Five Star Parks & Attractions→
General Manager at Five Star Parks & Attractions in Mesquite, TX
Skills
Job Description
NOW HIRING — A RESTAURANT OPERATOR'S NEXT MOVE
General Manager
Casual dining DNA. Family entertainment scale. A career path that actually goes somewhere.
BUILT FOR CASUAL DINING OPERATORS
If you can run a high-volume casual dining restaurant, you can run a Five Star park.
You already know how to hit a P&L. You can read a daily flash, walk a line check, hold a pre-shift, sit a section, recover a guest, coach a closer, and close out a $40K Saturday without breaking a sweat. You've lived prime cost, ticket times, table turns, comp sales, mix shift, and the holy trinity of food, labor, and beverage.
All of that translates here — and then some. Because a Five Star park is essentially a casual dining restaurant with an arcade, an attractions deck, a party sales team, and a redemption counter bolted on. Multiple revenue lines. Bigger AUVs. More variables. Way more fun.
Think Olive Garden volume. Dave & Buster's mix. A culture that actually means what it says about Safe, Clean, and Fun.
WHO WE ARE
Eleven brands. Twenty-seven parks. Thirteen states. One promise.
Five Star Parks & Attractions is one of the fastest-growing family entertainment platforms in the country. Our portfolio includes Adventure Ziplines of Branson, Celebration Station, Craig's Cruisers, Fun Land, LazerPort, Malibu Jack's, Scene75, SpeedZone, The Track Family Fun Parks, Xtreme Racing Branson, and Xtreme Racing Pigeon Forge. Go-karts in the Smokies. Indoor coasters in Kentucky. Bowling, laser tag, ziplines, raceways, ropes courses, arcades, mini golf, full-service kitchens, full bars, and birthday cake by the case.
Eleven brands. Twenty-seven locations. Thirteen states. One promise to every guest who walks through the door: Safe. Clean. Fun. In that order. Always.
THE ROLE
Mayor of the building.
As a Five Star General Manager, you own the four walls and everything inside them. Full P&L. FOH and BOH. Salaried managers and hourly crew. Food, beverage, attractions, games, retail, parties, and corporate events. The line at the prize counter on a rainy Saturday. The party room turnover at 4:15 when the next group is already in the lobby.
This is not a desk job. Expect to spend 70%+ of your shift on the floor — touching tables, running expo when it gets weeded, walking the line, opening and closing with your team, working pre-shift like you mean it. The other 30% is forecasting, scheduling, ordering, vendor calls, P&L reviews, and the occasional vendor lunch.
You'll report to a Regional VP of Operations who came up exactly this way and is genuinely invested in you taking their job someday.
RESTAURANT OPERATOR → FIVE STAR GM (THE TRANSLATION)
What you already do well, just bigger
**P&L ownership → P&L ownership.**Prime cost, labor percent, food cost, beverage cost, controllables, EBITDA. Multi-revenue-line modeling. You'll own a meaningful unit volume from day one.
**FOH/BOH leadership → FOH/BOH/Attractions/Games.**Same playbook — service standards, ticket times, recovery — applied across a much bigger floor with more profit centers.
**Brand standards → Brand standards.**We have books, audits, secret shops, and steps of service. If you've ever run a brand-standard playbook, you'll feel at home in week one.
**Comp sales → Comp sales.**We benchmark unit-over-unit, year-over-year, and against the company. We expect comp growth and we coach to it.
**Catering and group sales → Parties and corporate events.**Birthdays, lock-ins, field trips, fundraisers, holiday parties, team-building. Some units run $1M+ in group business alone.
**Speed of service → Throughput.**Karts loaded in 90 seconds. Laser tag flips in 4 minutes. Food run in 12. The clock matters, just like dinner rush.
**Hourly development → Hourly development.**We hire teenagers and college students by the dozen. The GMs who win here are the ones who love coaching first jobs into first promotions.
WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO
Run the business
Own a full P&L: revenue, food and beverage costs, labor, attractions revenue per cap, games per cap, prize cost, R&M, EBITDA.
Build accurate forecasts and budgets. Defend variance. Find the basis points.
Partner with corporate accounting on payroll accuracy, vendor invoices, and period-end close.
Manage inventory across food, beverage, retail, redemption prizes, and game cards/wristbands.
Lead the team
Recruit, hire, onboard, and develop a salaried management team and a 40–150+ hourly crew.
Run a tight meeting cadence: daily pre-shift, weekly manager meeting, monthly business review, quarterly planning.
