How Dave’s Hot Chicken Protected Revenue by Leveraging Vivant

How a fast-growing QSR chain traded days of lost sales for a resilient network that ensured zero revenue loss even during outages.

locations and climbing, targeting 500

~ 0

of sales come through digital ordering

~ 0 %

of typical recovery time today

10–15 min 0

The original Dave’s Hot Chicken pop-up stand in 2017

2017 · 1 standToday · ~470

From a Parking Lot to Nearly 500 Stores

Dave’s Hot Chicken started as a pop-up stand in an East Hollywood parking lot in 2017. Under CTO Leon, the chain has scaled from roughly 50 locations to nearly 470, with 150 more stores committed this year and a billion-dollar acquisition behind it. Digital ordering now makes up about 40% of sales — a channel that lives or dies on the store’s network staying online.

Customer

Dave’s Hot Chicken

Customer

Dave’s Hot Chicken

Industry

Quick Service Restaurant (QSR)

Industry

Quick Service Restaurant (QSR)

Locations

~470 stores, 150 more committed this year

Locations

~470 stores, 150 more committed this year

Solutions

Dual Backup Internet, Managed Networks, Remote Power Cycling, Proactive Monitoring

Solutions

Dual Backup Internet, Duplicate On-Site Hardware, Remote Power Control, Leading-Indicator Monitoring

40% in Lost Sales & Zero Redundancy

“As soon as we have a piece of equipment go down… sales just literally drop by 40% because you’re not getting any digital orders in.”

— Leon Davoyan, CTO, Dave's Hot Chicken

As Dave’s scaled past 50 locations, every store still ran on a single firewall and a single switch — no redundancy. When hardware failed, recovery depended entirely on a vendor’s managed-service process, often taking one to five days, and in the worst cases, more than a week.

Because the digital mix is so high, an outage hit revenue directly. Guests don’t wait out a down store — they order somewhere else. Leon estimates a hardware failure cuts a location’s sales by roughly 40% while it’s down.

The Two Weeks Offline Problem

One of Dave’s franchise locations lost a switch on a Friday. It took a day to get a technician scheduled, another day to confirm that the switch was dead, and the replacement part landed on backorder over the weekend, with no temporary swap offered. The issue didn’t reach the CTO, Leon Davoyan, until a full week had passed with no online sales at that store.

total time to recovery

0 Weeks

estimated lost
sales

$ 0 K

lost profit at typical margins

$ 0 K

total time to recovery

0 Weeks

estimated lost sales

$ 0 K

lost profit at typical margins

$ 0 K

Three Vendors In,
No Quick Recovery in Sight

As network disruptions continued across multiple stores, Leon evaluated and passed on three vendors before Vivant. His requirements were specific: no unproven or proprietary hardware, and a provider that could provide faster recovery than a standard managed-service model at a competitive price.

No vendor managed to tick all the boxes, except Vivant.

Vivant collaborated with Dave's Hot Chicken to develop a customized solution that hit both the price point and the performance bar Leon was asking for.

Redundancy at Every Layer

Vivant and Dave’s rebuilt the store network so no single point of failure could take a location offline.

Dual backup internet

Two carriers, automatic failover when the primary degrades, and automatic fail-back once it’s stable.

Color-coded cabling

A consistent standard across stores, so any manager can execute a failover without guesswork.

Remote power control

Devices restart remotely — no more walking a manager through a reboot over the phone.

Managed overage tracking

Active monitoring of backup data usage to stop runaway LTE bills before they happen.

“Do you see the thing that’s got blinky lights and the thing that doesn’t? Take the cables out of the one that doesn’t and plug them into the one that does.”

— Leon Davoyan, CTO, Dave’s Hot Chicken

On how simple the failover is for non-technical store staff.

Leading-indicator monitoring

Packet loss, latency spikes, and instability get caught and acted on before it impact's a store's sales.

The Results

Recovery in Minutes, Not Days

7 daysWorst case before Vivant

1 dayTypical case before Vivant

15 minToday with Vivant

Time to recovery

Before Vivant1–7 daysDependent on a vendor’s standard dispatch and parts availability

Since Vivant10–15 minStore staff swap to mirrored hardware without a vendor call

“Our job is to get lost in the background. You should never talk to us — that means we’ve delivered on our goal.”

— Hamed Mazrouei, CEO, Vivant

Zero downtime

Since moving to Vivant, Dave’s has not experienced a single minute of downtime.

Lighter HQ load

Dave’s IT team is no longer triaging hardware failures store by store.

Proven, then repeated

Vivant has since rolled the same model out to five or six other restaurant brands.

The Only Connectivity Partner You Need

The Same Fix, Built Once & Repeated

What started as a custom build for Dave’s Hot Chicken is now a repeatable model. Vivant has rolled the same approach out across other multi-unit restaurant brands, protecting revenue at every location the same way it does at Dave’s.

How Dave’s Hot Chicken Protected Revenue by Leveraging Vivant

From a Parking Lot to Nearly 500 Stores

Customer

Dave’s Hot Chicken

Customer

Dave’s Hot Chicken

Industry

Quick Service Restaurant (QSR)

Industry

Quick Service Restaurant (QSR)

Locations

~470 stores, 150 more committed this year

Locations

~470 stores, 150 more committed this year

Solutions

Dual Backup Internet, Managed Networks, Remote Power Cycling, Proactive Monitoring

Solutions

Dual Backup Internet, Duplicate On-Site Hardware, Remote Power Control, Leading-Indicator Monitoring

40% in Lost Sales & Zero Redundancy

The Two Weeks Offline Problem

Three Vendors In,
No Quick Recovery in Sight

Vivant collaborated with Dave's Hot Chicken to develop a customized solution that hit both the price point and the performance bar Leon was asking for.