Tom Gordon and the price of Friday

At one point in the early life of Slim Chickens, Tom Gordon and Greg Smart flipped a coin to decide whose car would be sold to make payroll. It is a compact business anecdote with an unusually clear balance sheet: two founders, one car to lose, employees who needed paying. The coin supplied a decision. It supplied no money of its own.

Gordon has described taking Friday lunch receipts to the bank so that Friday payroll could clear. He and Smart went without salaries and worked through arrangements to get bills paid after weekend sales arrived. The restaurant had customers. What it needed, repeatedly, was enough cash at precisely the right hour. Anyone can admire a promising business on Monday. Friday asks a more pointed question.

“Surviving is the key,” Gordon said in 2020. The remark is useful company for the photographs of new restaurant openings that came later. Slim Chickens began in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2003. Its co-founder and chief executive would eventually oversee an international franchise business. The distance between those two facts contains a great many ordinary Fridays.

A finance degree meets a turkey fryer

Gordon studied finance at Texas Christian University, then worked in restaurants in Arkansas and California. He learned the practical jobs: scheduling people, placing orders, dealing with vendors, keeping track of a restaurant’s accounts. When Smart called him in California about a chicken concept for Northwest Arkansas, Gordon could bring both operating experience and financial training to the conversation.

The proposition was specific. Smart had seen chicken restaurants elsewhere in the Southeast and thought Fayetteville had room for a fresh chicken tender business. Gordon and Smart wanted a menu with enough variety to accommodate a group without losing its center. Tenders would anchor it; wings, sandwiches, wraps and sauces would give different diners reasons to agree on the same address.

Their development kitchen was Smart’s garage. Friends came to eat, and score sheets asked them to judge flavor, quality and consistency. A turkey fryer did some of the equipment’s more glamorous work. Months of testing preceded the restaurant. Calling the visitors a focus group was accurate, although it lent a certain corporate dignity to an evening in a garage.

An existing building with a drive-thru was essential because the partners lacked money to build from scratch. They found a former Sake Express on North College Avenue. Gordon’s mother, Jane, supplied the name Slim Chickens. The restaurant opened on February 17, 2003. There was now an address where strangers could decide whether the friends had been right.

The customer gets the deciding vote

Gordon’s approach to the plate has remained practical. Asked in 2016 for his favorite menu item, he chose the 3 & 3 Plate: three tenders and three wings. He liked being able to sample several products together and compare one restaurant with another. Lunch could double as an inspection. An executive expense with unusually edible supporting documentation.

He also acknowledged the trade-off in cooking to order. An order might take a few extra minutes, but the company was investing in preparation, sauces, sides and a room where people wanted to sit. He expressed respect for established competitors while describing the particular experience he wanted Slim Chickens to deliver. Confidence did not require pretending the other restaurants were empty.

That experience extended beyond the recipe. Early restaurants drew on a Memphis-style, blues-inflected atmosphere. There were patios and drive-thrus, with different ways for people to use the same business. A meal could be a stop on the way somewhere or a reason to stay. Gordon’s challenge was to make the food and the welcome hold together across those occasions.

Getting the restaurant out of his head

Customers asked about franchises when there was still only one Slim Chickens. Interest alone could not create a franchise system. The business needed people who could turn operating knowledge into something another owner could use. Gordon has described bringing in a chief financial officer around the seventh restaurant and later recruiting experienced franchise executive Sam Rothschild.

That spending arrived while the founders still felt the strain of building the business. Their judgment was that experienced operators expressing interest deserved an organization capable of supporting them. A franchisee with a portfolio of restaurants would bring expectations about training, reporting and execution. Selling the idea was only the beginning of the obligation.

Gordon’s shorthand was “Processes, product, preparedness.” He described spending about a year translating the founders’ knowledge into written material and videos. Staffing, ordering, checks and food costs had to become teachable. The achievement here was almost literary: take what two people knew from doing the work and make it intelligible to someone who had never stood beside them.

