The place succeeded past its setup.
Phones ring through service, large parties die in a shared inbox, and the owner holds it all together by hand. The walkthrough finds where the operation outgrew the way it runs.
The place works. The way it runs doesn't.
Friday, 7:15 PM
The phone rings through service. Everyone on the floor can hear it. Nobody can get it. Whoever that was, they wanted to give you money.
Saturday, 11:40 PM
A twelve-top inquiry lands in the shared inbox. Three people can read it. It belongs to nobody. By Tuesday it belongs to another restaurant.
Sunday, 10:30 PM
Six logins to learn how the weekend went — POS, reservations, direct ordering, two delivery portals, the accounting file — and the numbers still don't agree with each other.
Every day
You are the integration layer: orders re-keyed by hand, the book checked against the POS, prices corrected in three places, the invoice stack priced from memory. It works because you make it work.
None of that is failure. Each system was bought one at a time, for that month's fire, for the restaurant you were a few years ago. Then the place succeeded past its setup. The volume grew. The way you run didn't.
Around $3M, or a trigger you can name.
On one site, this starts to make sense at around $3M in revenue — or when something specific has changed: a lease signed, a POS dying or being forced onto a new version, a system bought in the last eighteen months that never earned its logins.
Below that line, the honest answer is “not yet.” A responsible rebuild is hard to fund at that size, and we'd rather print that here than have you learn it on a call. What we'd do instead is further down this page.
What the walkthrough finds on one site.
The Operations Assessment is a contractor's walkthrough of how your restaurant actually runs: phones, reservations, online ordering, POS, delivery portals and back-office reporting, and the handoffs between them. On a single site, the walkthrough goes looking for five things:
Where calls go
We call your restaurant at six different hours — mid-Friday service and after close included — and read you back exactly what happened.
What those calls cost you, with a formula for your own phone logWhat a guest hits when they try to give you money
The two-top, the eight-top, the private-event or catering inquiry — who owns it, how fast a quote goes back, whether a deposit can be taken without a phone call — and the same order placed twice: once direct, once on the third-party app, prices and fees compared line by line, and the menu checked in every place it's published.
Your software bill, priced line by line
Every tool: what it costs, what it duplicates, who actually logs in, when the contract ends, and how much notice a cancellation takes.
The seams
Every place a person re-keys data from one screen to another, who does it, and how long it takes. On one site, the seams usually run through the owner.
Two things fixed while we're there
Whatever two small things surface during field week that can be fixed in an hour get fixed. You'll have seen us work before you decide whether to hire us to build.
Why don't my restaurant systems talk to each other?
Restaurant systems rarely talk to each other because each was bought for a different month's problem: a phone system, a reservation book, online ordering, a POS, one or two delivery portals, an accounting file. None was designed to hand information to the others, so the handoffs land on a person, usually the owner, who re-keys orders and reconciles the book against the POS by hand. OpsRefresh treats those handoffs, the seams, as the first thing to map: who carries each one, how often, and what it costs, before any system is replaced.
The seams: where a restaurant loses ownership between its systemsHere's what to do instead.
Run the twelve tests. They're the outside-in checks from our own walkthrough, published in full: six calls at six hours, two reservations, a large-party inquiry, the same order placed twice, a list signup, a review check. They cost an evening.
Then fix the two worst things you wrote down. The usual first two cost nothing: an after-hours voicemail re-recorded so it books instead of apologizes, and a large-party inbox with one named owner and an auto-reply. When the volume or the trigger arrives, come back.
If Friday at 7:15 sounded familiar
One call about your room and your numbers, ending in a straight answer either way.