Restaurant consulting
Restaurant consulting for independent operators
We work with independent restaurants and small groups whose sales are healthy and whose margin is not. The work is diagnostic first, then hands-on: we read the numbers, watch service, rebuild whichever of menu, labor or purchasing is doing the damage, and stay until the change holds on a real Friday.
What a restaurant consulting engagement covers
Most restaurants that call us are busy. The room fills, the reviews are good, and the bank balance does not reflect either. That gap is almost always a systems problem rather than a demand problem, and it lives in three places: what a plate costs, how many hours are scheduled against forecast covers, and what happens to inventory between the back door and the pass.
An engagement starts with a diagnostic. We read twelve to twenty-four months of P&L, an item-level POS export, the current schedule, invoices from your top suppliers, and we observe two or three services live — deliberately including a slow one. The output is a sized gap: what the restaurant should keep at its current sales, what it actually keeps, and where the difference goes.
- Plate-level costing for every dish and every modifier
- Menu pricing and layout rebuilt around contribution margin
- Labor model driven by forecast covers and sales per labor hour
- Purchasing consolidation, par levels and counting discipline
- Front and back of house SOPs written for the team you actually have
- A one-page weekly scorecard the owner can read in ten minutes
How we work with restaurant owners
We do not hand over a binder. Recommendations arrive with the recipe cards, prep sheets, ordering guides, schedules and reporting formats needed to run them, and a senior advisor is present while the team adopts them on live service. That adoption phase is where most consulting fails, so it is the part we refuse to shorten.
Fees are fixed against a written scope before any work begins. Audits start at $4,000, strategy engagements at $12,000, and full turnarounds at $25,000. There is no hourly meter, because hourly billing rewards slow work and makes the owner the one managing the budget.
Every engagement opens with a free thirty-minute call. If your problem is one obvious thing a strong GM can fix, we will tell you that on the call rather than sell you a project.
Who this is for
Full-service and fast-casual restaurants doing roughly $1M to $8M a year, and emerging groups of two to fifteen locations that need one standard rather than fifteen improvisations. Owners preparing for a second site, a refinance or a sale also come to us for the clean operations and defensible numbers those events demand.
We work across Texas, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina on site and take engagements worldwide, with financial and menu analysis handled remotely and service observation, kitchen flow and training done in your building during real trading hours.
What operators get
- Prime cost reduced by five to eight points in the first two quarters
- Labor scheduled against forecast rather than habit
- A costed menu that steers guests toward margin without shrinking the plate
- Weekly numbers the owner can act on while the month is still in play
Common questions
- How long does a restaurant consulting engagement take?
- Most projects run six to twelve weeks. A standalone diagnostic audit can be completed in two to three weeks. Multi-unit work scales with the number of establishments involved.
- Do you work on site or remotely?
- Both. P&L, menu and labor analysis happens remotely; service observation, kitchen flow and team training happen on site during real trading hours.
- What does restaurant consulting cost?
- Fixed fees against a written scope: audits from $4,000, strategy from $12,000, pre-opening from $18,000, full turnarounds from $25,000. The first thirty-minute call is free.
Related services
Or see all 9 disciplines on the services hub.
Quick enquiry
Talk to us about restaurant consulting for independent operators
Three lines is enough. A senior advisor reads every message — not a bot, not an intern.
We reply within one business day
+1 (214) 988-5411Find out what this is worth to you
Run the free margin health check for a benchmarked read, or book a thirty-minute call and we will tell you honestly whether an engagement is worth it.