CG Common Ground | Mike Fields BBQ
What we did and what it producedActive

The work, decision by decision

The work, in the order it ran

  1. Retire every name but one. Known on April 9: the original brand, an earlier variant, an old social account and the new name were all live, and new cities were opening under the mix. The question I asked was not which name looked best. It was what a lender, an investor or the convention center's foodservice operator would see in one search, because every relationship he was building depended on outside parties confirming who they were dealing with. The directive made Mike Fields BBQ the only name. It ordered the old domain redirected to mfbbq.us, the old social account given a last post pointing to the new one and then archived, the other names taken off every page and signature, and the best of the old photos and video moved to the new brand rather than thrown away. The site at mfbbq.us went up under the one name. The record holds the directive and the site; it does not show the redirect, the archive or the signature changes completed. The directive is Attachment B. What it changed: every deliverable after it was built under one name, which is what let the rest of the work run in order at all.
  2. Find what a cooked pound actually costs. Known: his raw cost per pound for every protein. Not yet written down: how much of that weight survives the smoker. A brisket loses about half its weight between the trim and the slicing board, so at a 50 percent yield its true cost per cooked pound is twice the raw price. Pricing off the raw number means pricing off the wrong number. Every protein on the menu got its own yield and its own true cost per cooked pound, and that became the figure every price was checked against. This is standard foodservice costing. What made it useful here is where it ran. Yield-adjusted cost usually lives in a P&L after the fact, protecting margin on sales already made. We ran it on the quote itself, before the sale, where it takes the room to negotiate off the table.
  3. Load the labor, and anchor it to the slowest item. The question was whether to price labor as one blended rate or to tie it to the item that drives the schedule. A blended rate overcharges the fast items and undercharges the slow ones, so the baseline is set by the most labor-heavy protein, his house pastrami, with the other proteins stacked into the same coverage while it smokes. Each role carries its base wage, California employer burden itemized to the line, and a stated margin. I also pushed him to pay himself as labor inside the model, at the pit master's rate, rather than treating his own hours as free. The rates are in Attachment A.
  4. Itemize the overhead, then amortize it per event. Kitchen rent, two insurance lines, fuel, equipment depreciation, permits, health compliance, tax preparation, card processing and disposables each got its own line, and the annual total was spread across the events a month the business expects. My rule on that schedule was the one I gave him in the consultation: an exact figure beats a round one, because the exact figure means somebody found the receipt. Several lines are still round figures, and the standing instruction is that a receipt stands behind each one before an investor sees it.
  5. Give the institutional buyer its own instrument. Known: the convention-center channel was the biggest relationship he had. The question was whether the catering sheet would stretch to fit it, and it would not. A procurement desk that buys at volume treats margin buried inside the food price as the first thing to negotiate out. The method already prices every event quote that way, for a family's party and the convention center alike: food at true cost, margin in the billed labor and a separate production fee scaled by event size. What the institutional instrument adds is the workings a procurement desk audits, the raw weight, the yield, the receipt price and the hours on every line, and procurement terms. The margin inside the pound stays on the by-the-pound price, where a customer buying by weight compares it with other barbecue, not with a yield table. The fee tiers on that quote are round placeholders, set by guest count, and are not yet built from crew hours the way the labor is. The two instruments side by side are Attachment C.
  6. Rebuild his model on the method. His own model, sent April 3, was a clean piece of work. It ran three scenarios by event volume and sized the raise per scenario. The problem was that its costs were percentages of sales, so the model could only ever agree with itself. We rebuilt it on April 10, the day after the consultation, on the pricing method, with event revenue and cost taken from the four layers, overhead from the itemized schedule, the concession channel as its own scenario with its own gross-to-net and its own payment lag, and an opening balance sheet that counts his equipment as the owner's contributed equity. The raise in the rebuilt model is sized for working capital, insurance and marketing, not for equipment he already owns.
  7. Route the raise to the licensed side. On May 12 he sent his own pro forma drawdown and investment overview. I routed both to Prince Capital, the licensed capital side, the next day. On April 30, 2026 Common Ground's engagement was re-scoped to include an equity position. The terms are pending and tied to his fundraising. A Common Ground data room for the business was scaffolded on June 9 and is not public.

What the method produced

The build-up is the figure a reader can check without trusting me. Each bar is a line the client sees on the quote, and each line has its basis written under it in Attachment A. The worked example carries its own price line by line, in the pricing method itself, and that number is not the point. The point is that every dollar in it traces to a receipt, a yield, an hour or a schedule, which is what ends the "why does it cost this much" conversation before it starts. The method says it plainly on its own page: a complete, line-item answer to that question takes most of the pushback out of a quote.

The chart also shows the thing I would fix first. The production fee is the largest single line on the page, larger than the food, and it is the one line still set by a round tier rather than built from cost.

The second chart shows where the margin sits on each way he sells. Sold by the pound, the way the calculator's by-weight option and the planned storefront sell it, the margin lives inside the price of the pound, the distance between the dot and the bar, and the customer never sees the dot. On an event quote the food goes through at the dot, true cost, for a family's party and the convention center alike, and the margin sits in the billed labor and a named fee. The institutional instrument shows its workings as well: raw weight, yield, receipt price and hours on every line, a quote hold, a card charge and a certificate of insurance. Show the dot to a customer buying by weight and every pound becomes a negotiation. Hide the workings from a procurement desk and the desk assumes the worst about everything else on the quote.

What we kept, retired and installed

We kept the logo he wanted to build on, the site domain, the social account carrying the new name, and his taglines. We kept his yields, his raw costs and his sell ranges too, because the method checks them rather than replacing them. The directive retired the original brand name and the earlier variant from everything we built, and ordered the old domain redirected rather than abandoned and the old social account archived; the record does not show those two orders carried out. We installed the one-brand directive, the four-layer pricing method, the institutional quote template, the rebuilt model, and a site at mfbbq.us, with a client-facing quote calculator built for it from the same numbers.

Who put it in and why: I did, in the April 9 consultation and the documents that came out of it the same day, because the raise and the convention-center relationship both depended on outsiders being able to check what they were looking at. What was faulty in the original logic: the business treated its name and its prices as matters of taste, the name that looked best and the price that felt right, when both were claims that a buyer or an investor would test. Why it had to change then: the concession agreement and the first investor conversations were landing in the same month. Every week under several names and soft ranges was a week of first impressions spent on the wrong version of the business.

A range with nothing behind it does not read as flexible to a serious buyer. It reads as a number nobody checked, and he negotiates it down.

In September 2026 he cooked for the Emmys, by his own caption from the event. He sent me photos from it, in his apron in front of the statue and beside a buffet line he had set. The photos and the site images are Attachment D.

What it cost to hold the line, and what I would watch

The consolidation carries a real cost. Reviews and followers under an old name do not all come across when the name is retired, and one name starts out looking smaller than the old names added together. The directive accepted that. The line-item quote cost him something too: the fast, friendly concession at the table. Once every number traces to the same method every client sees, he cannot knock a few dollars off for one client without explaining why the method changed. I would make both trades again, because the business he is building is one that investors and institutional buyers can check.

What I would watch, in the order I would work it:

What it produced

One name, mfbbq.us, carrying the brand everywhere by directive. A pricing method built from the true cost of a cooked pound, with a separate cost-plus-fee instrument for the institutional, convention-center buyer. A client-facing calculator, the brand site, marketing and LinkedIn strategy, a rebuilt financial model and business plan, and the institutional quote template, all under the one name. In September 2026 Mike worked the Emmys.

A slice of the project list

A few related projects.