Opening your second location: a setup checklist

Do not build the second menu from scratch. Start from your existing master catalog and clone it, so every item, modifier and photo carries over exactly. Then set per-branch overrides only where site two genuinely differs — a local price, an item the second kitchen does not run, a dish tied to that neighbourhood. Everything else stays governed by one source of truth, so a price change lands in both places at once. A real local difference should be a deliberate exception you can see, not an accident a customer finds first. This is what catalog management is built to do.

Decide who at each site can see and change what — before opening, not after the first mistake. At one location everyone could do everything because everyone was you or trusted by you directly. At two, "everyone edits everything" is how a shift lead discounts the wrong branch's whole day or edits hours in the site they are not standing in. Give the site-two manager their branch, keep head-office controls — brand, core pricing, compliance — above what anyone below can override by accident. The point is not distrust; it is making the safe action the easy one.

Agree, on paper, what is standardised and what a local manager gets to decide. Recipes, portion sizes, core pricing and brand standards stay fixed — that is what makes two sites feel like one restaurant instead of two that share a name. But a good local manager needs room: a day-part promo, a weekend special, a staffing call. Write down which lever is theirs and which is yours. Get this wrong in one direction and every site drifts; get it wrong in the other and consistency curdles into rigidity that drives good managers out.

Turn on branch-level P&L before the doors open, not at the first month-end. One P&L is a spreadsheet you understand; two, each mixing dine-in, takeaway and several marketplaces at different take rates, is an archaeology dig — and the dangerous outcome is not a bad number but a late one, found three weeks after you could have acted. Set up a side-by-side branch comparison so you can actually see which site is working: same metrics, same period, next to each other. When each location's real contribution is visible weekly, a struggling branch is a decision, not a surprise. This is what analytics is for.

Two calls to make before go-live. First, hardware: run dojofood on your own tablets and phones (bring-your-own-device) or on provisioned units — decide early so the floor is not fighting a login at 7pm on opening night. Second, staff onboarding. Build it once — the walk-through, the practice shift, the channel switch-on in sequence rather than all at once — and reuse it at every site, instead of reinventing training per opening. The goal is that site two's first week looks like a rehearsal you have run before, not site one's chaos again.