Mountain Ops AI
Mountain Ops AI
For mountain-town restaurants & bars on Toast

I can get your restaurant or bar up to speed with AI.

Not a dashboard you'll never open. Not a $50,000 platform. Practical, fixed-fee builds that cut food cost, forecast a powder-day rush before it hits, answer the phone during service, and rebuild your seasonal crew in a week instead of a month.

Fixed-fee projects. No retainers, no lock-in, no monthly software you didn't ask for.

26%of restaurant operators use any AI tool at allNRA State of the Industry 2026
32.4%average full-service food cost — one point is real moneyNRA 2026
36.5%median labor cost vs. 34.2% for profitable operators2025 industry median
70%of operators can't fill hourly roles — worse above 8,000 ftIndustry survey, 2026
Sound familiar?

You're already paying for tools you've never turned on.

Toast has shipped an enormous amount of AI in the last year — an assistant that takes action, invoice scanning, demand forecasting, auto payroll, a marketing agent. Most operators are using two of the six things on their bill. Meanwhile the expensive problems live in the gaps between systems, where no POS will ever reach.

  • Vendor prices crept 6% and nobody noticed. The invoices are PDFs in an inbox. Nobody enters them.
  • You overstaffed a dead Tuesday and got crushed Saturday. Your POS forecast doesn't know the back bowls opened.
  • The phone rings all through service. Every missed call is a table or a takeout order gone.
  • You rebuild your entire staff twice a year. Then train them from scratch, in a compressed window.
  • Your P&L shows up six weeks late. By then the quarter you'd want to fix is already gone.
  • Nobody answers Google reviews. In a resort town that's most of your top-of-funnel.
  • Catering inquiries sit in email for three days. They never touch the POS, so nothing chases them.
  • May terrifies you every single year. And you've never modeled a bad snow season on paper.
How I'm different

I sell points of prime cost, not software.

I don't resell a platform and I don't take a cut of your vendors. I start by telling you what you're already paying for — free — and then build only the things that pay for themselves fast enough that you'd notice.

Audit before I sell

Ninety minutes in your Toast back office against a ten-point checklist. You get a written findings memo whether or not you hire me. Most operators find something on it worth more than my first project.

Fixed fee, fast delivery

Every build is a quoted price and a date. Most ship in one to three weeks. If a project won't clear its own cost inside a season, I'll tell you not to buy it.

You own everything

Each build ships with a plain-English runbook and a saved workflow you can run yourself. No retainer, no hostage situation. If you never call me again, it still works.

The menu

What I build.

Pick one. Start small — most people begin with the invoice pipeline or the demand model, see it work, and come back for the rest.

Toast AI AuditFree

Ninety minutes in your back office. What's enabled, what you're paying for and not using, and a ranked list of the three biggest opportunities with dollar figures attached.

$01 week
Menu Margin Teardown

Your product mix crossed with true plate cost. Every item sorted into stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs, with ten specific repricing moves and three items to cut.

$4501 week
Vendor Negotiation Kit

Spend analysis across every invoice, price benchmarking against what you should be paying, and drafted negotiation emails ready to send.

$6001 week
Review Response Engine

A brand-voice profile so AI replies sound like you and not a chatbot, the tool configured, escalation rules for the ones that need a human, and a weekly sentiment digest with the operational fix behind each complaint.

$7001–2 weeks
AI Phone Agent Setup

I pick the right vendor, train it on your actual menu, test it against real call scenarios, write the staff handoff protocol, and review performance after 30 days. Vendor fees passed through at cost.

$8501–2 weeks
Schedule Prep Brief

Every Thursday morning: last week's labor against sales by daypart, next week's forecast, and recommended shift counts — before the schedule gets written.

$9501–2 weeks
Marketing Content Engine

Ninety days of social and email content built from your real sales data and the local event calendar, plus the reusable workflow so you can regenerate it yourself each quarter.

$1,1002 weeks
Nightly Close Recap

An automated daily digest to you and your GM: sales against the same day last week, labor percentage, top and bottom items, and anything anomalous — waiting for you when you get home.

