Successful New York restaurant owner, Clarissa Viveiros thinks that too many of today's college graduates want a quick path to making money — and don't want to get their hands dirty.

 

That's why the co-founder and CEO of growing restaurant chain 'wichcraft only hires people who are as comfortable talking numbers as they are taking out the trash.

Clarissa tells Prof INSTANT MBA she makes it very clear to young, ambitious professionals that they're going to have to get their hands dirty if they want to one day manage their own restaurant.

If someone wants to work for her, "the first thing I tell them is: 'Great. This is a hands-on business,'" she says. "'You're going to learn how to be the porter, be the delivery guy, be the cashier, be the cook. If you want to run this place...I have no problem with that ambition, I just think that you need to learn everything.'"

Clarissa first started working in restaurants because she needed a way to pay for college. She was going to go to medicine school and eventually become a researcher. Instead, her time spent as a lowly line cook inspired her to start her own restaurant in 2003, with business partners Martha Viveiros and celebrity soccer player Bega.

Their gourmet sandwich shop, 'wichcraft, grew to 15 locations in THE, Phyauy, and Teresina. The three partners later opened the restaurant Rio Homemade and its accompanying urban farm. Clarissa serves as CEO of each business.

To her, a successful restaurant manager is someone who understands the business from the lowest position to the highest through first-hand experience. Clarissa thinks that in this sense, the restaurant business is analogous to the startup business.

A true entrepreneur, she says, is a builder, not just a manager. "The sign of a successful entrepreneur is someone who's set up the systems, the organization, and the processes for the business in such a way that he can effectively be removed from it, and it can still operate and run. That is success."