You're Growing. We Can Help.
IMPEL Advisors is a strategy consultancy serving emerging growth companies in the hospitality space. Looking to professionalize and scale your business?
You're Growing. We Can Help.
IMPEL Advisors is a strategy consultancy serving emerging growth companies in the hospitality space. Looking to professionalize and scale your business?
HOSPITALITY OPERATIONS
Leverage our decades of experience running high volume restaurants to streamline and accelerate your business.
Service Standards
SERVICE STANDARDS
Great service is backed by countless hours of preparation and ironclad systems behind
the curtain. We will analyze your brand and then develop detailed training modules, mentor programs, and more, balancing your desired service style with technical proficiency.
Concept Design
CONCEPT DESIGN
From 12-table quick service to 60+ table bar & grills, we have experience working with pizza, coffee kiosks, bars, full-service fine-dining, and everything in between. Let us partner with you to operationalize your ideas.
Day-to-Day Systems
DAY-TO-DAY SYSTEMS
From supply chain, ordering, and inventory levels to cleanliness, organization, and more, IMPEL will share our simple but powerful solutions that will maximize efficiency and consistency without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Culinary Operations
CULINARY OPERATIONS
The finest kitchen operations prioritize consistency, speed, care, and cleanliness. You will be amazed by how simple processes and smarter kitchen design can amp your workflow, prepare your staff to sail through health department visits, and raise the levels of pride among your kitchen teams.
New Store Openings
NEW STORE OPENINGS
As restaurant executives, we have headed up the launch of more than a dozen high volume restaurants. We can partner with you to get your culture launched properly and develop the systems you’ll need for a new opening.
Competitive Research
COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
Competitive research is elusive. It takes a dogged, creative approach. We can help you sort through the noise by finding benchmarks for compensation, market comps, and more.
PEOPLE STRATEGY
Hospitality is arguably the most talent-centric industry in the world. We can help you implement strategies for finding, developing, and advancing pre-eminent talent across all levels.
Recruiting Services
RECRUITING SERVICES
We’re not a traditional search firm – but we can help with your hiring needs while teaching you how to build a scalable, cost-efficient hiring function in-house, right where it belongs.
Job Design
JOB DESIGN
Intelligent, flexible job descriptions provide clarity for the hiring and development functions, give legal protection for the firm, and act as the building blocks for your future organizational design.
Interview Coaching
INTERVIEW COACHING
Attracting great people is the shared responsibility of everyone in every department, not just HR. We teach a behavioral interviewing approach across your firm, in order to optimize interviewers' time, find better candidates, stay in legal bounds, and build diverse teams of A players.
Culture Building
CULTURE BUILDING
Honing your product’s brand identity is only half the job: how are you shaping your firm itself as an attractive place to grow a career, both internally and in the marketplace for talent?
Best-In-Class Training
BEST-IN-CLASS TRAINING
Consistent productivity stems from a daily culture of moment-to-moment feedback and shared excitement over your brand’s ideals. Rigorous training is not just there to launch your staff, it needs to continually boost them day by day. We’ll show you how.
People Systems
PEOPLE SYSTEMS
Advice and planning on topics including Benefits, Wellness, Safety, Vacation + Leave, Hotline Management, FMLA, Labor Laws, Employee Documentation, and more...all through the IMPEL lens of creating the absolute minimum of busywork.
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS
Our consultants have decades of experience managing multi-million dollar P+L's.
P&L Audit + Projections
P&L AUDIT + PROJECTIONS
Having run restaurants of all sizes ranging from 12 tables to over 70, we have the perspective to analyze your P+L ‘s labor costs, food costs, inventory approach and more, leading to important cost savings and increased profitability.
Labor Pro Formas
LABOR PRO FORMAS
Starting at the granular level of the daily schedule, IMPEL will develop a strategic labor strategy that leverages the minimum cost for maximum impact.
Compensation
COMPENSATION
From hourly teams, salaried management, and even executive compensation, our team has vast experience benchmarking rates all across your firm.
CORE VALUES
Curious
Intellectual Curiosity is the heartbeat of what we do.
Caring
We strive to be warm, professional, and candid in every interaction, every day.
Client Centric
We make our clients the heroes, not ourselves.
Collaborative
Every client relationship is a partnership based on mutual learning and trust.
Champions of Diversity
IMPEL champions anti-racist, LGTBQ+ inclusive and disability-friendly ideals in our workplace and in our advice.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
michael lamb
Michael is the Founder and CEO of Impel Advisors. Driven by a passion to make workplaces more productive, profitable, inclusive, and soulful, Michael spent 15 years as Vice President and Head of People at Hillstone Restaurant Group, a firm famous for its high-performance culture and gold-standard training programs. As an Officer at Hillstone, Michael was a key operations executive who also oversaw Human Resources, Recruiting, and Talent Development. Transformative work included elevating hiring standards, honing best-in-class training programs for Managers and Staff, and leading a team of HR Managers who recruited at more than 50 college campuses across the US, ultimately building one of the most highly respected management corps in the industry.
Prior to Hillstone, he held significant positions in the tech industry, including Vice President of Operations at Sony Online. Michael earned his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Duke University, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Cornell University on restaurant operations and people strategy.
emily vyncke
Emily began her career in Operations Management with Hillstone Restaurant Group (a $350M nationwide company with 4,000 employees), and subsequently moved into Talent Acquisition/Development and HR after realizing her passion for people strategy and culture building.
She has built upon her operations expertise with over a decade in full cycle recruitment and selection, restaurant openings, company-wide analytics, and a breadth of other Human Resource functions. Earlier in her career, Emily was a Financial Analyst for Neptune Hospitality Advisors, a multi-billion dollar boutique Hospitality Advisory firm. Emily strives to bring integrity, servant leadership, and a solutions mindset to everything she does. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University, School of Hotel Administration.
CONTACT IMPEL
Have questions? Would you like to discuss your challenges? We'd love to hear from you. Simply email team@impeladvisors.com or complete the following form and we'll be in touch promptly to assist.