A website request, and a business with too many names
Mike Fields is a pitmaster. He came up at Franklin Barbecue in Austin and started his own catering and events business in 2025, with Austin as home base, Los Angeles as the growth market and Phoenix as the place we first talked about a restaurant. I met the business before it had one name. On September 28, 2025 a LÏEF Development proposal for a turnkey Phoenix restaurant, in four phases, went to him under the brand he was using then. It covered a brand and investor package, a capital raise, a site and build-out, and a launch. The record does not show it executed. The engagement that did run began through Common Ground in April 2026.
On April 3 he sent me his executive summary and financial model. On April 9 we sat down for the founding consultation, and he told me what he needed. He needed a website, and he needed better prices. Both requests were honest, and neither was the problem.
The first thing I did was search for him the way an investor would. What came back was three websites and, when I asked him to count, several versions of the name in use at once. There was the original brand, an earlier variant, a separate social account, and a newer name that was the one he actually wanted to build. Each had some content, some followers, some reviews. None had been retired.
The second thing was his pricing. He quoted catering jobs as broad ranges per person or per pound, and clients pushed on every one. He read that as a price problem. It was a basis problem: nothing on the sheet showed where any number came from, so every number was open.
The third thing was the buyer he had just signed. That same April 9 he had a subcontractor concession agreement with the foodservice operator of a major Los Angeles convention center. That is a different buyer from the family booking a backyard party. A convention center's foodservice operator buys production capacity, knows what a pound of brisket costs, and reads a quote the way a procurement desk does. His one price sheet was being asked to serve both.
And behind all three sat a raise. Everything we built was going to be read by people deciding whether to put money into a business that, on a search, could not settle on its own name.
One name before one page, and a price built from the cooked pound
The obvious move was to build the site he asked for, under the name he liked best, and to tighten the price ranges. I would have delivered something handsome and fixed nothing. A good site under a fragmented brand makes the fragmentation easier to find. A tighter range with nothing behind it is still a range with nothing behind it.
So I held the website. The first deliverable was a directive that settled the business on one name everywhere, ordered the others retired on a deadline, and named the one logo, the one site, the one social account and the one inbox that would carry everything after. Only then did the site, the price sheet and the investor material get built, all under the same name for the first time.
On pricing, I changed the question from what the price should be to what the price is made of. That is an estimator's habit. In my years as a general contractor, a number without its takeoff behind it got shopped. A number with its takeoff behind it got argued line by line, and a line is an argument the seller can win, because the inputs are facts. So the method starts from the true cost of a cooked pound, adds labor at loaded rates, adds an itemized share of overhead, and states the fee and the margin as their own lines. The quote stops being an opinion and becomes arithmetic a client can check.
How I came at this one
The first question was what an investor finds when he searches the name, and the answer was several businesses, and you can only underwrite what you can verify. The second was what a pound of barbecue actually costs once it comes off the smoker, because a buyer stops arguing with a price once he can see what it is made of (should-cost, the way a procurement desk reads a quote). The third was who is buying: a family booking a party and a foodservice operator buying production are different buyers, so they get different instruments.