Coach with specifics. Praise loudly, correct privately, document everything.
Build a bench. We'll ask you about your next assistant manager promotion every single quarter.
Deliver the experience
Walk the floor every shift like you're the GM and the guest at the same time.
Own service recovery — fast, generous, on-brand, and on your watch.
Hit secret shop scores, NPS, and Google review targets. We track them. So will you.
Hold the standard
Daily walk-throughs against Safe • Clean • Fun standards. Weekly audits. Monthly deep cleans. Quarterly safety drills.
Oversee food safety (ServSafe), responsible alcohol service (TIPS or state-equivalent), and attraction safety protocols.
Partner with the corporate Games & Amusements and Tech Services teams to keep attractions up and earning.
Build the brand locally
You are the face of the park in your market — schools, leagues, chambers, youth sports, local press, the radio station that wants to do a remote.
Partner with corporate Marketing and the Regional Director of Sales to drive group bookings, parties, and corporate events.
WHERE THIS TAKES YOU
This is a launchpad, not a landing spot.
Five Star is on a serious growth curve — eleven brands, an active acquisition pipeline, and new builds in motion. Every new park needs strong operators to open it, fix it, scale it, or run it. That's why we promote like our growth depends on it (because it does).
**GM → Multi-Unit GM.**Earn your stripes, take on a second location, then a market. Same playbook restaurant companies use — we just have more profit centers per box.
**GM → Regional Director / RVP of Operations.**Several of our current regional VPs were GMs in this company within the last few years. Ask us — we will introduce you.
**GM → New-Build / Acquisition Integration Lead.**Help us open the next park or fold the next acquisition in. The best resume builder in this industry.
**GM → Corporate Operator.**Cross over into Ops, Training, F&B, Games & Amusements, or Sales at the platform level.
If you're hungry, coachable, and own your numbers — we will run out of jobs before we run out of room for you.
WHO YOU ARE
A high-volume casual dining operator who's ready for the next box.
**Tenured.**5+ years as a GM or strong AGM/Senior AGM in casual dining, polished casual, family dining, fast casual, eat-ertainment, or hotel F&B. Multi-revenue-line experience is a real plus.
**Numbers-fluent.**You can read a P&L, build a labor plan to the quarter-hour, defend a forecast, explain variance, and tell me your last unit's prime cost from memory.
**People-magnetic.**Your former team members text you about how their kids are doing. Your old assistant managers ask when you're hiring. That's not an accident.
**Standards-obsessed.**You see the smudge on the glass and the chip on the plate. You also know how to coach the fix without making a federal case of it.
**Calm in chaos.**Power outage, walk-in birthday of 40, line cook calls out, fire inspector pulls up, kart breaks down mid-race — you've got it.
**Available when it matters.**Nights, weekends, holidays, and peak seasons (spring break, summer, the four weeks before Christmas). That's when families show up — and that's when GMs lead.
**Tech-comfortable.**POS (Aloha, Toast, Micros, NCR — pick your poison), scheduling (HotSchedules, 7shifts, UKG), inventory, and Microsoft 365. Bonus: redemption/arcade systems (Embed, Intercard, Sacoa).
BONUS POINTS
Multi-unit, multi-concept, or new-restaurant-opening experience.
Casual dining brand pedigree (you know the playbook of running to brand standards at scale).
F&B + entertainment combo experience (bowling, eat-ertainment, hotel resort, country club, or family entertainment center).
ServSafe Manager and TIPS / state alcohol certifications in hand.
Bachelor's in business, hospitality, or restaurant management — or a street MBA earned in 60-hour weeks.
Experience integrating ERP, scheduling, and back-office systems through an acquisition or remodel.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU
The kind of GM job restaurant operators actually call us back about.
Competitive base + performance bonus tied to the lines you actually move (sales, prime cost, EBITDA, guest scores).
Better hours than a restaurant — we close earlier most nights, and we're not the brunch business.
Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), PTO.
Free play for you and your people. Bring the kids. Bring the nieces. Bring your team for the holiday party.
Real development — leadership training, cross-brand exposure, mentorship from operators who built this thing from the inside.
A seat at the table at a private-equity-backed growth company that's still small enough that your work shows.
HOW TO APPLY
Get in the game.
Send your resume and a few sentences about a guest moment you're proud of to careers@fivestarparks.com. Or apply through our careers page at
Five Star Parks & Attractions is an equal opportunity employer. We hire for character, talent, and the willingness to make somebody's day. Race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, and veteran status have nothing to do with whether you can run a great park. We celebrate the differences our team brings to work.