• Week 1 — Vision & Reality Check

  We start by getting your concept and your plan in the same room together. I want to know what you picture on a Friday night — who’s walking in, what they’re ordering, what the energy feels like — and then we hold that up against the space, the buildout, and the timeline you’re actually working with. If there’s a gap, I’d rather find it now than the week you open.

• Week 2 — The Money and the Fine Print

  This is where most first-time owners get hurt, and I’m not going to let it happen on my watch. We go through your lease terms, your loan terms, any partnership agreements — line by line if we have to — because I’ve seen what happens when the person holding your lease is also your lender and your landlord and nobody wrote down what happens if things go sideways. We also build out your working capital plan, because a good restaurant that people love can still die in a slow season if you can’t ride it out.

• Week 3 — Systems That Run Without You Standing There

  Pre-opening checklists. Inventory tracking. Prep sheets. Whatever piece of your operation is still living in your head instead of on paper, we get it out and built into something your team can actually follow. This is boring work. It’s also the work that separates restaurants that make it from the ones that don’t.

• Week 4 — Building Your Team’s Foundation

  If you’re bringing on staff you haven’t managed before — a bar manager, a kitchen lead, whoever it is — we build the training tools together. I’ve done this for full bar programs from scratch: slide decks, leave-behind guides, cheat sheets your manager can actually use on a busy Friday. Your team is your first customer. Treat them like it and everything else follows.

• Week 5 — Countdown to Opening

  We build your real countdown — 30 days, then narrowed down to the week — covering everything from supplier consolidation to emergency procedures to the stuff nobody thinks about until it’s an emergency. By the end of this week, opening day should feel like a plan, not a leap of faith.

• Week 6 — Opening Week & The First 90 Days

  We finish with a one-pager you can tape up in your office — the checklist you actually look at during opening week and the ninety days after, when everything is loud and moving fast and it’s easy to lose track of what matters. This is also where we close out with an honest look back: what you’re walking away with, and what you’re ready for now that you weren’t six weeks ago.

What you get: Weekly one-on-one sessions, a full toolkit built specifically for your restaurant — not generic templates — and a coach who treats your restaurant like it’s his own, because that’s the only way I know how to do this.