There’s a familiar moment in a growing hospitality business. Things start slipping.
Managers are stretched. Teams are frustrated. Projects aren’t getting finished. Guest issues are taking too long to resolve. Someone is spending half their week putting out fires.
Eventually somebody says: “We need another operations manager.”
Maybe you do. But before you open the job posting, we’d ask a different question: What exactly are you hiring this person to fix?
Because adding another manager to an operation that isn’t working doesn’t necessarily fix the operation. Sometimes it just gives the dysfunction another person to invite to meetings.
Capacity and complexity aren’t the same problem
There are absolutely times when a team simply has too much work. If one manager is effectively doing the job of two people, that’s a capacity problem. Hire.
But hospitality organizations can also become overwhelmed because the work itself has become unnecessarily complicated:
Approval chains grew.
Responsibilities became unclear.
Technology added steps instead of removing them.
Meetings multiplied.
Processes were created to solve exceptions and eventually became the rule.
Managers started owning tasks that should live somewhere else.
And suddenly a role that once comfortably supported ten properties can barely support six.
Hiring another person might relieve the pressure. It doesn’t necessarily remove what’s creating it.
Before adding headcount, follow the work
If we were evaluating the need for another operations role, we wouldn’t start with an org chart. We’d start with a calendar.
What is the existing team actually doing all day? How much time goes toward guest issues? Administrative work? Vendor management? Scheduling? Reporting? Approvals? Meetings? Quality control? Projects?
And perhaps most importantly: What are your highest-paid operators doing that someone, or something, else should be doing?
That’s where things get interesting.
A general manager spending hours reconciling reports isn’t necessarily evidence that you need another GM. It might be evidence that your reporting process is broken.
A regional leader approving routine purchases isn’t necessarily overloaded. Your approval structure might be.
An operations manager manually assigning every task isn’t necessarily understaffed. Your workflow might be.
Accountability problems often disguise themselves as staffing problems
This one can be uncomfortable.
When ownership isn’t clear, work tends to migrate toward the most reliable person in the room. Eventually that person owns everything. And then they’re overwhelmed.
The natural solution? Hire someone to help them. But if you don’t clarify ownership first, six months later you’ll have two overwhelmed people sharing an unclear job.
Before adding a position, we’d want every major responsibility to answer three questions:
Who owns it?
What does success look like?
When does someone else need to get involved?
If those answers aren’t clear, headcount alone probably isn’t the solution.
Sometimes you absolutely should hire
None of this is an argument against growing your team. There are moments when the answer is obvious:
The portfolio grew.
The workload grew with it.
Responsibilities are clear.
Processes work.
Technology supports them.
Performance expectations are defined.
And the team simply needs another capable human being. Hire them.
But now you’re hiring someone into a functioning system instead of asking them to compensate for a broken one. That’s a dramatically different job.
The goal isn’t fewer people. It’s the right people doing the right work.
Hospitality will always be a people business. The objective shouldn’t be to eliminate headcount at every opportunity. It should be to make sure every role creates enough value to justify the time, attention and money you’re investing in it.
Sometimes that means hiring. Sometimes it means restructuring. Sometimes it means eliminating a process everyone assumed was necessary.
And sometimes it means discovering that the person you thought you needed was already there. They just needed the space to do their actual job.
Sometimes, the better way has already been found.
At Found Better, we've operated hospitality businesses from individual units to high-rise aparthotels and portfolios spanning thousands of keys. We've implemented technology, replaced technology, integrated technology—and occasionally discovered that the best solution was simply using what we already had better.
If you're trying to figure out whether your operation needs new technology, a better process, or both, bring us the problem.
Book a Found Better Advisory Call. One hour. Real operators. Practical answers.