Start wherever you are. Stop whenever it's right for you.
Expansion readiness evaluation
We audit the business the way a franchisee eventually will, and tell you plainly whether it can be repeated.
Ongoing advisory & support
We stay in the business month over month, in your leadership meetings, in your numbers, on your floor.
Managed growth, at your pace
Opens only when you are validated expansion-ready. Then you have a franchise sales team that already knows your business.
Nothing goes to market until the business can carry it.
Expansion does not open on a calendar date. It opens when three things are true. If they are not yet, you will hear it from us long before you hear it from a franchisee who trusted the projection.
Profitable in more than one location, with a model a franchisee can underwrite and a bank will finance.
Everything a stranger needs to run your store correctly, written down and tested.
A team that can support franchisees without dropping the stores you already have.
Franchising is where a brand ends up. Most of our work is everything before that.
Where we started, and still the fastest money in most restaurants. Over $60M in off-premise sales generated for clients.
Acting COO when you need one. We work on the floor and in the P&L, not from a deck.
Acting CMO, from brand positioning down to what goes on the reader board this week.
The menu is the product. We engineer it for margin without making it taste engineered.
Restaurant and hospitality is where we are strongest, but food service problems look similar everywhere. We also build programs for healthcare and higher-education dining, corporate food service, retail and ecommerce brands, and emerging consumer concepts.
Operations, margins, systems and openings.
How to grow catering into a real channel.
The three miles around each door.
How to franchise a restaurant, stage by stage.
Qualification, process and candidate journey.
Growth should not cost you control of the thing you built. Every decision about your brand stays yours to make, and everything we create belongs to you, documented well enough that your own people can run it without us in the room.
Our job is to make ourselves optional. Most brands still call anyway.
We write down what you would never compromise, then hold franchisees to it. Nothing gets simplified because it's easier to teach.
We qualify hard and bring you candidates. You decide who gets to put your name on a building.
Growth moves at what your team can support. If that means fewer openings this year, we'll say so.
A founder once told us the third store was the one that broke her heart. Same recipes, same signage. And it just wasn't the place anymore.
Nothing had been written down. Everything that made the first store work lived in her head and in the hands of four people who'd been there since the beginning. That's the work we do: getting it out of your head and onto paper, so it survives the fortieth opening.
Operators, not analysts.
The work is done by people who have run restaurants. Opened them, staffed them, closed them out on a Friday night. That is why it holds up on the floor and not just in the deck.
We hold the roster to four to six brands at a time, so the people who walk your line in week one are the people in your review two years later.
One or two locations that work, with something worth replicating.
Consistent profitability, ready for the next growth phase.
Strong product and early demand, no franchise infrastructure yet.
The non-negotiable. Systems can be built; willingness can't.
Most restaurant consulting firms write the strategy and leave. Most franchise brokers sell units and leave. We do the operating work, and we are still there when the twentieth store opens.
Our team has run kitchens, opened stores, carried a P&L and answered to a franchisee. We give advice we have had to live with.
A deliberately small roster. Whoever walks your line in week one is the person in your review two years later.
We write the manuals, renegotiate the distributor agreement, train the managers and stand in the store on opening weekend.
Not general management consulting with a hospitality practice attached. Ticket times, prime cost and third-party margin are the native language.
The readiness gate is real. We have told brands to hold a year, and we have turned engagements down.
Unit count is easy to grow and easy to lose. We pace expansion to what the operation and the leadership team can genuinely carry.
This thinking is set out in full on our methodology page, including the readiness gate and the three-phase engagement model.
From single-unit independents to national systems and private equity portfolios. A few of the engagements, described without naming the brands.
We built the catering playbook from scratch: menu architecture, packaging, order flow, pricing and a sales script — then rolled it out system-wide with training built for franchisee crews rather than corporate staff.
We fast-tracked the program end to end: catering software selection, third-party partners, packaging, sales tactics and direct introductions to the operators and vendors who could move it.
We opened revenue channels the dining room could not reach: holiday packages, retail formats and a catering program engineered to protect the brand rather than dilute it.
Readiness assessment, unit economics validation, operational standards, entity structure and an intellectual property audit. The full pre-FDD foundation, built before a single territory went to market.
Thirteen months of embedded work: menu redesign for distinct market segments, outreach programs per market, and sales training on closing, upselling and account retention.
What began as catering consulting became organizational work: DISC assessment, succession planning and a culture of accountability rebuilt around people, quality and profits.
“Their contribution to our catering efforts and our company in general have far surpassed our expectations. Twice in the past month we have set company records for catering sales, and the momentum is continuing.”
The full roster, the categories we work in, and more engagements in detail.
See all clients
No. Plenty of brands stop after Foundation or stay in Growth Partnership indefinitely. Activation is an option, not an obligation.
A broker's work ends at signing. Ours continues through onboarding, the opening, and the reviews after, and we built the systems the new owner is being handed.
Then we tell you, and we do the readiness work first. We have asked brands to hold a year, and turned engagements down.
Foundation runs about a quarter. Growth Partnership is twelve months minimum. Activation begins when readiness is met, not on a date.
Three things must be true: proven unit economics in more than one location, operations documented well enough for a stranger to run the store correctly, and leadership with the capacity to support franchisees without dropping the stores you already have.
Thank you for spending time with us. I know how much of yourself is in the brand you built.
Everyone on this team has stood on a line during a bad Friday night, signed the front of a payroll check, and watched a number on a P&L go the wrong way for reasons nobody could explain yet. That is why we work the way we do. We are careful with what you have made, honest when the answer is not yet, and we stay long after the part that is fun.
If any of this sounds like what you have been looking for, I would genuinely like to hear about your brand. Not a pitch. Just a conversation about where you are and what it would really take.
Monica Challingsworth
Founder, Eustress & Demeter
Tell us what you have built. We will tell you honestly whether now is the moment. No pitch, no fee.
