Insights from ChopShop’s CEO, Jason Morgan, on scaling into new markets without losing culture, overextending your team, or sacrificing profitability.
Scaling a restaurant brand in 2025 takes more than ambition. With high turnover, rising costs, and tightening margins, today’s operators need a smarter, more disciplined playbook. That’s exactly what Jason Morgan, CEO of ChopShop, explored in a recent webinar with Clinton Anderson, CEO of Fourth.
Drawing from his experience leading Zoës Kitchen through an IPO and now growing ChopShop across multiple markets, Jason shared candid lessons on what it really takes to expand without sacrificing culture, profitability, or team health.
From common missteps to the systems and strategies that make growth sustainable, here are the top takeaways from their conversation.
Original ChopShop is a fast casual brand founded in 2013 and headquartered in Phoenix, AZ. Known for its “feel-good food” and people-first culture, the company has grown to 25+ locations across Arizona, Texas, and Georgia, all company-owned. CEO Jason Morgan brings deep industry experience from his previous role leading growth and expansion at Zoës Kitchen through its IPO.
Jason was clear: the goal isn’t just more units, it’s stronger, healthier units.
Rather than chasing store count, ChopShop focuses on core performance indicators like repeat traffic, store-level margin, and strong general manager (GM) tenure. Leadership readiness is a key signal for when and where to grow.
He also reflected on past mistakes, such as entering new markets without enough density or a deep enough bench, moves that created strain and stalled momentum. The big takeaway? Expansion should follow operational readiness, not pressure from capital.
Build the Bench Before You Build More Stores
When asked what matters most before opening a new market, Jason pointed to leadership.
ChopShop has made internal growth a priority, and it shows:
That doesn’t happen by accident. Jason shared how their shift leader and assistant general manager (AGM) roles act as a training ground for future leaders. These roles come with higher pay, additional responsibilities, and a clear path to GM, so when it’s time to open new stores, they already have talent ready to step in.
The warning for others? Don’t overburden your team by stretching GMs across too many stores or opening before your people are ready.
ChopShop uses scheduling as a strategic lever, not just a staffing necessity.
With tools like HotSchedules, GMs have the visibility and forecasting they need to:
Jason emphasized that labor strain is one of the biggest risks when scaling fast. Smart scheduling and prep planning help reduce that strain so managers can spend less time fighting fires and more time coaching their teams.
Jason’s approach to tech is practical: “Start with what actually helps your managers.”
For ChopShop, the focus has been on foundational systems that:
He warned against tech that adds complexity without solving real problems. The right tech, he said, should extend the reach of good management, not replace it.
When asked about AI, Jason was cautiously optimistic.
He sees potential in using AI for:
But he cautioned that AI is only useful if it integrates into existing workflows and gives managers more confidence, not more confusion.
Throughout the conversation, Jason came back to a central idea: sustainable growth is about getting your people and your systems in sync.
That means:
For other operators scaling from 10 to 50 units, his advice was clear: move fast when you can, but only when your teams and tools are truly ready.
Want to hear it straight from Jason? Watch the full webinar on-demand to learn how ChopShop is scaling profitably with a people-first approach.
To see how Fourth is helping growth-stage restaurant brands scale smarter (without burning out their teams or sacrificing profitability), talk to us.
From AI-powered scheduling to tools that support manager development and BOH efficiency, we’re helping operators build the foundation for multi-unit growth.
Christina Lau (Host, Fourth):
Everyone, welcome to our webinar today. Our session is all about the growth playbook for restaurant CEOs with an exciting guest speaker I will introduce momentarily. So we’ll go ahead and get things started.
I’m Christina from the Fourth team here as your host. And just as people are joining and signing on, I’ll use this time to cover a quick few housekeeping notes. So first is that this is being recorded in case you do want to re-watch it, share with someone, be interested, or if you have to step away at any point.
We will email you the recording afterwards.
And second is if you have any questions… if you’re joining us live, you will see an option to submit a question towards the bottom right of your platform.
So now to get to what you came for. I will introduce our speakers to let you know who you’ll be hearing from.
So first, our guest speaker, Jason Morgan, the CEO of Chop Shop. Thank you. And we also have Clinton Anderson, the CEO of Fourth, who will be moderating the conversation with Jason.
