From spreadsheet chaos to a clear 16% operating margin in 2 weeks.

Business X is a solo smash-burger operator doing weekly school lunch pop-ups, weekend street fairs, and occasional catering. Open ~14 months when we connected.

Revenue was real ($30k+ across 68 events) but everything was tracked manually across multi-tab Google Sheets. Inventory math was done in their head before every Costco run. Catering leads sat in Gmail for 1-2 days before reply. Worst of all — the ledger told them they were running a $7k net loss.

• Operations dashboard — Pulled from their 2 years of spreadsheets. Revenue / expense / labor / cover KPIs, each clickable for full drill-down. Lane breakdowns showing their highest-margin lane ran at 64%.
• Operating vs. tax-ledger P&L — Showed them their ledger's -$7k loss included ~$11,900 in non-operating items (pass-through sales tax, equipment capex, business meals). Real operating P&L: +$4,875 (16% margin).
• Opportunity Calculator — Lane-aware. Type of event + headcount + price returns a take-it / skip-it verdict with cost breakdown and inventory shopping list — calibrated to their menu mix and the 17% prep buffer they themselves use.
• Inventory tracker — 19 stock items with vendor info from their real purchase history. Real-time deficit alerts before each event.
• Lead-funnel chatbot prototype — Demo of how AI would handle inbound catering inquiries — qualify the lead, check the calendar, auto-quote per their pricing rules, route to inbox with margin pre-calculated.

The biggest moment in the project wasn't software — it was a conversation about how they were reading their own numbers wrong. Strip the non-operating items out of the ledger and the food business runs a healthy 16% operating margin with massive room to grow. They were scaring themselves with their own bookkeeping.

Free working prototype during discovery (~30 hours of build time on me). After they saw value and signed on, $75/month retainer covers hosting, monthly check-ins, bug fixes, and small features. Bigger items get quoted as flat-fee projects starting at $1,500.

Foundation is live. Greenlit the AI chatbot + Google Calendar integration as their first paid project. Evaluating an event-opportunity scraping agent next — AI that finds vendor openings in their radius and pre-fills the applications.