There’s no place like home.
Literally.
In your home market, your restaurant[s] are humming, your team knows the drill, and you’ve built something you’re genuinely proud of. Now you’re looking at a new city, a new state, maybe even a new region, thinking: “We’ve proven this works. How hard could it be to do it again somewhere else?”
I get it. I thought the same thing years ago when we were expanding. What I didn’t realize was that the leap from operating in your backyard to managing locations you can’t physically visit every day isn’t just about distance. It’s about fundamentally changing how you run your business—and if you’re not prepared, that first location outside your home market can expose every crack in your foundation.
Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Andrew Lester, Founder and CEO of Tablespoon, a restaurant systems, technology, accounting, and financial services firm that specializes in helping operators build the financial and operational infrastructure they need to scale successfully.
Andrew has spent over a decade watching restaurant groups attempt geographic expansion, and he’s seen the same patterns repeat themselves. Some operators thrive. Others struggle. And the difference, he’s found, almost always comes down to whether they’ve built the right systems before they tried to scale.
Mistake #1: Thinking Your Home Market Playbook Will Work Everywhere
When you open outside your home market, you lose your single biggest competitive advantage—your physical presence.
The cost of this mistake goes far beyond just worrying about whether your new GM is executing properly. Without centralized systems, you end up with what Andrew calls “choose your own adventure”—different processes, different vendors, different ways of doing everything across your locations. You can’t benchmark. You can’t compare. You’re basically operating separate restaurants with no real connection between them.
The solution? Build a centralized back office before you expand. Andrew emphasized this repeatedly:
“It’s really, really critical to implement systems across all facets of the operation. In the back office, one of the things that we have seen consistently be essential.”
What does centralized actually mean? It means having one place where vendor invoices go, one workflow for processing them, one system for tracking spend. It means your accounting function isn’t scattered across multiple markets with different people doing things differently.
Mistake #2: Letting Technology Become a Free-For-All
One of the most surprising things Andrew shared was about technology sprawl—and it’s something I’ve definitely been guilty of in the past.
“One of the warning signs that I would look for is sort of this proliferation of apps and tech subscriptions and SaaS subscriptions,” Andrew said.
Here’s how this plays out: Your operations team in a new market decides to turn on a delivery partner. Great idea—more revenue, right? They put a tablet in the restaurant, but the partner isn’t integrated into your POS or restaurant management system. Suddenly, accounting can’t properly record those sales. The numbers don’t flow into your back office system, throwing off your inventory. Your data becomes unreliable.
And it gets expensive fast.
The fix is having a strategic approach to technology. Before you add anything new, ask: Does it integrate seamlessly with our existing systems? Does it solve a real problem that’s costing us money or time? Can we enforce its use across all locations? If you can’t answer yes to all three, you’re probably creating more problems than you’re solving.
Mistake #3: Moving Too Fast Without Capital and Infrastructure
This one stings because growth is exciting. When you’ve proven your concept works, there’s a natural desire to accelerate.
But as Andrew pointed out, expanding outside your home market is significantly more expensive than opening another location down the street—and a lot of operators underestimate what that actually takes.
“One of the biggest differentiators is having a solid financial plan,” Andrew said. “It’s so important, especially when we’re expanding into new markets, because there’s so much investment that is necessary to make that successful.”
He broke down what that investment really means: You can’t be in the new market daily, so you need to hire experienced multi-unit leadership from outside your organization. You need to develop training systems that can be replicated. You need stronger marketing to build awareness in a market where nobody knows your brand yet. And that’s on top of the obvious costs like construction and equipment.
The consequence of underestimating this? You end up undercapitalized in a market where you’re already at a disadvantage. You try to cut corners on hiring or systems or marketing—and then you wonder why that location isn’t performing the way your home market does.
Mistake #4: Not Separating Unit-Level Economics from Corporate Costs
Here’s something I didn’t fully understand until we had multiple locations: if you can’t cleanly separate what it costs to run an individual restaurant from what it costs to run the overall company, you’re flying blind.
