While you stay open.
Every cutover has a written rollback — and your manager on duty decides to pull it, not us. The work runs in short fixed-fee phases, and you can stop after any of them.
Seven rules the work runs under.
They're written into the engagement letter, where you can hold us to them. Each one exists because somewhere, a busy service met a mid-shift change nobody ordered.
Rule four — the one to hold us to
Every cutover has a written rollback — and your manager on duty decides to pull it, not us.
Before anything switches, the way back is on paper: what to press, who to call, how long it takes. If the new way wobbles during service, whoever runs your floor that night pulls it back to the old way and the shift carries on. No call to us first, no debate at the pass.
Nothing changes during service.
Work that touches a live system happens while the room is quiet. If a change can't be finished before doors open, it waits for the next window.
One change at a time.
Never two cutovers in the same week. When something misbehaves, you and we both know exactly what moved.
The old way runs until the new way has proven itself.
A new call path, a new ordering flow, a new anything runs alongside what you have until it has survived real shifts. Only then does the old one retire.
Your team learns on the floor, in shift language.
No binders. Training happens at the host stand and the pass, during real prep, with the person who built the thing standing right there.
Everything is written down as we go.
Logins, settings, what changed and why, who to call — the record lands in your hands every week.
A named person answers through your first services on anything new.
The week a change lands, you have a number for a person who knows your floor. If the Friday 7:15 call finds a seam, it's rolled back or fixed before Saturday's service.
What this costs you while it's happening.
Anyone who tells you a rebuild is invisible is selling you something. Here is the real bill: a handful of your own hours for the decisions only an owner can make, about two hours a week of your GM's attention, and two or three shifts that run slower while hands learn the new way.
What it doesn't cost is a closed door or a lost Friday night. The rules above exist for exactly that: changes land in quiet hours, the old way keeps working until the new one has proven itself, and the way back is always written down. That's the trade — a few slower Tuesdays so the busy nights stay boring.
Fixed numbers, short phases, a written test for each.
The report prices the rebuild in phases, and every phase runs on the same contract shape.
- One fixed number per phase
- Each phase is quoted as a single fixed figure before it starts. No day rates, no hourly meter, nothing billed as time and materials.
- No phase longer than five weeks
- If a piece of work can't be delivered inside five weeks, it gets split until it can. Long phases are where accountability goes to die.
- A written acceptance test, countersigned before work starts
- We both sign a plain-English description of what done means — something you can check yourself, on your own floor. The phase is finished when the test passes, not when software is installed.
- Stop after any phase
- Every phase ends at a natural stopping point. If cash, season, or confidence says pause, you stop, you owe nothing further, and everything delivered keeps working.
You own everything, from the first week.
Every account is opened in your name. Every login, every setting, every decision and its reason goes into a record that lands in your hands weekly. If we vanished mid-engagement, another firm — or your own team — could read the file and keep going.
And it's in the engagement letter: nothing we build stops working if you stop paying. No piece of the rebuild phones home to us, needs our blessing to run, or sits behind a subscription of ours. Stop, and you've stopped buying new work; everything already built is yours and stays on.
One rule about guest texting.
Where a rebuild touches guest texting (confirmations, waitlists, missed-call text-backs), consent gets built in the legal way from day one. Under the TCPA a consumer can recover $500 per violation; for a willful or knowing violation a court may, at its discretion, treble that, to as much as $1,500 per violation. We build the consent record so those numbers stay a footnote you never meet.
Where that lands, said plainly: the consent design is part of the build and it's in writing — the wording on the form, the record of who agreed to what and when, and where that record lives. It is not legal advice, and we are not your lawyers. Have your own counsel read it before the first message sends.
Can a restaurant replace its systems without closing?
Yes. OpsRefresh writes the rules for it into the engagement letter: nothing changes during service, one change at a time, and the old call path, ordering flow or reservation book keeps running beside the new one until the new one has survived real shifts. Every cutover has a written rollback that the manager on duty can pull without calling us first. The real cost is a handful of the owner's hours for the decisions only an owner can make, about two hours a week of the GM's attention, and two or three shifts that run slower while hands learn the new way.
Replace the POS last: the disruption ranking