Any other advice to people interested in restaurant management?
I encourage people to call restaurants and set up an appointment with the general manager or the dining room manager. Interview them—ask how they got started, what was the hard part of the growth curve. Hearing those stories is helpful. It gives people a good understanding of what the job is about. Spend a couple of hours on the floor while the operation is up and running. I’m all about the people. The financial part was the steepest learning curve for me. I didn’t care about the numbers until I became a general manager. But I’m an excellent teacher now, because I wasn’t very good at it in the beginning. Numbers were kind of boring to me, but once I figured out how they work, the financials became exciting.
