Sticking with this week's theme, let's talk about a brand that has turned collaboration into a growth engine: Big Chicken, the better-chicken concept founded by Shaquille O'Neal back in 2018. Full disclosure, and a happy one: Big Chicken is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. The wins have been coming fast, and the how is the whole story.
Start with the newest one. This week Big Chicken opened at Jackson State University, its first location on an HBCU campus, in the Legacy Food Court, through a partnership with SodexoMAGIC.
Sit with that pairing for a second, b/c it's beautiful.
SodexoMAGIC is itself a collaboration, the joint venture between food-service giant Sodexo and Magic Johnson Enterprises, a minority-owned business majority-held by Magic. So this is, quite literally, Shaq's brand and Magic's platform teaming up to serve students at a historic HBCU.
Two Hall of Famers, one food court. It even helps that Shaq and JSU's basketball coach Mo Williams were teammates on the Cavs. The whole thing is authentic to its bones, which, per this week's Top of the Fold, is the entire ballgame.
And it's not a one-off. In August, Big Chicken opened its first standalone Maryland restaurant in Gambrills, run by franchise partner Pratik Patel, adding to an earlier Baltimore arena location. The brand is now north of 40 locations, almost all of them operated as franchises or franchise-partner deals, with Craveworthy Brands, the multi-brand platform led by Gregg Majewski, serving as managing partner.
Dr. O’Neal, for his part, has built roughly a $500 million empire across restaurants, car washes, and fitness.
Here's The Deal Room lesson, b/c it's bigger than one chicken brand.
Watch how Big Chicken actually scales, b/c it's a clinic in growth by collaboration, and every layer is the same trade: equity for distribution. Big Chicken brings the one thing money genuinely cannot buy, Shaq's brand equity and goodwill, an instant reason for a landlord, a campus, or a franchisee to want you in the building. In return, each partner brings the asset Big Chicken would otherwise have to build slowly and expensively on its own.
SodexoMAGIC brings distribution into campuses and venues that are notoriously hard to crack, plus real community credibility. The franchise partners bring local capital and operating muscle.
Craveworthy brings the operational playbook, systems and the scale. Nobody's doing it alone, and nobody has to.
That's the pattern worth internalizing. A challenger brand does not have to choose between growing fast and growing capital-efficiently. Stack the right partners and you get both. Big Chicken is opening in arenas, on campuses, and in new states largely on other people's balance sheets, using borrowed distribution and a founder's borrowed fame, which is about the most capital-light way to scale a restaurant brand that exists. Forty-plus locations, most of them funded and run by partners, isn’t an accident. It's a design.
But here's the catch, and it's the same one from the lead. The collab only works if it's real. The reason Shaq and chicken land, and the reason Shaq and Magic serving an HBCU lands even harder, is that none of it feels forced. It's a credible founder in a credible category, partnered with credible people who share the mission.
Match the brand to the partner honestly and the goodwill compounds. Force it and guests smell the shakedown a mile away.
So, the takeaway for operators and investors both: in a brutal market, the fastest and cheapest path to scale usually isn't building every capability yourself. It's assembling a roster. Find the partners whose distribution, capital, and credibility complement what you already own, make sure the fit is genuine, and let each side do what it does best.
Shaq knows this better than anyone. You don't win a championship with one superstar. You win it with a team.
