A brand people love does not stop working on its own. When comps slide, the fix is almost always operational, and it happens in the restaurants and in the numbers.
The instinct is to discount, add to the menu, or spend on marketing. Each of those is a fix aimed at a cause nobody has confirmed. We find the cause first: whether the slide is fewer first visits, fewer return visits or a smaller check, and what is behind it, because the fix for each is different.
The work is led by Jon Peck, who did turnaround work in his six years at Del Frisco’s Restaurant Group, before he was Chief Operating Officer of two Dallas restaurant groups.
Tell us what’s breaking.
Bring this year’s P&L by unit beside last year’s.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Nobody calls it a turnaround at first
It starts as one of these, or several:
- Same-store sales have stalled or are sliding, and the concept used to work.
- Margins are slipping. Labor or food cost has crept up and nobody can say why.
- Execution has drifted: ticket times, the plate and the greet change from unit to unit and shift to shift.
- A unit or two is dragging the whole group.
- New ownership or capital needs the operation performing to the level the deal assumed.
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.
A turnaround is a sequence
- Diagnose: during paid discovery, guest counts and check average split out by unit and daypart, each unit read against its own best sustained performance rather than the budget alone, and shifts watched in the units until the cause has a name.
- Stabilize: stop what is costing cash, margin and guests now, in triage order.
- Rebuild: a reset plan for each unit, written area by area from the host stand to the dish pit, every action with an owner and a date, and the plan read every week until the last one closes.
- Hand off: your GMs and director of operations own the recovery, on a cadence they were already running before we stepped back.
Each market changes what the diagnosis finds. In Denver it is often the labor discipline the boom years never demanded; in Orlando, a team turning over against the parks’ wage floor faster than training can replace it; in Palm Beach, a summer roster the winter no longer pays for.
The first ninety days run in triage order
Stabilize is the acute phase. It follows discovery, which can start within a week or two of the first call, and usually runs about ninety days. Through it, we set the sequence and read sales and labor against the forecast with the managers by call, several times a week, with time on site scoped to the units in the worst shape.
From your team it asks the GMs for those calls and an hour a week of your director of operations.
Authority is settled in the scope, before day one: the owner stays the owner, and your managers keep their roles.
- Cash and vendor terms: who has you on COD, who is about to cut you off. A turnaround dies faster from a stopped delivery than from a slow month.
- The schedule: rebuilt as a labor model against this year’s sales forecast.
- The menu: costed item by item, each item read on what it sells against what it earns. The ones that neither sell nor earn are cut, and the ones that sell at a thin margin are repriced.
- Variance: brought down by making the menu that was costed the menu that gets prepped, ordered and served every night, with a weekly food-cost read to check it.
- Execution: a lost return visit is won back in the restaurant, so the line check and the steps of service run the same way on every shift, and the GM grades each one.
- The scorecard: each manager owns one number (for the GM, the guest number the diagnosis named; for the chef, food-cost variance), read the same way by every manager and reported by Friday.
The managers run each of these from the week it is built, and the recovery is reported to you every week on the GM’s number: first visits, return visits or the check, unit by unit.
Fewer first visits usually trace to an occasion the unit stopped winning, and the daypart read names it. The rebuild takes that occasion back: its menu, its hours and the service set for it.
A smaller check is read server by server on the shift review: each server’s average check and beverage sales beside how that server ran the steps of service.
Whether we stay on a weekly call through the rebuild or hand the cadence over when the acute phase ends is set in the scope, case by case.
If this is the problem, bring it.
Thirty minutes with Jon, on your schedule.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)One unit is dragging the group
A dragging unit costs more than its own P&L shows. It pulls leadership hours, the best managers and the group’s patience away from the restaurants that are still winning. That is how one struggling unit becomes three.
The diagnosis has to separate two cases that look identical on a P&L. If the unit’s problem is operational (leadership, the labor model, execution drift), it is fixable, and the fix starts when the group stops treating it as the exception and runs it on the same cadence as the units that work.
If the problem is structural (a trade area that moved, total occupancy above ten percent of any sales the unit can reach), no operating fix outruns it, and we say so with the evidence and put the decision in front of you. Either way the call gets made early, instead of by exhaustion two years in.
The team you have is usually the team that fixes it
Turnarounds get framed as housecleanings, and the framing is usually wrong. Most of the people inside a sliding operation were given no way to win: scheduled against last year’s sales, executing a menu nobody costed, held to a standard nobody defined.
Give the same managers what the ninety days build, and most of them perform. The problem was the system they were handed.
Where someone cannot hold their number after the system under them is fixed, we tell you and help make the change. That is a finding, and it comes last. A recovery the existing team builds is the one that holds after we leave, which is why your managers run the rebuild, with us beside them.