General Manager – Northern Soul
Location: Northern Quarter, Manchester
Salary: £40,000–£45,000, with flexibility towards £48,000 for an exceptional candidate + performance bonus
Job Role: Senior management role, approximately 50 hours per week. Saturdays and peak trading periods are important.
Northern Soul is looking for a hands-on General Manager to take real ownership of the next stage of the business.
We’re not looking for someone simply to manage shifts, write rotas and keep a restaurant ticking over.
Northern Soul is now a £1m+ hospitality business across our established Manchester restaurant and wider events activity.
We already have a strong team and a good operation. What we need now is a proper operator who can make the business more commercially driven, structured and professionally managed.
Someone strong with people, confident with numbers and naturally inclined to take ownership.
Someone whose instinct is:
“I’m on it.”
The role:
Your core responsibility is simple:
Run Northern Soul brilliantly.
You’ll take overall ownership of the restaurant — its people, standards, financial performance, systems and continual improvement.
Initially, you’ll be highly visible in the operation while learning the business and setting the standard.
Over time, we expect you to develop the people underneath you so you can spend more time improving the business rather than simply reacting to day-to-day shifts.
Northern Soul also has wider activity across events, activations and stadium hospitality, including work at the Etihad Stadium. This is not the core of the role, but there will be opportunities for the right person to support and become involved in the wider business over time.
What you’ll be responsible for
- Overall restaurant performance and profitability
- P&L, labour, GP, stock and wastage
- Leading, developing and holding the team accountable
- Developing supervisors and future managers underneath you
- Food and beverage operations
- Recruitment and continual team development
- Training, compliance, EHO readiness and operational documentation
- Weekly rota and payroll controls
- Customer feedback and service improvement
- Local sales, office catering, partnerships, promotions and activations
- Creating genuinely new revenue
- Turning ideas into action and ensuring things get finished
- Supporting selected events and wider Northern Soul projects when required
You’ll work closely with our accountant on the financial side and directly with the owners on wider business direction.
We don’t expect you to know everything.
We do expect good judgement.
Most problems should reach us as:
“I’ve dealt with it.”
Sometimes the right answer is:
“Here’s the issue, here’s my recommendation, but I need a steer on this one.”
Knowing the difference matters.
What we’re looking for
You’ll ideally:
- Have managed, or had significant P&L responsibility for, a £750k–£1m+ hospitality business or venue
- Have strong commercial awareness and genuine experience working with a P&L
- Be confident across both food and beverage
- Understand busy weekends and high-volume trading
- Be comfortable setting standards and holding people accountable
- Be able to develop people rather than keeping all responsibility to yourself
- Be highly organised and capable of building strong operational systems
- Be genuinely interested in food and hospitality
- Be commercially curious and naturally look for ways to grow revenue
- Have experience within independent hospitality or a similarly entrepreneurial environment
You may already be an established General Manager.
You may also be a strong operator who feels capable of much more if given genuine autonomy.
We’re more interested in ability, hunger and trajectory than how many years you’ve had “General Manager” written on your CV.
The person
We’re looking for somebody calm, fair, firm and clear.
Approachable with the team, while remaining very clearly their leader.
Someone who doesn’t need constant permission or reassurance.
Someone who spots problems and deals with them.
Someone who can represent the business confidently in commercial meetings.
Someone who brings solutions rather than excuses.
And someone who gets genuine satisfaction from improving a business rather than simply maintaining one.
What success looks like
Within your first year, we’d expect to see:
- Improved restaurant profitability
- Strong operational systems, training and compliance
- New revenue created through your own activity and ideas
- A stronger management team developing underneath you
- A business running with greater structure, confidence and accountability
If you achieve that exceptionally well, there is more opportunity here.
We have wider interests across events, hospitality, commercial projects and future food concepts.
For the right person, we’d like this to become a long-term relationship with increasing autonomy, responsibility and the potential to participate financially in opportunities they help create.
Package:
£40,000–£45,000 base salary, with flexibility towards £48,000 for an exceptional candidate, plus a meaningful performance-related bonus.
Bonus will focus on:
- Improving restaurant profitability
- Creating genuinely incremental revenue
- Building and developing the management team underneath you
This is a senior operational hospitality role.
Saturdays and peak trading periods matter, and there will be weeks when the business requires more from you.
In return, we believe strong senior operators should be trusted to manage their own time sensibly around the needs of the business.
We’re interested in ownership, output and results.
If you’re looking for another conventional GM role with a set playbook and several layers of management above you, this probably isn’t it.
If you’re looking to take real ownership of an established independent business, be trusted to make decisions, improve it and create new opportunities, we’d like to hear from you.
Pay: £40,000.00-£48,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Cycle to work scheme
- Discounted or free food
- Employee discount
- On-site parking
- Store discount
Experience:
- Managerial: 4 years (required)
Licence/Certification:
- Level 3 Food Hygiene Certificate (preferred)
Work Location: In person
