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Help with job title and description for startup?

5K views 40 replies 7 participants last post by  danib 
#1 ·
Working with a client on a wonderful new concept, a fresh take on food within health care folding in scratch-made food, wellness, nutrition and gardening. It will involve cafe, catering, coffee, grab+go, a teaching kitchen space and a limited garden.

The idea is to start on "roller skates" and work up to the Tesla. But of course in the beginning, the leader will need to know and do and be ALL the things.

Because it's so menu-driven, and a chance to be really responsive, collaborative and creative (working with the on-site folks to move from my starter menu and recipes, to develop their dreams, menu and dishes) I feel like starting with a strong chef/kitchen and then eventually hiring for FOH management would be better (from a chef's perspective).

But in the beginning, it also involves FOH responsibility (cafe-style service, coffee, smoothies).

And ongoing, it also entails what are often owner-operator or outsourced responsibilities: marketing/social media management, and full responsibility for the financial ops.

So this position is entrepreneurial, but with a safety net. Overwhelmingly big, but super-full of fun potential.

I quickly realized we are looking for a unicorn, so I'm backing up a bit and reaching out for YOUR experience, perspective and guidance on the TITLE, and the job description (and the next few hires).

Anyone want to help me scaffold this part of the dream? I need to get out of my own head.
 
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#2 ·
Working with a client on a wonderful new concept, a fresh take on food within health care folding in scratch-made food, wellness, nutrition and gardening. It will involve cafe, catering, coffee, grab+go, a teaching kitchen space and a limited garden.

The idea is to start on "roller skates" and work up to the Tesla. But of course in the beginning, the leader will need to know and do and be ALL the things.

Because it's so menu-driven, and a chance to be really responsive, collaborative and creative (working with the on-site folks to move from my starter menu and recipes, to develop their dreams, menu and dishes) I feel like starting with a strong chef/kitchen and then eventually hiring for FOH management would be better (from a chef's perspective).

But in the beginning, it also involves FOH responsibility (cafe-style service, coffee, smoothies).

And ongoing, it also entails what are often owner-operator or outsourced responsibilities: marketing/social media management, and full responsibility for the financial ops.

So this position is entrepreneurial, but with a safety net. Overwhelmingly big, but super-full of fun potential.

I quickly realized we are looking for a unicorn, so I'm backing up a bit and reaching out for YOUR experience, perspective and guidance on the TITLE, and the job description (and the next few hires).

Anyone want to help me scaffold this part of the dream? I need to get out of my own head.
You wrote that big wall of text, with a lot of buzzwords thrown around, and I'm still not sure I have any idea what you are looking for.

You want a chef who can develop the menus and cook for a cafe, and for catering, and coffee, and grab and go, while simultaneously serving customers, doing email/marketing, social media, responding to guest inquiries? Lol…ok.

what is the actual concept of the business? Like a retreat or day spa?

you didn't actually say much with your post.
You don't mention your pay rate…I'm afraid to ask. Some sort of sweat equity and low pay? No health insurance I assume?

Your question is what to call this job? The closet I could come is "owner" and it doesn't sound like the person is going to be an owner…so. I dunno.
I think I'd need more information but if you tried to sell me this job I wouldn't be buying. I see your concern with getting someone on board.
 
#4 · (Edited)
I think the title is “Chef/Sucker”. Starting small yet having everything you can think of to see what sticks is a recipe for disaster. I can assure you… the pay won’t be high enough. I’m not convinced that you have a well-formulated business plan. Big dreams are great but this one doesn’t seem well congealed yet.

Maybe what you really need is a level-headed and experienced PARTNER rather than an employee.

May I ask, what is your role in this venture? Are you the concept developer, financier, owner, silent partner?
 
#5 ·
I hear you!

I'm the mid-wife. The org has wanted to do this for years, had their dreams all hashed out before we found each other. I'm the one who puts it on paper, challenges it, makes the connections, and makes it real. They want a (small, for now) counterbalance to contracted foodservice experience. There are lots of models for parts of this, nothing I've found yet that pulls it together in one place. This is a pilot to see if it can work.

Business plan is tricky to build, for sure. Been working on it all year : ) The concept is clear, menu is drafted, kitchen is (on its way) to being built. I have confidence in all those things. I'm building in an advisory team to provide training wheels as long as needed (these folks are super-smart, great at what THEY do, passionate about food, what it means for healthcare and communities) they just don't know the mechanics. It's a new business unit for them, essentially.
 
#7 ·
Definitely partnering w/inhouse nutritionist or RD. In my experience, they most often don't know or care "how the sausage gets made". I've got deep experience with this, and nutritional analysis is a part of the game. I'm test-driving meez, if anyone's used this. The concept is all-foods-fit, but education is key to meeting your body's needs. One aim is to have inhouse physicians feel comfortable "prescribing" food for their patients. So it'll be baked in to the model.

