Over more than 30 years, he has owned and operated brands including Pizza Hut in Quebec, the Cultures restaurant chain, Salisbury House, and the Starbucks Coffee license for Eastern Canada, and he held the development rights for P.F. Chang’s in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. For the past decade, his work has centered on advisory engagements for U.S. and Canadian restaurant and investment groups. He spoke about what that work actually looks like once you get past the title.
What Does a Typical Engagement Look Like When It Starts?
It rarely starts with a clean brief. A client usually comes to us with a symptom, not a diagnosis: margins are shrinking, a franchise system is strained, or an expansion plan has stalled. The first few weeks are about figuring out what’s actually causing that symptom, which is often different from what they assumed. You can’t fix a supply chain problem by redesigning a menu, and you can’t fix a menu problem by renegotiating freight contracts. Getting the diagnosis right determines everything that follows.
How Is Advisory Work Different From Running a Brand You Own?
When you own the brand, you live with every decision for years. As an advisor, you’re brought in to solve something specific, hand over a plan, and let the operator’s team carry it forward. That changes how I work. I have to build something that their people can run without me in the room, not something that depends on my presence. The plans that fail are usually the ones built around the consultant instead of around the client’s own team.
What Does “Margin Improvement” Actually Involve Day to Day?
It’s unglamorous work. You go through cost of goods, labor scheduling, portion specs, vendor contracts, and waste, line by line. Most of the gains come from a dozen small corrections rather than one big idea. A restaurant group might be losing a point and a half of margin to inconsistent portioning across locations, or paying for freight terms nobody has revisited in years. None of that makes for an exciting headline, but it’s where the money actually is.
How Do You Approach a Market Assessment Before a Client Expands?
I start with the economics of a single unit before I look at the market at all. If one location doesn’t work on its own numbers, rolling it out to ten locations just multiplies the problem. Once the unit economics hold up, then I look at real estate costs, labor supply, local competition, and how close the market is to the brand’s existing footprint. Expansion plans fail more often from stretching too far geographically than from picking the wrong city.
What Does Menu Repositioning Work Involve?
It’s part food, part math. You look at what’s actually selling, what it costs to make, and what the guest thinks they’re paying for. Sometimes the fix is removing items that drag down kitchen efficiency without adding much in sales. Sometimes it’s repricing based on what a dish actually costs to produce rather than what’s always been charged. The goal is a menu the kitchen can execute consistently at a margin that makes sense, not just a menu that looks good on paper.
What Does Supply Chain Optimization Mean in This Context?
For a restaurant group, supply chain usually means the gap between what a contract says and what’s happening at the store level. I’ve seen groups with good vendor agreements losing money because of how product actually moves from the distribution center to the line. It involves looking at order frequency, minimums, spoilage, and whether the purchasing decisions made at head office match what stores actually need week to week.
How Do You Decide Which Engagements to Take On?
I look at whether the group has a real operating team already in place. Advisory work goes best when there’s a capable team that needs a specific problem solved, not a team that needs to be built from scratch. I also want to see that ownership is prepared to act on what the work turns up, including the parts that are uncomfortable. A report that sits in a drawer doesn’t help anyone.
Has Packaged Goods Work Become a Bigger Part of the Business?
It’s become a more common request. Restaurant groups look at packaged goods as a way to put their brand on a grocery shelf and generate revenue that doesn’t depend on seating capacity. The work there is different: it involves production partners, shelf-life, retail pricing, and distribution relationships that most restaurant operators haven’t had to manage before. It’s a logical extension for a strong brand, but it runs on a different set of rules than a restaurant does.
What’s the Hardest Part of This Work That People Don’t See?
Getting an organization to actually change its habits. You can hand a group an analysis that clearly shows where the losses are, and the numbers can be right, but changing how a kitchen plates a dish or how a purchasing manager places an order means changing behavior that’s been in place for years. The analysis is the easy part. Getting it adopted is where the real work happens.
