Ignite Consulting / Hospitality Operations
Twenty-five years of real operational experience. Not frameworks. Not white papers. The instincts that only come from running the operation, holding the P&L, and watching where things actually fall apart.
We work with operators who are ready to find the real problem — not the symptom everyone's been chasing. That distinction is the difference between a 10% food cost swing and another deck nobody acts on.
The Problem
Every few years, this industry falls in love with a new concept. The lines. The press. The investors. Everyone inside believes the demand is so strong the fundamentals don't apply.
Then it levels out. It always levels out.
The things that didn't matter when the dining room was packed — the variance, the waste, the inconsistency, the overhead nobody questioned — become the only things that matter. Concepts that were changing the industry six months ago are closing locations.
Revenue without operational discipline is not a business model. It's a loan from the future. And the future always collects.
The Second Problem
Phase 1: Best of Breed
A POS from one era. Payroll from another. An inventory system that was supposed to talk to the POS but doesn't. A loyalty program marketing bought without telling IT. The stack grows by vendor relationship, not by design.
Phase 2 — One-System Overcorrection
Overwhelmed by the chaos, operators pivot to a single platform that promises to do everything. The problem: no single platform does everything well. You've traded complexity for compromise.
Phase 3: Swing Back
Gaps emerge. Point solutions get added back. The archaeological dig restarts. Most operators are somewhere in this cycle right now — and they've never had anyone map the full picture before making the next move.
"If you can't take your data with you, you don't own your business. You're renting it."
Walk into almost any restaurant group operating for more than five years and you'll find the same thing: a technology stack that looks less like a system and more like an archaeological dig.
The problem isn't the technology. It's that nobody has done the work of understanding what the stack actually costs — not just in subscription fees, but in bad decisions made on unreliable data, in contracts that lock you out of your own history, in integrations that quietly break and nobody notices until the numbers stop making sense.
"Bad integration doesn't just create IT headaches. It creates bad decisions made in good faith."
The Ignite Technology Blueprint is the forensic assessment operators need before making any technology decision of consequence. Not a vendor comparison. A complete picture of what you own, what you're locked into, and what the right path forward actually looks like. Ignite's partnership with Aviture handles the engineering side.
Root Cause in Practice
A client came to us with a clear diagnosis: food cost too high. They had already run the standard analysis. Prices up, supply chain challenging. The plan on the table was menu price increases and supplier renegotiation.
We went through discovery. What we found had nothing to do with food prices.
Three specific operational failures were driving every dollar of variance:
The rib supplier changed pack size. Nobody retrained on trimming proportions. Every rack trimmed to the old standard. Consistent over-portioning, every shift, every location.
Fries were being over-portioned. Not dramatically — but consistently enough that the variance across the system was significant. Nobody was measuring at the portion level.
Sour cream containers weren't being leveled before serving. Invisible unless you're looking at waste by the ounce across thousands of covers.
Food cost swing. Not from renegotiating suppliers. From fixing three training and accountability failures nobody had connected to the outcome. In the restaurant industry, that swing is the difference between a profitable location and a marginal one.
How We Work
Engagement Models
These aren't service tiers — they're four distinct ways of working, each designed for a different kind of client need. The right model depends on scope, urgency, and your capacity for change.
The starting point for most Ignite relationships. A structured 2–4 week discovery engagement — we map the full picture, identify where the real problem lives, and deliver a prioritized action plan. Fixed-fee. Low-barrier by design. Not a sales tool. A diagnostic.
An Ignite principal joins your leadership team on a fractional basis, attending the meetings that matter, owning specific workstreams, and present for the hard conversations. Not a quarterly check-in. Actually inside the business. 3–6 month minimum commitment.
30, 60, or 90 days. Specific outcome. Fixed scope. Fix the food cost. Build the sales playbook. Get the tech stack right. Priced per sprint. The scope is fixed, the timeline is fixed, the deliverable is fixed. We won't accept a sprint where the outcome is undefined.
Ongoing strategic access without a full embedded commitment. Monthly working sessions, on-demand access to the leadership team and pattern library. Built for investors, PE-backed operators, and clients between larger engagements who want a trusted operational voice in the room.
