When brothers Cody and Scott Davis and their friend and business partner, Josh Rowden, last month opened their seventh Slim Chickens restaurant out of a planned 25, they were just following in their parents’ footsteps of franchise success.
The partners, whose business is based in Heber Springs, opened a Slim Chickens at 2534 Hwy. 62E in Mountain Home, the town’s first, on July 31. The opening came just a few months after the Davis brothers and Rowden opened a Slim Chickens in Paragould in March.
The partnership, which formed in 2019, also has Slim Chickens restaurants in Searcy, Southaven, Mississippi (their first); Memphis; and Collierville and Jackson, Tennessee. Their development agreement calls for 25 stores total.
The three men were raised in the restaurant business. Cody and Scott’s father, Ricky Davis, is a partner with Rowden’s father, Greg Rowden, along with David Hull in Davis Hull & Rowden, or DHR, which owns 34 Sonic Drive-Ins and which has offices in Heber Springs, Searcy and Poyen (Grant County).
And though in an interview Cody Davis said he didn’t want his father’s business success to overshadow any conversation about what his Slim Chickens franchise business is doing, it’s obvious that he’s proud of his father and mother, Cindy Davis, a partner in his father’s business.
“We all grew up in the restaurant industry,” Davis said of his brother and Josh. In his Slim Chickens group, Cody Davis’ role centers on marketing and technology, Josh focuses on operations, and Scott is in charge of development, working with the Slim Chickens corporation, based in Fayetteville.
Slim Chickens’ food, which Davis calls “incredible,” was what attracted the Davis brothers and Rowden to the brand. In addition, “It was such a young brand, whenever we started looking at it.
“And of course we’ve seen the success that our parents found in the restaurant industry,” he said. “Scott and I, we grew up in the side room of a Sonic Drive-In,” adding that his parents “had a huge part obviously in our success because they taught us everything that we know. They taught us that hard work and giving your people opportunity is the most important thing.
“And so for us, we saw Slim Chickens as an area that not only could we get in there and roll our sleeves up and build some great success around, but also where we could maybe give some success to some of these other people around us that have been working hard.”
Davis cited Trey Harris as someone taking advantage of that opportunity by developing the Chattanooga, Tennessee, market as a Slim Chickens franchise partner. “We sell them a percentage of the business, and they get in there and they run it like it’s their own baby, and success builds success,” Davis said.
He, his brother and Josh Rowden saw similarities between the Slim Chickens and Sonic brands and the same possibilities for success that their parents had seen years earlier.
The Davis-Rowden Slim Chickens partnership plans to start construction soon on an eighth store, in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The partnership has a goal of opening two to three stores per year under its 25-store development agreement.
The partners’ first Slim Chickens, in Southaven, is the busiest in the entire chain, Davis said. Last year, sales among the five restaurants that they had opened to date totaled about $19 million, he said.
Davis said his restaurant group works with and contributes to local charities and one of its favorites is Make-A-Wish, the nonprofit that grants wishes of children with critical illnesses. “We’ll do just about anything we can to get a wish granted, and we try to grant one at all of our openings.”
Davis is a big believer in the franchise restaurant business model. “We empower our people.”
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