The decisions nobody sees are the ones that matter most.

There's a version of every food business that exists only on paper. A spreadsheet, a mood board, a floor plan, a pitch deck. A concept that hasn't been tested yet — by customers, by operations, by the market.

Most founders rush through this phase. The pressure to do something tangible — sign the lease, hire the chef, launch the product — is enormous. So the invisible work gets skipped. The positioning never gets properly defined. The pricing gets set by gut feel. The customer experience gets designed by whoever is standing in the room when the decisions need to be made.

And then the business opens, and things that felt obvious in theory turn out not to be obvious at all.

I've seen it across restaurants, hospitality concepts, and F&B brands. The problem is rarely the product. The food is good. The space is considered. The team is committed. But the system behind it — the logic that should connect positioning to pricing to operations to brand — was never properly designed.

So the business works harder than it should. It attracts the wrong customers, or not enough of the right ones. It prices itself out of profitability without realising it. It builds a brand that looks good but doesn't convert.

These are not problems you fix with better marketing. They're design problems. And the best time to fix a design problem is before the design is finished.

If you're building something right now — or wondering why something isn't performing the way it should — that's the question worth sitting with: what did you design before anyone could see it?

In December I visited Viña Vik in Chile's Millahue valley. What struck me wasn't the wine (which was delicious) — it was the coherence. Nothing felt added as an afterthought. The vineyard, the hotel, the food program — they don't compete with each other. They function as a single system, designed from the beginning in relation to the land, the climate, and what was actually possible there.

Sustainability wasn't a talking point. It was visible in the decisions: what they produce, what they offer, and — just as importantly — what they decided not to do.

The lesson isn't about wine or luxury. It's about what happens when a business is designed from its context rather than grafted onto it. Most of the hard questions answer themselves.

Several projects on the table right now — different in type, different in market, but with one thing in common: the work that matters most is happening before anything launches.

If you're at that stage — building something new or reworking something that isn't quite landing — the best place to start is a conversation.

Carla
Founder, kooleats