Resturaunt & Saloon  --  1979-1982

At the same time I moved into Los Gatos, one of the town's favorite son's was in the processing of building a large restaurant and saloon in the heart of town.  Once it opened, it was an immediate success.  The young owner had no hostelry experience, but a boat load of local friends and money who helped him convert some turn of the century offices and the old Oddfellow's Temple hall in to the nite spot of the Santa Clara Valley.  And once it opened, the remodeling friends became the employee's; the cooks, waiters,waitress's and bartenders and barmaids.  From the beginning, it was like one large, extended family.  As luck would have it, one day I bumped into a lady friend from high school.  As it turns out, her husband was the favorite son, the owner of the big, new club.  He and I met and became fast and close friends ourselves.      As the years passed and as his family grew, the owner became less and less personally involved with the club, paid less and less attention to it, his interests broadened.  After not even ten years of operation, he came to me and asked me to come on as assistant manager.  I was a bit stunned, he knew it was my goal to get reestablished in the computer business.  He said that because of my management backround, and the fact that my father was a lifelong waiter and I had grown up in the restaurant business (as well as the farm work) , he needed someone in his business to discover what was going wrong.  Despite it's populalrity, much to my surprise, the club was in horrible financial trouble.  He needed an inside business analyst that was not intrusive and I had been a "friend of house" since it opened.       I took the job as Assistant General Manager and immediatly set up all sorts of tracking systems; inventory, departmental effeciency, food costs, entertainment profit/expense as well as entertainment/bar sales.  I was soon made full General Manager and I began implementing, what seemed to me, rather normal rules and expectations.  Since most of the employees knew me as a long time customer and not a boss, there was a growing resentment of my "strict" policies as oppossed to the lax family style of the staff.  After firing a waiterss (who I had known for many years) because she missed four scheduled shifts in a single month, the staff wanted my head on a pike.       When the owner originally approached me, he said the place was so broke, he couldn't sell it, he couldn't even bankrupt it. After 18 months, I was showing a very healthy operational profit according to guidelines for the industry.  However, the debt load which had carried over from years of mismanagement prior to my term, was twice the monthly profit margin.  The owner could never fully grasp the difference here.  How could we be operating in the black, but still have all the bill collectors.  After almost 2 years, I was exhausted, berated and alienated.  By a frustrated mutual agreement, I left the job and the friendship.

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