Atomic Provisions has been a Denver fixture since its original East Colfax location opened more than 20 years ago — and it's grown from there into four brands sharing kitchens across greater Denver, Colorado Springs, and one location in Overland Park, Kansas, plus a newer outpost inside Denver International Airport. Denver Biscuit Co., Fat Sully's, Atomic Cowboy, and the newer ice cream brand Frozen Gold all run out of the same buildings, sharing staff, kitchens, and a point-of-sale system while keeping their own menus, dayparts, and service styles. That's the kind of complexity that breaks a lot of growing restaurant groups. Atomic Provisions' Director of IT Operations and Network Infrastructure, Zach Sipherd, has spent the last several years making sure it doesn't — and his answer isn't a bigger org chart. It's building consistency into cross-training and technology from the ground up, so it doesn't depend on any one person holding it all together.
Sipherd didn't arrive at that job as a generalist. His entire career has been dedicated to hospitality technology, and he's built point-of-sale systems across nearly every restaurant concept there is — sushi, steakhouse, fine dining, quick-service counters, and everything between. Before joining Atomic Provisions, he worked as a project manager for the POS vendor NCR Aloha, where he built databases from scratch and rolled out installations running into dozens of terminals, printers, and kitchen screens per project — the kind of large, complex systems work that teaches you exactly what breaks when a multi-brand operation scales. That job put him alongside Atomic Provisions for close to a decade before he formally joined the company as Director of IT Operations and Network Infrastructure just under three years ago, which means the consistency playbook below isn't theory for him — it's a decade of pattern-matching across concepts, brought in-house.
That distinction matters for any operator running more than one concept, because the instinct when things get complicated is usually to add more management layers. Atomic Provisions did the opposite: it invested in making the people already on the floor able to move between brands, and in technology that's designed around them rather than around IT's convenience.
What's actually hard about running multiple restaurant concepts under one roof?
The hardest part isn't managing different menus — it's making sure staff can move fluidly between brands when the day requires it. "One of the biggest challenges is cross training," Sipherd said, describing how back-of-house staff have to be able to execute pizza, biscuits, and bar service interchangeably. "We may have a guy at 11am tossing a pizza and making a giant 26-inch pizza... and then somebody calls out — it's the restaurant industry, it's normal. So that pizza guy may have to jump over on the saute station behind the biscuit line."
That's not a hypothetical edge case; it's a daily operating reality for any group running multiple concepts out of shared kitchens. Stone Brewing ran into a version of the same problem at its 700-seat Escondido location, where VP of Hospitality Gregg Frazier's team built a "One Team, One Dream" staffing philosophy and invested heavily in training so every employee — regardless of station — prioritized the same guest experience. The lesson from both operators is the same: cross-training isn't a nice-to-have for multi-concept groups, it's the actual mechanism that makes the whole model work.
Does brand consistency across concepts mean identical menus and service?
No — consistency is about matching the level of care to the occasion, not making every interaction identical. Sipherd's example: "If you've got two guys coming in on Saturday morning with a slight hangover and they're having some beers at the bar, they're going to have just as good of experience as that ten-top that's celebrating a nine-year-old's birthday... our staff is very versatile in how they approach every individual guest. But at the end of the day they're providing that same experience and level of care for everybody."
That's a useful reframe for any group juggling a bar concept, a family breakfast spot, and a pizza counter under one roof: the goal isn't uniformity, it's making sure every guest — no matter which brand or which daypart — gets the same underlying standard of care. Caboose Brewing Company runs the same playbook across its two Northern Virginia venues — Caboose Commons leans on contactless self-service, while Caboose Tavern relies on full waitstaff — and keeps both consistent by giving managers a shared, real-time view of sales and labor across locations rather than forcing identical service models onto different venues.
Should restaurant technology be built for IT, or for the staff using it?
