Operator-led restaurant consulting for Denver multi-unit groups, from RiNo and the Highlands to Cherry Creek and Boulder.
The dining room is still busy on Saturday and the month still misses. The craft-driven boom of the late twenty-tens peaked, the overbuild corrected, and the market that emerged on the other side is quieter and less forgiving.
Colorado adds its own weight. Denver sets a local minimum wage above the state’s and indexes it up every January, the tip credit is capped at $3.02 no matter how high the wage climbs, and paid sick leave and FAMLI premiums sit on the labor line before a single shift gets scheduled.
It is one of the heaviest structural labor loads of any market we work, and the job is rebuilding, with your managers, the discipline the boom years never demanded.
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
Survivors compete on execution
It takes someone who has owned a multi-unit labor line to see which schedule the boom was covering for. Your managers rebuild it with us, and the month is the test.
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
One unit needs a turnaround and the average is hiding it
Put each unit’s rent against its current covers instead of its peak-year covers and the picture changes: the Highlands location pencils at today’s volume, and the RiNo unit is a boom-era lease that post-boom volume cannot carry.
We isolate which unit is carrying the exposure, decide whether the lease can ever work at today’s demand, and rebuild the schedule and the menu around the covers that remain, before the weak unit sets the terms for the whole group.
You expanded on momentum and the systems never caught up
Easy covers let a group open a second and third location without ever tightening the systems underneath the first. And once demand normalized, those gaps arrived in the margin all at once, with Colorado’s labor-cost load stacked on top.
Your managers build, with us, the labor and cost controls that should have been there from the start, before the next lease is signed.
The market stopped forgiving soft nights, and your units still have them
The group grew fast, and the standard still holds only at the unit you visited last.
Your managers take over the weekly review the easy years let everyone skip, so the director of operations stops being the only one who can run it.
For investors
What is left once the boom comes out of the numbers?
Leases signed at the peak still sit on a Denver platform’s P&L. The question an investor needs answered is which units were built on discipline and which were built on a demand wave that has already receded.
The read we bring answers it unit by unit, before the check is written.
How the engagement runs in Denver
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 is a post-boom shift: the spreadsheet says the month missed, and one over-scheduled Tuesday in RiNo says why. RANGE is based in Dallas–Fort Worth, a direct flight away.
The correction did not hit the city evenly
RiNo absorbed the overbuild hardest, Cherry Creek’s affluent trade barely noticed, and Boulder ran its own cycle.
RiNo (River North)
The epicenter of the boom and of the correction that followed: breweries, warehouse redevelopment, and a young, discovery-minded crowd. What remains rewards the operators who never needed the crowd to cover for them.
LoDo & Union Station
The historic downtown core: tourism, business, and event volume anchored by Union Station. High rent that needs steady volume to pencil, and a guest who is part transient, part local.
The Highlands & LoHi
Dense and view-driven, with a young-professional guest and one of the highest restaurant concentrations in the city.
Cherry Creek
Affluent, upscale, and retail-anchored, with an older, more conservative, higher-check guest who notices a change in service before a change in the menu.
South Broadway (SoBo) & Baker
Eclectic, independent, and value-minded, with a neighborhood crowd and small footprints. Character wins here, and the tight economics punish a loose operation faster than anywhere downtown.
Boulder
Up the road: affluent, college-anchored, and quality-driven, with a guest who pays for substance and a rent that reflects it.
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 audit runs every month now
Supply caught demand in the hottest neighborhoods, the guest got selective, and every loose practice the easy years covered for started arriving as a line item: over-scheduled slow shifts, unwatched food cost, a menu priced for a crowd that no longer shows up on its own.
Where the month leaks
What the work covers:
- Repricing each location’s unit economics to today’s covers, not the boom-era volume the lease was signed against.
- Engineering labor models for Colorado’s wage, tip-credit, and paid-leave load.
- Running the turnaround where a unit needs one: an operator’s read on the lease, the menu, and the cost structure, then the fix.
- Opening new units that have to earn every cover from the first week.
- Building managers who hold the standard at every unit, whichever one the director of operations visits.
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.