Operator-led restaurant consulting for Atlanta multi-unit groups working Downtown, Buckhead, Midtown and the BeltLine.
From the outside, Atlanta reads like a market that should run on its own weight. Six million people, a stack of Fortune 500 headquarters, dining rooms that ought to fill on demographics alone.
The volume comes from a calendar someone else publishes: the Georgia World Congress Center’s convention book, an event at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a film production in town for a season, graduation and championship weekends. The week spikes and troughs, and the P&L moves with it.
That calendar is the operating problem most Atlanta groups never model. A labor plan built for an average week bleeds through the trough weeks and buckles on the peaks. Overstaffed when the hall is dark, blown out when forty thousand badges land downtown. Scaling here means building an operation that flexes with the calendar instead of averaging it.
Who runs it
RANGE was founded by Jon Peck, who spent twenty years running multi-unit restaurant groups: eight brands built and scaled, twelve openings across six concepts in three years, and more than $100 million of annual P&L owned.
Why RANGE
A schedule built for the swing
It takes someone who has reforecast a schedule on a Thursday night to catch what a spreadsheet average hides. Your managers learn to staff the dark weeks as carefully as the convention ones, and we are accountable with them for both.
Tell us what’s breaking.
Thirty minutes with Jon. The fastest way to find out whether RANGE can help.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)When groups call
The same week posts a record at one unit and an ordinary week at another
A convention lands and the Midtown restaurant runs its best four days of the quarter while the Alpharetta unit has an ordinary week. Then the hall goes dark and the pattern inverts. The consolidated P&L blends the two, and the labor line eats the difference.
We rebuild the reporting and the schedule around each unit’s own demand pattern, convention week versus dark week, event night versus ordinary Tuesday, so the operation stops paying for a week that never comes.
Four units, four versions of the event calendar
One restaurant, a sharp GM can flex by feel. Four restaurants across Buckhead, Old Fourth Ward, Midtown and Sandy Springs, each swinging on its own dates, cannot be run on feel, and the group is signing its next lease anyway.
We install the labor and forecasting systems that let every unit flex to its own calendar without the director of operations rebuilding the schedule by hand, so growth compounds instead of multiplying the volatility.
The operation stalls the moment you step back
The group still needs you in the building on the big weeks, and on a big week you can stand in only one restaurant.
A peak week in Midtown should not need you standing in Midtown. Your managers learn to read the convention calendar and staff to it themselves, so the peak runs on their schedule.
For investors
What does this group earn in a dark week?
Trailing-twelve numbers flatten this market’s volatility. A group can look steady in aggregate while its margin depends on a convention calendar it does not control, or look erratic while the underlying operation is sound.
What we hand investors is an operator’s read on how the numbers were earned, week by week.
How the engagement runs in Atlanta
Most of the engagement runs on a weekly cadence, wherever you are: the numbers, the scorecard, the standing call with your managers. Time on site is scoped to what the work needs and built into the fee, never metered on top.
What earns a trip in Atlanta is the swing itself, and it takes two visits, not one: a convention week and a dark week, because that pair of shifts explains more than a quarter’s worth of consolidated reports. Dallas–Fort Worth is a direct flight.
Every Atlanta submarket rides a different calendar
The event-driven swing is metro-wide, but it hits each corridor differently: downtown runs on the convention book, Buckhead on corporate entertaining, the BeltLine on the weekend. Knowing which calendar a unit answers to is the first operating decision.
Downtown & the convention corridor
Packed when the Georgia World Congress Center or the stadium is running, quiet when they are not. A business staffed to the event book.
Buckhead
Expense-account dinners that track earnings seasons, client visits and the corporate entertaining calendar. High rents, high check tolerance, and demand that follows the office more than the neighborhood.
Midtown
Dense office-and-residential around Tech Square and the arts corridor. Weekday lunch and after-work volume that moves with return-to-office patterns and the Fox Theatre’s marquee. A hybrid calendar.
Old Fourth Ward & the BeltLine
The boom along Krog Street and the Eastside Trail: the metro’s counterweight, running on weekends and evenings with a young, discovery-minded local crowd. Steadier than downtown, but crowded and re-rating fast.
West Midtown
Warehouse-district redevelopment turned destination dining: large footprints, big fixed costs, and a guest who drives to it. The peaks have to be captured, because the rent is the same on a quiet night.
Inman Park & Virginia-Highland
Established in-town neighborhoods with a regular crowd that lives within walking distance. The closest thing in-town Atlanta has to a predictable week, and the place a slip costs the most regulars.
Alpharetta & Sandy Springs
The northern suburbs: Avalon, corporate campuses, family dayparts. The steadiest demand in the metro, which makes it the wrong place to park a labor model built for downtown’s spikes, and vice versa.
If this is the problem, bring it.
Thirty minutes with Jon. The first call is free.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)The operating case
What the template schedule costs
In Atlanta the same restaurant can swing hard between a convention week and a dark one, and a template schedule guarantees you pay for labor you do not need in the trough and turn away revenue you cannot serve at the peak. The bleed is invisible on a monthly P&L because the two errors partially cancel.
Staffing to the event book
What gets installed:
- Installing demand forecasting tied to the convention and event calendar, so the schedule is built on what is coming, not on last year’s average.
- Building labor models that flex by week and by daypart without burning out the core team the peaks depend on.
- Aligning prep, ordering and food cost to the forecast, so trough weeks do not eat the margin the peak weeks earned.
- Opening each new unit across the metro with the forecast and the flex schedule in place before its first convention week.
- Developing managers who read the event book two weeks out and run the swing themselves: the skill this market pays for.
How we help
- Restaurant management consulting Senior operating judgment beside your team, accountable for what changes.
- Fractional COO A senior operator in the role until your own leader can hold it.
- Restaurant turnaround When comps slide, the fix is almost always operational. We build it with your managers.
- Restaurant growth strategy Where to grow next, sequenced to what your managers can already run.