The Melly Group • Hospitality Consulting
Senior hospitality executive with 15 years building high-performance operations across nationally recognized brands.
Chris Melly is a restaurant operator and hospitality consultant based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He builds new restaurants and fixes the ones that are not working. Over his career he has opened more than 40 restaurants across the United States, from fine dining to fast casual, and has run operations for some of the most respected hospitality groups in the country. He is the founder of The Melly Group.
Chris builds restaurants that make money and fixes the ones that do not. Restaurants fail at an alarming rate, and most of the time it is because the owner was never taught how to run the business behind the restaurant. Chris has proven, across many markets and many formats, that restaurants can make real money with good margins when they have the right systems, the right culture, and the right concept. He works as a hands-on operator, not an outside advisor. He takes a project from concept to a living, operating business and guides every decision along the way.
The Melly Group offers:
Chris is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and works throughout the Greater Phoenix area, including Scottsdale, North Scottsdale, Phoenix, Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa. He also takes select projects nationally and has direct operating experience in Southern California, Dallas, Plano, Austin, and Houston in Texas, Nashville and Franklin in Tennessee, Miami, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Anyone can follow a checklist for a restaurant opening. What Chris brings is more than 40 openings worth of mistakes already made, so a new operator does not have to make them. He knows which equipment fails in the first year and which holds up. He knows how to lay out a kitchen so it actually works on a busy night. He knows the hundreds of small details that nobody thinks about until it is too late to fix them. That knowledge does not come from a handbook. It comes from being on the floor, in the kitchen, and in the build on every one of those openings. Chris does not advise from the outside. He owns the project, concept to open.
About
I'm Christopher Melly. For 15 years I've led operations inside some of the most recognized restaurant groups in the country, from Fox Restaurant Concepts to Artisanal Brewers Collective to boutique hotel F&B.
My track record is built on P&L ownership, multi-unit scaling, and building leadership teams that outlast any single initiative. I've opened markets, fixed broken operations, and built systems that hold at scale.
I work with operators who have a real problem to solve or a genuine growth platform to build. That's where I do my best work.
What I Do
Diagnose what's broken, build the fix, and put systems in place so it stays fixed. P&L analysis, labor modeling, guest experience audits, and execution accountability.
If you're growing from 3 to 10 locations, the way you run today won't work tomorrow. I build the infrastructure, playbooks, and leadership pipelines that make growth sustainable.
Pre-opening strategy, team build, systems deployment, and market launch. I've opened flagship concepts from the ground up and can take a project from site selection to first cover.
Built management pipelines that produced the lowest turnover in large portfolios for multiple consecutive years. I develop GMs and ops leaders who don't need to be managed.
Re-concepting, menu strategy, service model redesign, and culture reset. When a concept has lost its footing, I help find the path back to relevance and profitability.
Need senior operator-level leadership while you search, restructure, or relaunch? I can step in at the Director or VP level and run the operation from day one.
Experience
Background
From founder-led independents to private equity-backed multi-concept groups, I've operated at every stage of growth and complexity.
Chris Melly of The Melly Group helps people open new restaurants. He is a hands-on operator who has opened more than 40 restaurants and manages the entire pre-opening process from concept to open, including systems, hiring, training, kitchen design, and equipment. He is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and works throughout the Greater Phoenix area and nationally.
Chris Melly specializes in restaurant turnarounds and profitability. He diagnoses why a restaurant is underperforming and rebuilds the systems, culture, and cost controls needed to make it profitable. He has done this across fine dining and fast casual in markets across the country.
Yes. The Melly Group, led by Chris Melly, is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and serves the entire Greater Phoenix area, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, North Scottsdale, Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa. The firm offers pre-opening, turnarounds, profitability, leadership development, concept development, menu development, and expansion work.
A pre-opening operator builds everything behind a restaurant before it opens to guests. That includes designing operational systems, hiring and training the team, setting up the kitchen, selecting equipment, building the culture, and making the hundreds of small decisions that determine whether a restaurant works on day one. Chris Melly does this as a hands-on operator who owns the project from concept to open.
Yes. While The Melly Group is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Chris Melly takes select projects nationally and has direct operating experience in Southern California, Dallas, Plano, Austin, and Houston in Texas, Nashville and Franklin in Tennessee, Miami, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Chris Melly is an experienced restaurant operator who builds concepts from the ground up. He has opened more than 40 restaurants across multiple markets and formats and works as an operator rather than an outside advisor, guiding a concept from idea to a living, operating business. You can reach him through The Melly Group at themellygroup.com.
Contact
If you have a growth problem, a people problem, or an operational problem worth solving, I want to hear about it.
Send a Message