So Jason, how about I let you give the audience some information about your background and you can also tell them a little bit about Chop Shop. And then I’ll let you take it from there, Clinton.
Jason Morgan (CEO, Chop Shop):
Okay, great. Thanks Christina. My name is Jason Morgan, CEO of Original Chop Shop.
I’ve been doing this for about nine years now. We bought the brand in 2016—three units—and I’ve grown it to 26.
Prior to this, I’ve spent most of my career in hospitality in some shape or form. After a brief stint of trying to be an accountant for about a year and a half, I transitioned into casino property and worked in corporate finance. That led to a corporate finance job at another casino company, into a hotel company, and then to Zoës Kitchen in 2008. I was the first employee there after private equity bought the business. Helped grow that from 20 to 150 locations, took it public in 2014, and then left about a year and a half after going public to do this at Chop Shop.
My hope is that we can replicate the success we had at Zoës, and we’re off to a really good start.
Our brand is a better-for-you, fast-casual concept. We’re at the counter, we bring the food to the table. It is primarily protein bowls—about 40 percent of the mix. We also do salads, sandwiches. The key to the program is we have a beverage component as well with fresh-squeezed juices and protein shakes. We do all stables, we do breakfast all day. So one of the biggest menus in fast casual today. A little more complicated than some of the walk-the-line concepts that are out there, but we think we’ve got something pretty special.
We’re going to add another store this year and at least four stores next year. So we will be 31 or so stores by the end of next year.
Clinton Anderson (CEO, Fourth):
Thanks, Jason. Hey, everyone. It’s great to be with you again. My name is Clinton Anderson. I’m the CEO here at Fourth. I’ve been in this role for about six years.
Fourth, as many of you know, is a leading provider of software solutions to the restaurant and hospitality industry. Our goal is to help our customers be successful in driving profitability and being efficient—managing labor, managing inventory, and basically providing them with tools they need to deliver their vision.
And so I’m really grateful to have Jason with us here today. It’s rare to have companies that are beloved and growing quickly, that can repeat that success year after year. Jason, one of the reasons I was so excited to have you join our session is… the success at Zoës was amazing.
I’ve only met a handful of brands where there was such a strong customer affinity for the brand. And you guys took that to huge heights. And now you’re doing the same thing at Chop Shop. When you talk to customers about Chop Shop, they love the place. They speak about its differentiation.
And to be able to take what is a relatively complicated concept in terms of delivering a great experience for the customer, and be able to grow that from a few stores to now north of 30 stores next year—it’s amazing.
The topic today is an interesting one. We’re going to talk about how to scale a restaurant business. Every restaurateur I ever talk to has dreams of taking one store, two stores, five stores, and turning it into something much bigger—expanding across the city, across the state, into multiple states, and ultimately national, even international reach.
But it’s not easy, especially in today’s environment. Many restaurant chains are seeing flat to negative same-store sales. Labor is tough. Inventory costs remain high. It’s not an easy time to drive profitability and growth at the same time.
But we’re glad to have you here today, Jason, because we’re going to dig into that topic. The questions are going to be really around: how do you grow a business? How do you scale it and make it successful? How do you replicate early success? And from there, after we talk about your experience and the lessons you’ve learned, we’d love to then say: well, look, how could technology help? How can you use technology as a multiplier to replicate early success to far-reaching success?
Second, beyond technology, how do you scale great teams?
And lastly, AI. Everyone’s talking about AI—how are you thinking about using advanced AI capabilities in your business?
So with that, let’s dive in.
Clinton Anderson:
The first question I have for you, Jason—look, you’ve done this twice now in the restaurant industry. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned? What has your experience been in terms of what it takes to really drive success in expanding restaurants? Tell me a little about your path, what you experienced along the way, and maybe some of the harder lessons you learned.
Jason Morgan:
Wow, that’s a pretty open-ended question to start with. But in my mind, there is a playbook here. And it’s a playbook that I think a lot of people have pieces of.
Turns out it’s a lot about execution. Like, a lot of people talk about the same things around the restaurant industry. You could talk to 10 other CEOs—they’re all working on the same five or six things in their business.
But not everybody’s winning, right? The people that are winning are executing a little bit better than the other folks.
We talked a little bit before we started about LinkedIn, and I’ve got a post teed up to follow this next week about what the playbook is like—point by point—for growing a business.
