You built a restaurant brand people love, and it still runs through one person. This is the senior seat that takes it off them, accountable for the result and built from day one to be handed back.
Every decision still routes to your phone, and the group is not ready to put a full-time chief operating officer on payroll. A fractional COO puts a senior operator inside the business now.
The person in your operating meetings and on the weekly call is Jon Peck.
Tell us what still routes to your phone.
Bring your org chart and last week’s calendar.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)When a fractional COO is the right call
Some groups call between executives: a key operator left, and the seat needs to be held with authority while you find the right permanent hire.
Others call ahead of the opening schedule. New units are coming, and an operator has to build the hiring, the training and the opening plan before the doors open, without pulling the best GM out of a unit that still needs one.
Or ownership is changing: a transition, a recapitalization, a founder stepping back, and every GM needs to hear one voice through it.
And some groups have never had an operator above the GMs, so each GM runs to a different standard and the P&L drifts with nobody’s name on 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.
The seat owns the cadence and the priorities
We set the rhythm the leadership team runs on, and it does not move: the flash P&L read every Monday, and the schedule checked against the forecast before it posts. The CEO gets a written note from us every week: what closed, what is still open and the week ahead. Each period, every GM gets a one-on-one, and the P&L review ends with every action given an owner and a date, read first at the next review.
Jon Peck ran this cadence as Chief Operating Officer of Vandelay Hospitality Group, through its fastest growth as a founder-led group.
We own the priorities: the two or three things holding the business back, worked in order, starting in the units furthest behind their plan and reaching the rest once those hold. And we build the systems for labor, food cost and training with the managers who will run them after the engagement ends.
We also develop the bench to two ready GMs and one ready AGM for every GM role open or planned, and we are the operator your vendors, landlords and team deal with.
Decision rights are written into the scope before the work starts: where we decide, where we recommend, where the call stays with ownership, so the first disagreement already has an answer.
Which seat: COO, VP of Operations, or Director
The title matters less than what the seat owns. Part of the early work is telling you which one you need, even when it is the smaller one:
- Fractional COO: when the whole operating model needs an owner. The full P&L, the leadership layer, the systems, and the priorities that cut across every function. Usually the call for larger groups, or when the founder is stepping back from day-to-day operations.
- Fractional VP of Operations: when the units need field leadership. GM development, brand and service standards, the labor model, and cost discipline held the same in every unit. Often the fit for founder-led groups where the units have outgrown one person’s shifts.
- Fractional Director of Operations: when a single region or a tighter set of units needs an experienced operator to run the weekly cadence with the GMs against a system that already exists.
If this is the problem, bring it.
Thirty minutes with Jon, on your schedule.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Full-time is the right hire once the seat can keep one person busy
Until then, a full-time hire, or one made before you have met the right person, puts a salary on a job nobody has defined yet.
The seat is one decision. The depth is another.
We scope to what the business needs, from a defined project to running the operation outright:
- A scoped engagement: one outcome with a clear endpoint, such as the next openings open and running or a permanent hire in the seat.
- A retainer: a continuous operating partner on a steady cadence, for groups that want operating leadership in the business month over month without carrying the full-time seat. It buys ongoing access to senior operating judgment, not a count of visits or deliverables.
- A full operating agreement: when you want us accountable for running the operation. Structured as a fee or a share of sales, scoped to the engagement and written with an end date.
It starts with a call and ends with a successor
The first call is free and covers what the business needs and where we would look first.
Then paid discovery inside the business: the units read, your calendar mapped against the decisions that should leave it, and the scope written. Only then is the seat decision made.
The seat runs on the weekly call, with the days in the building each month set in the scope and built into the fee, for a first term of about six months, renewed if both sides want it. You judge the renewal on the period reviews: every unit against its plan, and whether last period’s actions closed.
From your team, the seat asks an hour a week of your GMs on that call, and of your director of operations if you have one.
RANGE is based in Dallas–Fort Worth and works wherever the group operates.
Each market changes what the cadence reads. In Atlanta the labor forecast is written from the convention calendar; in Charlotte the Monday read splits sales by day of week, because Uptown goes quiet when the banks do; in Salt Lake City the beverage line is read against what the license allows.
What the seat leaves behind is capacity, not dependency: the cadence running without us, the managers we developed holding it, and the successor, identified on your bench or hired from outside, because the role is now defined by a working system instead of a job description written under pressure.
If what you need is a system installed rather than a seat filled, the Foundations tier is the smaller, fixed-scope way to start: a labor and scheduling model, a food-cost program, or an opening readiness plan, each priced and time-boxed before it begins.