Most CEOs talk about taking care of their employees.
But one restaurant executive just proved he meant business.
And Dave’s Hot Chicken CEO made one move that left 19 employees counting their millions.
Bill Phelps turned a $900 investment into a billion-dollar bonanza
The American Dream isn’t dead — it just got a Nashville-style hot chicken makeover.
Dave’s Hot Chicken started in 2017 when three childhood friends pooled $900 in savings to open a chicken finger stand in a Los Angeles parking lot.
Fast forward to June 2025, and private equity firm Roark Capital acquired a majority stake of the Pasadena, California-based chicken finger chain in a deal worth “close to” $1 billion.
But here’s where the story gets interesting.
69-year-old CEO Bill Phelps turned 19 Dave’s employees into millionaires after the sale.
That’s not a typo — 19 regular employees became millionaires in the last two weeks of the deal closing.
Phelps defied his own investors to reward his team
Creating that many millionaires was intentional, Phelps told CNBC Make It.
“I had some investors who were like, ‘you’re giving away too much money, this isn’t right,'” he said.
Some bean counters thought Phelps was being too generous with the company’s money.
But the former Wetzel’s Pretzels CEO had a different philosophy.
“They were absolutely right as investors to stand up for other investors. They have a fiduciary duty, but I have a duty to the people that created this business and I was true to taking care of all of those stakeholders in this deal,” Phelps explained.
This wasn’t some feel-good publicity stunt.
Phelps had been planning this windfall for his employees from the beginning.
The CEO who doesn’t believe in traditional management
Phelps joined Dave’s in 2019 after an investor group he was part of acquired a stake in the company with plans to franchise the brand.
From day one, he operated with a revolutionary management style.
“I was told by one of my investors that I had no concept of what management compensation should look like,” Phelps said with a chuckle. “And he’s right, because I don’t look at them as management. I look at them as my partners in this journey, and I compensate them as partners in the journey.”
That partner mentality just paid off in a big way.
Early Dave’s investors aren’t the only ones making money from the deal. Masterminded by Phelps, the company plans to give dozens of its employees, from its support center team to restaurant assistant managers, significant bonuses.
From parking lot to billion-dollar empire in eight years
The Dave’s Hot Chicken story reads like something out of a business school case study.
Co-founder Arman Oganesyan told the “How I Built This with Guy Raz” podcast that the friends were courted by many investors looking for a stake in the company in the early days.
But most investors had the wrong attitude.
“A lot of people came in with this energy of, ‘you guys got really lucky and you don’t know what you’re going to do with this,'” Oganesyan said.
Phelps and his team were different — they believed in the founders’ vision.
Now Dave’s Hot Chicken has grown to over 300 locations and attracts celebrity investors like Drake, Samuel L. Jackson, Maria Shriver, Michael Strahan and Tom Werner.
The company that refuses to cut corners
Dave’s has resisted conforming to industry practices, like focusing on speed of service, switching to cheaper ingredients or expanding its short menu.
The chain’s menu is intentionally simple — consisting only of 4 choices of hot chicken tenders, sliders or both.
Sticking to many of its founders’ original practices allowed the chain to keep the quality of its signature chicken high even as it opens new restaurants every day.
That commitment to quality is what attracted Roark Capital to make the billion-dollar investment.
The vision for explosive growth ahead
Looking ahead, Dave’s could reach up to 4,000 locations worldwide over the next 10 years, Phelps said.
The acquisition gives Dave’s access to Roark’s international supply chain to reduce costs and the international ability to grow with all of their franchisees around the world.
“We have an opportunity to blow this thing up very quickly,” Phelps added.
Phelps isn’t the first CEO to share the wealth
Phelps isn’t the first CEO to turn his employees into millionaires through the acquisition of a company. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban makes it a habit to give employees bonuses with every company he sells.
When Jay Chaudhry, billionaire founder and CEO of cloud cybersecurity firm Zscaler, sold his first company, SecureIT, to VeriSign in an all-stock deal in 1998, at least 70 of his employees became millionaires after VeriSign’s stock price surged two years later.
“People were going crazy in the company, because they had never thought of so much money,” Chaudhry told CNBC Make It. “A lot of them were buying new houses. They were buying new cars. They could do what they wanted to do.”
But in an era where corporate greed dominates headlines, Phelps stands out for putting his employees first.
The man who proved loyalty works both ways
“He literally made 20 millionaires,” Oganesyan said about Phelps.
In a business world where employees are often treated as expendable, Phelps proved there’s a better way.
His philosophy was simple — treat people like partners, and they’ll help you build something extraordinary.
The 19 Dave’s Hot Chicken employees who became millionaires this month would probably agree that philosophy paid off.
In an economy where workers are struggling to get ahead, Dave’s Hot Chicken just proved that some companies still believe in sharing the American Dream.
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