefully positive. Restaurant managers have a variety of tasks every day, ample opportunities for promotion, and a job that is rarely boring.
However, as with any job, being a restaurant manager has downsides. Being a restaurant manager is a difficult job. It's fast and stressful, and requires a special combination of skills and personality traits (most importantly, staying calm under pressure). Since you'll be responsible for the success of a restaurant and also for the well-being of your employees, you'll have to work long hours to ensure that the processes run smoothly and that you do everything necessary to make your restaurant a long-term success.
Being an ill-mannered restaurant manager leads to constant staff turnover and a bad reputation among food service workers in your community. Since you will learn a lot of organizational skills, working as a restaurant manager can also be great for your private life, since it will be quite easy for you to organize your life while many other people really struggle in this regard. You'll stand out more by taking risks and being the first to follow a trend instead of copying the restaurant at the end of the block. While compliance officers and many other people usually work with a computer all day long, you, as a restaurant manager, can work with your hands and actually see the progress of your work every day.
A good restaurant manager knows how to make the most of customers' time at the restaurant by informing them about things like Wednesday's Happy Hour with medium-priced wine, Friday's trivia night or the BOGO food special. Be sure to experiment with the new things you're seeing in the restaurant industry, whether it's a customer loyalty program or contests on social media. If a restaurant manager works for a restaurant chain, there may be opportunities to advance within the restaurant chain, but a relocation may be necessary to take advantage of the opportunities. You'll notice that the most successful restaurants advertise their food specials and events in a variety of ways.
As a restaurant manager, you also have the privilege of working indoors, while scaffolding and many other people have to work outdoors when the weather is bad and, therefore, you can enjoy your working day much more in a fairly comfortable environment as a restaurant manager. You should also know that you are very specialized as a restaurant manager and, in case you no longer want to work in this industry, you may find it difficult to find a job in another field, since you will often lack the necessary skills to do so. Another advantage of working as a restaurant manager is that you also have high levels of freedom in terms of how to structure your working day. While restaurant managers can make decent money and you can also outsource a lot of unpleasant tasks to your employees, restaurant managers also have to work on weekends, and your overall work-life balance is often quite poor.
If a restaurant manager works for an independent restaurant, the only way to increase the salary after a certain point is to move to another restaurant. To help avoid some universal pitfalls, we've compiled a list of the key things that great restaurant managers avoid. .