$1,2002 weeks
Catering & Events DeskSki town

Watches for inquiries, drafts the quote and proposal, holds the calendar slot, and chases the deposit. Corporate retreats and buyouts never touch your POS — so nothing currently chases them.

$1,3002 weeks
Seasonal Hiring MachineSki town

Job posts that lead with housing and a pass, a screening rubric, candidate replies drafted within the hour, onboarding packets generated per hire, a J-1/H-2B document tracker, and the August return-offer campaign to last season's crew.

$1,4002–3 weeks
Powder Day Demand ModelFlagship

A seven-day cover forecast that fuses snow totals and forecast, lift and terrain status, road conditions, the local event calendar and your own sales history. Staffing and prep recommendations, delivered before you write the schedule.

$1,5002–3 weeks
Training & Onboarding PackSki town

Menu study guides, allergen matrix, beverage cheat sheets, upsell scripts, quizzes and a certification tracker — generated from your actual POS menu, in English and Spanish. New server floor-ready in three days instead of ten.

$1,6002–3 weeks
Prime Cost Dashboard

A live page on your phone. Food cost, labor and prime cost against target, with variance flags. Opens fresh every time — no login, no laptop, no spreadsheet.

$1,8002–3 weeks
SOP Library

Everything living in your head, written down once. Interviews plus your shift notes converted into a structured manual, so the next GM doesn't start from zero.

$1,9003 weeks
Invoice-to-Food-Cost PipelineBest ROI

Vendor PDFs become structured line-item data. Every price compared against your last three deliveries. Creep flagged weekly, with the vendor email already drafted. This is where the money usually is.

$2,2003 weeks
Toast API Enablement

Purchase and provision standard API access, set up credentials, and build the live read pipeline. Upgrades the reporting builds above from daily exports to same-hour data.

$2,8003 weeks
Why a mountain town is different

Your restaurant is actually two restaurants, and both of them are hard.

A generic consultant will hand you the same playbook they'd hand a strip-mall taqueria in Phoenix. That playbook has no idea what happens to your covers when fourteen inches fall overnight, or what May does to your bank account.

The powder-day swing

Your POS forecast is built on last Tuesday. It doesn't know the back bowls opened, the pass is closed, or that it's Presidents' week. I fuse snow, terrain status, road conditions and the event calendar into your own sales history so the forecast reflects the mountain, not just the calendar.

Two full staff turnovers a year

You hire against a housing crisis and an uncertain J-1 pipeline, then train everyone in a compressed window — twice. Every hour of that cycle you automate compounds across both seasons. Response speed to applicants is the recruiting strategy here.

The shoulder season nobody plans for

April through June is the hardest marketing and cash problem you have, and it arrives on schedule every year. Seasonal cash flow model, menu contraction plan, skeleton staffing, and a locals program that keeps the lights on.

The bad snow year

Resort towns cut hours when the snow doesn't come — it's happened recently in Vail, Steamboat and Breckenridge. At 70% of forecast skier visits, what happens to your P&L and what are the three levers, in order? Almost no operator has this written down.

Bundles

Or take the whole thing at once.

Same fixed-fee logic, better price than buying the pieces separately. Quoted for a single location doing $1M–$2M; add roughly 30–50% for two or three rooms.

Starter

Prove it works before you spend real money.

$1,450 one-time
  • Free Toast AI Audit
  • Menu Margin Teardown
  • Nightly Close Recap
  • Runbook + saved workflows
  • 30-day check-in
Start here
Most operators pick this

Seasonal Command Center

Built for a two-season mountain business.

$5,400 one-time
  • Powder Day Demand Model
  • Seasonal Hiring Machine
  • Training & Onboarding Pack (EN/ES)
  • Winter + summer playbooks
  • Shoulder-season contraction plan
  • Two training sessions
Book a call

Full Back Office

Every number that matters, handled.

$6,500 one-time
  • Invoice-to-Food-Cost Pipeline
  • Prime Cost Dashboard
  • Nightly Close Recap
  • Schedule Prep Brief
  • Powder Day Demand Model
  • Custom workflow library
Book a call

Two projects that resell themselves on a calendar rather than a subscription: Season Turn ($900, each October and May — refresh forecasts, retrain hiring, update menus and training) and Quarterly Tune-Up ($450 — re-fit the models, add one new workflow). Buy them when you want them. Never automatic.

