Dave Dunmire

Sometimes You Don't Need To Work Harder. You Need To See What's Actually Going On.

Price: $350 Flat Fee

Corporate chains have accounting departments, operations teams, and people whose entire job is watching the numbers.
Most independent owners don't.
You're running the restaurant, covering the kitchen, dealing with staffing, placing orders, fixing equipment, answering the phone—and somehow you're supposed to step back and figure out why the money isn't where it should be. That's hard to do when you're standing in the middle of it.
That's where I come in.
For $350, I'll spend an afternoon in your restaurant with you.
I'll watch the operation.
I'll talk to the people doing the work.
I'll look at the numbers and systems you actually have—not the ones some consultant wishes you had. We'll identify where money, time, and effort are leaking out of the operation and what is making the restaurant harder to run than it needs to be.
Then I'll give you a prioritized battle plan for what I'd attack first.
What happens after that is up to you. Take the plan and run with it yourself. Or, if you'd rather have me help build the systems, train your people, and put the changes into practice, we'll talk about that separately.
No promises of miracles. No six-month consulting contract. No bullshit.
Just a fresh set of eyes and an honest assessment of your operation.

Tell me about your restaurant:

Who I Work With

Independent restaurants and bars. Rural communities. Small towns. Owner-operated businesses.I work best with operators who are close enough to the operation to know something isn't working, but too buried in the day-to-day to step back and figure out exactly what it is.I'm a regular guy working with regular folks. I don't have a corporate playbook, and I don't need one. I've been in the weeds, and I know the way out.

Built in the trenches, not a boardroom

I didn't learn this business from a boardroom, I learned it the hard way.
I worked the line, ran the floor, opened restaurants, and put in the time.
I've stayed too late because somebody had to make the restaurant work.
I've spent more years than I'd care to count trying to solve problems by simply working harder.
Eventually I learned something I wish I'd understood much earlier:
A broken system doesn't become a good system just because you work yourself into the ground.
I know what it's like when the restaurant starts taking everything you have—your time, your energy, your sleep. I know the sting of missing anniversaries, birthdays, and family vacations.
I also know that a lot of those problems aren't inevitable. Sometimes the restaurant doesn't need a harder-working owner. It needs better systems.
That's what I bring to the table.
Not theory. Not corporate jargon. Not another software platform you're going to spend six months implementing.
I walk into the building, look at what's actually happening, and help you fix the things that are making your life harder than it needs to be. Because you didn't open a restaurant to become a prisoner of it.
You built something that was supposed to be yours.
I'd like to help you get some of it back.

Want to know how I think?

Every week, I write about the problems I see repeatedly in independent restaurants—and the practical ways I'd attack them. We talk about food cost, labor, staffing, training, kitchen flow, management.All of the things that quietly turn a restaurant into a job you can't escape. Check it out here:
The Shift Handoff