Brandon Hurst Chick-fil-A fans in Brooklyn already know his restaurants. Soon, readers everywhere will know how he thinks.
The Alabama State graduate is one of Chick-fil-A’s youngest and highest-grossing franchise Owner/Operators. He runs two Brooklyn locations that rank among the brand’s top earners worldwide. Now he’s adding author to the résumé. His debut book, Outthink Yourself: The Mindset and Discipline of Leaders Who Refuse to Quit, arrives January 26, 2027 from Post Hill Press.
Civil rights icon and former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young wrote the foreword. That’s not a small co-sign.
A Drum Major Before He Was a Boss
Hurst grew up in East Atlanta and finished Riverdale High School in 2006. Then he headed to Montgomery.
At ASU, he didn’t just attend class. He served as co-head drum major for the Mighty Marching Hornets. He also crossed into the Beta Upsilon chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha in 2008 and later served as chapter treasurer. On top of that, he joined the W.E.B. DuBois Honors Program and held a leadership post in Alpha Kappa Psi.
In 2010, he graduated magna cum laude with an accounting degree.
Leading a band in front of a packed stadium teaches lessons no classroom can. You learn to set the tempo. You learn that hundreds of people move based on your decisions. Hurst credits ASU with building the foundation for everything after.
“I am a product of Alabama State University,” he told students during the school’s 125th Founders’ Day Convocation.
From $12 an Hour to Brandon Hurst Chick-fil-A Owner
Funny enough, Hurst had never set foot in a Chick-fil-A before his sophomore year. At the time, he was pulling overnight shifts as a Taco Bell supervisor. Fraternity brothers eventually nudged him toward the Montgomery restaurant on Eastern Boulevard. He resisted at first. Still, that suggestion changed his life.
After graduation, he made a choice many accounting grads wouldn’t. He took a $12-an-hour job at Chick-fil-A to learn the business from the ground up. Corporate offers could wait. He wanted to understand every station, every shift, and every customer.
That patience paid off. He moved into operations leadership in Chicago and went through the company’s leadership development track. By 26, he was opening his first restaurant, the first Chick-fil-A in downtown Baltimore.
Chick-fil-A’s operator selection process is famously competitive, with only a small fraction of applicants chosen. So landing a restaurant at 26 put him in rare company.
Building a Brooklyn Powerhouse
Brooklyn came next. In September 2019, Hurst opened Chick-fil-A Flatbush & Atlantic, right across the street from the Barclays Center. Few corners in New York see more foot traffic on a game night. Five years later, he added a second borough location. Chick-fil-A Clinton Hill opened November 14, 2024.
Today, he employs roughly 170 team members across the two restaurants. Yet his leadership goes well beyond the front counter. He talks with young staff about entrepreneurship, stewardship, and personal financial literacy. Some even get help drafting business plans. On top of that, Hurst bought a multifamily building near the restaurant to help house team members.
The approach shows up in the numbers, too. “My retention rate is above the chain’s average right now,” he told BK Reader in 2022. In a city where restaurant workers have endless options, keeping people says a lot about the culture inside.
Even so, he shrugs off the “philanthropist” label. To him, it’s just doing the right thing.
Through his company, Birth of a Dream Ventures, he also invests in education, financial literacy, and generational wealth.
Giving Back to the Yard
The Brandon Hurst Chick-fil-A story keeps circling back to Montgomery. In February 2025, he joined the ASU Foundation Board.
“I am excited to be on ASU’s Foundation Board and pledge to give it my all,” Hurst said at the time.
That same month, he delivered the Founders’ Day keynote inside the Dunn-Oliver Acadome. His message to students was blunt. “Excuses were the tools that built bridges that lead to nowhere,” he said.
He also invoked the Marion Nine, the ASU students expelled in 1960 for a lunch counter sit-in. “The Marion Nine operated in the spirit of excellence, so should you,” he told the crowd.
Then he left them with a reminder about the long game. “The challenges that you face are only temporary but the legacy you build will always last forever.”
What Outthink Yourself Brings to the Table
The book packages those lessons for a wider audience. Its core idea is a single line: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your thinking.”
Hurst lays out what he calls The Thinking Discipline System, a framework for making decisions under pressure. Readers can expect lessons shaped on the restaurant floor. Expect lessons from the hard years before ownership, too. The book also tackles discipline, the unglamorous habit that separates people who quit from people who finish.
For HBCU students and young professionals, the timing matters. Plenty of grads chase titles right away. Hurst took the opposite route. He started at the bottom, mastered the operation, and then built ownership on top of that knowledge. That’s a playbook any student working a campus job can study right now.
The 256-page paperback is available for preorder now ahead of its January release. Mark the date.
For Hornets everywhere, it’s one more proof point. The yard builds leaders. Sometimes those leaders end up running the busiest kitchens in New York.
