Intelligence & Finance
The market analysis and financial modeling an operator needs to make the call with confidence, before the lease is signed, the concept is greenlit, or the capital is raised.
In this domain: Market Intelligence & AnalysisFinancial Modeling
Every group carries one decision that outweighs the rest of the year. The lease, the second market, the raise, the concept waiting on a green light. Intelligence and finance goes in front of that decision: understanding the market before you enter it, and modeling the numbers the way the business will actually perform, not the way you hope it will. It’s the read an operator would do for themselves before betting their own capital, brought to the table before you commit.
Most capital mistakes in this business aren’t made on the floor. They’re made before anyone unlocks the door. The wrong market read, a pro forma built backward from the best case, a ramp that was never realistic. By the time the operation feels the problem, the lease is signed and the money is spent. The decision was the moment, and it passed without the analysis to back it.
The two capabilities run in a fixed order. The market read comes first, because it sets the volume assumption. Trade area, comp density, who else is fighting for the same guest at the same hour. The model comes second, because its job is to test whether that volume clears the capital: the build-out, the debt service, the working-capital drawdown, month by month. Run them the other way and the spreadsheet just launders a guess. And the first number the model checks is the downside, not the base case: what the P&L looks like if the ramp takes eighteen months instead of six, because that is the version of the future the capital plan has to survive.
So every pro forma we build or review is held to five stress checks — what a credible number has to survive: a realistic 12-to-18-month ramp to stabilized volume · a soft quarter tested against debt service · cannibalization priced in for any site near existing units · the labor model at real wages, not budget wages · rent escalators run against year-3 volume, not year-1 hope. A projection that clears all five is worth signing against. One that doesn’t should never see a signature.
Tell us what’s breaking.
Take the Diagnostic →Thirty to forty-five minutes, with the Straight Read back within 48 hours.
Where Groups Call Us
You are deciding on gut at a size that punishes it
Instinct got the group to where it is, and instinct is still how the next lease, the next hire, and the next raise get decided. That worked at three units on one balance sheet. At this size, one wrong instinct call moves real capital, and there is no longer a margin big enough to absorb being wrong twice.
We build the model underneath the instinct, not to replace your judgment, but to give it something real to check against before the number gets signed.
The growth plan has no model behind it
The pitch is compelling and the market opportunity is real, but ask what happens to debt-service coverage in a soft second quarter and the answer is a shrug. A plan that only works in the base case is not a plan. It is a hope with a spreadsheet attached.
The downside case gets modeled first (the ramp that runs long, the quarter that misses) and the capital plan to survive it, not just to fund the upside.
The consolidated P&L is hiding the unit that is actually losing money
Blended margins look acceptable, and one location has been quietly bleeding for two quarters underneath the average. Consolidated reporting is built to reassure the board, not to show an operator where to act.
Reporting gets rebuilt to unit-level truth (real prime cost, real contribution margin, per location), so the number that reaches leadership is the number that’s actually true.
The Record
Outcomes from two decades inside multi-unit restaurant operations. Owned from the operating seat, not advised from outside.
22%
Store-level EBITDA margins held through an inflationary stretch. One that erased margin across the category.
Selected Outcomes →