About Tempo
Built By People Who Have Sat On Both Sides Of The Table.
We’ve been operators, financial leaders, marketers, creatives and technology partners, and we’ve seen the same challenge from every side: restaurant owners are asked to solve interconnected business problems with disconnected expertise. Tempo brings operations, finance, technology, marketing and brand to the same table.
Why Tempo
We’re Not An Agency That Learned Restaurants.
We’re restaurant people who built a growth agency.
Tempo grew out of years inside restaurant businesses, and those years kept revealing the same thing: the problems restaurant owners face rarely stay inside one department. A profitability problem may start with operations. A marketing problem may really be a guest-data problem. Expansion exposes weaknesses that were manageable at one location.
Traditional consulting separates those questions. Tempo brings them together — not to sell every discipline to every restaurant, but to understand the business well enough to know which problem actually deserves attention.
Origin
Different Backgrounds. A Shared View Of The Business.
The roots of Tempo came from working together on restaurant businesses where brand, operations and financial performance could not be treated as separate conversations.
Bruce Nelson brought decades of restaurant finance, operations and ownership experience. Dan West brought the perspective of a founder, brand strategist and creative leader who had spent years building businesses and restaurant brands. Their work together reinforced a simple idea: the strongest restaurant businesses are built when the creative and commercial sides of the business move in the same direction.
As the work expanded into financial leadership, Restaurant365, technology, operations and growth strategy, so did the team. Today Tempo works with independent restaurants, multi-unit concept groups and emerging franchises.
What we believe
Better Restaurants Start With Better Businesses.
Growth is a system.
Revenue, margin, operations, people, technology, marketing and leadership affect one another. Sustainable growth happens when the whole gets stronger — not when one metric moves in isolation.
Practitioners make better advisors.
The people advising restaurant operators should understand the realities of doing the work. Tempo is built around people with experience inside the disciplines they advise.
Hospitality and business performance belong together.
Strong economics and strong systems do not compete with hospitality. They create the stability and capacity that let great hospitality thrive.
The people behind Tempo
Built By Practitioners.
Tempo is a team of restaurant operators, financial leaders, strategists, technologists, marketers and creatives. Different backgrounds give us different ways of seeing the business. The shared standard is practical expertise and work that helps operators move forward.
Bruce Nelson
Co-Founder / Restaurant Finance + Operations
Bruce brings more than four decades of restaurant finance, operations and leadership experience to Tempo. His work focuses on helping restaurant owners understand the economics of their business, improve financial visibility and make better operating and growth decisions.
His experience spans restaurant owner, general manager, chef instructor and financial executive, and he has served on the boards of Hospitality Minnesota and the Hospitality Technology Network.
Author of Restaurant Management: The Myth, the Magic, the Math
Dan West
Co-Founder / Brand + Growth
Dan brings a founder’s perspective to brand, marketing, creative strategy and business growth. After founding and leading creative agency Westwerk for more than a decade, his work with restaurant concepts increasingly connected brand development with the operating and commercial realities behind the business.
At Tempo, he focuses on brand strategy, marketing infrastructure, creative, growth and the development of Tempo’s programs and platforms.
Jared Krekelberg
Partner / Operations
Jared brings more than two decades of hospitality operations and systems experience, including leadership across complex multi-unit restaurant organizations. His work connects restaurant systems, operating processes and technology with the realities of how teams actually run the business.
He doesn’t guess why margins are shrinking. He audits the waste, maps the database and locks food costs in place — then aligns C-suite financial goals with the daily reality of kitchen staff.
The broader team
Specialists Around The Table.
Brian Mantone
Fractional CFO
Kristine Manna
Lead Fractional Controller
Ronda Bakos
Fractional Controller
Thomas Beltran
Fractional Controller
Melissa Krekelberg
Fractional Accountant
Alexander Nelson
Data Integrity Specialist
Ramiro Oroya
Support Specialist
Maria Sayles
Office Manager
Join Tempo
Want To Work With Tempo?
We’re building a growing network of restaurant operators, financial leaders, Restaurant365 specialists, technologists, marketers, creatives and advisors. Some work with Tempo every day. Others join us for the clients, projects and problems where their experience is most valuable.
Join our teamBuild a more profitable restaurant
The Restaurant Is Only As Strong As The Business Behind It.
Whether the next challenge is profitability, operations, technology, marketing, expansion or preparing for what comes next, Tempo brings the people and perspective to help you see the business more clearly and move it forward.