Four brands, six rooms,
one growth system.

HSU Hospitality is four restaurant brands across six locations in Georgia, built by Anita and Howard Hsu over more than a decade. Sweet Auburn Barbecue started inside the Municipal Market and has now spent eleven years on North Highland, with a second room at Henry Town Center in McDonough. Gezzo's West Coast Burritos runs fast casual in Locust Grove and McDonough. Tio Lucho's is chef-driven Peruvian-American in Poncey-Highland. Lazy Betty holds a Michelin star in Midtown.

Four brands that share nothing but an owner and a standard. A woman- and minority-owned group that has built a Michelin-starred room and an eleven-year neighborhood institution in the same city, at the same time. That is not a marketing problem waiting to be solved. It is a portfolio with more credibility than reach.

Our audit of Sweet Auburn Barbecue's digital presence, dated August 21, 2026, scored the brand 28 out of 45 — Mid Maturity, at the top of the band. Branding, social, reviews and revenue architecture all scored 4 out of 5. The three that did not were analytics, paid media and the website: 2 out of 5 each.

That split is the whole story. The brand is strong, the content is consistent, the reputation is earned. What is missing is the layer underneath that turns all of it into traffic you can count.

Three findings, each verifiable in about five minutes:

The Google Analytics property on the site is receiving a placeholder measurement ID — the example number that ships in the documentation. There is a Google Tag Manager container installed and even a server-side container running on Stape, so someone built the plumbing. It was never connected. No website traffic has been reaching the analytics property.

On the day of the audit there were four active Meta ads. All four promoted McDonough events — the car show, bike night, a watch party. Not one supported the Highland Avenue flagship. Nothing promoted ordering, catering, private events or reservations anywhere.

That is not a room at its ceiling. That is a room that has never had a single acquisition tool aimed at it. It is the reason we are comfortable putting a +15% target on a unit that already performs — the headroom is not a theory, it is visible in the audit.

In February you told us you were spending but could not tell whether it was working. Here is the mechanical answer: it was not being measured. That is the first thing we fix, in week one, before we ask you to judge anything else we do.

Sweet Auburn Barbecue already ranks first on Google for barbecue in Poncey-Highland. The hard part of local search — the part that takes years and cannot be bought — is done. What sits behind that ranking is a website that contributes almost nothing to discoverability. There is no menu page. Your navigation runs About, Catering, Events, Jobs, Locations, McDonough, Recipes, Shop and Social, and the menus themselves are six PDF files served under machine-generated names like 0337ff_3fca5d11c284468499190a4e24b38615.pdf. The main one weighs 1.9 MB. The homepage carries no H1 at all.

Meanwhile your guests are doing the keyword research for you, in public, for free. In Google reviews they name grits 96 times, pimento cheese wontons 85, brussels sprouts 53, and brisket egg rolls 39 — 273 dish-level mentions of demand that your own site cannot be found for. Someone in Atlanta searching for those dishes tonight is being handed to a competitor.

You outrank both on quality and hold a third of the leader's volume. Rating is the hard part and you already won it. Volume is the mechanical part, and it responds to a structured review-request system at checkout and post-visit — which is exactly what the audit found is not in place.

The pattern repeats across the group. Tio Lucho's pulls guests who drive forty-five minutes from Alpharetta, and the most common reaction from new guests is still that they did not know it was there. Four strong brands, six rooms, and a reach problem — not a product problem.

Six signals, taken directly from the audit's key findings and ordered by how fast each one can move. Every one is externally verifiable — we did not need access to your accounts to find any of it, which also means a competitor could have.

Resto360 is our full-service program: twelve services, one accountable owner, and a single reporting layer that ties activity to revenue. It is not a menu of tactics you assemble — it is one system, and the parts are designed to feed each other.

The part that matters for a group like yours is who built it. Resto Experience was built inside restaurants, not around them. We operate our own restaurant group, and every strategy in this document was tested there first, on our own P&L, before it was ever sold to anyone else. When we tell you that one new concept per month is the right onboarding pace, or that $2,000 in media will not carry a $231,000 room on its own, that is an operator's answer, not a salesperson's.

We match the task list, and then we contract for results above it. One owner, one dashboard, one number to argue about at the end of the month.

Twelve services, delivered as one system. Where our scope differs from what you receive today — in either direction — we say so plainly below rather than letting you find out in month three.

This is not a discount on our fee. It is deliberate, and here is the reasoning. The delivery channel is where we can move money fastest, and most of that money is already yours. Platform commission runs 20–22% of sales through our partnership rate, against a standard 30–32%. Everything else standing between what a guest pays and what lands in your bank account is marketing you are choosing to spend — and that is the part we manage.

We include delivery from day one because it is the line most likely to generate the revenue that pays for the rest of the program. If we are right, the channel funds a meaningful share of your investment. If we are wrong, you paid nothing for it. The two accounts that prove it are in the next section.

We would rather tell you what we do not do than have you discover it together in month three.

Four accounts, chosen because each one answers a specific question this deal raises: can they run a multi-unit group, can they actually move the delivery line, does it hold across several locations at once, and what does the full system do to a single room.

This is the pilot plan for Sweet Auburn Barbecue, Highlands. Ninety days, one location, one number to judge it by. The sequence follows the audit's own priority order — measurement first, because nothing after it is provable until that is fixed, then the website and paid media that scored lowest, then optimization against real data.

What follows is a scenario, not a promise. Growth depends on marketing investment and on operational execution, and both of us have to hold up our end. What we can commit to is the sequence and the measurement.

Our portfolio median is +74% in monthly sales growth — documented across real client engagements, not projected. Results vary by market, concept, and starting point. But the pattern is consistent: restaurants that commit to the full system grow.

A second location of a concept already onboarded does not count as a new concept, because the menu, the brand assets and the creative system are shared. That is why Sweet Auburn McDonough can come online in the same month as Gezzo's.

The sequence: Sweet Auburn Highlands at kickoff → Gezzo's plus Sweet Auburn McDonough → Tio Lucho's → Lazy Betty. Four onboarding months to a fully live portfolio.

How the group number is built

Nothing here is a bundle price pulled out of the air. This is what each concept costs on its own, and what comes off when the portfolio moves together.

* Your standing quote for Tio Lucho's remains $4,500 all-in, exactly as offered. Inside the group program that same location lands at $3,333.

The full portfolio costs less per location than the promotional pilot rate. That is the whole argument for moving from one room to six, and it does not need any rhetoric behind it.

A note on media investment

The $1,000–$2,000 per month you have earmarked will be put to work, and it will produce results: delivery promotions, boosting the organic content that already proves itself, and capturing high-intent search. Those are the three highest-return uses of a small budget, and they are where we will start.

We also want to be straight with you about what that budget can and cannot do. For a location doing $231,000 a month, $2,000 in media is under 1% of sales. The industry range for total marketing investment is 2.5% to 3.5%.

So we want to be equally clear about the condition attached to the target. The +15% is your number, and we are willing to be measured against it — but a target like that is not reachable on content and local search alone. It requires media behind it, in paid social, search and creator partnerships. The $2,000 per month minimum is a condition of the target, not a suggestion. If the media investment is not in place for all three months, the +15% is not a fair measurement of the system and we would rather agree on that now than argue about it on day 90.

This is why our 90-day plan does not lean on paid media alone to deliver the lift. It leans on organic short-form video, local search, the review engine, the guests already sitting in your Toast database, and the delivery channel. Media accelerates those channels; it does not carry them on its own — and without it, they do not get to +15% in ninety days.

Terms

Six things, in order. The first four are ours to run; the last two are one export and one number from your side.