My husband said something to me once, back when we had four restaurants running at the same time. "I'll never make as much money as I did when we just had one restaurant." He was right. We had several different concepts going, none of them running perfectly. We grew even when we weren’t ready, and what came with that was a constant stream of putting out fires. Opening location number three is an easy thing to want. A new lease, a new concept, a new number to put on the websit

A great hotel General Manager is not automatically the right GM for a luxury property. And a great luxury GM is not automatically the right person for a ground-up opening on a private island. I know this because I just finished one of the most demanding searches of my career. A client is opening a very substantial ultra luxury hotel in Turks and Caicos. Independent brand. Building from scratch. And hiring somebody to run it is a completely different assignment than filling a

We recently placed an executive chef with a very well-known NFL player. His diet is unique to him and also critical to the success of his career. That kind of detail changes the entire search. That's the kind of stakes I'm talking about when people ask me about our high net worth searches. And I get asked about them a lot, because everybody is a little obsessed with how the wealthiest people live. I get it. I'm a little obsessed too, honestly, and I've been doing this a long

The mistake I see operators make, over and over, is treating hiring like a staffing problem. You have an open role. You fill it. You move on. But the hiring decision is actually a brand decision. Every single time. And if you're not thinking about it that way, you're going to keep making hires that check every box and feel wrong on the floor. I'll tell you how I know this. My husband and I are in the middle of opening a restaurant right now. And the process of getting here, f

I'm probably aging myself with this one. Back when I owned my restaurants, inventory meant an Excel sheet printed out from whatever computer was closest, a pencil scavenged from wherever a pencil could be found, and me walking the building hunting down every bottle. Half-full bottles are the worst part. You end up marrying them together to get an honest count, which I know you're not supposed to do, but you do what gets you an accurate number. Then you'd adjust your PARs on t

You can walk into a packed restaurant on a Saturday night, wait forty-five minutes for a table, order cocktails and appetizers, look around at a completely full dining room, and assume the business must be doing incredibly well. That is what success looks like from the guest side of hospitality. Operators know it can look very different from the inside. A restaurant can be fully booked, serving hundreds of guests a night, and still be operating on a very thin margin. In some

Anyone who has ever worked in a busy restaurant has experienced hard shifts. A server calls out thirty minutes before service. The POS system freezes. The walk-in suddenly has a problem. A VIP guest walks in unexpectedly. The kitchen is already behind. Somebody on the floor is overwhelmed. The reservation count keeps climbing and ticket times start stretching longer than anyone wants them to. And the manager whispers to a flustered server through gritted teeth, “Stop running

If you talk to enough restaurant operators about what happened during COVID, a clear pattern starts to show up. The details might change depending on the market or the type of concept, but the core experience is consistent. What felt like chaos at the time now looks more like a structural shift in how restaurants operate. Most people think of COVID as a temporary disruption. Restaurants shut down, adapted, and eventually reopened. But what actually happened went deeper than t

Recently, I was asked to help find an HR manager for a really high end, luxury property. That kind of search always stands out to me, because HR is one of those roles that people assume translates easily across industries. It exists everywhere, so it feels interchangeable. But in hospitality, it is not. Doing HR for a restaurant or a hotel, especially at the luxury level, is completely different from doing HR anywhere else. You are dealing with a very specific set of challeng

A resume can tell you where someone has been. It cannot tell you who they are when the kitchen printer jams during a 300-cover night and the sous chef just walked out. I have been reading resumes in this industry for over three decades now. First as an operator, hiring roughly a thousand people across five restaurants my husband AJ and I owned together. Then as a recruiter, placing senior leaders into restaurant groups and luxury hotels across the country. And the single bigg

When you open a restaurant, you get one shot at it. One night. One first impression. And the people standing on that floor, running that kitchen, greeting guests at the door are not just filling positions. They are deciding what your restaurant’s personality is going to be. I think about this constantly. After 32 years in this industry and having opened restaurants myself alongside my husband AJ, I know what that first week feels like from the inside. The electricity running