Andrew explained this in terms that really clicked: “One of the things that we help our clients do in the early stages of this process is from an accounting standpoint, put the systems and the processes in place to be able to separate the costs of running the business, like the overall company, from the restaurant level P&L.”
This concept—called restaurant level profit, restaurant level EBITDA, or unit-level economics—is critical for understanding which locations are actually profitable and which ones are being propped up by strong performers elsewhere. But more importantly, it’s the language that investors and lenders speak.
“Being able to understand what you’re spending on corporate G&A as a percentage of overall sales versus the margins that are being generated at the restaurant level are things that any capital provider is going to hone in on,” Andrew told me. “If you’re trying to grow and you’re looking for money and funding to be able to do that, you have to be able to communicate this financial information. It’s a must have.”
The solution involves setting up a management company structure where corporate costs are tracked separately and then allocated back to restaurants through a management fee (typically a percentage of sales). This gives you clean unit-level P&Ls that show the true four-wall profitability of each location—and those are the numbers that matter when you’re trying to raise capital to grow.
Mistake #5: Accepting “Garbage In, Garbage Out” as Normal
This might be the most insidious problem of all—and it’s one I saw repeatedly in my own restaurants. You get your end-of-period numbers, and the first thing everyone does is try to figure out why they’re wrong.
Andrew nailed this: “It’s not productive for anyone to have to spend time questioning the data, ‘Why is this not right, where is this coming from?’ The whole focus should be trusting the information. How do we use that information to guide operational decisions to make the store more profitable? That’s where all the focus should be.”
Think about what happens when your data isn’t trustworthy. Your GM in a new market—someone who needs to be in the dining room building relationships with guests, who needs to be the face of your brand in a community that doesn’t know you yet—instead spends six hours trying to prove that the pack sizes are wrong and that’s why food cost looks high. Especially if their bonus is tied to those numbers, they’re doubly incentivized to find errors rather than focus on actually improving operations.
The root cause? Data isn’t being captured correctly at the source. Andrew and his team spend enormous amounts of time on what might seem like minutiae—making sure job codes are set up properly in the POS, ensuring that payroll categories flow correctly into the accounting system, verifying that integrations actually work the way vendors claim they do.
The solution is getting fanatical about data accuracy from day one—which means having someone who actually understands restaurant operations and accounting working together to build systems that produce reliable information automatically.
When You’re Actually Ready to Expand
For single-unit operators looking to open location number two, Andrew’s advice is focused on operations, not systems. “Going from one to two is a very, very big shift operationally. That’s really where I think the focus should be—basic bookkeeping and a basic inventory management system are really all you need at that stage.”
But once you’ve proven you can operate multiple locations and you’re looking at geographic expansion or moving beyond three or four units, that’s when systems become critical. “We’re looking at beyond geographic expansion, more complexity, the bookkeeper or bookkeeping service or whatever function is in place isn’t scalable, doesn’t have the depth. We’re ready to level up and take that next leap. That’s really where we focus and where I think we can help the most.”
The key trigger? When you’re building out a financial plan for the next three to five years and looking to raise capital, that’s the moment to get your systems right. Because investors and lenders are going to dig into your unit-level economics, your corporate G&A, your ability to replicate success—and if your back office can’t clearly demonstrate those things, you’re going to struggle to get funded.
Partner with an Accountant Who Actually Understands Growth
Looking for a restaurant accountant who gets what it takes to scale beyond your home market? Someone who understands that solid systems and accurate data aren’t just nice to have—they’re the difference between successful expansion and expensive mistakes?
At The Restaurant CPAs, we specialize in working with growing restaurant groups to build the financial infrastructure you need before you expand, not after things start breaking. We understand unit-level economics, we know how to structure your back office for multi-market operations, and we speak the language that investors want to hear.
