Dave’s Hot Chicken’s New CEO Turns Generosity Into a Growth Play

By Olivia Hart

About 60 of Dave’s Hot Chicken’s roughly 75 corporate support employees had already worked with the leadership team at Wetzel’s Pretzels, Blaze Pizza or Carl’s Jr., CEO Jim Bitticks estimates. That equals roughly four-fifths of the support staff, based on his estimate.

Bitticks said he became CEO in January 2026, moving up from president and chief operating officer. He succeeded Bill Phelps, who became executive chairman. The interview offers no revenue, profit, restaurant-count or comparable targets for the transition.

What does generosity teach a CEO?

Bitticks recalled approaching a valet stand with a crisp $10 bill for a tip. Phelps, his boss, handed the attendant $100 instead. The car sat about 30 feet away, and retrieving it took less than a minute.

When Bitticks returned and suggested Phelps could have let him tip first, Phelps produced another $100. He offered three words: “Make his day.” The story also captures a broader habit Bitticks says shaped Dave’s growth.

Bitticks said he spent years watching Phelps give generously. He ties that generosity to employee care beyond salary and benefits. “I’ve seen Bill pay people’s student loans off,” he said. Phelps once upgraded a private jet to make room for Eddie, an hourly graphic artist.

At Blaze Pizza, where Bitticks rose to chief restaurant officer, a manager called about $200 left in a tip jar. She worried Phelps had meant to leave $2. Bitticks asked Phelps’s longtime business partner Elise Wetzel, who said: “That’s Bill Phelps, generous to a fault.”

Bitticks connected those gestures with the company’s trajectory. “I think a lot of the Dave’s success story is connected to sort of that willingness to be generous to others,” he said. The anecdotes show a culture; they do not establish whether generosity improved retention or output.

Bitticks also believes people can develop the skills a company needs when leaders provide training and a chance. He attributes much of the current team’s cohesion to colleagues who recruited one another across Wetzel’s Pretzels, Blaze Pizza and Carl’s Jr. Bitticks now leads a company staffed largely by those familiar faces.

In plain terms, Bitticks treats employee care as a management tool, although the source tests that claim with stories rather than measurable workforce results.

How does local knowledge guide expansion?

Dave’s initially heard warnings about entering the United Kingdom, Bitticks said. An experienced restaurant operator saw an opportunity instead. Bitticks recalls the group saying: “We know how to do U.K.”

The unnamed partner backed that confidence with the site: two neighboring souvenir shops became a corner restaurant on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. Artwork, construction and marketing helped make it Dave’s highest-volume restaurant for roughly a year, according to Bitticks.

Dave’s also opened in Dublin and signed a deal to expand into 10 additional European countries, including Italy, Poland and Germany. The item discloses no opening timetable, investment amount or franchise terms.

“The whole model is built around franchisees that know their market,” Bitticks said. His own example concerns real estate and restaurant operations; he offers no data on how many international locations the agreement will add.

In plain terms, local operators supply market knowledge, but the 10-country agreement remains a plan without disclosed economics or timing.

How does Dave’s preserve a recognizable identity?

According to the source, Dave’s began in 2017 as a chicken stand in a Los Angeles parking lot, with street graffiti on the brick wall behind it. When the founders opened their first permanent restaurant, they hired two graffiti artists, friends of the founders, to carry that energy indoors.

Bitticks links the graffiti at Dave’s Dublin restaurant to the Los Angeles parking lot where the brand began. The two original artists have worked with the company’s design and construction teams to give new restaurants a family resemblance without repeating the same room.

“Every single location you go to at Dave’s isn’t exactly the same as another, but feels related,” Bitticks said. He compares the restaurants with his four children: each looks different, but guests can tell that they belong together.

Bitticks said the artists had completed about 98% of Dave’s locations. They expanded their team and trained others internationally to keep pace with growth. His claim leaves the scale of the shared design system and franchisees’ ability to preserve it unquantified.

In plain terms, Dave’s uses a consistent visual signature, though the nearly universal 98% completion rate comes from Bitticks rather than a published project list.

What does the source not establish?

The source’s key takeaways say generosity shapes company culture, employee ownership creates a direct stake in success, and expansion can preserve the identity that made a brand stand out. The interview develops the first and third claims through examples. It does not describe any ownership plan, eligibility rules, grants or financial terms.

It also omits company revenue, systemwide sales, restaurant counts, franchise fees, profitability and employee-retention data. For a business story, that leaves Bitticks’s culture and expansion claims plausible but largely unbenchmarked.

The program description identifies Restaurant Influencers as “brought to you by Toast” and PepsiCo as the episode sponsor. It presents Toast as restaurant point-of-sale and management software intended to improve operations, sales and guest experience.

It says PepsiCo Foodservice offers digital tools, AI-backed menu optimization and products designed to make online orders more profitable. The block carries the slogan “Toast — Powering Successful Restaurants” and closes with “Check out PepsiCo Foodservice.”

The source also notes that opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors belong to the contributors themselves. The next test for Bitticks is whether the employee-first culture and local-franchise model can turn the 10-country agreement into durable growth without eroding the graffiti-led identity he says distinguishes Dave’s.