The first franchise opened in Texarkana in 2013. A second location in Rogers had followed the original restaurant in 2005, so the founders had already spent years repeating and refining their own operation. The rhythm matters. A franchise contract can be signed much faster than a restaurant’s accumulated habits can be understood.

Letting other people into the kitchen

In July 2019, 10 Point Capital invested as a minority partner. The firm’s account puts Slim Chickens at 80 domestic and international locations by that year. Gordon and Smart remained active leaders and board members, with Gordon as chief executive and Smart as chief brand officer. Outside capital joined a business whose founders were still very much present.

The relationship supplied more than money. Gordon has spoken positively about the working partnership and the flexibility it allowed. The transaction belongs in a different chapter from the payroll coin toss: the company could now bring in a partner to help accelerate growth. Getting there had required making the restaurant repeatable enough to support that ambition.

The physical restaurants could change, too. By 2020, the company was using two ground-up prototypes and converting buildings that had housed other chains or independent restaurants. Jackie Lobdell, who joined in 2018 to lead franchise development, helped pursue multi-unit partners. Growth depended on people finding sites, adapting buildings and getting doors open, well beyond anything a founder could accomplish at one fryer.

By late 2019, Slim Chickens had reached its hundredth restaurant. The arithmetic is pleasing; the work behind it is less tidy. Each location introduced another set of employees, another operating team and another place where a customer could have a disappointing lunch. Expansion multiplied the chances to earn trust and the opportunities to waste it.

A robot can carry lunch. Then what?

Gordon’s interest in technology has included ordering systems, loyalty tools and even food-running robots. In 2022, some franchise locations were trying robots that transported meals. Employees worried about errors, then saw the machines successfully make repeated trips. Gordon treated the experiment as a useful contribution to restaurant work while continuing to emphasize the people greeting and looking after guests.

“Hospitality is hospitality,” he said. The repetition sounds almost stubborn. It suits a business in which the usefulness of a new device still depends on what happens to the diner. Carrying a plate solves a task. Someone must still notice the guest, answer a question and judge whether the visit is going well.

His description of the customer journey is similarly concrete. The experience begins when someone drives onto the lot. The building, the grounds, the people and the drive-thru all count. In a 2024 conversation, he described wanting a visit that was consistent, friendly and easy enough to repeat, including for a parent arriving with children in the back seat.

The same thinking reaches into hiring and development. In a Paycom webinar, Gordon discussed pairing the kitchen’s traditional brigade structure with automation for payroll and human resources. Recruiting future leaders and planning succession belong alongside getting orders out. A growing chain needs people who can take responsibility before the next opening makes their absence painfully obvious.

“Hospitality is hospitality.”

Tom Gordon, on restaurant technology, 2022

Hundreds of restaurants, one restless founder

By August 2024, Gordon was discussing a business with 284 restaurants globally and an ambition to reach a billion dollars in revenue by 2027. He also talked about inflation, supply chains and balancing the needs of franchise owners with employee pay. Growth had changed the scale of the questions. It had preserved their financial sharpness.

His advice to younger entrepreneurs included being open to partners and investor input. That is a revealing position for someone whose early business required such personal persistence. Holding on long enough to survive and allowing other people to influence the next stage can demand different habits. Gordon’s career contains both, without making either sound especially comfortable.

In 2025, asked about the chain’s growth, his response was “What took so long?” There is humor in a founder looking at two decades of work and wondering why it could not have happened sooner. There is also the impatience that makes a completed opening feel like the start of the next task.

By summer 2026, Slim Chickens was approaching 400 restaurants, following more than 70 openings in 2025. Its stated trajectory pointed toward 600 by 2029. Those are different kinds of numbers: an account of what had opened and a destination still ahead. Gordon continued personally testing new menu items. The larger organization had not removed the plate from his job.

Franchise partners train in Northwest Arkansas, using the company’s local restaurants. New markets have carried the business far from Fayetteville, but learning how to run one still brings people back. For Gordon, the satisfying moments include managers building careers and franchisees succeeding. Somewhere between the first payroll scramble and the next opening, the business became a way for other people to make their living. That gives Friday a longer reach.