And did I mention there's a Teaching Kitchen attached? We're digging deep into the concept of Culinary Medicine, so chefs, RD's, all those folks will be getting hands-on.
 
#9 ·
Think outside the tray : ) It's all retail, though there will be clinic patients through and targeted. There'll be a heavy outreach to larger community to make it a place people want to come to eat (also in a beautiful setting) and for educational and cultural events.

And the food will be awesome.

I had a gig for a long time on a mucky-muck college campus, where we pioneered amazing fresh food, made from scratch from real ingredients, sourced locally before that was a hackneyed phrase (though still important). It worked! There were lots of kinks to work out. Was it "school lunch"? Yes, in that we needed to be constantly responsive to who was eating our food (students, faculty, vip's, internationals, greater community) and what they wanted and if/how we could provide it. But so much better than school food, so the gears caught, and once they did, people got what we were trying to do and it worked. And now it's pretty common on campuses. This is a similar mission, similar frontier space, which is where the entrepreneurial (and business) mindset is needed, in addition to being a great cook.
 
#12 · (Edited)
Chef/partner. To succeed, the “hired hand” will need a huge amount of incentive, a vested interest, to perform as you want them to. I’d suggest a good salary, benefits, and a decent % cut. Only a fool would do what you want as a mere employee. Good luck.

What did you call the person you hired in your past ventures, and what were there duties, and how were they compensated?
 
#13 ·
There was an (active) owner, I was nominally chef but did all the things, including the developmental/rail-laying work/menu and recipe design. We started with one stove and built over a few years, growing (organically! ha!) Eventually we hired a catering director, and that helped. When the owner (after I left) lost the contract, that catering director (brilliant) got the contract back, and organized it in a much better way (and stayed fairly active as an owner).

In this place, many years later, I've already designed the kitchens/workspaces. We have a much better sense of the model and what's needed than I ever had. But there are parallels and I appreciate your questions and challenges to dredge up memory!
 
#33 ·
chefwriter, is your kitchen independently managed? Are you able to change the menu/recipes from day-to-day, or are your feeding patients and need set cycle menus (or both)? What % of your customers are patients/staff/outside folks?
 
#16 ·
here is my 2 cents.

I don't want to sound mean but I probably will.

It sounds like you want someone to do everything that you are supposed to do. Somehow you'll move on to be some kind of middle man while the guy you hire would take a ton of responsibility and you/owners will take all the benefits.

Unless the person expected to take care of this as a baby is motivated(money!) he just won't give two shits about the place. Even if you make him an "owner", it will be useless if its used as an excuse to pay them nothing. Promises on far of concepts will only attract in-experience.

You are using a lot of very "nice" words in your posts and giving me a lot of very vague info that hints at a lot of trendy concepts that my brain wants to fantasize about while at the same time not giving me any concrete facts. That immediately raises my hackles and makes my brain scream "scam" in the sense that whoever picks this up is gonna be abused to hell.

Real talk

You need a guy that will handle everything from the financial/marketing side of things to food execution, menu planning, front of the house everything and basically everything else (gardening as well, really?) in a small store on his own(maybe with a couple of people?). Sounds like a lot of the other employees are not in the picture unless the place starts printing money. So basically the guy needs to live and breathe the new business on the hope that when more employees come in he will be top dog(maybe of multiple stores or whatever rhetoric is used to sell the dream) in the far off future. Anything and everything will be expected of him cause he should look at it long term.

All of the owners worries with none of the benefits(if those ever existed in the first place)while at the same time having to listen to some outside perspectives with no experience but since its their money a very loud voice on what they want done. I don't know what would justify this kind of involvement unless it was my place(stuff done my way, the only way that works) and even then fuck that unless I had enough capital to delegate big part of those responsibilities.

This is my knee jerk impression of what the "insert fancy tittle here" position responsibilities and expectations will end up being. Again I am just trying to be honest but it just sounds like a shit deal from my perspective.

This is the kind of deal that someone with no experience to make it work would jump at and someone that has all the skills to make it work will stay the hell away from.

rant over
 
#17 ·
My big answer on how to give a different impression(at least from my pov)

Be Specific.

Give me a job offer with exact numbers and job expectations. Nothing in the air, all the i's dotted and all the T's crossed(that's how it went I think). what kind of food cost do you want? what's your menu? where are the recipe cards? how many employees? How much time am I expected to be in the shop per day? what %is mine? etc?ect?etc? everything down on paper and well thought out.

I would go around doing it as if you wanted the person to invest money in the venture(he is very much your meal ticket). Be professional AF and win them over.

