Iron Summit Operations
Operational consulting that gets implemented. No abstract strategy. No motivational frameworks. Practical, structured improvements built for the reality of how service businesses actually work.
Zach Johnston
I spent 22 years in high-volume service operations — 20 of them in leadership, 7 running multi-unit organizations across multiple states. My background is in restaurants. The skills are operational. The problems I spent two decades solving — owner dependency, inconsistent execution, systems that live in someone's head, businesses that can't function without their founder — are the same ones I see in every service industry I work in now. The industry is different. The structural failures aren't.
I spent 12 years at LongHorn Steakhouse, working across 22 locations and multiple states, including helping open 5 of them. My first Managing Partner unit arrived ranked 481st out of 540+ locations. Twelve months later it was in the top 25 — and earned a Diamond Club award, LongHorn's recognition for elite operational performance across the company.
My second unit is where the revenue story happened. I grew it from $52,000 to $120,000 in weekly revenue, cut employee turnover from 208% down to 48%, and closed my final year there with over $1 million in operating profit — one of only 7 locations out of 540+ to hit that threshold. That unit ranked #1 in the entire company on overall performance metrics, earned multiple consecutive awards for highest sales improvement, and was selected as a divisional training hub responsible for developing talent across 90+ locations.
After LongHorn, I served as Director of Operations at HomeGrown while the brand scaled from 7 to 15 locations. I built the infrastructure that made that growth possible — SOPs, training frameworks, financial controls, vendor systems, and leadership pipelines built from the ground up. I drove market profitability to 20%+, reduced administrative workload by 50% through process redesign, and led an organization of 140+ people — more than 30 of whom moved into leadership roles from within.
What I kept seeing across every business I worked in was the same structural problem: owners who were skilled, worked hard, and were still completely buried. Everything ran through them. Nothing worked without them. Not because they weren't capable of building something better — but because nobody had ever built the infrastructure to let them step back.
I built Iron Summit Operations because I'd spent 22 years learning exactly how to fix that — and I'd rather apply it across a hundred businesses than stay inside one.
If your business is growing but feels harder instead of easier — that's not a hustle problem. That's a structural one. Let's find out exactly what's causing it.
We don't assume we know what your business needs before we've looked at it. Every engagement starts with a thorough diagnostic. Recommendations are specific to your operation — not generic best practices applied from a template.
The consulting deliverable is the system itself — the SOP, the accountability framework, the workflow, the process documentation. Not a slide deck about what you should build someday.
The best operational system is the one your team will actually use. We design for reality — the actual people, tools, and conditions of your business — not a theoretical ideal that falls apart on day two.
The order of operational improvements matters as much as the improvements themselves. We prioritize by impact — what fixes the most, fastest, with the fewest dependencies.
Every engagement is designed to reduce owner dependency. The business should function when you're not there. If it can't, that's not a people problem — it's an infrastructure problem.
Every recommendation comes with a defined outcome. Time saved. Revenue recovered. Processes reduced. You should be able to measure whether the consulting worked.