When Jim Bitticks joined Dave’s Hot Chicken as chief operating officer in July 2020, the brand had four locations. During a recent conversation on QSR Uncut, the now-CEO explained what the road to hundreds of units (Dave’s opened a net of 120—the company’s most yet—last year to reach 358) has looked like.
But his approach to growth wasn’t built around changing everything that came before him. Instead, Bitticks emphasizes understanding why a business works, protecting its defining qualities, and supporting the people who helped build it.
Drawing on his experience at Dave’s, Blaze Pizza, and Carl’s Jr., here were five leadership lessons from the conversation.
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1. Learn the business before imposing your playbook
One of the questions Bitticks faced while starting at Dave’s was rather specific: Would he make the founders use tongs?
It suggested someone had already tried to introduce an operational change without understanding what was working, and why. His response: ask how the founders operated, not immediately tell them how they should.
The restaurants were generating strong sales. Bitticks had experience scaling brands, but he hadn’t created one. “I’ve never done what they’ve done at this point,” he said.
Bitticks wasn’t arguing new leaders should withhold expertise. Rather, they should take time to understand before deciding where to guide. If a change was necessary, ask questions and explain the reasoning behind the motivation. That would be more productive than issuing a directive and leaving an existing team feeling like their prior work had been dismissed.
The lesson: Bring your experience to a new role, but don’t mistake familiarity with another business for understanding this one.
2. Define what cannot be compromised—and teach it repeatedly
Bitticks spoke to groups going through Dave’s brand training every week. There were three things he believed brought the company to this point: “mind-blowing” chicken, great service, and the brand’s distinctive vibe.
Those principles provided a framework for decisions that otherwise could become mere calculations about speed or cost.
If the choice was between offering subpar chicken faster and serving great chicken more slowly, Bitticks picked the latter. He credited Dave’s cofounder Arman Oganesyan with reinforcing the idea food worth returning for is also worth waiting for.
The same thinking extended beyond the menu. The restaurants’ hand-painted art and music are part of the experience. They’re not incidental details you can strip away amid scale whenever a cheaper alternative appeared.
For Bitticks, protecting those elements required more than mentioning them in a strategy meeting.
The lesson: Identify the promises your brand makes to customers, then give employees clear guidance on how to protect them when competing priorities arise.
3. Build the support system before growth overwhelms it
Bitticks came to Dave’s after helping Blaze Pizza expand from two locations to roughly 370. That experience taught him a distinction: Running restaurants and building the systems that allow other people to do so are different tasks.
At Dave’s, he drew on relationships with former colleagues to establish that infrastructure. Early on, several members of the Blaze team worked part time to help get the new operation settled. Bitticks credits Juan Lopez, now Dave’s chief restaurant officer, and his team with preparing the systems needed to begin training and opening stores in about three months.
But internal capabilities were only a part of it. Bitticks also pointed to experienced franchisees and vendors willing to invest in a small brand’s future.
“The quality of those operators is literally the foundation of the success,” he said.
Longstanding vendor relationships helped, too. Supplying an emerging brand entering a new market required a partner to commit before the business reached scale.
The lesson: Growth depends on more than demand. Build the operating capabilities and partner relationships needed to support expansion before the pressure arrives.
4. Don’t assume your team has an expiration date
Bitticks rejected the idea the people who get a company through its debut stage of growth lack the ability to lead its next one.
“One of my maniacal focuses is … the team that got us to the first 500, I still want those people to be here when we get to the second 500,” he said.
Bitticks sees a similar pattern inside restaurants. Some of his strongest general managers at Carl’s Jr. back in the day were employees who had worked their way up from team member positions.
The lesson: Evaluate people on their capabilities and potential; not on an assumption that growth automatically requires replacing them.
5. Treat leadership as a shared achievement
When Bitticks referenced his career, he returned to the people who worked alongside him.
Some relationships went back decades. Others carried across multiple brands. He described colleagues who followed him into assignments, helped build new systems, and brought along their own expertise.
“I attribute a lot of … my personal success to all these people that have stuck with me,” he said. “We’ve done it together.”
The lesson: Give people credit for what they contribute, remain open to expertise that doesn’t resemble your own, and recognize that a leader’s success is inseparable from the team’s.
