Running a restaurant with 96 and counting employees sounds like it wouldn’t be very glamorous, but Robinson McDonald’s general manager Katherine Collard makes it look like a walk in the park. Katie has worked at McDonald’s since October of 2005, which is longer than most high school students have been alive. There are many positives and negatives to her job. I  asked Katie what her favorite part of her job was and she told me, “meeting new people, helping people in bad situations, bettering their lives, and watching people grow in the company.”

Clearly, she is a people person. Katie doesn’t like to call it firing people, so instead she calls it “promoting people to customers” and this is easily her least favorite part of the job. 

Katie hasn’t always been the general manager, though; she was hired on as a crew member, but that only lasted two weeks. After two weeks she was promoted to shift manager and not long after she was promoted to first assistant, which is basically the general manager’s right arm. After 5 years Katie became a general manager for a different owner/operator than Wally for a year. After that year away she came back to the Wally stores and after a year Wally promoted her to a general manager and she has been the general manager at Robinson McDonald’s for three years. Between the two she has been a general manager for four years in total. Clearly she has a lot of experience, but not all of it has been at Robinson store. When she originally started at McDonald’s she worked in Lawrenceville. But since then she has worked at Hart and 6th street McDonald’s in Vincennes, Olney, Washington, Sullivan, Loogootee, and many other McDonald’s locations. 

With all that it sounds like she has been at McDonald’s forever but she has been a manager at many other places, too. She managed a clothing store and was a shift manager at Hardee’s and at Mach 1 gas station. She was also a school bus driver, which is how you know you have lots of patience. Katie is paid for 40 hours weekly but she says, “my job never stops, I receive phone calls all the time, messages about payroll issues, equipment issues, crew problems, personal life issues, quitting employees and sicknesses.”

I asked her if it was hard balancing all of that with her home life, and she said, “Yes, I need the money but I miss my babies. I do my best to spend as much time with my family on Sundays and whichever other days I’m off.”

At home Katie has two children, one of which is special needs, and that leaves no extra time for relaxing, “with Johnnie being special needs with doctors appointments, let’s say I don’t have time for myself.”

Katie’s advice to anyone else raising a child with autism is, “be organized, use your phone calendar…one day at a time, stay calm and breathe.”

Getting any time at home at all would be impossible without her first assistants, Sara and Alisha. “I am very blessed to have experienced first assistants, and they each have special roles in the restaurant. I would have more paperwork and training new managers. It really takes a team to run a restaurant. We each have our strengths and weaknesses. Where I lack, the others pick up the slack.”

Katie, Sara, and Alisha are not just coworkers; they are also friends. Katie said her favorite memories with them are, “jamming out at work, Christmas shopping for the crew, peoples week, and planning girls’ nights out! Sara is truly my best friend. We have hour-long conversations about all the craziness in life. Alisha is truly a great friend, always willing to help others in times of need. The love and appreciation I have for them is more than words can explain.” 

Alisha says, “I complete the weekly schedules for the store. I also conduct interviews and hire new employees.”

Sara say, “I track attendance. I also track who has earned the attendance bonus that we pay out every month. I am in charge of the crew trainers as well. I make sure that they do all the training and get their raises at the end on their training. I make sure that all the employees files are in store and pull the files of terminated employees and fill out their end of employment information and remove them from the system.”

These are some of Sara’s many jobs. She also is in charge of doing the orientations in Vincennes at the office for all of the Wally store employees. So if you get a job at McDonald’s, you will see both Alisha and Sara before you even get your uniform. These girls having these jobs takes a lot of stress off of Katie. Sara and Alisha both have been working at McDonalds for about 10 years. 

Not only are Alisha, Katie, and Sara coworkers, they both have hung out with Katie outside of work. Sara’s also has a favorite memory of being with Katie outside of work.

“One time she got these tickets inline for a Tom Perry cover band. It was almost a four hour drive to the venue. So, we went. WE drove four hours to go see a cover band… We get to the venue and we were told that you had to be vaccinated or have a negative test result to get into the venue. Katie had only gotten her first dose at that point, so we just went to Applebee’s, ate, and had a few drinks and drove home. It was an amazingly fun disaster of an evening. Eight hour round trip to go eat at Applebee’s.”

Sara has many other wonderful memories with Katie, and says she could talk anyone’s ears off all day just telling about these two’s crazy adventures.

Alisha said that her favorite memories with Katie also involve road trips. 

“I love all road trips that I get to take with Katie. She hangs on tight with my crazy driving and enjoys every minute of it.