To me, one of the key things, and I feel very fortunate, is that both brands I’ve been involved with are unique. Zoës—there wasn’t really anything exactly like Zoës during the time we were growing that business. And there’s nothing exactly like Chop Shop in terms of what we’re doing with a large, diverse menu.
Most brands today are very singularly focused in terms of what they’re offering from a food product. I feel like we started at an advantage with both brands by having something unique that filled a niche no one else was doing.
If you told me I had to run a brand selling hot chicken or pizza or burgers, I’d probably have a harder time doing that. Because it’s just harder to stand out when there are 10, 20, 50 concepts within a two- or three-mile radius trying to do the exact same thing.
So a lot of it starts with the brand. Does your brand have something unique that no one else is doing? That’s rare. It doesn’t happen often.
The second thing—I came from a finance background, so a lot of my learnings are more finance and data-driven versus a lot of early startup restaurateurs who are creative types. They love the food, they built the menu, they built the brand. I probably couldn’t do that from scratch.
But if you gave me something that has all those components in place, I can take it from there and put the playbook in place.
One of the key things people miss—I see this in private equity-backed companies and others—is they don’t understand their unit-level economic model. They don’t know their breakeven sales. They don’t understand how margin improves as sales increase. They don’t understand cash-on-cash returns.
I’ve seen so many companies where the numbers just don’t work. And yet people say: let’s open 10 more. And I’ll say: why? It doesn’t make money. Stop.
You need to find a concept that is unique. And you need something that works financially. If you don’t have those two things, you shouldn’t be building stores.
Clinton Anderson:
Yeah, maybe both, right? Because as I hear your description, you’ve highlighted three things: execution, brand differentiation, and financial viability.
You’ve got to start with execution. If you don’t have an operating model that works, expanding it just multiplies problems. Expansion of an ineffective operating model is a disaster.
Second, you need a compelling brand or unique concept that resonates with customers.
And third, the math has to work. If you don’t understand your unit economics, your fixed and variable costs, you may be expanding blind and losing money.
Jason Morgan:
Exactly. And another key lesson is about entering new markets. At Chop Shop, our home market was Phoenix, where we saw strong sales and margins. But when we expanded to Dallas, I expected new stores to do 50–70% of Phoenix sales in the first year.
Too many operators assume new markets will open at full volume day one. That almost never happens. And when the stores open slow, but you’ve signed leases and built a financial model based on higher volumes, you get overextended. Many brands end up retreating back to their home markets.
I always joke: if you look at the “hot concepts” list each year, maybe three to five out of 50 have actually doubled or tripled their base. It’s not as easy as people think.
You need patience, capital, and the ability to withstand a slow start.
Clinton Anderson:
That’s a really good point. Many founders are creative, visionary types, but expansion requires combining that creativity with operations and finance. Otherwise, they get rose-colored glasses about success in the home market and assume it will translate quickly.
You mentioned expecting 50–70% volumes. That’s sobering. I’ve even seen cases where it’s just 25–30% at launch. It underscores how critical capital structure is.
Jason Morgan:
Yes. Most small growth concepts like ours rely on equity, not debt. Banks won’t lend unless you’re generating $1–2 million EBITDA, and personal guarantees are risky. So you need equity sponsors who believe in the vision and the team.
Another lesson: you need to open four to six stores in a new market within two to three years. That’s expensive, but it creates critical mass, builds awareness, and justifies above-store leadership. Without it, you stay slow and unprofitable.
At Zoës, we had a scattered early footprint. At Chop Shop, we deliberately built strong bases in Phoenix and Dallas first. That gave us the profitability to withstand slow starts in Houston and Atlanta.
And we were fortunate that Dallas—our second market—was also where our team lived. Having the whole team in-market to support stores, hire, and ensure culture was huge.
Clinton Anderson:
That’s a great segue into the team discussion. People often underestimate how critical team is to scaling. How have you approached building and scaling your team?
Jason Morgan:
This is something I’m really proud of. Our team took all the things we hated from past jobs—feeling underappreciated, underpaid, growth-stifled—and built the opposite culture here.
We emphasize growth mindset and career pathing. We rolled out training that maps progression from cashier to shift lead to assistant manager to GM to regional manager. And it resonated so much more than I expected.
Our results: hourly turnover around 97%—about half of Chipotle’s. GM tenure over 4.5 years. Top third of hourly staff tenure 2.5 years. Over 80% of GMs promoted internally.
