Seth Gerber: Your Restaurant Is a Factory

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
What are you doing this month to make sure your business grows? Do you mind if I make a suggestion? This month's free Restaurant Marketing Master Class is about one thing, using AI to create an unfair advantage. And not by replacing what makes your restaurant special, but by helping you move faster on the work that actually drives growth. I'm taking my proven tactics, tools, and strategies and showing you how to use AI to sharpen your marketing, speed up execution, and turn good ideas into action without getting buried in the details. You'll be working with me personally to build these strategies into your business in real time. And because of that, space is limited. But you can sign up for free today by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com Again, you can sign up for free today just by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com I'll see you there.
Now here we go.

**Seth Gerber** (0:54)
It really comes down to the idea that you can't manage people. You can manage the structure that they're in. It's so cliché to say you hire the right people, you let them do the work. But at the end of the day, I can't dictate what the manager at any of the stores is doing right now. And if I can't trust those people, then I'm never going to be able to.

**Josh Kopel** (1:13)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators, served up on the house.
What if you can't actually manage your people? And every hour you spend trying is the reason your restaurant won't scale. Seth Gerber co-owns MIDA, a 6-restaurant Italian group out of Boston, and was a 2024 James Beard Semi-Finalist for Best Restaurant Tour. He came up through Hillstone, earned his sommelier pin in an MBA, and treats out-learning everyone in the room as his only edge. In today's conversation, we get into why you manage the structure people work in and never the people themselves, why the cinematic version of risk that bets it all on one move is a fantasy that quietly ruins operators, and why the best restaurateurs grow slower than their egos want them to. If you're grinding inside of your business and still feel like the bottleneck, this one is going to tell you where your real problem lies.

**Seth Gerber** (2:23)
I mean, the story is not a super beautiful and an inspiring story. The truth is-

**Josh Kopel** (2:29)
No shit.

**Seth Gerber** (2:30)
Yeah, the truth is that I was a degenerate teenager who wanted a job where they could stay out late, do things that they were not supposed to do, meet girls, just basically be out and about as a 16 year old and make some quick cash.
It became something that I did because I saw it as a counterculture and it was something that was different. I wasn't great at the traditional academic stuff that a lot of kids that I went to high school with were really hyper-focused on and excelled at. I just did not resonate with that stuff. So I found hospitality and restaurants as something that I had thrived at that was unique to me. And it went from being able to party and stay out late to, oh my God, there's a lot going on here. I had some exposure to wine, I had exposure to fine dining service, and the energy of the dining room, I just got addicted to it. I saw it as this, almost this athletic, intense kind of performance-based thing, and I was in control in that environment, and I loved the pirate ship, I loved the chaos. It just became the greatest thing in the world, and the thing that I love to do more than anything else. So that's really about it.

**Josh Kopel** (3:38)
And then what inspired you to take the entrepreneurial leap?

**Seth Gerber** (3:41)
I always wanted to open a restaurant for some reason. Like when I would go home from school, I would watch, now it's Taboo, but like Multimario before he was a creep, Emeril Lagasse, and those, I just was obsessed with those like demigods of the business, the people who were just like these larger than life personalities, and saw what they were doing, and thought it was cool, and wanted to emulate it. I learned pretty early on, my first job out of college, I was working for a corporate restaurant group, and dude, I could not stand the culture. I just realized that I have a huge chip on my shoulder, and I can't do the politics, I can't do just the bullshit that goes into sometimes hierarchical corporate bureaucracy, and it became clear pretty early on that I need just some runway to be my own boss. And then I think the last part of it was that I saw some of the managers, and I saw some of my peers that were ahead of me, people that were 10 years my senior, and maybe they had a pretty good salary, and they were making good money, but they had the kids, they had the house, maybe they had a boat, maybe they had a nice car, and all of a sudden, what you thought is a lot of money isn't that much money, and then you're 40 years old, 50 years old, grinding in restaurant operations, and you don't really have a way to start over. You're kind of hip-cuffed to that, and I saw that and figured if I was gonna have a job, I could do something later in life that looked a little bit different, and if I'm gonna take huge risks and figure out how to be a restaurateur, what's stopping me from doing it right now? So I didn't want to fall into that trap, and I wanted to find something that sues my personality, and it just seemed like it was destiny for me to try to open a restaurant and give it a shot.