CHUCK E. CHEESE CONTINUED...
LEADERSHIP
ry. Now owned by the investment firms Monarch Alternative Capi- tal and Reden Advisors, CEC does not disclose financial information, and McKillips declined to share any unit-level metrics. But he revealed that the company has generated five consecutive months of positive same-store sales as of August. Not bad for a career run that started with supervising the dolphin pool at SeaWorld’s Orlando theme park. ‘NO F---ING WAY’ Before joining CEC as CEO in Jan- uary 2020, McKillips spent more than 13 years with amusement park operator Six Flags, rising from VP of corporate alliances, a post where he pursued outside partnerships, to president of international devel- opment. His time there included a two-year stretch of overseeing the foodservice operations of domestic Six Flags parks. The only other restaurant ex- perience listed on his resume was working as a shift cook while a teen- ager at Ken’s Pizza in Manchester, Missouri. Most of his professional life had been spent in theme parks, including his time with SeaWorld’s dolphins. When McKillips was approached in November 2019 about the CEO’s job at CEC, he had no idea what the company did. Being enlightened didn’t exactly whet his interest in the opportunity. At the time, he was developing Six Flags parks in China, Saudi Ara- bia and other exotic locales. “I’m working on these billion-dollar theme parks around the world, and I’m going to check out Chuck E. Cheese for a job?” It didn’t help that the concept was at a low point. “It had a bad reputation as a place with dirty ball pits, bad pizza and rowdy guests,” he recalls. Simultaneously, new concepts
offering more contemporary forms of interactive entertainment were springing up, offering families ev- erything from pickleball to simulat- ed golf to virtual-reality games. Businesswise, the special pur- pose acquisition company Leo Holdings had recently agreed to merge with CEC as a backdoor way of taking it public, only to balk in the 11th hour. It was hardly a vote of confidence. But McKillips saw that his career to date had uniquely prepared him for the challenge posed by Chuck E. Cheese. “I started thinking about what an incredible opportunity it’d be to lead this incredible brand that just needed cleaning up,” he recalls. He took the plunge. Then, six weeks later, the world was shut down by COVID. “You can’t think of a more chal- lenging brand to manage during the pandemic than Chuck E. Cheese,” says McKillips. “Right now, we are focused on our brands and aren’t actively seeking any sort of deal. We have a lot of long- term strategies that are He recalls having lunch with the CEO of another restaurant compa- ny while health officials were just starting to comprehend what the nation would need to do. His lunch companion mentioned hearing reports that restaurants might be still unfolding, and we need to give them time to fully deliver results.” - DAVID MCKILLIPS, CEO OF CHUCK E. CHEESE
The Chuck E. Cheese restaurant conceptmaynotbeunknowninthose markets, but children have been ex- posed to its spokes-mouse through YouTube videos, social media posts and other online references from American fans, according to McK- illips. He asserts that Chuck E. Cheese is preselling development deals in those areas, but acknowledges that operators abroad see more than a celebrity mouse as a reason to im- port the concept. “It’s the games, it’s the food, it’s the aspirational ap- peal of a Western brand,” he says. Plus, the company is willing to give international partners broad leeway to customize the restaurant-arcades to local preferences. “We have ziplines, we have climbing walls, we have bowling lanes,” McKillips says of those over- seas stores. Some of those foreign variations are being embraced domestically. Chuck E. Cheese started installing trampolines in its U.S. stores af- ter seeing how popular the devices were in Mexican branches. CEC is looking to accelerate its charge abroad by entering into re- gional development pacts, a depar- ture from its prior reliance on lo- cal operators interested in trying a store or two. For instance, a partner in Australia is about to open the first of 10 units it’s committed to devel- oping on the nation-continent. WHAT’S NEXT? CEC still has a way to go in recap- turing its pre-pandemic vitality, so McKillips is not about to echo an- other character from his past, Mad magazine coverboy Alfred E. New- man: “What, me worry?” (McKillips was the bible of irreverence’s as- sociate publisher during his nearly nine years with DC Comics.) But he says the flurry of activ- ity over the last three years has the company on the right trajecto-
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS OCTOBER 2024
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