A standing weekly one-on-one for the leader the group’s decisions run through.
The calls that stall a restaurant group are the ones that land on the CEO: the labor model and the tip structure, what every GM is held to, and who gets the next promotion. We coach the founders and senior leaders who carry them.
Every problem you bring is tested first: who raised it, what has been seen firsthand and what was only reported, whether it sits in one unit or all of them, and what has already been tried. A problem in one unit usually traces to a manager or a standard, and a problem in every unit to a process.
Tell us what you’re carrying.
Bring the decision that keeps coming back to you.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Everyone close to the CEO has a stake in the call.
When the investors want one answer and the family another, the CEO ends up deciding fast and alone. The session is where that call gets worked through before it is made.
When a GM needs the director of operations’ sign-off on a decision the GM is paid to own, the GM is no longer running the restaurant. The same thing happens one level up, when a director brings the CEO a problem and leaves the conversation without it. Each session checks the week’s handoffs for a problem that went up and stayed there.
Example scope of work
Examples of what the scope can include; yours is written to the problem you bring.
- The session: an hour every week, with the phone in between for a decision that can’t wait.
Who decides
- An absence test at the start: what slips while the CEO is away, and which calls still route up that belong to a GM or the director of operations.
- A quarterly succession test: what breaks in thirty days if the strongest GM leaves, answered unit by unit.
- A decision-rights map, lane by lane: unit visits, culinary, group dining and turnover each given an owner, the calls that cannot be undone kept by the CEO, and one voice to every GM.
- A delegation of authority by title: spend, contracts, capital, hiring and raises, and no purchase split to slip under a limit.
- A decision brief for any cross-unit change: the issue, the fix and who it touches, who recommends and who decides, and the call made at the next leadership meeting.
- A written handoff for each delegated call: the outcome owned and its measure, the authority that comes with it, a review date, and what the CEO agrees to stop doing.
- A 30-60-90 plan for a new director of operations: the calls that move to the GMs, and the job measured by how the units run while the director is elsewhere.
Meetings and reporting
- An operating cadence: nightly numbers, the weekly ops review with the GMs, the monthly P&L review with its resolutions, the quarterly map review and the annual budget, each with its owner.
- The CEO’s standing meetings triaged: each named for the decision it makes and the CEO’s part in it, and any meeting that decides nothing cut.
- A weekly note from each direct report: what was promised against what got done, read by the CEO before that report’s one-on-one.
- A decision queue: every stalled initiative traced to the call it is waiting on, with the decider, a need-by date and the cost of the delay.
- A quarterly board read built the same way each time: results by unit against budget and last year, and each miss written as cause, response and next step.
How it runs: by phone or in person, whichever the week allows.
Fees are set by the scope and the value of the outcome, agreed before the work starts, with any time on site built in, never by the hour, the day or the visit.
The order of the work
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 01 | The absence test and the decision-rights map come first |
| 02 | The operating cadence is set next |
| 03 | Calls move off the CEO one at a time, each on a written handoff |
| 04 | The map is redrawn at each quarterly review |
| 05 | The term is six months, reviewed against the map, and renewed only if you want it |
If this is the call, bring it.
The first conversation works out where the work starts.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Further reading
What managers own is what the leader has said out loudCommon questions
Is coaching confidential from my partners and my team?
Do you coach leaders below the CEO?
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.