Underwrite
“Tell me if this deal is real.”
Operational and financial diligence for sponsors and lenders. Quality-of-earnings support, red-flag assessment, and 100-day planning, from someone who has run the P&Ls being underwritten.
Operating partner · Foodservice & hospitality
The operator who can also read the numbers and sit on the board.
Joe Essa has run the restaurant companies most advisors only study, as President & CEO of Wolfgang Puck Worldwide and the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, COO of Gordon Ramsay North America, and past Chairman of the National Restaurant Association. He is also a CPA. That combination is why investors bring him in when a business needs to be assessed, fixed, and grown, not just advised.
President & CEO
Wolfgang Puck Worldwide
President & CEO
Thomas Keller Restaurant Group
COO, North America
Gordon Ramsay
Past Chairman
National Restaurant Association
The engagement
Put a proven operator in the seat of a business that needs to grow.
That is the work. Some engagements begin with a diligence question, some with a broken P&L, some with an open board seat. They tend to end in the same place: an operator inside the business, accountable for the result, with an outcome that tracks the investor's.
Fix
“This asset is underperforming.”
Turnarounds, margin recovery, and interim executive leadership for portfolio companies missing plan, including fiduciary and court-appointed roles where independence is required.
Grow
“We own it. Now what?”
Multi-year strategy, unit economics, footprint and format decisions, and ongoing asset management for investors who need senior operating judgment inside the business, not a report on the shelf.
Govern
“We need an operator on this board.”
Board and advisory service for platforms, sponsors, and management teams that want a director who has held the CEO seat and can read the financials without a translator.
Most advisors have never run the business. Most operators have never read a quality-of-earnings report.
The restaurant industry has no shortage of consultants, and no shortage of operators. What it has almost none of is one person who is both, and who has also been trusted with governance and with other people's money under a court's supervision.
That is the whole basis of MKM. Not a methodology. A rare combination of chairs sat in.
- 01
Public-company CEO
Ran global restaurant companies, not engagements. Accountable for the outcome, not the recommendation.
- 02
Certified Public Accountant
Reads the model and walks the kitchen. Sponsors typically hire two people for this.
- 03
Past Chairman, National Restaurant Association
Led the industry's national board. Governance credibility a nominating committee can verify.
- 04
Court-appointed fiduciary
Trusted by a court with an asset in dispute. A different standard than consulting.
Track record
Built, bought, fixed, and grown across every format that matters.
Scale
Global multi-brand operations
Led restaurant companies spanning fine dining, celebrity-licensed, catering, and consumer brands across multiple countries.
Restructuring
Thomas Keller Restaurant Group
Restructured the group's operations and systems, and secured the full slate of federal relief funding across the portfolio through the pandemic.
Origination
Airport F&B: 13 concepts
Won a competitive airport concession program and secured the construction and tenant-improvement financing behind it.
Strategy
Golden Corral Corporation
Leading the long-term strategic growth initiative for the national family-dining chain.
Performance
Gordon Ramsay North America
Improved top- and bottom-line performance while building the operating infrastructure for expansion.
Governance
Boards & fiduciary roles
Past Chairman of the National Restaurant Association; current director across industry and operating boards; court-appointed receiver.
MKM takes on a small number of engagements each year, structured so that the outcome tracks the investor's. That is a deliberate constraint. It is also the reason the work goes deep enough to matter.
Have a deal to underwrite, an asset to fix, or a board seat to fill?
Joe personally reviews every inquiry.