Operations manager: running the sites through the people who run them

An operations manager is not in charge of a restaurant. They are in charge of the people who are in charge of restaurants. Every site they look after has a general manager who runs it day to day, and the ops manager’s job is to make sure those GMs are running them well, consistently, and to the numbers the business needs.

That shift, from doing the work to getting it done through others you see once a week, is what makes the job different from everything below it. Some excellent GMs find they do not enjoy it.

What the days look like

Much of the week is spent travelling between sites. A typical visit covers:

• A walk round with the GM, front and back of house, looking at what the guest sees and what the inspector would.
• The numbers: sales against budget, labour, gross profit on food and drink, and the reasons behind any gap.
• A conversation with the head chef, separate from the GM, because some problems only surface that way.
• An audit against the group’s standards, whether that is a brand checklist, a food safety check or a mystery diner report.
• Agreeing actions with the GM and checking the actions from last visit were done.

Around the visits sit the rest: weekly reporting to the owners or directors, recruiting and developing GMs, stepping in when a site loses its manager, and planning openings, refurbishments and closures. When a site has a crisis, such as a failed inspection, a flood or a walk-out, the ops manager is usually there the same day.

Evenings and weekends still happen, because a site can only be judged properly during service. But the hours are less tied to one building’s rota, and the phone never quite goes off.

Operations manager or area manager

The titles mean much the same thing. Area manager is more common in pub companies and larger chains with sites grouped by region. Operations manager is more common in restaurant groups, where the job may cover every site in the business. Above them, in bigger companies, sit a head or director of operations.

When a group needs one

A single-site business never needs an operations manager; the general manager or owner does that job. At two sites, the owner usually covers it, splitting their week between the two.

The need becomes real when the owner can no longer see each site often enough to know what is happening in it. Symptoms tend to be:

• Sites drifting apart, so the same dish or drink is different depending on where it is ordered.
• One site quietly losing money while the others carry it, noticed only at the year end.
• GMs who feel unsupported and leave, taking their teams with them.
• The owner spending all their time firefighting and none on the next opening.

Before hiring an ops manager, some owners promote their strongest GM to a hybrid role: running their own site and overseeing one or two others. That can work as a bridge, but it has a limit, because the home site suffers whenever the other sites need attention.

Who they report to and who they run

Ops managers report to the owners, the managing director or a director of operations. The GMs of their sites report to them, and through the GMs, everyone else. They also work across the central functions a group builds up: finance, HR, the development chef, marketing, property. Part of the job is translating between head office and the sites in both directions.

What good looks like

An adequate ops manager visits, audits and reports. The results are known and filed. A good one changes what happens next: they coach a struggling GM rather than replacing them, spot the site that is about to go wrong before the figures show it, and make the group’s standards feel like a help rather than a stick.

Groups look for proven results as a GM, preferably at more than one site or through a turnaround, plus the ability to read a profit and loss quickly and to manage people who are not in front of you. Comfort with the employment side matters too: disciplinaries, grievances and hiring decisions at manager level land here.

How people get there, and beyond

The route is almost always through general management. Some groups promote a GM to look after a small cluster first. Beyond ops manager lie head of operations, operations director and managing director roles, and for some, a move into consultancy or opening their own business with the systems they have learned to run.

What belongs in the advert

Give the salary and how the bonus is earned. Say how many sites the role covers and where they are, how much travel is involved, whether there is a car or car allowance, and what support sits at head office. A candidate reads an ops manager advert mainly to work out how much of the week they will spend on the road.

Pay for site and multi-site management: management salaries

The role an ops manager works through: what a general manager does

Every vacancy, filtered by role and area: the jobs board