Hiring for Pre-Opening Isn’t Hiring for a Tuesday

I’ve watched the same mistake sink good venues more than once: they hire the person who opened the place to also run it, or they hire a steady-state operator to lead the opening. Both feel logical. Both are usually a mistake. Opening a venue and running one are different jobs that reward almost opposite temperaments, and the person who’s exceptional at one is often a poor fit for the other.

If you don’t separate these in your head before you hire, you’ll pick the wrong animal for the phase you’re in, and you’ll pay for it either at launch or six months later.

Pre-opening rewards tolerance for chaos

Opening a venue is building a plane while taxiing. Nothing is finished, everything is ambiguous, half the information you need doesn’t exist yet, and the person leading it has to make fifty decisions a day with incomplete facts and keep moving. There are no systems, because you’re inventing the systems. There’s no rhythm, because you’re establishing the rhythm. The kitchen isn’t done, the team isn’t hired, the menu isn’t locked, and the opening date is fixed.

The person who thrives in that is a specific type. High tolerance for chaos, comfortable with ambiguity, energised rather than paralysed by a blank page. A builder: someone who likes creating the thing that doesn’t exist yet, who can hold twenty half-finished workstreams in their head and drive them all forward at once. They’re generalists by necessity: on any given day they’re doing recruitment, supplier negotiation, menu engineering, training design, and troubleshooting a delivery that didn’t arrive. They run hot, they improvise, and they get a venue open against a deadline that always looks impossible from the outside.

Steady-state rewards the opposite

Now fast-forward six months. The venue is open, the systems exist, the team is hired. What the business needs now is completely different: consistency, refinement, the grinding discipline of making the same thing excellent five hundred times without getting bored. It needs someone who optimises rather than invents, who tightens the machine rather than builds it, who finds the two percent of margin hiding in the roster and the waste sheet and the sequence of service, week after week after week.

That’s a different temperament. Where the builder is energised by novelty, the operator is energised by mastery and repetition. They want the systems to hold, the standards to be defended, the numbers to be predictable. They’re not bored by the same Tuesday recurring; they’re good at making that Tuesday a little better each time. Give them a stable venue and they’ll compound its performance quietly for years.

Here’s the problem: those two people are rarely the same person. The builder who opened the place brilliantly often gets restless once it’s running. The chaos they fed on is gone, the interesting problems are solved, and steady-state optimisation bores them. Six months in, they’re mentally already on the next opening, and the venue starts to drift because the person in charge has lost interest in exactly the phase the venue is now in. Meanwhile the pure operator, dropped into a pre-opening, freezes. They want systems that don’t exist yet, they can’t make decisions without data that hasn’t been generated, and the ambiguity that energises the builder just stresses them out.

What this means for how you hire

The practical implication is that you should hire for the phase, and be honest about the handover.

For pre-opening, hire the builder, and hire specifically for it. Look for people who’ve opened before and can talk concretely about the mess of it, not just the glory. Ask them about a delivery that failed the week of opening, a hire that fell through, a system they had to invent on the fly. The ones who light up telling those stories are your openers. The ones who describe opening as a smooth execution of a plan have either never really done it or weren’t paying attention.

But go in knowing the builder may not be your long-term GM, and plan the transition rather than pretending it won’t come. Some builders can make the shift to operator; most can’t, and forcing it wastes both their talent and your venue’s momentum. The strongest setup I’ve seen is a builder who opens with real intensity, and a steady-state operator brought in — or grown internally — to take the machine once it’s built and run it for the long haul, with a deliberate, respected handover between them rather than an awkward power struggle nobody planned.

For steady-state, don’t be seduced by opening credentials. A CV full of glamorous launches tells you someone is a good opener. It tells you very little about whether they’ll defend standards on a wet Tuesday in the eleventh month, which is the actual job you’re hiring for. For that role I’d rather see someone who ran one venue steadily and profitably for four years than someone who opened six and left each within a year. The serial opener is a real and valuable talent, but it’s a talent for the first act, and you’re casting the second.

The reframe

Most hiring failures in this business aren’t about competence. The people are good. They’re about phase-matching: putting a genuine talent into the phase that punishes their temperament. A brilliant builder made to babysit a mature operation, or a brilliant operator thrown into the chaos of a launch, both fail, and both failures look like the person when they’re really a casting error.

So before you write the job spec, be honest about which act you’re in. Are you building a plane while taxiing, or flying one that’s already in the air? Those need different pilots. One of the more expensive things you can do is hire the wrong one and then blame them for not being the other.