| Benign dictatorships are almost always easier to pull off than board management models. Board management models generally only work if it the restaurant was individually owned at one point and then that owner left Starting a worker owned restaurant from the ground up is a terrible idea because the end customer doesn't really care and your artificially creating additional managerial barriers to entry when you have to move fast early on If someone has the capability of leading a worker owned restaurant (there is always a leader even in these models - e.g. a board chair), they are also equally capable of running a simpler ran benign dictatorship with less red tape. The other issue with board management runned operations is if you want to expand operations (e.g. opening up a second restaurant). It will get political very fast and not work because there will be disagreements on how money should be spent and allocated A worker owned business is just a more complicated business. It can work but it needs very specific conditions and it's prone to political issues I have seen though however a benign dictatorship take on funds from investors to expand operations, but that only works if there is a well established culture (e.g. usually the restaurant has built a few successful stores on their own). It's not very that far off from startups taking investor funding There's a reason we call restaurant entrepreneur as restauranteurs I run my own nonprofit currently (board management) and have done startup consulting for the restaurant space for over a decade. Restaurants and startups operates on similar principles |
A board management can elect a leader/ceo/dictator if they wanted (and from the sounds of it probably should).
Just like having a company run directly by shareholders is probably a bad idea.
Having a company that is 100% Owned by the same people that it employs does not make a decision on how it's run, it just aligns workers and shareholder interests completely.