The first week as GM of a new unit is the most important week of your first year. What you set in place in those seven days becomes the operating rhythm the team will run on for the next twelve months. Getting it wrong is expensive and hard to undo. Getting it right is a matter of discipline, not talent.
I have coached about a dozen general managers through this week. The pattern of what works and what breaks is consistent enough that I now hand out the same checklist to every new-unit GM before opening. Here it is, day by day.
Day 1 (opening day): run expo
The single most important thing the GM does on day one is stand at the expo pass and touch every plate. Not because expo is the hardest job in the kitchen (it is not, on day one) but because expo is the position from which the GM can see everything. Ticket times. Plating quality. What the servers are doing. What the line is doing. Guest reactions when the food lands on the table.
You will not learn the room as fast from any other position. Not from the office. Not from the front. Not from behind a station. From the pass, you see all of it. And every member of the team sees you seeing it.
The training crew's most experienced chef supports you. The line cooks cook. The servers serve. You expo. Do not skip this. On my opening playbook, the GM being anywhere other than the pass on day one is a warning sign that the hand-off is going to fail.
Day 2: read the P&L, then run expo again
Come in two hours before service. The training crew lead sits with you and walks the day one P&L end to end. Every line. Sales by day part. Labor as a percent. Food cost as a percent. Comps and voids. Every number you will look at every day for the next twelve months, for the first time, on the actual data from opening day.
Then you go back to expo for service.
What you are building is the reflex of reading the numbers before you run the room. If day one was operational, day two is operational plus a first pass at the analytical layer that will hold the operation together.
Day 3: start the huddle
Fifteen minutes before service. Whole team, front and back of house together. Same three questions, every day:
- What is the forecast for today (covers, weather, anything unusual)?
- What was yesterday's biggest problem, and how are we fixing it?
- What is our one thing to nail today?
The huddle takes fifteen minutes. It becomes the spine of the operating rhythm. If you skip it on day three because service is busy, you will skip it every day. Do not skip it. Even if the team is exhausted. Even if the training crew tells you it can wait. It cannot wait. The huddle is what turns a group of new hires into a team.
Fig. 1 · Week one, day by day.
Day 4: one-on-ones
Before service on day four, sit with each new hire for ten minutes. Same three questions:
- What is one thing that has surprised you about this job?
- What is one thing you need from me that you have not gotten?
- What is one thing you would change about how we are running the shift?
You will get more useful signal in the four hours of one-on-ones on day four than in any other single activity of week one. The team is fresh. Nothing has ossified yet. They will tell you the truth. In week eight they will not.
Fix one specific thing before day five. Announce the fix at the day five huddle. Say who raised it. The team will notice.
Day 5: cover the weakest station
By day five you know which station is the weakest. Sometimes it is grill because the grill cook is stressed. Sometimes it is expo because the ticket flow has a bottleneck. Sometimes it is the front door because the host is not managing the wait well.
Whichever it is, spend day five behind that station. Do not delegate this. Do not send the training crew lead. You go stand there. Take tickets. Watch the flow. Cook if you can. If you are running a full-service concept and your grill cook is drowning, work the grill for a service. The team will remember.
This is not about you being the best at every station. You are not. It is about you understanding the specific problem in the specific station well enough to fix it. Which you cannot do from expo.
Day 6: prep for the peak
Friday afternoon, before Friday dinner and Saturday brunch and Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch, the peak of week one hits. This is the four services in a row where the systems will be under the most pressure they have seen.
Walk every station for readiness. Talk to every station lead. Ask them what will break under peak volume. They will tell you. Fix what you can before service.
Then stay in the building through both peak services on Friday and Saturday. The GM absent during peak weekend of opening week is a signal to the team that the peak weekend does not matter. It matters.
Peak weekend of opening week is the shift the team will remember for their first year here. The GM in the room, calm and visible, is worth more than any coaching that happens later.
Day 7: reset for week two
Sunday night, after service, when the team has gone home, sit in the empty dining room with the training crew lead. Write the week two plan on paper.
- What worked in week one
- What broke
- What changes on Monday
- Who takes the lead role in week two on each station
The week two plan does not need to be complicated. It needs to be written down and shared at the Monday morning huddle. The team needs to know that week two is a new week with a new plan, not a continuation of week one on autopilot.
What not to do in week one
Three things I have watched new-unit GMs do in week one that hurt them badly:
- Fire someone. The urge is strong. Someone will underperform. Someone will show up late. Do not fire in week one. It signals to the team that you are unstable, and it eliminates any chance you had to coach the person into being useful. Fire in week three or later if the coaching fails.
- Rearrange the schedule. The schedule you inherited was built during pre-open by the training crew based on the forecasting model. It is probably wrong in a few places. Do not rewrite it in week one. You do not have the data yet. Rewrite it in week three.
- Take a day off. Do not take a day off in week one. Even if you are exhausted. Even if the training crew tells you they have it covered. Your presence in the building for seven straight days is a signal the team will notice. Take a day in week three.
The training crew handoff on day 14
The last day of the training crew assignment is day 14. On day 14, at the end of service, hold a 30-minute all-hands. Publicly thank the training crew by name. Publicly name the local team members who are now the leads on each station.
The transition has to be visible and formal. If it happens quietly, the team will not know it happened, and the standard will drift because nobody knew when to start owning it.
The point
Week one is a specific job. Not the normal job of the GM. It is a set-up job. What you install in the first seven days is what you will run on for a year. Expo the room. Read the P&L. Start the huddle. Do the one-on-ones. Cover the weak station. Show up for the peak weekend. Reset for week two.
Do these seven things, in order, and week eight of your unit will look like a mature operation. Skip them and week eight will look like a scramble that never ended.