Meet Old Skool Cafe
Old Skool Cafe (OSC) is a faith-based, violence prevention program that provides job training, employment, and wrap-around support through collaborative partners, using the vehicle of a jazz restaurant run by at-risk, formerly incarcerated, and foster care youth ages 16-22.
They embrace evidence-based practices to help young people heal from the inside out, replacing cycles of incarceration and poverty with a sense of community, purpose and the confidence needed to fulfill their destiny.
Ready to scale
Old Skool Cafe’s team needed to find someone to fill their head of operations role, a position that was critical for their ability to accelerate expansion. Their head of operations would oversee all operations at OSC and provide expert leadership and humble guidance for the team.
By finding someone with experience scaling an organization, leading diverse teams, and developing team culture, their team would have the help they needed to fulfill their goals to expand their reach.
A specific vision for the role
With a specific vision for who their head of operations would need to be, Old Skool Cafe reached out to Vanderbloemen to expand and accelerate their search. By partnering with Vanderbloemen, the OSC could shift their focus completely back to their mission while Vanderbloemen took the lead on the search.
CEO and Founder Teresa Goines along with some board members met with our Director of Executive Search Eugene Lee, who is also based in San Francisco, to get to know OSC’s brand and team culture. As Eugene learned more about the role, he created a profile that would be used throughout the search for their unicorn candidate.
Eugene then worked alongside members of the Vanderbloemen team to collect and sort candidates as the search began. They looked for a uniquely gifted leader who is passionate, professional, humble, emotionally intelligent, and spiritually mature.
The right candidate would need several years of leadership experience to equip them for the job. Full service restaurant experience would be essential. Experience alone wouldn’t be enough though—the right candidate had to have a heart for their mission and the character to lead the team well.
To find someone with a strong faith and restaurant leadership experience, the search team used some out-of-the-box tactics to source candidates, while also discerning if internal candidates OSC put forward would be the right fit.
The right man for the job
One of the candidates stood out to Old Skool Cafe’s team as the right man for the job. Matthew Arch comes with a decade of leadership experience, specifically within a values-based restaurant, among others. He has practice leading and uniting large teams toward a common goal.
After a thorough vetting process, it was clear that Matthew checked all OSC’s boxes and then some. His extensive restaurant leadership experience, deep faith, and compassion for at-risk teenagers made him the unique fit OSC’s team hoped to find.
Matthew was offered the role, and he was able to start after just two weeks.
