Growth Has a Price: The CEO Decisions Nobody Talks About When a Restaurant Scales
Everyone wants to talk about restaurant growth. Far fewer people talk about what growth breaks. Scott Deviney has led Chicken Salad Chick from 32 restaurants to more than 340 today — and in 2026, that growth hit a new kind of test: pushing past the brand's Southern home turf into markets like New York and Michigan, where the guest, the economics, and the franchisee pool all look different.
In this keynote, Deviney takes CEOs inside the less visible side of that expansion — the trade-offs, organizational decisions, and uncomfortable calls required to scale a franchise system without outrunning the business underneath it.
He'll tackle the questions CEOs are actually wrestling with:
- When should you slow or speed development?
- How do you know when you need to change your infrastructure to grow with the company?
- How do you protect franchisee returns while investing in the brand?
- Which decisions stay centralized — and which move closer to the restaurant?
- And what changes in the CEO's own job as the map gets bigger and less familiar?
This is not a growth story. It's a conversation about the price of growth, told through a brand paying that price in real time — and how to make sure it's worth it.
