Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Generosity toward employees can shape a company’s culture.
- Giving employees a path to ownership gives them a direct stake in your success.
- Grow into new markets without losing the identity that made your brand stand out.
Jim Bitticks had a crisp $10 bill ready for the valet. Then Bill Phelps handed the man $100.
The parking lot was only about 30 feet away. Retrieving the car had taken less than a minute. Bitticks looked at his own tip and told Phelps he could have at least let him go first.
Phelps pulled out another $100 bill and handed it to Bitticks.
“Make his day.”
In January 2026, Bitticks became CEO of Dave’s Hot Chicken, moving up from president and chief operating officer. He succeeded Phelps, who became executive chairman.
Asked what he learned from his predecessor, Bitticks talks about taking care of employees beyond their salaries and benefits.
“I’ve seen Bill pay people’s student loans off,” Bitticks says.
Phelps once upgraded a private jet to make room for an hourly graphic artist named Eddie. Earlier, while Bitticks was working at Blaze Pizza, where he rose to chief restaurant officer, a manager called about $200 Phelps had left in a tip jar. She worried he had meant to leave $2.
Bitticks asked Phelps’ longtime business partner Elise Wetzel about it.
“That’s Bill Phelps, generous to a fault,” she told him.
Bitticks sees a connection between those gestures and the company Dave’s Hot Chicken has become.
“I think a lot of the Dave’s success story is connected to sort of that willingness to be generous to others,” he says.
That includes sharing experiences and giving people opportunities to learn. When asked about building the team behind the company’s growth, Bitticks starts with believing people can develop the skills they need if someone gives them training and a chance.
He estimates that about 60 of roughly 75 corporate support employees had worked with the leadership team at Wetzel’s Pretzels, Blaze Pizza or Carl’s Jr.
The team has grown across brands because people who worked together before have brought one another into the next opportunity. Bitticks now leads a company staffed largely by those familiar faces, with firsthand knowledge of what they can do when given room to grow.
International expansion
The graffiti at Dave’s Hot Chicken connects a restaurant in Dublin to a parking lot in Los Angeles.
For Bitticks, that recognizable identity travels alongside something the company cannot export: a franchise partner’s knowledge of the local market. The company initially heard warnings about entering the United Kingdom. An experienced restaurant operator saw an opportunity instead.
“We know how to do U.K.,” Bitticks recalls the group saying.
The partner backed that confidence with its choice of real estate, combining two neighboring souvenir shops into a corner restaurant on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. Artwork, construction and marketing helped turn the location into the brand’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 whole model is built around franchisees that know their market,” Bitticks says.
What guests recognize when they arrive comes from a different kind of expertise.
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 wanted to preserve that energy. They hired two graffiti artists who were friends of the founders to bring it inside.
The artists have worked with the company’s design and construction team 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 says.
He compares the restaurants to his four children. They look different, but people can tell they belong together. Bitticks says the artists had completed about 98% of Dave’s locations, expanding their team and training others internationally to keep up with growth.
European franchisees bring their local expertise to the business while preserving the visual identity guests associate with Dave’s. A London operator can find the right corner. The design team makes it recognizable as Dave’s.
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