Do the math yourself

What one point of prime cost is worth to you.

Drag the sliders. This is the entire argument — if a build can't clear its own cost inside a season, don't buy it.

$41,700

estimated annual recovery

Food cost
$18,000
Labor cost
$12,000
Recovered orders
$11,700
Payback on a $2,200 build
3 weeks

Illustrative only, using your inputs. Real projections come from your actual Toast data during the audit — and I'd rather show you a smaller honest number than a big invented one.

How it works

Four steps. No surprises.

  1. The free audit

    Ninety minutes together in your Toast back office, working a ten-point checklist. I'll tell you exactly what's enabled, what you're paying for and not using, and what your monthly Toast bill actually totals line by line. Most owners can't answer that last one.

    90 minutes · free · no obligation
  2. A findings memo with numbers

    You get it in writing whether or not you hire me: the three biggest opportunities, ranked, with dollar estimates from your own data. If the honest answer is “you don't need me yet,” that's what the memo says.

    Within 3 business days
  3. Pick one build

    Fixed price, fixed date, scoped in writing before anything starts. I'll steer you toward the cheapest thing that works rather than the biggest thing you'd tolerate. Most people start under $1,500.

    1–3 weeks to ship
  4. Handover and a 30-day check-in

    A plain-English runbook, saved workflows you can run yourself, and a walkthrough with whoever will actually use it. Then I come back in a month — free — to see whether it did what I said it would.

    Included
Straight answers

Questions you should be asking.

Is this going to replace my staff?

No, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who pitched it that way. Everything here targets work nobody wants to do anyway — entering invoices, building schedules by hand, retyping training material every November, answering the same phone question forty times a night. Your problem isn't too many people. It's that you can't find enough of them.

Do I need to buy anything else?

Usually not. Most builds run on Toast report exports you already have. A few work better with Toast's paid API access, and the phone agent needs a vendor subscription — I'll tell you the real monthly cost before you commit and pass it through at cost. I don't take vendor commissions, which is why I'll happily tell you when the answer is a $12/month tool instead of me.

Can this change things inside Toast automatically?

Mostly no, and this is the honest constraint everyone else glosses over. Toast's self-service API tier is read-only — every scope it offers is a read scope. So anything that reads Toast and acts elsewhere is buildable today; anything that writes back into Toast requires a partner or custom integration, which is a much bigger project with Toast's own team involved. I'll never quote you something that depends on write access I can't get.

What about my data and my logins?

Per-client credential vaults, documented access scope, and a written offboarding procedure so access is revoked when we're done. Nothing gets connected without you knowing what it reaches. Anything touching payroll, tax or immigration paperwork produces a checklist for your CPA or attorney to sign off on — I don't give legal, tax or employment advice, and I say so in the contract.

How fast is “fast”?

Most single builds ship in one to three weeks. The audit is 90 minutes and the memo lands within three business days. Bundles run four to six weeks. If I can't hit a date I'll tell you before you sign, not after.

What if it doesn't work?

The 30-day check-in exists precisely for that. If a build isn't doing what I said it would, I fix it or I refund it. In a town this size a bad reference costs me far more than a refund does.

I'm not on Toast. Can you still help?

Yes. Toast is where I'm deepest, and most of the mountain-town operators I work with are on it, but Square and Clover actually allow more automation than Toast does. The analysis, hiring, training, marketing and cash-flow work is POS-agnostic anyway.

Do I have to sign up for something monthly?

No. Every project is one-time and fixed-fee. There are two things I offer on a calendar — the Season Turn in October and May, and a quarterly tune-up — but you buy them when you want them. Nothing auto-renews, ever.

Start here

Ninety minutes. Free. Worst case you learn what your Toast bill actually pays for.

Tell me the name of your place and roughly what you do in a year. I'll come back with a time and the ten questions I'll be asking.

I take on a limited number of builds per season so each one ships on time.