Front of house, back of mind
There's a moment in every project where the excitement is impossible to miss. The waves have been tested. The board room is looking stocked and ready. Ownership, investors, and the local community are counting down to opening day.
And somewhere in a back office, buried under a dozen other priorities, is a line item that reads "staffing onboarding plan" — untouched, unowned, and quickly running out of time…
The front of house plan/the frontline team has lost priority - not because operators don't care about their teams, because the engineering, the permitting, the construction, and the capital stack are loud. They demand attention every single day. Staffing, by comparison, feels like something you can figure out later — right up until "later" is two weeks before opening and you're left scrambling.
Front of house isn't just lifeguards and bartenders. It's all the faces a guest sees, the person checking in guests and verifying waivers, the surf team matching rental boards to surfers, the cleaning crew making sure the beach is raked everyday, the managers on duty visible and ready for escalation.
When staffing is treated as a checkbox instead of a strategy, the cracks show up fast:
Rushed hiring that skips real vetting
Training compressed into a day or two instead of built with confidence into the pre-opening timeline
No clear chain of command once doors open, because roles were never mapped out fully
Burned-out early hires who leave within the first season
And in the end it creates a guest experience that doesn't match the multi-million dollar facility you just built.
You need to be building the culture you want for your facility from the very thought about operations hiring - and keep that enthusiasm and messaging consistent until the end. That’s what we do!
Staffing structure and org charts finalized months out, not weeks
SOPs in the works before the first hire walks through the door
Training check points and measurements
A clear runway for uniforms, signage, software and hardware to be ready alongside the physical space
A leadership team that knows their roles before the opening day pressure hits
Front of house shouldn't be back of mind. It should be part of the plan from the very beginning.