We also created interim roles like AGM-in-training to have people ready for the next opening. That costs more upfront, but pays off in readiness, culture alignment, and reduced training cost.
At Zoës, we overstretched regional managers with 10–13 stores each. At Chop Shop, we keep it to 4–6. That’s made a huge difference in execution quality.
And we’re careful to hire people who love the brand. If someone comes to interview and hasn’t eaten at Chop Shop, that’s a red flag.
Clinton Anderson:
I love that. People who love the brand give that extra 10%. It’s not just a job. And when you create opportunities for them to grow, they stay longer.
Jason Morgan:
Exactly. On the corporate side, I hire “doers,” not executives who just build layers under them. We’ve kept the team lean, provided growth opportunities, and accepted that some people will outgrow us and move on—and that’s okay. I even write references for them.
We’ve already had people go on to bigger roles in the industry, and that builds our reputation as a growth culture.
Clinton Anderson:
That’s fantastic. Let’s move to another enabler: technology. How do you think about it?
Jason Morgan:
My fourth hire at Chop Shop was an IT lead, which most people thought was crazy. But I believed scalability depended on it.
We replaced the POS quickly, added inventory/back office systems, and launched digital ordering early—even overpaying to get it. We also added a data warehouse (Mirus) so we could do real reporting, not rely on canned POS reports.
When COVID hit, even at 18 units, we looked like a 150-unit brand. We had digital ordering, our app was launching, and we were ready. Today, 74% of sales are digital, and 40% of transactions have a loyalty number attached.
That tech foundation has been huge for scaling.
Clinton Anderson:
I couldn’t agree more. Tech gives managers the tools they need, especially in new stores, and creates consistency.
One last topic: AI. Everyone’s talking about it. What’s your perspective?
Jason Morgan:
We’re still experimenting. Some AI guest response tools aren’t great yet. But we’re rolling out an AI-powered prep planning tool that I’m really excited about—it will help optimize kitchen time, reduce waste, and lower breakeven costs.
Beyond that, I’ve played around with ChatGPT for press releases and posts, but nothing major yet.
Clinton Anderson:
That’s okay—you don’t need to figure it all out yourself. Vendors should embed AI into their tools. We’ve been deploying AI across our product suite, and the combination of algorithms plus data from thousands of restaurants creates powerful insights in labor and inventory.
It can make young managers much more effective and free up their time to coach teams and delight guests.
Christina Lau (Host, Fourth):
Perfect timing. We do have a couple of questions from the audience, so let’s take those before we wrap up.
Audience Question: What is your playbook when you enter a totally new market?
Jason Morgan:
We typically start inside the city loop with the first location. We seed the market with proven leaders from another market who move there and live it daily. From there, we focus on execution and let growth be organic—word of mouth, social sharing. We don’t spend much on marketing.
And, as mentioned earlier, we try to open 4–6 stores relatively quickly to build awareness and continuity.
Audience Question: How do you make sure scheduling stays consistent across stores?
Jason Morgan:
At Zoës we used a flat labor percentage, but that didn’t scale well. At Chop Shop, we built a regression model using six months of store data.
On the x-axis: daily sales. On the y-axis: hours worked. From that, we derived a formula: a fixed number of hours to open a store, then add an extra hour per $150 in sales after $2,500.
This keeps us within 1% of labor forecasts every week. Managers distribute hours by peak (lunch, dinner, breakfast), then adjust in real time if sales beat or miss forecasts.
Clinton Anderson:
That’s a great example. And we’ve actually built AI labor scheduling tools that do exactly this for managers who don’t have finance backgrounds. It’s a huge opportunity for the industry.
Jason Morgan:
Yes—and I think back-of-house labor is the next frontier. With prep planning tools, we can better allocate time for cutting, prepping, and line service. I think we’ll unlock 10–20% efficiency improvements.
Clinton Anderson:
Exactly. These tools are maturing fast, and the next few years are going to be exciting for the industry.
Clinton Anderson:
Jason, thank you so much for joining today. Your blend of financial discipline, operational execution, and focus on people and culture is rare. I learned a lot personally, and I know our audience did too.
Jason Morgan:
Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Save time, reduce costs, and increase profitability with Fourth’s intelligent solutions.
By