What Building CRUMBS Taught Kelly About Sustainable Restaurant Growth

In restaurants, growth is rarely about one big breakthrough. More often, it comes from seeing overlooked opportunities before everyone else does—and building the systems to turn them into something repeatable.

For Kelly, CEO and Founder of CRUMBS, that opportunity was catering.

What started as years of conversations with operators searching for more transactions became a full-service growth agency built around helping restaurant brands scale smarter. Along the way, Kelly learned that revenue strategy is only one piece of the puzzle. Sustainable growth comes from infrastructure, ownership, and using technology to give teams more time to focus on what matters most: relationships.

Here’s her story, in her own words.

The Beginning: How It All Started

I spent three years post-COVID talking with operators who just needed more transactions and would do nearly anything to get them. 

The energy in those conversations was real, but so was the frustration. These were operators who had survived something that almost wiped out the entire industry, and they were ready to grow. All I wanted was to help them build stronger businesses without compromising the brands they had worked so hard to create.

I had always loved the local store marketing and catering side of the business. There is something about catering specifically that clicked for me. It is one of the few channels where a single order can represent an entire company, a whole office, a recurring relationship. 

The upside is enormous, and most operators were barely scratching the surface. I knew I could help change that.

The early days were exciting and a little chaotic. I was showing up with energy and ideas, and teams were responding. I also learned quickly that I could not do it alone. The work was too big and too important to carry by myself. 

Three years later, we are still doing the same thing, just with more people behind us, sharing our passion for helping operators generate revenue the right way.

Building the Brand

The early momentum shaped the way CRUMBS would grow.

We led with a simple approach: let us show you. 

We offered free catering consultations so we could demonstrate our skills and give operators easy, fast wins. No long pitches, no complicated proposals. Just results. 

From there, the trust built itself. Those early clients stayed with us because they saw what was possible and they wanted more of it.

We built our team the same way we build client relationships. We see ourselves as an extension of the brands we work with, which means we think and act like operators. We do not show up as vendors. We show up as people who genuinely care whether the business grows.

The milestones that mattered most were client 10, client 20, client 30, client 100. 

Every new team member is a milestone. Every new solution we find and can replicate across partners is what keeps this work exciting. 

We are always testing, always asking what else is possible, always looking for the thing that will make a real difference in someone's business.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

As the business scaled, one lesson became impossible to ignore: strategy only works when the operation is ready for it.

The hardest part of this work is caring deeply about an operator's business when they do not. 

We push hard and aim high, but we are not miracle workers. When leadership is not aligned around growth, when the team is not bought in, when the infrastructure is not there to support what we are building, it is genuinely difficult to move the needle, no matter how good the strategy is.

We also learned that selling catering is actually the easier part. Everyone gets excited about revenue. 

The harder part is building the infrastructure, the team culture, and the execution habits that make that revenue sustainable. 

Most programs fail not because the sales strategy was wrong but because the operation was not ready to handle the volume.

My advice to any operator thinking about growing their catering: get your house in order first. 

Make sure your team understands catering, your systems can support it, and your leadership is behind it. Then go get the business. 

You will be glad you did it in that order.

The Role of Technology in Your Growth

A big part of making that growth sustainable has been choosing the right technology.

We are grateful for tools that help us do more with less, because that is exactly what we aim to deliver for our partners. When they work with us, they get more done without having to add headcount or manage five different systems that do not talk to each other.

The way we approach technology has always been: find the one-stop shop that we can actually manage and analyze in one place. 

We are not interested in tools that create more work. 

Marqii has been a great example of this for us across many of our partners, helping us manage presence and data in a way that is efficient and clear.

As AI has evolved, it has opened up even more. 

We are using it to build content faster, create training resources, and help operators communicate better with their catering clients. 

The goal is always the same: give operators back time so they can focus on the work that actually requires a human being.

Where CRUMBS Is Today

Today, that philosophy has expanded far beyond catering.

CRUMBS is a full-service agency for restaurant operators. It is so much more than catering or third-party delivery. We support our partners in whatever makes sense for their business, whether that is technology, team development, systems, or all three at once. 

Every partner is different, and we like it that way.

What I am most proud of is the reaction we get when something works. An email that says "OMG we hit a record this month" or "YES we finally got that account" never gets old. 

Watching an operator go from uncertain about catering to fully committed because they saw real results—that is why we do this. Their excitement is the fuel that keeps us going.

Our vision keeps pushing forward. 

The question we always come back to is: how do we do more for our partners, how do we make their lives easier, and how do we keep those registers moving? 

That question does not have a final answer. It just keeps getting better.

What's Next

Looking ahead, Kelly sees one of the biggest opportunities in helping operators build more ownership into their growth channels.

Right now, I am focused on finding simpler, smarter solutions for restaurants and making sure operators are not overly dependent on platforms they do not own or control. 

That independence matters. 

When your entire catering business runs through one channel you did not build, you are one policy change away from starting over.

What excites me most is that the industry is finally prioritizing catering and investing in real solutions around it. Conferences are talking about it, platforms are building for it, and operators are asking better questions. 

It has always been one of the strongest growth channels available, and it is great to see the rest of the industry catch up to what we have known for years.

There is also a lot of work still to do around franchises and multi-unit operators. That is where the biggest opportunity sits right now. The scale is there. The appetite is there. We just have to keep building the systems that make it work.

Final Thoughts

At the center of it all is something Kelly believes operators often overlook: they have more control than they think.

You are in control of how your restaurant shows up in your community. 

That might sound simple, but most operators underestimate it. 

The way you respond to a catering inquiry, the follow-up you send after an order, the relationship you build with that office manager or event coordinator, all of it is in your hands. Owning that is what separates the restaurants people talk about from the ones people forget.

When you lean into the customers who are already choosing to spend money with your brand, you stop chasing transactions and start building something real. 

One catering order can turn into a weekly order, a company-wide account, and a client who sends referrals without you ever asking. That is the compounding effect of treating every order like the beginning of a relationship.

Technology is here to help us do more with less. It is not here to replace the human side of this business. Use it. Let it save you time and sharpen your systems. But never let it be the reason a client feels like just another order in the queue.

Author: Kelly Grogan

About CRUMBS

CRUMBS is a revenue growth platform helping restaurant operators build intentional systems around every off-premise and community revenue channel, including catering, group dining, fundraising, local store marketing, and third-party delivery. Founded on the belief that most restaurants know the opportunity but lack the structure to capture it, CRUMBS focuses on operational simplicity, cross-departmental alignment, and relationship-driven growth. We work with independent operators, franchisees, and emerging chains to turn scattered revenue efforts into repeatable programs that run in the real world, during real service, with real teams.