The Best GMs Don’t Arrive - They Grow
Hospitality has always had a bit of a fetish for the “experienced hire.” You know the one. A CV thick enough to choke a horse, a tidy list of places they’ve “led teams” or “driven operational excellence,” and just enough confidence to make you think they might actually know what they’re doing. They arrive with the right buzzwords, a LinkedIn profile that reads like a consultancy brochure, and the quiet assumption that the place they’re walking into will benefit enormously from their presence.
Sometimes they’re good. Occasionally they’re very good. But more often than operators like to admit, they’re tourists. They know a way of doing things, often the way things were done in the last place they worked, but they don’t know your way. They don’t know the culture, the rhythm of the room, the unwritten rules that govern how a place actually functions when the doors open and the public come piling in.
And in hospitality, culture beats CV every single time.
Culture Over CV
This week we promoted a new GM internally. Yesterday she was an Assistant Manager. Today she’s running the site. We didn’t do that because there was nobody else available, and we didn’t do it because we were short of options. If we wanted to, we could have gone out to the market tomorrow and brought in someone with fifteen years’ experience, a tidy little portfolio of previous roles, and a reassuringly corporate way of talking about margins and team engagement. Recruitment agencies are full of people like that.
In fact, we did exactly that not long ago.
We brought in an external GM. Good CV. Plenty of experience. All the right boxes ticked on paper. The sort of hire that looks reassuring when you’re reading the application and thinking about operational stability.
And yet, here we are, already making the decision that they won’t make it past probation. Not because they’re incompetent. Not because they don’t work hard. But because they’re the wrong cultural fit for the business. Hospitality is full of people who are perfectly capable operators in the wrong room. They might thrive somewhere else. Just not here.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about hiring from the outside. You can interview someone, check their references, talk about leadership style and operational discipline, but until they’re actually inside the building you don’t really know if they belong there.
Culture is a strange animal. You can feel it instantly when someone fits, and you can feel it just as quickly when they don’t.
The Power of Internal Promotion
The person we moved across to another venue, the GM whose seat has just been filled, took the opposite route entirely. Six years ago he was behind the bar, learning the job the same way everyone does in this business: by doing it. Pulling pints while trying to remember which IPA was which, getting through the Friday-night chaos where the bar is three deep and the music is loud enough that nobody can hear a thing. He did the closes, the stock takes, the endless small operational details that actually make hospitality work but rarely make it onto anyone’s LinkedIn page.
From there he climbed. Bar shifts turned into responsibility. Responsibility turned into management. Eventually he landed in the big chair and took over a site that, if we’re being honest about it, needed turning around. Not the romantic version of the job, not the one where everything is already ticking along nicely and you just sit back and collect the credit. The other kind. The kind where the numbers need fixing, the team needs rebuilding, and the job is essentially grabbing the steering wheel before the whole thing goes off the road.
He did that job properly. The team stabilised. The numbers improved. The site found its feet again. No fanfare, no consultancy report, just someone who understood the place and got on with it.
Learning the Job From the Ground Up
That’s the thing about internal progression. It’s not glamorous, and it doesn’t look particularly exciting on paper, but it works. The people who grow inside a business don’t just learn the systems; they absorb the culture. Culture, in hospitality, is the invisible operating system that everything else runs on. It’s how the team behaves when the manager isn’t around, how the kitchen reacts when the ticket machine suddenly starts screaming, how the bar handles the moment when the room fills up and everyone realises they’re in for a long night.
You can’t teach that in a training manual. You can’t deliver it through a management seminar. It comes from living inside the business long enough that you start to understand how the place breathes.
External hires often arrive wanting to make their mark. They want to implement things, restructure things, change things. Sometimes that’s necessary, but more often than not it happens before they’ve properly understood the machinery they’re tinkering with. Meanwhile the person who has been working their way up through the ranks already knows where the pressure points are. They know the regulars. They know which member of staff needs a quiet word and which one needs a firm shove in the right direction. They know the difference between a slow Tuesday that’s about to explode and one that’s genuinely going nowhere.
That knowledge isn’t theoretical. It’s practical, lived experience.
Loyalty, Visibility, and Opportunity
Promoting from within also does something else that’s quietly powerful: it tells the rest of the team that the ladder actually exists. Hospitality has a bad habit of overlooking the people already in the building and bringing in outsiders with shinier CVs instead. When that happens repeatedly, the message is pretty clear: it doesn’t matter how hard you work here, the top jobs will go to someone else.
When you promote internally, that changes overnight. Suddenly the bartender can look at the GM and see a path instead of a ceiling. The story becomes visible: start here, learn the craft, take responsibility, move up. It sounds obvious, but it matters enormously in an industry where good people often feel stuck.
There’s also a deeper loyalty that comes with that journey. Not the corporate kind of loyalty that gets talked about in HR presentations, but the real thing that comes from feeling invested in a place. When someone has worked their way up from the floor, they carry the business with them differently. They’ve seen it on good nights and bad nights, they’ve been part of the graft that keeps the doors open, and they know exactly what the job looks like at every level.
That sort of connection is hard to manufacture from the outside.
Experience vs. Cultural Fit
None of this means internal promotions are risk-free. You are asking someone to step into a bigger job, sometimes sooner than they expected. There’s usually a learning curve and occasionally a wobble while they find their feet. But the difference is that the foundation is already there. They know the culture, they know the team, and they understand what the business is trying to be.
That’s half the battle won before they even start.
So the ladder moves again. One GM shifts to a new site after proving he can take a venue from shaky to solid. His Assistant Manager steps up into the job he leaves behind. The next person down the line sees the gap open above them and starts thinking about what comes next. Meanwhile the external hire who looked perfect on paper quietly moves on before probation is up, a reminder that experience and cultural fit are not always the same thing.
For all the talk in this industry about talent shortages and recruitment challenges, the truth is that a lot of the time the talent is already standing in the building. They’re behind the bar, running food, closing the pub at two in the morning, learning the mechanics of the business shift by shift. The real trick isn’t finding them. It’s recognising them early enough and giving them the chance to grow.
Because in hospitality the best managers rarely arrive fully formed. They develop over time, shaped by the culture of the place and the experience of doing the job properly. One day they’re pulling pints and trying to remember the cellar layout. A few years later they’re running the room and wondering how they ever thought the job looked easy.
And more often than not, they end up doing it better than the polished “experienced hire” who might have walked in off the street.
Which, frankly, is exactly how it should be.
