How Chicken N Pickle Scaled Eatertainment Without Franchising | Kelli Alldredge

How Chicken N Pickle Scaled Eatertainment Without Franchising | Kelli Alldredge Michelin-awarded restaurateur Josh Kopel sits down with Kelli Alldredge on FULL COMP — the show where Josh Kopel unpacks the tactics, tools, and strategies of the world's best restaurateurs. Kelli Alldredge is President of Chicken N Pickle, and she walked in with zero restaurant industry experience. She started in 2016 as a customer playing pickleball every Sunday, asked founder Dave Johnson whether she could run a fundraiser on the property, and was told she could — but that nobody there had done one before and she would have to figure it out. That first event raised $80,000 for a nearby cancer center and became one of the best sales days the company had recorded in its first year of operation, even though the property gave away the courts. That result opened the door. She joined part-time to build a community program, came on full-time to help with expansion, absorbed pickleball operations after noticing as a customer that the courts and the restaurant were run as two separate businesses, then built the partnership team. Her areas of responsibility now cover marketing, community engagement, partnerships, pickleball, employee relations, and the Chicken N Pickle Foundation, alongside a CEO who owns operations, IT, accounting, and HR, and the founder who owns development and construction. She also corrects the assumption that a concept this size must be franchised: Chicken N Pickle has a single owner and every location has been opened by the company itself. She positions the brand as the deliberately low-tech answer to Topgolf — a whiffle ball and a paddle, free yard games, cornhole and Jenga, dogs welcome, engineered for long dwell time and human connection rather than screens. Build time on a new property runs about nine to ten months, community staff are hired before a location opens, a cup campaign rotates every two weeks at every location, and a 10% give-back runs every Tuesday night. On the growth side she talks candidly about challenging industry conventional wisdom as an outsider, why it was not all roses, and how the company grows leaders internally while still pushing revenue and profit at each individual location. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT THE HOST Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur, founder of Restaurant Scaling Systems, and the host of FULL COMP. After two decades operating restaurants — from fast casual to fine dining — Josh Kopel now teaches independent restaurant owners how to build profitable restaurants that run without them. For free restaurant marketing tools and trainings from Josh Kopel, visit https://joshkopel.com ▶ Subscribe for a new FULL COMP episode with Josh Kopel every day. #restaurants #hospitality #restaurantbusiness #FullComp #JoshKopel