The RANGE Framework, by Jon Peck, founder of RANGE Hospitality Advisory.Recognize: read the operation before anyone fixes it.

Every operator arrives with an explanation of what is wrong. Sometimes it is right. More often it is a symptom, or a theory that is easier to live with than what sits under it. Recognize asks one question before any work is scoped: what is wrong under the story the business tells about itself?

The step exists because the fix that matches a symptom is always closer to hand than the fix that matches the cause. In RANGE’s own example, a labor line running two points hot for three straight periods looked like a staffing problem. The cause was a prep system nobody had written down: components built to order in the middle of the rush, every ticket stretched, the closers kept late, and overtime that should never have existed. Cutting hours would have hit the number and left the cause running.

Recognize takes two readings, separately, and only then lays them side by side.

• The numbers. The P&L read period against period and unit by unit, never as one summary. Prime cost, labor against sales by daypart, and the lines that moved when nothing on the menu or the calendar explains it.
• The operation in service. A walk through service at more than one unit, at the hours that carry the week: the expo station at its peak, and what the schedule called for set against what the shift needed.
• What the operator knows. The things leadership is sure of that no report shows, asked for on their own, before anyone looks at the numbers together.

The two readings rarely match, and the gap between them is usually where the problem is. A full dining room is the hardest place to see it, because volume covers for a lot of what is broken underneath.

Recognize runs on questions that cannot be answered in the abstract. The useful ones force a specific answer, because a specific answer is hard to rehearse.

The answer comes back as a station, a person, a wait, or a manager who will be behind by eight o’clock. That is the step working: what the operator already knows and has not yet said out loud.

Without Recognize, the four steps after it run on the story the business arrived with. Leadership agrees on that story, the plan narrows around it, systems get built for it and managers get trained to it. Each of those feels like progress while it happens.

The most expensive version is the one that looks reasonable. A group asks for a training program, and the training gets delivered, when the need was decision rights nobody had defined. Delivering what was asked for is faster and easier to scope. It is worth a fraction of delivering what was needed.

A diagnosis in writing: what is wrong, where it starts and what it is costing. It is not a list of everything that could be better. It is one cause, named plainly enough that ownership and operations can read it together and argue with it before anyone spends money on a fix.