The brand people love is in the model. Whether it runs at five, ten or twenty locations is not. This is diligence run the way an operator buys: on the asset itself.
The questions that decide the return are operational: whether the numbers repeat, whether the team executes without its senior leadership, and what breaks the first time the operation is stressed.
Jon Peck assesses restaurant targets in the units. The work on the deal clock ends in a margin bridge: from the unit margin the business runs today to the one in your model, line by line, each step named with the lever that carries it and whether the current team can pull it.
Before you sign.
Tell us about the dealStart with the thesis, the margin your model needs and where the deal stands.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)What only the operation shows
The three questions above come down to six things:
- Unit economics by cohort: each year’s openings set against the ramp the older units ran, and each unit’s sales split into guest counts and check average, so neither a weak year of openings nor growth that came from price alone hides inside the blended average.
- Management depth: the bench counted by name against two ready GMs and one ready AGM for every GM role open or planned, and the people the business could not lose.
- Consistency across units: the same shift walked in every unit we sample (the line check, ticket times, the steps of service) and scored the same way, so the drift from location to location has a number.
- Labor by unit: where each unit’s total labor sits against its market’s band (in our experience 30 to 35 percent of sales at full service) and why the units above it are there.
- Menu, recipe and spec integrity: actual against theoretical food cost by unit, and whether the recipe cards match the plates the line sends.
- Systems fragility: which of the tools the units run on (the flash P&L, the schedule, the order guides) live in one person’s spreadsheet or memory.
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.
Where financial diligence stops
Financial diligence works from the books. The rest is read in the units, by someone who has run the kind of business you are buying.
An operator reads a target’s margin one point at a time and asks where each came from. The points the operation produces (a schedule written to the forecast, recipes costed to the plate) survive a change of ownership.
The other points will not: they came from a price increase that traffic has not answered yet, a competitor that closed down the street, a GM who leaves once the deal closes.
Some markets mislead a model on their own: the rent underneath a Miami top line, the Strip-versus-Locals split in Las Vegas, or a Tampa group whose sales have grown faster than its operating standard.
The read changes with the stage of the deal
Operational diligence slots in at three points when you buy and once more when you sell, with the timing set to your deal calendar.
- Before the LOI: a fast, discreet scan of the units as a guest sees them, their reviews and job postings, and the operating model as the seller presents it. The deliverable is a short written read (proceed, proceed with conditions, or walk) with the two or three operational questions your LOI should protect you on. We sign your NDA, or a joinder to the seller’s, before the target is named.
- Inside your exclusivity window: confirmatory diligence. The deliverable is the margin bridge with the written read behind it, each finding ranked by EBITDA impact and integration risk, so the operational facts are in the room while price and structure can still move.
- After close: a 100-day plan built from the findings, naming what gets fixed first, who owns each number, and which levers the current team cannot pull without help.
- When you sell: the same read, run on your own business before it goes to market, and time to fix what it finds, so the reporting hands over unit by unit and the management layer survives the next buyer’s diligence.
A business you already own that is running behind its model needs a turnaround.
If the deal is live, bring it.
Tell us about the dealYou hear back within 48 hours.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Inconvenient for a seller who staged the tour
Once you have exclusivity, all we ask of your deal team is the data room and access to the units we name and to their GMs. From there the mechanics are an operator’s:
- Unit sampling by performance: the access request lists both the top and the bottom performers, not the flagship the seller wants shown.
- GM and chef interviews: how the schedule gets written, how the order gets placed, and who runs the unit on the GM’s night off.
- A labor-model stress test: the schedule rebuilt by position at the volume your model assumes, and the labor line it produces set beside your model’s, because the thesis usually counts on growth the labor structure has never been asked to hold.
- Lease escalators run against unit economics: each unit’s occupancy (rent, CAM and taxes) as a share of sales in every year of your hold, on today’s sales held flat and on your model’s growth, so you see which units only work if the growth arrives. Six to eight percent is the norm; the units that pass ten get named.
- A deferred R&M walk: the walk-in, hood and HVAC repairs put off before the sale, which flatter the trailing EBITDA and come due in the first year of your hold, as repair expense or as capex.
The findings get worked, then handed over
RANGE can stay on as an operating partner and work the 100-day plan with the management team: each unit’s P&L estimated every week, the standing call with the GMs, and the next GMs developed from the managers already there.
When that work ends, the director of operations runs the weekly P&L estimate and the GM call without us.