Selected Outcomes
Jon Peck spent two decades inside multi-unit restaurant operations, in senior operating seats through the COO chair, from a national brand’s pilot rollout to founder-led groups scaling fast, which is where the systems break first.
The pattern is the same every time: find the trapped margin and the thin bench, build the systems that stick, and hand back a more valuable operation. Which result belongs to which operator stays unattributed. That is their business, not a case study.
Food Cost & Purchasing
8% → <3%
Actual-vs-theoretical variance, trailing twelve months
A multi-brand portfolio running food cost on instinct: actual-vs-theoretical variance wide, with no clear cause. We rebuilt recipe costing, par, prep and ordering, and the enterprise purchasing program — and put the tracking in place to hold the gain.
~$500K/yr recovered in purchasing alone
Labor
−200 bps
Labor as a share of sales, against the prior staffing model
Labor running above what the volume justified, schedules built by feel. We tied staffing models to sales and daypart, held them to productivity benchmarks, and standardized the scheduling discipline across units.
Held without cutting the guest experience
Multi-Market Leadership
$56M
Revenue under management: 8 high-volume units in three states
Senior field leadership across a multi-state region where the markets don’t behave the same way. Set the strategy, held the standard, and kept execution aligned to the brand in every one of them.
800+ people · the standard held across markets
Operator-Built Tooling
−20%
Food purchases, with variance held under 2%
Food-cost variance widening across units, with no tool built for the work. We built a bespoke prep-and-ordering system (POS sales into par and purchase orders), then handed the capability to people who had never written software.
Across a multi-brand portfolio — owned by the operator, not rented
Culture & Retention
#1
Employee engagement ranking across the brand, over a two-year tenure
A region where turnover was treated as a cost of doing business and engagement was measured but not managed. We managed it — hiring standards, manager development, and a cadence that surfaced problems while they were still fixable — and the region went from the middle of the pack to first in the brand.
Engagement run as an operating number, not an annual survey
Bench & Succession
5
Managers promoted from within in 12 months
A group capped by its bench: every promotion a scramble, the founder the deepest operator in the building. We built the development program and the succession structure that filled senior seats from the inside.
Across the wider record: field organizations of 1,000+ built and led
Discretion by Design
The work is discreet by nature.
Operators rarely broadcast that they’ve brought in help, and we don’t ask them to.
That is why the outcomes above stay unattributed. Each one is work that was owned and executed. Accountable for the number, not adjacent to it. References from the people who were in the room come before any engagement begins.
The discretion you’re reading is the discretion you’d get.
For private equity and family offices, the operating judgment that finds the value before close is the same judgment that executes it after. Diligence and value creation in one accountable seat.
Brand & Revenue
+4.5%
Comparable sales, year over year, after a brand reposition
A brand with awareness but soft traffic. A reposition turned attention into covers, and a daypart that had never been worked became real incremental revenue.
+7% traffic · a new daypart at +$500K
Concept Development
6
New brands launched (of nine advised)
Concept development from the earliest stage (from positioning through service standards) across nine brands, six of them launched. Every decision pressure-tested against whether it could actually be built, staffed, and run profitably.
Concept, format, culinary vision, and service standards — from the ground up
Growth & Platform
$17M → $75M
Revenue scaled in three years
Turning a founder-led business into a multi-brand platform: the systems, brand standards, and performance rigor that carried the growth and positioned the group to attract outside investment.
A founder-led group built into a scalable, investment-ready platform
Openings & Growth
$39M
New revenue: three large-format launches in 12 months
A portfolio scaling faster than its systems could carry it. We built the pre-opening readiness and the new-unit ramp that let it open strong and stabilize fast.
Across the wider record: 14 openings · 8 brands · 3 years · $2.5M–$18M+ AUV
Reporting & Controls
400 bps
Food cost margin gained against the pre-rollout baseline, once the numbers could be read weekly
A group growing faster than its reporting: cost reconciled after the period closed, in spreadsheets that disagreed with each other and with the invoices. We put inventory controls and one financial system of record in place, so cost became a weekly number the operators could act on instead of a quarterly post-mortem. The margin moved 400 basis points once they could see it.
Cost tracking rebuilt on a single system of record
Profitability
22%
Store-level EBITDA margins held through an inflationary stretch
As food, labor, and every other line rose across the industry, the work held store-level EBITDA at 22%: costs and service managed in step while much of the market gave the margin back.
Costs climbing industry-wide — the margin held
You’ve seen the numbers. The rest is a conversation.
The next line on this page gets written inside someone’s operation. The Operator Diagnostic™ is where that starts. Thirty to forty-five minutes, with the Straight Read back within 48 hours.