That would give me a much better impression of the gig for starters.
 
#18 ·
The position you need filled is called an owner. No one hired will take on so many roles or responsibilities.
Yes I am blunt, but I have years of experience as a chef and as an owner— as do many of the people who responded to your thread.
 
#20 ·
Y'all, this is EXACTLY what I hoped for. No apologies. Your candor is invaluable.

This is what is screaming around in my head, and my job is to make the case to client that you can't just hire a chef with good all-around skills and expect them to act like (and be capable to be) the "owner". But it needs to be "owned". I don't care how good or big the staff is: this is a self-contained business unit that requires all the pieces of a business functioning at a high level and there is no unicorn that will do all of this job, not for all the money.

I've BEEN that person with all the world's hopes on your shoulders. It's a recipe for disaster.

Can it be a team effort? If the chef is part of the team AND THE TEAM (Exec level in the org) is willing to step up and do their parts until it's fully staffed and humming.

My M.O. is to be crystal clear, in writing, in the job description, in the pro forma, in the ops manual, what this requires (and potentially requires) and what the safety valves are if any part of the team is not pulling their weight. And by team, I mean Advisory Team, not staff.

And the rest of my job is putting all of the parts of the car on the engine that I can. Yes, recipes. Yes a fully functional system of costing and menu engineering set up. Yes, a well-designed and stocked kitchen. Yes, accountability for partners in marketing (or a dedicated staffer). Yes, a first-year schedule (and partner staff member for scheduling/organizing events) with great connections already in place for the educational side. A sous chef who can be the operational chef as needed, who overlaps in schedule. Clarity about % expectations of time in kitchen/in office etc. I'm advocating for a FOH manager on par with the sous.

Keep shooting it full of holes. Come back to me in a year. If it works, I'll owe you a good drink.
 
#27 ·
Ah... Now my experiences have been dealing with hydrochloride acid- my "term of endearment" for bank managers/financial lenders. And I have been successful, I've gotten lending and subsequent lines of credit for two businesses. Either I had a good business proposal- which included projected gross sales as well as projected costs- or, and this could be true, the lenders just liked me. What ever the case, if I had no estimate of gross sales, there's no way I could negotiate a lease, purchase equipment, or, in your case, hire staff.

New wheel or old, you need money to make it spin around. How much money determines the design of the newly invented wheel.
 
#23 ·
I'm going in the other direction: advising what it will take/cost to staff/run it, what is *very conservatively* likely to happen w/sales based on their menu and target markets, with the marketing efforts they're realistically willing to put forth and a very slow phase-in/shakedown cruise, and let's figure out how the shortfall will be covered. I do not sugarcoat.
 
#24 ·
I wrote this yesterday and deleted because I thought I was being a bit meanspirited. But are you sure that there is really a market for this kind of cafe with this kind of strategy?

In my area we have had for decades small cafes in medical and other professional office buildings. Most serve breakfast and lunch... soup, sandwich, smoothie drinks, and snacks. Almost all are mom-and-pop operations, with the interesting commonality that it is generally a middle-aged Asian couple who work their fingers to the bone just to make a living. No staff; no fancy advisory group; no nothing except the sweat off their brows. It always looks like a low-volume, low-revenue operation to me and I have no idea how they can make a living. Most shut down when COVID hit. Few seem to be reopening, at least yet.

As a consultant I understand that you want to help them realize their dream but I'm struggling to see how the concept will succeed given the described scenario.

It's good that you don't sugar coat...
 
#25 ·
P.S. I could be completely wrong about the twist you are offering of healthy eats. There is a health food restaurant in my area the has been in continuous operation since the 1970s. I really hate the taste of their food yet eat there annually… and annually predict that they will shut down. I may underestimate that market segment.
 
#26 ·
No worries, I feel a kind spirit with some frank challenges, and I'm GRATEFUL.

To me, the difference here is that it is not contracted, but owned in-house. That's part of my role: help them learn how to fold this in as a business unit, how to make it as financially responsible and viable as it can be, and if it cannot, figure out how to make up the cost to the extent that they value the investment in the concept.

In my professional opinion (I worked many years in university settings and directly with clinical teams on program development) it is an excellent time to dig into food as medicine. Success will require an integrated educational approach, and a spirit of collaboration AS WELL AS these hard business truths.
 
#28 ·
Managers use big words to describe nothing more than everybody working together to make it happen.
In life there will always be those who hang on the coat tails of others and take the credit where no credit is due.
In order for your project to work, you're going to need a lot more incentive to bring in those skilled laborers that can make your business fly.
Food is and always will be subjective, so in order for your business plan to work, you're going to need cooks that can and managers who do. It is tough.
 
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