The Unlikely Group Getting Rich Off Dave's Hot Chicken's $1 Billion Deal

Forbes

10 hours ago

'How late did you guys stay out last night?' jokes Dave's Hot Chicken CEO Bill Phelps. The 69-year-old, who joined the Los Angeles-based spicy chicken chain in 2019 after leading Blaze Pizza and Wetzel's Pretzels, is sitting next to his second in-command, Dave's president and COO Jim Bitticks, another Blaze alumnus, on one side of a large conference room table in Forbes' Jersey City office.
On the other side are two of Dave's four cofounders, Arman Oganesyan, 33, and Dave Kopushyan, 34, who do indeed look like they're on their way to (or from) a big night out. Kopushyan, a cook who is the brand's namesake, is coolly dressed in a white T-shirt and blue-washed jeans covered in Black stars. Oganesyan, meanwhile, dons a bright pink and orange Versace silk shirt, matching pink sunglasses and a Hermes belt with shorts, his arms and legs exposed to show intricate tattoos.
Though both claim no mischief the night prior, the duo have plenty to celebrate. Their visit to Forbes is the last stop on a whirlwind two-day press tour following the June 2 announcement that Dave's sold 70% of its business to Roark Capital – the private equity giant that owns Subway, Dunkin', Buffalo Wild Wings among other restaurant brands – at a $1 billion valuation. After the interview, they're hopping on a private jet from Teterboro Airport back to Los Angeles.
Dave's was founded in 2017 by Oganesyan, Kopushyan, and brothers Tommy and Gary Rubenyan. All four were children of Armenian immigrants who grew up together in East Hollywood and high school dropouts. They started the business as a pop-up in a parking lot near where they grew up. Their cayenne-coated, Nashville-style chicken, which comes in six different spice levels (the hottest of which, 'The Reaper' requires buyers to sign a waiver), gained an immediate cult following. Continued social media hype around the brand, which says its brand organically generates millions of views a week on TikTok, along with a cadre of celebrity investors including rapper Drake helped turn Dave's into a $620 million (2024 systemwide sales) business with over 300 global locations — and a prime takeover target.
The Dave's original pop-up was set up in the parking lot of a random apartment building in East Hollywood.
Dave's Hot Chicken
The four cofounders, who were at one time so broke they say they struggled to pool together the $900 needed to launch the first Dave's popup, are now richer than they ever imagined. Each owned roughly 10% of the business prior to the sale and is selling around 80% of their stakes, amounting to around $80 million (pre-tax). 'The money's in our accounts,' says Oganesyan, who admits he Googled whether Roark could request the money back. 'Wires are permanent. Even if you mistakenly wire money to somebody, you can't take it back.' (The day before announcing the Roark deal, Oganesyan, a former standup comedian who is Dave's chief business officer, posted a photo of himself sitting on the hood of an electric blue McLaren with the caption: 'Patiently waiting for all my relatives in Armenia to call and ask me for money.')
It's quite a jump from the last time they cashed out. The founders previously sold half the business – Dave's had just one location at the time – for $2 million in 2018 to an investor group led by CEO Phelps and the Hollywood producer John Davis, son of billionaire oil and entertainment tycoon Marvin Davis (d. 2004) who is now a prominent food investor. (The pair had having previously worked together on Wetzels, which Phelps founded, and on Blaze Pizza.) 'I fell in love with the boys. There was something about them,' says Davis, who claims he knew from the beginning: 'This is a $1 billion company.'
It was really Phelps and Davis who helped it grow so big so fast and, while the duo have worked on the other two restaurant concepts together, this one is the most successful concept to date in terms of the company's ultimate valuation. Phelps and Davis both made 250 times their initial investment. According to Davis, he and Phelps were the largest shareholders in the company at the time of the sale to Roark, with roughly equal stakes. (Davis declined to share his ownership stake but says he still kept some after the sale.) Phelps, who also declined to reveal his ownership stake, says he sold off half of his shares and adds that he and the rest of his investment group voted to give away a chunk of their earnings to create a bonus pool for Dave's executives and employees, around 20 of whom will become millionaires. 'The average bonus for the support people all the way down to assistant restaurant manager level was about $100,000,' adds COO Bitticks.
