At TTW, we don’t just recruit traditional hospitality employees. We also work with businesses to find self-employed operators and franchise partners to take ownership of hospitality operations – and it’s a model we think more businesses could consider.
Particularly where hospitality is an important part of the customer experience, but not the core business.
Rather than employing a manager to run your restaurant, café or bar, could an experienced hospitality professional take it on as their own business?
What are the benefits for the business?
Running an F&B operation brings its own challenges – recruitment, staffing, food costs, stock, service standards and all the day-to-day demands of hospitality.
Bringing in the right independent operator can provide a very different solution.
For the business, it can mean:
- Reduced staffing and recruitment pressures
- Less management time spent on an area outside your core expertise
- A commercially driven operator with a direct interest in growing revenue and controlling costs
- Greater ownership and accountability
- The opportunity to develop your hospitality offering without building additional in-house expertise
The operator isn’t simply managing somebody else’s department – they have a genuine commercial stake in making it successful.
Understanding the hospitality role beyond the job description
Next, we look beyond the job description.
What are the current challenges? What does the business need from this person? What needs to change? And what would success look like six or twelve months down the line?
Sometimes the person a client initially thinks they need isn’t necessarily the person they actually need.
That’s where we can challenge the brief and help shape the role around the reality of the business.
And for the operator?
For experienced hospitality professionals, it can offer an exciting alternative to another employed management role.
They have the opportunity to run their own hospitality business, often benefiting from an established venue, existing customers and infrastructure without the same level of investment and risk involved in starting completely from scratch.
It can offer greater autonomy, the opportunity to put their own stamp on an operation and, importantly, the potential to benefit financially from the success they create.
How our hospitality recruitment search really works
This isn’t simply a case of posting a vacancy and waiting for applications.
We search our network and database, use LinkedIn and other platforms, market map, approach potential candidates directly and use industry contacts, referrals and recommendations.
At management level especially, some of the strongest candidates aren’t actively looking for a new job.
They need to be found, approached and given a reason to have a conversation.
Finding the right operator
Recruiting for these opportunities is different from filling a traditional vacancy.
At TTW, we work with businesses to understand the opportunity, how the commercial arrangement will work and, crucially, what type of person is going to make it successful.
We then identify and directly approach experienced hospitality professionals with the operational skills, commercial understanding and entrepreneurial mindset to take it on.
They may not be looking for another job – but the opportunity to run a business of their own can be a very different conversation.
If hospitality is an important part of your business but not your core expertise, finding the right independent operator could be well worth considering – and it’s exactly the kind of recruitment project we can help with.
At TTW, we believe the difference is in everything that happens in between.
We take the time to understand the business, find the right people and make the right match.
That’s what good hospitality recruitment should look like. Discuss your hiring needs with our team →