It should be built for the people using it hundreds of times a shift, not for whoever maintains the database. "The way I look at it is I build a POS database with the end user in mind," Sipherd said. "I've got 300-plus front-of-house staff members. They're the ones using this tool every day, all day." In practice, that means obsessing over small things most operators never see: "Can I design that item and the modifier flow to only have three touches... so that they're not tableside staring at a phone... they're creating a guest experience and not just taking an order."
That philosophy lines up with how GoTab's own approach to multi-unit management is built — a "create once, publish everywhere" model that lets a group standardize menus, pricing rules, and loyalty programs centrally while still giving each location room to adjust for its own market. The point isn't centralizing for its own sake; it's giving operators like Sipherd one system to configure instead of stitching together workarounds location by location.
How do multi-concept groups avoid losing control as they add locations or partners?
By making sure knowledge and decision-making don't live in just one person's head, and by choosing partners carefully when expanding into venues you don't fully operate yourself. Atomic Provisions' most visible recent growth move is a Fat Sully's location inside Denver International Airport, which opened five to six months before this conversation and now has a presence across three different terminals. "We have complete control of the menu. The intellectual property of Fat Sully's still is ours," Sipherd explained. "However, we partner with a super high-level operations team out there and they really know what they're doing." The airport partner runs day-to-day service; Atomic Provisions keeps the brand, the menu, and the standards — the same tradeoff GoTab is built to support for multi-vendor and multi-concept venues, where automated, per-vendor payouts and full brand/menu control let an operator share a space or a partner's footprint without losing ownership of either.
Internally, that same discipline shows up in how Sipherd works with GoTab as a vendor. Asked about the risk of any one person becoming a single point of failure, he described a habit of translating requests from the floor rather than making them himself: "That all comes from — not just me — that comes from the end users. I come in to kind of be their front man and then relay the importance of, hey, here's what this feature ultimately should do and here's why it's going to make everybody's lives easier and better." Requests grounded in what staff actually need travel further than a generic feature wish list — and they don't disappear if one person leaves.
Should new concepts come from leadership vision or guest demand?
Both have a role, but the strongest expansion decisions tend to follow the guests who are already showing up. Atomic Provisions' Denver Biscuit Co. and Fat Sully's now share several locations, and that pairing wasn't planned from day one — it came from customers asking for it. "They opened as a standalone Denver Biscuit Co., and then added the Fat Sully's later on because we just — we heard from the customers, and they said, where's the pizza, man?" Sipherd said. "We're used to being able to show up at 11 and getting a Franklin or getting a slice."
It's a small story, but it's a useful model: rather than assuming what a shared location needs, Atomic Provisions let demand at existing locations tell them which concept to add next.
Who does this operational approach fit best?
This is built for multi-unit or multi-concept groups where staff regularly move between brands or stations, where a point-of-sale change carries real adoption risk because of long-tenured staff, and where leadership wants technology configured around the people using it — not just around back-office reporting. Sipherd's own team includes bartenders with 12 years of tenure and servers with 8 to 15 years, which is exactly the kind of staff base where a poorly designed system creates the most friction, and a well-designed one pays off the most.
FAQ
What's the biggest operational challenge for restaurant groups running multiple concepts?
Cross-training staff so they can move between brands and stations as the day requires — not managing separate menus, which is comparatively easy to configure once.
Does consistency across restaurant concepts mean every location should feel the same?
No. Consistency means matching the level of care to the occasion and guest, while letting service style, pacing, and tone vary by concept and daypart.
How should a multi-unit restaurant group evaluate POS technology?
By asking whether the system is designed around the staff using it every shift — how many touches it takes to ring an order, how easy it is to train new or cross-trained staff — rather than just how much it can report to management.
How can a restaurant group expand into a partner-operated venue, like an airport or stadium, without losing brand control?
By retaining ownership of the menu and intellectual property while partnering with an experienced operations team for day-to-day service — the model Atomic Provisions used for its Denver International Airport location.
