PB&J turns a $60K cost problem into a $500K growth opportunity in three weeks

The challenge

PB&J Restaurants has been feeding Kansas City since 1987. Founded and still owned by Paul Khoury, the company runs seventeen entities and roughly $55 million in combined sales across its own concepts, franchised brands, and a consulting arm that opens restaurants for other operators.

Catering used to be a headline act, $3 to 4 million a year in off-site sales, weddings and major events several times a month. After a leadership change in 2020, new pricing constraints made the business profitable again, and then something subtle happened: sales kept sliding, but profit held flat. It was nearly impossible to detect the decline. 

"We saw sales come down, but we weren't overly concerned, because we were making about the same on catering as when we were doing three and a half million a year."

Off-site revenue is really two businesses: deliveries (corporate lunches, daily drop-offs) and events (weddings, rehearsal dinners, fundraisers). Under a flat-looking total, the two were moving in opposite directions, and events are the side that compounds through word of mouth. By April 2026, leadership wanted answers.

"There's no guarantee the delivery business keeps offsetting the decline in events. At what point does the event business go away completely, and we're just a delivery company?"

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What Meetra found

Meetra took more than two years of raw system exports, thousands of transactions across roughly 750 duplicate-riddled customer records, and built PB&J's first customer-level view of the business. Three weeks from raw data to a decision-ready deck.

The view was blunt. Deliveries were rising while events fell fast. New-customer revenue was pacing down 13 percent. Forty percent of all revenue sat in just 20 accounts, and new event business renews at roughly 2 percent, so someone has to stay in the market full time. The sharpest finding: pay for the catering role had drifted to roughly twice the market range, yet only 9 percent of it was tied to winning new business.

"We had set up a compensation model that we thought was rewarding sales. In actuality, it was not. You could give up that nine percent pretty easily and still live very comfortably, and the company would keep watching the event business decline."

That reframed the entire conversation. This was never one problem. It was two, with different price tags.

"What problem are we trying to solve? Are we solving a $60,000 cost problem, or a $500,000 growth problem? Those are a lot different problems. And they can both be true."

Meetra put two options on the table and recommended one: keep the service and delivery work with the people who do it well, and hire a dedicated seller focused entirely on new event business. Break-even lands around $250,000 in new sales, against a first-year target north of $400,000 and an opportunity sized at $500,000 in sales, roughly $125,000 in profit.

"I'm not sure when, or if, this would have happened on our own. It always gets put on the back burner. We needed a fresh set of eyes, someone to help us segregate the numbers so they became workable."

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The results

The immediate result was clarity. The compensation question stopped being the point.

"It helped me come to the realization that the compensation isn't what bothers me. What really concerns me is that we're losing event business. We're leaving a lot on the table."

Then the analysis did something bigger than catering. Within weeks, Paul opened a leadership session with a question the company hadn't formally asked in years: what should PB&J be five and ten years from now? Restaurant building, the capital-light consulting arm, franchising, or a mix. Even the catering decision now runs through that lens, since the people who staff big events are increasingly booked opening restaurants for consulting clients. The growth decision is in motion, with the team reconvening with the numbers in front of them for the first time.

"This analysis helped Paul and me take a step back and say, we need to do better strategic planning for the company. What does this company look like five years from now? Ten years from now?"

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Would you recommend Meetra?

"If another CFO called me, I'd tell them it's always great to have a fresh set of eyes come in. Someone to help you look at things in a different way, in a consolidated way, in a way that's easy to understand. We're pretty good on the tactical side. We lack on the strategic side. It's well worth the money."