How I Built the Operations Review Cycle That Runs 200+ Restaurants

In 2024, Guzman y Gomez went public on the ASX. By that point, the Operations Review Cycle I'd built was already governing how every franchisee in the network gets assessed, coached, and approved for expansion. It's still running today across 200+ locations.

I'm not writing this to take a victory lap. I'm writing it because most operations frameworks in QSR are either too rigid to be useful or too vague to drive decisions. The one I built sits in the middle, and I think the principles behind it apply to anyone managing a multi-site business.

When I started as Franchise State Manager at GYG, there was no standardised system for answering the three questions that matter most in franchise operations: Is this franchisee performing well enough? What specifically do they need to improve? Should they be approved to open more locations?

Everyone had opinions. Nobody had a framework. Decisions were inconsistent. A franchisee in Brisbane might get the green light on expansion while a similar performer in Townsville got told to wait — not because of data, but because of who was doing the assessing.

The Operations Review Cycle is a repeating rhythm of assessment, coaching, and decision-making tied directly to KPIs. Every franchisee gets reviewed on a fixed cadence against a scorecard that covers food quality, speed of service, customer experience, labour management, and P&L health. The scores aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet — they directly feed into a tiered system that determines what level of support that franchisee receives and whether they're eligible to expand.

The key design decisions that made it work:

KPIs had to be observable, not self-reported. If a metric relied on the franchisee telling me how they were doing, it was useless. Every KPI in the framework is either system-generated or verified during a site visit.

Coaching had to be tied to the data, not separated from it. The review and the coaching conversation happen in the same cycle. You don't get assessed in January and coached in March. The assessment IS the coaching tool.

Expansion decisions had to be earned, not lobbied for. Before this framework, franchisees who wanted to open a second or third location would essentially pitch for it. Now, the data tells us who's ready. That removed a huge amount of politics from the process.

If I were building this from scratch today, I'd automate more of the data collection. When I first built it, I was pulling numbers manually from multiple systems and consolidating them into review documents. That worked at the scale we had, but it doesn't scale elegantly to a network that's now north of 200 locations.

I'd also build in more leading indicators. The original framework was heavily weighted toward lagging metrics — P&L results, customer complaints, audit scores. These tell you what happened. I've since become more interested in metrics that tell you what's about to happen: trend lines on speed of service, staff turnover patterns, order accuracy streaks.

The principle behind the Operations Review Cycle isn't specific to restaurants. Any business that operates across multiple locations or through franchisees needs a system that connects performance data to coaching to expansion decisions in a single loop.

I've seen businesses try to solve this with dashboards alone. Dashboards show you data. They don't tell you what to do with it or force a decision. The difference between a dashboard and an operations framework is that the framework has a decision point baked in — at the end of every cycle, something happens.

That's the part most people skip. And it's the part that matters most.