Operator-led restaurant consulting for Houston multi-unit groups, from Montrose and the Heights to Katy and The Woodlands.
Most of the structural protection an operator leans on elsewhere is missing in Houston: the district that limits restaurant density, the zoning hearing that slows a rival’s timeline, the corner that cannot be replicated. Outside the deed-restricted blocks, location protects little, and concept rarely does in a city this fluent in every cuisine on earth. Execution is the moat.
That is the frame for operating in the fourth-largest city in the country: enormous demand and zero insulation.
The guest is choice-spoiled and price-aware, the energy economy swings corporate spend without warning, and the market re-tests your operation every time a lease gets signed on your block.
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
The advantage no zoning board gives you
The work gets judged on covers held, unit by unit, a year out.
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
Something just opened on your corner and your covers noticed
A unit that ran steady for three years is suddenly down, and nothing inside it changed. What changed is across the street, because in Houston it always can. The covers went where the execution was.
With your managers we rebuild the advantage the unit was coasting without: service, consistency, cost discipline, and a guest experience that makes the new restaurant next door irrelevant.
Your units face different competition and it shows
The Montrose location runs clean and the Katy location loses money (or the reverse), and the consolidated P&L does not say why. In an unzoned metro, every unit sits in its own competitive set: one location may not have seen a serious new rival in two years while another has absorbed three since it opened.
We read each unit against the competition it faces, trace where the margin is leaking, and rebuild the operating discipline underneath it, unit by unit, not average by average.
Every unit is exposed except the one you’re standing in
The covers hold at whichever address you are standing in and drift at the ones you are not. An operation that only executes under your eye has no defense at the other addresses.
Each unit’s manager learns to read their own block, the newest competitor on it included, and answers for their own covers.
For investors
What do these covers do when someone opens next door?
A Houston platform carries a risk no other market’s diligence checklist includes: any unit’s trade area can be entered by a competitor at any time, so the question is how much of the volume is defended by execution versus by a temporary absence of competition.
What investors get from us is that answer, unit by unit, before the capital commits.
How the engagement runs in Houston
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 execution, because this market grades on it and a report cannot see it: a shift at the unit that just lost covers to the opening across the street, against a shift at the one that did not. Dallas–Fort Worth is a short flight or a few hours down I-45.
Every submarket is an open door
With no zoning to slow anything down, competition moves at the speed of a signed lease in every one of these districts, but what it takes to defend a corner changes block to block.
Montrose
Eclectic, independent, and design-forward: a guest that values originality and notices when a concept is coasting.
The Heights
Gentrified, historic, and family-plus-young-professional, with a neighborhood crowd that stays and rising rents that demand volume.
River Oaks & Upper Kirby
Houston money and fine dining, with deed restrictions holding the residential blocks steady: high check tolerance paired with high expectations, where the same service every visit decides it.
Galleria & Uptown
Corporate, upscale, and retail-anchored; business lunch and expense-account dinner that swing with the energy sector.
Midtown & Downtown
Nightlife and young-professional density in Midtown; downtown lives on business lunch and event volume with dead nights between, and the labor model has to be built around that rhythm.
Energy Corridor & Memorial
Affluent west-side corporate and residential, where catering and lunch dayparts move the P&L as much as dinner does.
Sugar Land, Katy & The Woodlands
Master-planned, affluent, family-driven suburbs where national chains set the bar, and where a new competitor arrives with corporate systems already installed, so an independent’s execution has to be tighter, not looser, than it was inside the Loop.
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
Nothing protects the corner, so the operation has to
Retail follows rooftops wherever the developers put them, and this city’s dining public, the most diverse in the country, will try the new restaurant.
Groups that answer it with execution (food that is right every time, service worth returning for, costs tight enough to survive a price war) grow here for decades. Groups that were renting their volume from an empty competitive set find out what it was worth.
Add an energy economy that swings expense-account spend and storm risk that can take a unit offline, and slack in the operation is the one thing this market never forgives.
Defending the corner at every address
With your team, the work here is:
- Building the execution advantage (food, service, consistency) that holds covers through a new competitor’s opening month.
- Installing cost and labor discipline tight enough to defend margin through a price war or an energy-sector soft patch.
- Reading each unit against its actual competitive set (Montrose and Katy are different fights).
- Building catering and lunch into the labor model where the trade area runs on them.
- Training managers to hold the execution standard at every address.
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.