Ops being paid less than General Managers & Head Chefs

and is it actually ok?

To find a leader who still has the spark and excitement about being in service and can successfully lead teams from the front is so very rare and should be cherished. And when you do find one, their pay expectations will often reflect all that talent that they bring to a business. I have spoken about it before, but the pay for the big jobs in service is getting bigger and bigger. So where will that money often come from? Potentially Operations.

With Ops roles becoming harder to come by all the time, and the queue for them continuing to grow, the pay for an Operations resource can be seen to be a place on a P&L to squeeze.

We are seeing this happen, and in some instances, will have salaries lower than those who report into them. Thinking about it like a football team, the GM and HC are the players (the hot talent if you will) and Ops (or Exec Chef), they are the coach. The in-service managers are the ones who create incredible experiences for guests, they are the literal bread and butter. They work across evenings and weekends until the early hours of the morning. The Ops manager though, despite the fact they’ll often have many more years of experience, get most of their work completed in the day and out of service hours, for which they seem to now have the privilege of being paid less for. But are the better hours, better work-life balance and different stresses, worth it?

It is quite a controversial proposition, and it begs big questions around career mapping for managers, getting paid less to step up in seniority and responsibility doesn’t necessarily feel right. However, it could well be the norm in the future, especially in smaller indy businesses budgets are smaller.

Looking back at my own Ops journey, I took a £10k pay cut to move out of GM’ing, and that was over a decade ago, so this isn’t necessarily new, although that was a move from one business to another.

Another thing worth remembering is that Ops is not a safe place to be, well in comparison to GMs and HCs anyway. Big salaries, in non-service related roles, bring big risk of redundancy in hard times. It can be very hard to quantify your worth in an independent Ops role. Although preventing an owner from being dragged into the day to day IS priceless.