Guide

Rajiv Dinakaran on Growing His Family's Bojangles to 46

By Wilson K Lee, updated October 2026 · How I get these numbers

The Bojangles in Milledgeville, Georgia, sat in a great spot and was still struggling. Rajiv Dinakaran’s family bought it as their first store in Georgia, and he worked out the problem quickly. There was nothing wrong with the food or the location. In his words, “the people just didn’t care.” Much of what he did about that cost very little, and it is the part of our talk I would hand to any owner whose shop has gone flat.

Rajiv is President and COO of Georgia Foods, LLC, the family’s Bojangles franchise. His father opened the family’s first Bojangles in 2004 and grew the business to six stores in North Carolina. Today the group has 46 in three states, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, and Rajiv looks after the Georgia side with his sister.

I sat down with him at On the Clock 2026 in Atlanta. Of the operators I interviewed there, his path looks the most like the one small owners ask me about: one family, a handful of stores, and a big question about what comes next. I went from one shop to seven with 720 Sweets before I sold it, so I asked him about the years in between.

What Rajiv told me, from the first store on

The owner’s son washed dishes first. He joined his father’s business at 16 and started at the bottom, as a dishwasher, because his dad drilled into him that respect has to be earned. By 24 he was district manager over all six stores. He still works shifts today, on the drive through and the front register, “making chicken, making biscuits,” because he wants the crew to see that he is one of them.

A good store with a people problem. The family looked at Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio before buying the Milledgeville store and the rights to build around it. It was poorly run, and he could see it in three places: food that did not taste as good, a drive through that moved slower, and a restaurant that was not as clean. His fix started with himself. He had to “show them that I cared,” and once the crew saw the owner care, they began to care too.

He asked before he spent. New to the town and knowing nobody, he pulled the crew and managers into one meeting and asked what needed to happen. They asked for changes to the schedule, extra staff, fixes to the building and more marketing, and “I just listened to them.” Then he asked customers while working shifts. They said the biscuits were off and the drive through was slow, so he reworked the biscuit process and staffed for speed. “It made the whole business win.”

Small yeses before big money. That first store had no spare cash for higher pay or big benefits, so he did the free things. One person got Friday off for a wedding anniversary. Another got two days for a child’s graduation. His reason: if a date mattered to them, it mattered to him. Better pay and benefits came later, and customers started saying, “Something’s different here.”

From 6 to 46, chase the problem. The hard part of growing was the support behind the stores: when to add HR services, more office staff and marketing people. Because he was in the restaurants so much, he saw problems first hand, and he learned to “chase the problem” until he found the fix that would work for every store, what he calls “a system that works multiple times.” He hired the same way, telling single store managers he wanted them to grow with him. His IT and analytics director began as a shift manager in high school, earning “maybe $10 an hour,” and has now worked for the family for over 25 years.

AI for the boring parts, people at the window. His stores use Bo-Linda, the AI drive through order taker, so a person is freed up for guests. As he put it, “AI loves boring jobs,” and he is just as clear that it will never replace the human touch at the window. On growth he is calm. He felt like he had won Wimbledon with his first store, and today he says, “We can be successful at 46.”

If you run one to five shops, start here

Rajiv learned a lot of this at one store without much cash, which is a lot closer to where most of us are than 46 restaurants. These are the moves I would make with it.

Hold the meeting before you write the check. Before you spend on a refit, a new manager or a marketing push, get your crew in a room and ask what needs to happen for the shop to win. Write every answer on one sheet, post it in the back, and put a date next to the first item. Then do it by that date and tell them it is done. That last step is what makes them answer honestly next time.

Collect the dates that matter. The anniversary and graduation days off cost him nothing but a schedule change. This month, ask each person on your team for one date this year that matters to them, and put it on the calendar before the schedule fills up. It costs you nothing today, and your people will remember it.

Keep a “fixed it” note. Every time you solve a problem at one store, write down in two lines what broke and what fixed it. When the same thing shows up at your second store, that note becomes the rule. That is the small version of his system that works multiple times, and it is how store three gets easier than store two.

Tell your next hire where they could go. He hired single store managers by telling them the plan was to see them run more. At two shops you can say the same thing honestly: here is what store two or store three would need from you. Put a check in on the calendar every quarter to see how they are tracking.

Write down what enough looks like. “We can be successful at 46” is a healthy sentence at any size. Before you sign for another location, write down the profit and the hours you want from the business. If you can hit that number with the stores you have, growth becomes a choice you make on purpose.

If your shop is still young, my guide to the five reasons restaurants fail in their first year covers what goes wrong before you ever get to store two.

His story, told two more ways

The same conversation became two articles on Workstream’s blog, both written by me, and they pull it apart in different directions.

• Why a Failing Restaurant Is Almost Never a Food Problem stays with the Milledgeville store: what was wrong, the crew meeting, the customer questions, and why money would not have fixed it.
• 5 Moves Rajiv Dinakaran Used to Scale Bojangles From 6 to 46 covers the growth years: starting at the bottom, turning a single store’s problem into a group fix, hiring people to grow, ownership, and AI on the boring jobs.

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