14 CLUBS
Lead Operations Manager
Job description, The Whiteley, Bayswater, London
Role title Lead Operations Manager
Location 14 Clubs, Unit 11, The Whiteley, Queensway, London W2 4BD
Reports to James Chapman, Founder
Works alongside Lead Front of House and Director of Golf. This role sits in parallel with Lead FoH, not under him.
Employment type Full time, permanent, salaried
Salary Competitive, dependent on experience
Start date Pre opening, Autumn 2026
About 14 Clubs
14 Clubs is a private Members golf club opening at The Whiteley in Bayswater in Autumn 2026. Four Trackman iO simulators, a team of in house PGA coaches and a premium clubhouse where Members eat, drink and spend time either side of playing.
We are a Members club that happens to have simulators in it, not a simulator venue with a bar attached. Our members are time poor professionals who take their golf seriously and expect the hospitality around it to match anywhere else they spend their money in central London.
Core trading hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 10pm, and Sunday 10am to 4pm. Mondays are reserved for corporate and private hire. We also expect to open some mornings from 7am for members playing before work, so the operating day is likely to run longer than core hours on a number of days each week.
Purpose of the role
This role owns the machinery behind the hospitality offer. Systems and technology first, stock, compliance, cost control, staff rotas and suppliers. If it needs configuring, documenting or holding to a standard, it is yours.
It sits in parallel with our Lead Front of House, who owns the floor, the service and the feel of the room. He makes the club feel effortless to a member. You are the reason it actually is. Neither of you works for the other. You both report to the Founder.
You are head of operations for the back of house. Your instinct should be to open the P&L, the stock sheet and the rota and find the problem before it becomes one. That is the core of the job and it is what we will hire on.
One thing worth being straight about before you apply. Nobody here has built this technology stack before and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The Founder and the Lead Front of House both learn fast, but neither of us is the right person to be configuring a booking system or wiring an EPOS into a membership database. We need you to be that person, and then to teach the rest of us to run it once it works.
Equally important. You are a senior member of the hospitality team, not a back office function. When the Lead Front of House and the Founder are not on the floor, you are the most senior person in the room and you are the one our Members deal with. So the service instinct has to be there alongside the systems brain. Both, not one or the other.
We are a small team with no layers in it. Four people carry this club. The Founder, the Director of Golf, the Lead Front of House and you. Everyone works the floor, everyone clears tables, and nobody is above doing either.
Core responsibilities
Systems, technology and integration
- Own the technology that runs the club and, critically, the joins between the parts of it.
- Own the selection, configuration and integration of that stack from a blank page. Booking, EPOS, membership management, payments, member app and coaching software all have to talk to each other, and getting those joins right is the single most important technical job of the pre-opening phase.
- Write the system documentation and train the Founder, the Lead Front of House and the wider team on it, so the club is never dependent on one person to run its own software.
- Work with the Director of Golf on the operational side of the four Trackman iO bays. Uptime, software updates, calibration, ball and mat replacement schedules, fault escalation and vendor support.
- Own AV, sound, lighting and screens across the clubhouse and bays, including presets for corporate hire and event days.
- Manage IT, networking, Wi Fi and data. Ensure member data is handled in line with UK GDPR.
- Maintain a planned preventative maintenance schedule for the whole site and manage contractors, the landlord relationship at The Whiteley and reactive repairs.
Food and beverage systems and stock control
- Own the EPOS setup and ongoing maintenance, including product hierarchy, pricing, modifiers, tabs, member accounts and bar credit against the founding member scheme.
- Build and run stock control end to end. Par levels, ordering, deliveries, goods in, cellar management, regular stocktakes and variance investigation.
- Manage gross profit by category and hold it to target. Food menu and pour costing, yield, wastage tracking and menu engineering alongside the Lead Front of House.
- Own supplier relationships, negotiate terms and manage the ordering calendar across drinks, food and consumables.
- Manage the interface with any third party food suppliers and kitchen partners, including specification, delivery windows, quality control, service levels and commercial terms.
- Produce weekly trading and cost reporting for the Founder covering revenue by stream, GP, labour cost percentage and stock variance.
Compliance, licensing and safety
- Act as day-to-day custodian of the premises licences and ensure every condition attached is met and evidenced.
