Operator-led restaurant consulting for Austin multi-unit groups, from East Austin and South Congress to the Domain and Round Rock.
A restaurant that ran a wait for a year goes quiet the season two hotter ones open nearby. The closures since 2023 have been sorting the concepts that were operations from the concepts that were moments.
The dangerous part is when the honeymoon ends, usually somewhere inside the second year, right after a group has used honeymoon numbers to justify a second and third lease. Volume built on novelty gets underwritten as permanent, and the operation underneath never gets built tight enough to run at year-three covers.
The work in Austin is building, with your team, a business designed to still be full when it is no longer new.
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
Built for year three
Anyone can advise a restaurant on its honeymoon. The numbers do the flattering.
We build for the year the market stops being kind: the systems, the unit economics, the management bench that hold when the line out the door is at somebody else’s opening. Your managers build them alongside us, because year three arrives after we have left.
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
You’re scaling on numbers the honeymoon produced
The opening ran hot, the second lease got signed on the strength of it, and the third is in negotiation. But the volume in the model is year-one volume, earned partly by being new.
We rebuild the growth math on year-three assumptions (what the unit does when the novelty is gone) and build the operating systems that make those numbers survivable before the next commitment.
The older unit has come off its honeymoon and the new one hasn’t
The newest location prints and the original has gone soft, and it is tempting to read that as a location problem or a management problem. Often it is neither. It is the same concept at two different ages, and the older restaurant is showing you what the newer one will do in eighteen months.
We treat the mature unit as the real P&L and fix it there (menu, margin, regular-building, cost discipline) so the number the honeymoon was masking becomes the number the whole group can run on.
The standard holds only at the unit you’re standing in
The concept works, the guest loves it, and it still only runs right when you are personally in the building. In a market this crowded, that is a hard ceiling. Every hour you spend holding the standard at one unit is an hour nobody is building the thing that keeps guests past the novelty.
Your attention belongs on what keeps guests past the novelty. The manager here learns to run the weekly numbers review without you, so this unit holds its standard while you are across town.
For investors
How old is each unit’s volume?
Austin growth stories look great on a pitch deck, and the deck rarely shows when each unit opened. Evaluating a platform here means separating durable volume from honeymoon volume: margin that will survive year three from margin that is young.
We date each unit’s volume against its opening and tell you which ones have already lived through the cycle.
How the engagement runs in Austin
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 down I-35 is a read the numbers cannot give: a Friday in the mature unit against a Friday in the new one, to see how much of each one’s volume is still novelty. Being based in Dallas–Fort Worth also buys you a read on your concept that is not caught up in Austin’s own excitement about it.
The honeymoon lasts a different length in every district
Rent, guest, and how long novelty lasts all shift hard across the city. A concept can still be ‘the new place’ in Westlake a year after East Austin has moved on.
Downtown & Rainey Street
Bar- and tourism-weighted, late-night, and festival-driven: volume that spikes and craters. High rent and a transient crowd; the model has to make its money in the windows it gets, because this guest was never going to become a regular.
South Congress (SoCo)
Walkable, tourist-heavy, and some of the priciest retail rent in the city. The foot traffic is heavy but largely first-visit. Execution and a reason to come back separate a SoCo winner from a one-visit photo stop.
East Austin
The city’s chef-driven, independent heart, much of it grown from the food-truck pipeline into brick and mortar, which means every operator here already survived one proving ground. Novelty wears off fastest on these blocks: the guest who found you first is also the first to find what opened after you.
The Domain & North Austin
Austin’s ‘second downtown’: upscale, corporate, retail-anchored, full of polished national brands. Novelty buys less here; the tech-campus and suburban-affluent guest defaults to whoever is reliably good, which makes it one of the few Austin submarkets where a mature operation is the advantage.
South Lamar & Zilker
Dense, residential, and rapidly redeveloping, with parking constraints and a neighborhood crowd that expects a local feel at a citywide price point, the guest most worth converting from first visit to regular.
Westlake & Lake Austin
Affluent lakeside money and destination dining, where check tolerance is high, loyalty is durable once earned, and the expectation never takes a night off.
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
The shakeout is the market now
Austin overbuilt. The boom years put more restaurants into this city than the covers can support.
Most of what closed served good food. The shakeout punishes operations that needed year-one volume to pencil, in a city where year-one volume is a loan the guest calls in.
Rent, wages, and construction costs all climbed through the boom and did not come back down, so the P&L a concept graduates into at year three is far less forgiving than the one it opened on. The groups still standing are the ones that treated the honeymoon as the time to build the operation.
The operation the novelty was covering
In practice that means:
- Rebuilding unit economics on the covers the unit will do at year three, not in its opening year.
- Converting first-visit traffic into regulars: the service systems, consistency, and guest re-engagement that outlast novelty.
- Pressure-testing expansion math before the next lease, so growth is underwritten on proven numbers rather than opening-year heat.
- Tightening cost and labor discipline so the operation holds margin at mature volume, in a market where every fixed cost climbed through the boom.
- Building the managers who get a concept to year three without the director of operations running every shift.
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.