A lot of things had to go right for Dave's to end up where it did. One important factor was the founders' timely bet on chicken. 'The two hottest new concepts in the restaurant world are coffee and chicken,' says John Gordon, a restaurant industry expert who is the founder of Pacific Management Consulting Group. In 2010, chicken overtook beef as the most popular meat in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A seemingly insatiable appetite for the protein has helped chicken joints including Raising Cane's, Wingstop and Dave's rank among the fastest growing restaurant chains in America in recent years.
Oganesyan says it was this burgeoning trend that prompted him to approach his friend Kopushyan, who he met in middle school, back in 2017. It was a tough sell at first. Kopushyan, who previously worked as a line cook at famed chef Thomas Keller's Bouchon restaurant in Los Angeles, was a vegetarian working at Elf Cafe, a veggie restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. But after a month of lobbying, Oganesyan managed to convince his friend, who developed a recipe he says is 98% the same as the one Dave's currently sells. The pair recruited Tommy Rubenyan and his older brother Gary, who would later help put up the money to open the first store.
The operation was extremely scrappy. Though they initially floated the idea of selling out of a food truck, they decided to do the pop-up instead, borrowing tables and chairs from their families and using the $900 to buy a fryer and heat lamps.
Dave's is known for its nuggets and sliders, which it sells with pickles, fries and Dave's signature sauce.
Dave's Hot Chicken
A rave review from local food blog Eater LA five days into business made Dave's an overnight sensation. Within a year, they opened their first restaurant in East Hollywood. Despite being in an area Phelps describes as a 'dump' – 'we would never approve that site today,' adds Bitticks – Dave's food went so viral that the founders claim the restaurant ended the year doing $5 million in sales.
'It was the cult following,' says Phelps. 'It was what they created through Instagram, the [Eater LA] article… It drew people to the restaurant like crazy and there would be two hour lines for that store.' The brand initially relied heavily on marketing its products through Instagram. But it's also become a big hit on TikTok, where it's trendy for people to post videos of themselves eating and reviewing Dave's' sliders, nuggets and fries.
Not surprisingly, the founders say there was immediate interest from investors. They shrugged off most inquiries but one stood out: A post-it note left with the restaurant's manager. 'It just said 'founders call John Davis,' recalls Kopushyan.
Davis is one of Hollywood's most prolific producers with more than 115 credits – including 'Predator' and 'Doctor Dolittle' – and $8 billion in box office earnings for the films he's backed. Over the past three decades, he's also made a name for himself as a successful early backer of early-stage fast-casual concepts. In 1997, Davis bought into Wetzel's Pretzels, an Auntie Annie's competitor founded by Phelps and Rick Wetzel (Davis and his investment group sold their stake in the business in 2008 at a valuation of $36 million). Davis and Phelps teamed up again in 2012 when they became two of the earliest investors in Blaze Pizza, another restaurant concept founded by Wetzel and his wife Elise. They sold their minority stake in the 380 restaurant chain for an estimated $250 million in 2017.
Davis, who is also an investor in Pop-up Bagels, has a simple formula for building winning restaurant brands: bring on board his posse of trusted investors including Phelps, actor Samuel L. Jackson and celebrity investment advisor Paul Wachter ('we just go from deal to deal'), take the biggest ownership stake, install his own management team and install a celebrity to help rep the brand. Davis did exactly this with Dave's, convincing Phelps, who he'd worked with at both Wetzel's and Blaze, to run the brand instead of retiring.
Immediately after the deal, Dave's began franchising with the help of a management team almost entirely carried over from Blaze.
A recent text exchange between Dave's Hot Chicken investor John Davis and cofounder Arman Oganesyan, who kept the post-it note Davis left at the first restaurant in August 2018.
John Davis
Dave's second restaurant opened in 2019 and then six more the next year, according to data from the restaurant industry data collector Technomic. They targeted franchisors who had owned a Blaze, Wetzel's or another fast casual restaurant previously. Phelps also helped several executives, including Bitticks and Dave's CFO James McGehee, buy franchise locations (Bitticks owns three currently and has plans to open up two more). Dave's founders now own a combined seven locations.
By 2022, a year after Dave's announced rapper Drake as its big celebrity backer (Drake is a client of Wachter's, who helped bring him into the deal, according to Davis), they'd opened nearly 100 locations, many of them in California. They've since more than tripled that number, expanding into 46 different states and seven countries. Dave's systemwide sales hit $617 million last year, up from $392 million in 2023, the Technomic data shows. In 2020, sales were just $22 million.
