Head of Catering / Warwickshire (ref:DS8940)

Location: Warwickshire
Salary: Excellent
Date: 12 Jan
Job Type: Full-Time
Duration: Permanent


A fantastic opportunity has arisen to join a thriving independent business and shape the future of their food offering in a great environment and location. This independent Warwickshire based Garden Centre is a relatively new build and has ongoing investment that has seen the turnover grow by more than 60% in the last 4 years and has become a great destination centre.

The Role

Currently the business has circa 160 covers split into two adjoining locations a café setting and a restaurant setting. There is also an ice cream/pottery barn (with 20 covers) that would fall under the leadership of this role.

The café is currently outperforming, the restaurant, based on 2015 turnover and are now considering how best to move forward.

Therefore, the person we are looking for must be able to carry out the following key aspects of this new role:

• Visionary leadership - ability to see the next stages of development, map them out and plan how these are executed over time. For example, the food offering has reached phase two in its plan so what might phase three look like?
• Personality Profile - the ability to work with the owners and sit alongside the more senior leadership of the business day to day. Also, the ability to work, motivate and create a great team spirit amongst and with the café/restaurant staff. Giving clear leadership whilst playing your part in the team and the wider team in the business. The business has a great mix of family feel with a professional dynamic environment.
• Commerciality - the ability to analyse current performance and situations and then look at creative ways of moving the business forward. The feeling is that the food offer could grow by 25% in the shorter term how do we do that? Beyond that there is a further 50% growth so what does that next phase look like and how do they get there? The business also recognises that the food sales as a % of the overall site could become a larger part of the sales mix so creating a plan to execute this is vital.

The Candidate

Personal skill set - the business would consider various backgrounds and garden centre experience is not essential. As a real example a member of the team came from a background in marketing and is now running front of house. Candidates with a food, food service, retail type background will be considered.

We are looking for someone who will fit the culture and ethos of this dynamic family business.

The business is open as to what background the person comes from but they must possess the skills, personality profile and the ability to perform the key aspects of this role. Ideally food retailing and or catering will have been part of their career but they will look outside of these areas as well.

To apply for this role click here