A pro forma built from your own units, every return run with and without the loan.
The lender and your investors read the same page: each return printed beside the hurdle it has to clear and marked pass or fail. Payback is worked year by year, first to your investors and then to the company.
Tell us what’s next.
Bring the pro forma, the lease draft and your actuals.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Most pro formas are built backward from the answer.
The ramp is the cell the whole model rests on: a growth rate typed in by hand until the return clears, with no note on where it came from, and three tabs of math built on it. The build-out line assumes nobody will sign a change order. The operator ends up presenting a model they do not believe.
The unit P&L runs the way your books do, with a shared kitchen moved into its own P&L so no unit’s margin carries another’s cost. The operating result is read before occupancy cost and again after it, so a well-run unit carrying too much rent shows up as a rent problem.
Example scope of work
Examples of what the scope can include; yours is written to the problem you bring.
The numbers it starts from
- Clean actuals before any model: every P&L line assigned to the manager who runs it and the leader who answers for it, and a monthly resolution log worked with accounting.
- Past openings against their models: sales, EBITDA and cash-on-cash by year from opening, set beside what each model projected, so the next ramp starts from what the last ones did.
- Unit P&L on your full chart of accounts: food, liquor, beer and wine sales, cost of goods by category, comps split out, and overtime and training wages apart.
The model
- Sales built from your nearest units: their check average and traffic, with a price change at opening and one each year after it, less any sales the new unit would take from them.
- Labor built from covers served: hours per cover by position, taken from a comparable unit and applied to projected traffic at local wage rates.
- Ramp by month: sales as a share of year one, with food cost, beverage cost and payroll each given its own ramp before it settles.
- Investment build by line: leasehold, kitchen package, FF&E, IT and AV, site work and the pre-opening cash, less the tenant allowance, plus an operating reserve and a change-order allowance carried line by line from the bids.
- Pre-opening cash by line: manager salaries from each hire date, training payroll, dead rent less any free rent, key money, broker fee, deposits, legal, insurance, the liquor permit, and trainer and manager travel and lodging.
- Returns with a sensitivity grid: cash-on-cash, return on invested capital and IRR, levered and unlevered, plus sales to investment and a long-hold IRR, all run across a range of sales.
- Debt tested on the ramp: debt-service coverage by month through the first year, and the fixed-charge and lease-adjusted debt tests a covenant sets.
The units you run
- Budget assumptions in writing first: what moves sales (price, traffic, group dining, events), cost of goods and labor, approved before a line of budget is set.
- Weekly P&L estimate inside the period: each unit’s week of sales, labor and inventory, against a forecast with the holidays moved to this year’s dates.
How it runs: a standing weekly call with your controller or finance lead, and time on site where the work needs it.
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 | Your own units’ history is read before any market benchmark |
| 02 | The downside is built before the base case is shown |
| 03 | Your controller reviews every assumption before a lender sees it |
| 04 | Done when your team can rerun the model on new numbers |
If this is what’s next, bring it.
The call works out where the work starts.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)Further reading
Prime cost: the number that decides whether you can scaleCommon questions
Our accountant already builds our pro forma. How is this different?
Will a lender or investor take the model seriously?
Market intelligence forecasts a site’s sales too. Do we need both?
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.