It's not uncommon for trendy food restaurants to hit the gas too quickly on their brick and mortar growth, then suffer when they fall out of style. This is what happened with Subway, which was acquired by Roark last year for over $9 billion after shuttering nearly a quarter of its locations over the past decade. Blaze, Phelps and David' previous venture, shut 30 locations, or 10% of its total stores, last year, according to Kevin Schimpf, senior director of industry research at Technomic. Blaze's sales also dropped from $400 million in 2023 to $357 million in 2024. When asked whether their chain has any reservations about growing too quickly, Dave's leadership is dismissive.
'We understand this business really well,' says Bitticks of Dave's. 'We're going to go from opening 80 restaurants last year to roughly 155 this year, to almost 165 or 170 next year. That's the kind of growth we can maintain.'
The company isn't worried about competitors. 'I went into a Popeye's and had their spicy chicken sandwich and said, 'We're going to be rich,' says Phelps. Even beloved brands like Chick-Fil-A and Raising Cane's don't rattle him, citing the eating patterns of his two young adult sons. 'They eat out twice a day,' he says. 'It's not like you only have one shot to eat out this week and it's either Dave's or Raising Cane's.'
They're talking a big game but, at least for now, Dave's is still a small fry. According to Phelps, the average Dave's restaurant brings in around $3 million a year in sales (EBITDA margins are between 18% and 20%); data from Technomic suggests that number is closer to $2.5 million. This outpaces the likes of Popeyes, which recorded around $1.9 million in average sales at its more than 2,400 locations last year. But Dave's sales pale in comparison to some of its more ferocious competitors: Chick-Fil-A averaged $9.3 million at its free-standing and drive-thru restaurants last year, while Raising Cane's reportedly hit $6.2 million in average unit volume.
Roark began circling Dave's five years ago when it had just 15 locations. The owners joked that the private equity firm was 'stalking' the brand as they were constantly being courted at conferences or, in Phelps' case, even one time on the golf course.
Before Dave's Hot Chicken, Bill Phelps cofounded and ran Wetzel's Pretzels until 2019.
Dave's Hot Chicken
In the end, the owners were keen enough on the $1 billion offer and worried enough about Trump's tariffs and ensuing economic uncertainty that they rushed to close the deal through a 'truncated sales process' after agreeing to the deal initially in January, according to Bitticks. 'The [mergers & acquisitions market] has been very quiet,' echoes Gordon, the restaurant analyst. Plus, there's another good reason for Dave's to get the deal done now: 'Eating out is a form of entertainment,' says Gordon. 'You need to sell when the concept is hot.' What's trending one day may not be trending the next. And as a business deeply rooted in trends, Dave's may be particularly vulnerable to changing cultural tides.
Davis, for his part, says it was largely his decision for Dave's owners to cash out when they did. 'We have to take care of our investors and give them the opportunity to get out what they want,' he says. 'What I recommended to all of them is when everything is perfect, that's the time to get out.' He adds that Roark's experience is going to 'open up' Dave's to foreign markets, which his team doesn't have as much expertise in. 'This concept is going to be really good in foreign countries.'
Dave's has already sold the rights to open more than 1,000 franchise locations in the U.S., the U.K., the Middle East and Canada over the next five years.
Despite the celebratory parade around the sale, Dave's founders and execs insist they are not walking away any time soon. None are contractually obligated to stay on now the Roark deal is done, but they all say they're planning to do so. Oganesyan remains Dave's chief brand officer, while Kopushyan is chief culinary officer. They highlight that they continue to hold a stake in the brand as well as multiple franchise locations. Plus, they say none of the now 55 employees at Dave's HQ have left the company since it was founded seven years ago.
As for the customers who may be concerned about what will happen to Dave's in the hands of private equity: 'Our whole journey, when we were in the pop up, people were saying 'Oh when you guys get a store the quality is going to go down.' Then when we started franchising, people were like 'Oh my gosh, the franchising quality is going to go down,'' says Oganesyan. 'Every step of the way, people were always like that. And I think what I was always trying to get across to people is, as long as you have founders and people within the brand who care about the food, they care about the experience, the quality will never go down.'