For a Culver’s operator, the success of a refinancing conversation is often decided weeks before the lender sits down at the table. Their restaurants are running well, their teams are strong, and their hospitality has made them a true community staple. The challenge that tends to catch them off guard is not operational. It’s what happens the moment they are ready to grow, and they realize the financial side of the operation was built for a business that no longer exists. The stores have multiplied. The ownership structure has deepened. Lenders, minority partners, and financing contacts are all at the table now. The question worth sitting with is whether the accounting relationship grew alongside all of that, or whether it stayed where it started.
Why Use a Multi-Unit CPA for Culver’s?
Most accounting relationships start with one operator. At the beginning, a single person signs checks, makes the calls, and carries the weight of every decision. When the accounting relationship only needs to serve one owner, a traditional setup works fine.
What is easy to miss is how quickly that setup becomes outdated. Culver’s has a way of producing operators who grow, and the structure underneath the business tends to grow just as fast. Many experienced operators don’t run a single entity. Financing partners and minority owners come into play as the operation expands, and suddenly, decisions shift from one owner to a group of stakeholders, each looking for different things from the numbers.
Culver’s has become one of the fastest-growing brands in the fast-casual segment, surpassing 1,000 locations nationwide and opening new locations at a steady pace year after year. This consistent expansion means ownership groups must adapt their structures to support ongoing development. As more Culver’s operators bring in outside capital or minority partners for growth, the way decisions get made changes. Reporting becomes more formal. Keeping everyone aligned becomes something that has to be actively managed rather than assumed.
What Accounting Issues Do Culver’s Owners Face?
The issues we see most often aren’t the result of a careless operator; in fact, the brand’s fundamentals are stronger than ever. According to the company’s latest franchise disclosure document, or FDD, only 99 franchised locations generate less than $3 million in annual sales, and company-operated stores have seen income margins improve to 13% of sales. The books are clean, the stores are profitable, and the intent is there.
The gap is that the accounting relationship was built for a single perspective. When more people join the conversation, the reporting was never designed for that audience.
This is what tends to break down when an accounting firm only communicates with one point of contact in a multi-entity operation:
- A lender requests consolidated financials across all entities, and the operator realizes, for the first time, that no one has ever prepared them this way.
- A minority partner wants to understand the tax implications of the new LLC before signing, but no one on the accounting side has the capital structure to walk them through it.
- The operation crosses into a new state, and the LLC structure that worked for three Wisconsin locations creates unexpected complications that no one caught early enough to plan around.
- Savings opportunities, such as cost segregation or available tax credits, are missed entirely because the accounting relationship was never set up to look across all locations at once.
None of these situations are unusual for a growing Culver’s operation. They are what happens when the accounting relationship does not keep pace with the business, and the cost tends to compound the longer it goes unaddressed.
How Can a CPA Help Culver’s Owners?
This is where MBE approaches things differently. Rather than anchoring the relationship to one contact, MBE works across the full ownership and financing picture from the start. That means understanding who the stakeholders are at every level, what each of them needs to see, and how reporting should be organized to support decisions that involve more than one voice.
When a Culver’s operator is preparing for a refinancing conversation, MBE is not simply pulling together last year’s returns. The firm is helping to organize performance data across every entity in a way that a lender can actually use, and that work happens before the meeting, not during it. When a minority partner has questions about how a new location fits into the existing structure, there is already someone who understands the full picture and can walk them through it.
In practice, that kind of relationship looks like:
- Organizing reporting around what lenders need from a Culver’s control structure, so financing conversations start from a position of preparation rather than scrambling.
- Preparing materials that reflect the full ownership picture so stakeholder conversations don’t require one person to translate every number for everyone.
- Helping ownership teams work through decisions with shared visibility at both the individual location level and the parent entity level, so no one is operating on incomplete information.
What Accounting Matters Most for Culver’s Owners?
The areas where this approach carries the most weight are the same ones where operators feel the most pressure as they grow.
- Structuring entities as the operation expands. An operator adding a fourth location in a new state is not just opening a restaurant. They are adding a new entity to an existing structure, and how that LLC is set up under the parent company has a downstream effect on taxes, liability, and how ownership is shared across the whole operation. For Culver’s owners who purchase the land and building, it’s essential to have the entity structure in place before closing on the property. Addressing these details up front is far better than correcting them after the fact.
- Preparing financials that hold up in lender conversations. Culver’s operators who consistently access capital are the ones who arrive at lender conversations with organized, entity-by-entity performance data and a clear picture of how growth is being funded. That preparation does not happen the week before the meeting. It is built into how the accounting relationship works from day one.
- Identifying savings across every location, not just the newest one. Cost segregation, available credits, and depreciation planning look different when reviewed across a control structure with locations in multiple states. An operator who has owned their building for several years may be sitting on deductions they have never taken, and a lookback analysis can surface those in the current year without amending prior returns.
- Giving every stakeholder a complete view. Growth creates blind spots when reporting is not built to span every entity in the structure. The goal is a consolidated view from the individual store to the parent company, so that when a minority partner or lender asks a question, the answer is already in the room.
Is Your Culver’s Accounting Ready for Growth?
Growing a Culver’s operation is something to be proud of. Reaching the point where you have multiple locations, a parent entity, and outside stakeholders at the table means you have built something that requires years of discipline and community. What we see too often is that the accounting relationship does not grow at the same pace. It stays anchored to the original setup while the business moves well past it.
If your current accounting relationship is still built around a single operator while your ownership structure has grown well past that, it’s worth stepping back and asking honestly whether it’s keeping up with you. The financial side of a growing Culver’s operation should be ready for every conversation that growth demands, not just catching up.
MBE CPAs works with Culver’s operators who are at exactly that point. Not to replace what has already been built, but to make sure that when the next conversation happens, you walk in ready for it.