- Own food safety management, including HACCP documentation, temperature records, allergen matrices, Natasha’s Law labelling and supplier due diligence.
- Maintain health and safety, fire safety and first aid compliance. Risk assessments, fire log, evacuation procedure, accident reporting and contractor permits.
- Keep the club permanently inspection-ready for Environmental Health, licensing officers and the landlord, and target and hold a five-star food hygiene rating.
- Own age verification, Challenge 25, refusals log, CCTV retention and incident reporting.
People and rota operations
- Build and publish rotas that cover trading hours across seven days while holding labour cost to target.
- Own time and attendance, holiday, absence and payroll submission for the hospitality team.
- Run onboarding administration, right to work checks, contracts and the training matrix, and keep certification records current.
- Write, maintain and enforce the standard operating procedures for opening, closing, cash handling, banking, deliveries and incident response.
- Lead recruitment for the hospitality team end to end. Write the adverts, sit the interviews, run the trial shifts, make the call and keep the paperwork airtight.
- Own the HR process and the paper trail underneath it. Probation reviews, one-to-ones, absence and lateness management, disciplinary and grievance procedure, all documented to a standard that would stand up if it were ever tested. UK employment law has tightened considerably, and we are not willing to be exposed on it.
Pre-opening priorities
You will join before we open. The first phase is about building the operation rather than running it, and it will move quickly.
- Configure and test the EPOS, booking and member management systems and the integrations between them.
- Set up stock control, supplier accounts and the ordering calendar from scratch.
- Build the compliance framework and documentation pack from a blank page.
- Write the standard operating procedures with the Lead Front of House and Director of Golf.
- Commission the venue alongside the fit out team and sign off snags before members walk in.
Shape of the week
Around 45 hours a week across five days, including evenings and weekends. The hours are divided according to the needs of the business between the floor and behind the scenes on systems, stock, compliance and admin.
The club trades Tuesday to Sunday and Mondays are held for corporate and private hire, so the week does not look like a normal Monday to Friday. Early starts and late finishes come with the territory and we will be straight with you about that from the first conversation.
About you
Essential
- Two or more years in hospitality operations, assistant management or back of house management, ideally in a premium single site venue, members club, hotel or restaurant group in London. If you are a strong number two ready to run your own operation for the first time, we are more interested in that than in somebody already comfortable.
- Demonstrable ownership of stock control and gross profit, with the numbers to show what you moved and how.
- Genuinely comfortable with systems. You have configured an EPOS rather than only used one, you can see where two pieces of software fail to talk to each other, and you enjoy that work rather than tolerate it.
- Strong working knowledge of licensing, food safety and health and safety in a UK venue, and the paperwork discipline to evidence it.
- Rota building and labour cost management across a seven-day trading pattern with early starts and late finishes.
- A real service instinct. You are happy on the floor, you can host a room of members and corporate guests, and you can step up and lead the hospitality operation when the Lead Front of House is not there.
- Organised to the point of being slightly annoying about it. You write things down, you follow up, and nothing quietly falls off the list.
- Interviewing and hiring experience, or the appetite to learn it quickly. You will be on the other side of the table for most of our hospitality hires.
- Current First Aid at Work certification and Level 2 Food Safety as a minimum, or both in place before we open.
Desirable
- Level 3 Food Safety and IOSH or NEBOSH.
- Pre-opening or new site launch experience.
- Familiarity with golf, whether as a player or through working in the sport. Not essential, but it will help you talk to Members and to the coaching team.
- Experience with Trackman, simulator technology or similar sports technology.
What we offer
- Salary discussed openly at first interview, dependent on experience and reviewed annually.
- The chance to build the operating model for a club from nothing, rather than inherit someone else’s.
- Direct access to the Founder. Short decision chains and no layers to push ideas through.
- Use of the facility and coaching from our PGA team.
- A genuine route to broader operational leadership as the club and the group grow.
How to apply
Send a CV and a short note to [email protected]. In the note, tell us about one operational problem you found before anyone else noticed it, and what you did about it. That will tell me more than a covering letter will.
James Chapman, Founder, 14 Clubs, The Whiteley, London. 07946 398 067.
Job Type: Full-time
Work Location: In person
