Some people dream about opening a restaurant. Robert and Lori Black have built a unique place for themselves by helping would-be business owners answer one question: Will it actually work? While customers may be familiar with the couple’s successful cadre of Edmond businesses, they may not rea lize that one power couple is behind Evoke, Twisted Tree Baking Company, Bluebird Books and La Loba. Certainly, most don’t know there is another business under the SpringBoard shingle: a consulting group helping entrepreneurs navigate the realities of hospitality. Robert and Lori Black For many clients, the reality check starts with a pro forma, a financial projection that estimates a business’s future revenue, expenses and profitability to determine whether the concept is likely to succeed. Robert Black, whose background includes years of restaurant leadership—most notably as vice president of operations for local hospitality powerhouse A Good Egg Dining Group—before moving on to owning and operating his own concepts, specializes in translating ideas into spreadsheets: projections accounting for labor, food costs, occupancy, margins and every expense hiding behind the excitement of a new concept. The goal is simple: determine whether an idea works on paper before someone signs a lease. “Everybody has a great idea,” Black said. “But the hospitality industry and restaurants are such a different animal.” Sometimes that process ends with a launch; sometimes it ends in stark black-and-white—and red. If the numbers don’t make sense, the business is unlikely to find a foothold. The consulting side of SpringBoard has worked with restaurants, hotels, coffee concepts, country clubs, bars and food trucks looking to expand successful businesses. Some clients arrive with dreams of opening their first concept. Others already have momentum and simply need help building systems, refining operations or preparing for growth. And occasionally, clients discover they should walk away. Black said those moments can be among the most valuable outcomes. La Loba “The people that have hired someone to help them take a good look at it and said, ‘This is too risky and too scary and it’s not for me’—those are the smart ones,” he said. The math can be sobering. According to the National Restaurant Association, average food-service profit margins hover around 3.8%. In practical terms, every dollar coming in may only generate a few cents in profit. A single miscalculation can have outsized consequences. For small independent operators—many working with limited capital and plenty of optimism—the margin for error is even smaller. “One thing goes wrong and you’re out of money,” Black said. “Then the first thing you cut is labor, and then your service goes down, and it becomes this self-defeating cycle.” While SpringBoard started as consulting, ownership happened almost accidentally. Lori Black, whose background began in nonprofit leadership and fundraising, said the couple originally had no plans to operate restaurants themselves. In fact, they had a rule: “We’ll never own a restaurant,” she recalled. Then came Evoke. The Blacks bought the popular coffee shop in 2019 from friends. A few months later came COVID-19, and the couple found themselves not advising hospitality operators but becoming operators themselves. Lori became a barista as Robert moved into the kitchen, and their children pitched in. Instead of discussing operational challenges with clients, they lived them in real time, an experience that fundamentally shifted SpringBoard. Today, Lori said the consulting work carries a perspective many advisors lack because they aren’t actively operating businesses themselves. “We’re business owners. We’re doing it every day too,” she said. “When he’s building a pro forma, he knows exactly what’s going on in the market because we’re living it.” The company’s collection of businesses has expanded less through a formal strategic plan and more through opportunity. Twisted Tree Baking Company helped fill a niche for artisan baking, both on the retail and wholesale side. Bluebird Books is as much a community third place as it is a bookstore. La Loba emerged after a completely different concept stalled when an unexpected opportunity surfaced. The Blacks often describe these moments using a metaphor borrowed from the book Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey: opportunities arriving as “green lights” instead of carefully engineered plans. That philosophy has helped reshape a stretch of downtown Edmond. On any given Saturday, customers move among sipping coffee, selecting pastries, browsing books and tucking into lunch as the owners move through the same spaces. That presence, Robert argued, matters more than many operators realize. “The best restaurants and food-service businesses are owner-operated, where you can see the owner on the floor,” he said. For all the forecasting, spreadsheets and business modeling SpringBoard does, Lori said hospitality still comes down to something much simpler. People want to feel known, as one of their regulars recently explained. “I could go anywhere for a cheaper cup of coffee,” he told them, “but I feel like a VIP every morning.” When it comes to building a successful restaurant, the most important element is the least quantifiable. The post SpringBoard Effect appeared first on Oklahoma Gazette. ...read more read less