What if the thing you are most proud of in your business is also the thing quietly draining it?
Amanda Signorelli and Nick McMillan took over the Golden Steer in 2019, the oldest steakhouse in Las Vegas, open since 1958. Neither of them came from restaurants. They came from tech, inherited a brand with more history than margin, and had exactly one year to learn the business before COVID shut it down.
In this conversation, we get into why they rebuilt the financial model from scratch instead of fixing the old one, why none of us have any business running their own social media, and the lessons learned growing the brand to new markets.
If you are sitting on a brand people love and numbers that do not work, this one is for you.
To learn more about Golden Steer, visit goldensteer.com.
The Playbook Takeaways
- A beloved brand is not a business model. Amanda and Nick took over the Golden Steer in 2019 — the oldest steakhouse in Las Vegas, open since 1958 — and inherited a brand with far more history than margin. The affection guests had for the room did not show up in the numbers.
- Rebuild the financial model instead of patching it. Rather than repairing the model they inherited, they rebuilt it from scratch, which is the faster path when the underlying assumptions belong to a different era.
- Owners are the wrong people to run their own social media. Both make the case that the job belongs to someone whose whole role it is, not to the operator squeezing it in between shifts.
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About the Author: Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur and the host of the Full Comp podcast. He helps independent operators build more profitable, more durable restaurants — more about Josh or learn with Josh.