Service Pillars
These aren't marketed capabilities. They're areas where Ignite principals have made the decisions and lived with the outcomes.
Process design, unit economics, variance management, labor models, inventory systems, and the accountability structures that make standards hold. Built around the Ignite Operations Framework, which runs from pre-engagement intelligence through diagnostic assessment to variance resolution and handoff.
Most revenue problems in hospitality are misidentified before anyone starts working on them. A traffic problem gets treated as a marketing problem. A throughput constraint gets treated as a staffing problem. A menu mix issue gets treated as a pricing problem.
Ignite starts with a Revenue Diagnostic to find the actual constraint before recommending any fix. From there: menu engineering, throughput analysis, third-party delivery strategy, and go-to-market planning for operators moving into new channels or dayparts. The work is sequenced so you know what you're solving before you spend anything solving it.
Ignite has built, sold, and operated restaurant technology at scale, which means the advice comes from production experience, not vendor relationships. The flagship offering is the Ignite Technology Blueprint, a full-cycle technology review covering data ownership, integration gaps, contract exposure, API lock-in, and ROI realization. Through Ignite's partnership with Aviture, Blueprint findings can be carried through to engineering-level implementation.
New concept development, menu and experience design, brand positioning, and pilot strategy. Useful for investors, PE-backed portfolios, and emerging brands working out what they want to become. The Ignite edge is operational: a concept that cannot be executed consistently at scale is a prototype, not a business.
The training and leadership gap is almost always the most expensive line item nobody is tracking. A well-led, well-trained team produces better throughput, lower turnover, fewer comps, and tighter cost adherence. Ignite's leadership work covers organizational design, hiring frameworks, training architecture, and the culture systems that determine whether a brand's standards actually show up in daily practice.
Who We Serve
Ignite doesn't have one client profile. The depth of the team's experience across the full hospitality vertical means real value in multiple contexts. These are where the model is most distinctive — where operational depth, pattern recognition, and root-cause methodology make the biggest difference.
Single-location and early multi-unit operators who have moved past survival mode and are ready to build something that lasts, but don't have the internal infrastructure to do it alone. Underserved by virtually every other consulting firm in the market. Where Ignite's grain-of-sand operational depth matters most.
Multi-unit operators managing 10–100 locations who have outgrown informal systems but haven't built enterprise-grade infrastructure. Good concepts and real revenue, leaving significant margin on the table through preventable variance. Ignite finds those variances and fixes them at the operational level.
Vendors and platforms selling into the restaurant space who need help with go-to-market strategy, operator relationships, and sales execution. Ignite understands both sides of the operator-technology relationship: how operators evaluate technology, what objections are real versus negotiating posture, and what successful implementation actually requires.
Operators facing declining performance, leadership gaps, or failed technology implementations. Flash Point brands that need to find their fundamentals fast. High-urgency, high-stakes engagements where Ignite's diagnostic speed and operational depth are most valuable — identifying root causes quickly and building a prioritized plan that addresses the real issues before they compound.
The Founder
"She didn't parachute into this industry. She climbed it — one role, one concept, one problem at a time."
Mandi Wooledge's story in hospitality doesn't begin in a boardroom. It begins at 13, waiting tables. That's not a footnote. It's the root system of everything that followed.
Over the next two decades, she held nearly every role the industry has to offer — running kitchens, managing floors, leading operations teams, and designing and opening restaurants from the floor plan up. She learned the business the way operators actually learn it: one shift, one P&L, one concept at a time.
As President and COO of Decision Logic, a back-office platform used across tens of thousands of restaurant locations, she was responsible for product, sales, marketing, and operations across every segment. Fast casual. Fine dining. QSR. Multi-unit franchises. Family-owned concepts.
She saw how all of them worked, where all of them struggled, and — critically — she saw the same problems repeat themselves across entirely different organizations under entirely different names.
That pattern library is what Ignite is built on. Ignite covers the full vertical: Strategy, Sales, Operations, Technology, Finance, and Innovation. Not superficially. With principals who have owned each domain.
Fixed-fee. 2–4 weeks. We map the full picture, identify where the real problem lives, and deliver a prioritized roadmap. No obligation to continue. The lowest-risk, highest-signal entry point into a real engagement — and a deliverable worth more than most projects you could commission.
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