A single-location owner holds everything: the kitchen standard, the hiring, the numbers, and the daily decisions. The moment a second location opens, that stops being possible. The chart below explains who picks up each piece of that job, and why the two new roles, governor and minister, have to stay separate.
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Start your applicationWhat is a governor in a restaurant group?
A governor is the one person who owns the full P&L and the results of every location in a territory, whether that territory is two restaurants or many more.
At one location, the owner is the M3, managing a single M2 who runs the location, with M1s on the shifts underneath. At two or three locations, an M2 runs each location, and someone has to manage those M2s. That someone is the governor.
The governor owns four things: every location's P&L in the territory, the M2s themselves (their hiring, scores, and training), the daily reports each M2 files, and the job of making sure the locations already running don't slip once a new one opens.
The rule behind the role is simple: one owner, one territory, one number. If a location's food cost is off, it is the governor's number, even if the standard that location is failing to hit came from someone else's department. That design choice is deliberate, so nobody can blame a bad location on another function.
What is a minister in a restaurant group?
A minister is the one person who owns a single standard, such as the kitchen, people, or the numbers, across every location in the company.
Ministers set policy and help. They are not the governors' bosses. A minister writes the standard, checks it, and supports the governor in hitting it, but never runs a location and never gives orders to an M2. The day a minister starts directing an M2 directly, the governor no longer owns the number, and the whole point of the structure breaks.
At two or three locations, the advice is to start with three ministers: the kitchen standard (recipes, specs, the kitchen check), people (the hiring pipeline, training, and a bench of M1s ready to step up), and the numbers (the books, the dashboard, and an independent check on every figure, so the person who produces a result is never the only one reporting it).
How are governors and ministers different?
A governor owns results inside a territory and answers for the number, while a minister owns one standard across every territory and helps without ever running a location.
| Governor | Minister | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns | Results of a set of locations | One function across all locations |
| Decides | Inside the locations | The standard, not the location |
| Reports to the owner on | The number | The policy and how well it's being hit |
| Can direct an M2? | Yes, they manage the M2s | No, never |
Keeping these two apart is what stops accountability from getting diluted as a group grows. A governor who also tried to set every function's standard would be back to doing the owner's old job alone. A minister who started managing M2s directly would quietly take over the governor's seat, and then the P&L would have two names on it instead of one.
Results are not typical and will vary with your business, your market, your team and how much of the work you actually do. Client figures on this site come from recorded interviews and are dated. Nothing here is a guarantee of revenue, profit or growth.
Does a minister have to be a full-time hire?
No, at two or three locations a minister is usually a seat held part of the week by someone already in the business, not a new full-time hire.
The lead cook whose kitchen already is the standard can take the kitchen seat part of the week. A controller already brought into the system can take the numbers seat. The people seat can stay open for a while, with an assistant running the hiring pipeline off an existing playbook. What matters is not that every seat has a paid specialist behind it. What matters is that every seat on the chart has a name next to it, or honestly says open.
Can a small restaurant group afford a governor?
The cost of the governor seat is a real percentage of a small group's sales, which is exactly why the role is planned before the second lease is signed, not after.
In the worked example used in the lesson, a governor's cost is measured against location sales: at two mature locations the governor's cost comes out to 37% of sales, and at three locations it drops to 24%. The owner can hold the governor seat personally, with a date written next to their own name for when it gets filled, while paying the eventual governor partly on the profit of the locations they run.
This is also why the chart gets built before the lease on the next location is signed: the people side of a second or third location takes longer to find than the room does.
Does this structure only work at scale?
No, the same governor and minister structure that ran 735 locations works the same way at two or three.
The scale that built this structure was large: 735 locations, 10,000 employees, and $200M a year in sales, run with governors owning territory P&Ls and ministers owning standards above them, working like a layer of government over the locations. The claim behind the lesson is that the structure does not change shape as it grows. It works at three locations the same way it works at three hundred. The difference at a small group's size is mostly that one person fills several seats until the group can carry dedicated ones.
For a look at what the first of these structures replaces, see how a restaurant runs without the owner in the room. Owners further along who want this chart built for their own group can look at Founders Board or see how it played out for other operators on case studies.
