After more than a decade in operation, Dillas Primo Quesadillas is posting average unit volumes of about $2 million as co-founders Kyle and Maggie Gordon begin preparing the brand for franchise growth.

“We’ve been in business for 12 years and just celebrated our anniversary,” Maggie said. “We opened at the end of 2013 and started with company stores — slow, steady, methodical growth. We listened to customers and made changes along the way.”

Founded in 2013, Dillas spent its early years focused on operations rather than rapid growth. Instead of expanding quickly, the Gordons worked to simplify the menu, improve in-store execution and make sure the model could perform consistently across different markets and real estate types, including drive-thru locations.

“We knew if we were going to hit our goals for growth, the brand needed to be refined one level extra,” Kyle said. “And so 2025 was really about that. So now we're kind of launching into not only continuing our company's growth, we still plan on opening locations, at least one this year.”

As Dillas prepares to bring on new franchise partners, the brand’s leadership says patience has been a strategic advantage. With proof of concept established both inside and outside its home market, Dillas is now focused on growing with operators who align with its long-term vision.

“I’m ready for Dillas to be an established, household name,” Kyle said. “That’s where we’re headed.”

The Gordons joined 1851 Franchise Publisher Nick Powills on a recent episode of the “Meet the Franchise” podcast to discuss their franchise journey. A transcript of the interview with Powills has been provided below. It has been edited for brevity, clarity and style.

Nick Powills: Kyle and Maggie, thanks for joining me today. We’re talking everything Dillas. I want to frame what I see first, then I’d love for one of you to give a kind of state of the union.

I recently completed one of our franchise assessments. What we do on the 1851 side is look at the viability of a franchise opportunity. Some businesses still have a lot of work to do. That doesn’t mean they’re not good franchises; it just means there’s work ahead. Then there are businesses where, once you look under the hood, you see something really well engineered.

If I zoom out across restaurant franchising, and even narrow it to QSR [quick-service restaurant], I would put Dillas at the front of the pack in terms of how the business has been engineered operationally. That includes execution, background, and ultimately volumes, which become the scorecard for whether there’s a strong business underneath.

For those watching live or recorded, I’m not saying you have to buy this business. I’m encouraging you to look at it if you’re considering food franchising, because sometimes the full story doesn’t show up on a website or in PR. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw, and I know some of these conversations help open that up.

That’s my opening. Kyle, Maggie — who wants to give a state of the business?

Kyle Gordon: I’ll let Maggie take that one.

Maggie Gordon: We’ve been in business for 12 years and just celebrated our anniversary. We opened at the end of 2013 and started with company stores — slow, steady, methodical growth. We listened to customers and made changes along the way.

Today, we have six company stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and one franchise partner with five stores in Louisiana and East Texas, for 11 total locations. He’s been a great partner. We’re really excited to lean further into franchising this year and bring on new partners.

Kyle: The only thing I'll add is that 2025 was a lot of foundational work. We had done 11 years of foundational work on this operating company and supporting our single franchise team. But last year, we simplified the menu. We brought on a new franchise development person who has tremendous experience in the industry. We invested in the marketing department. We really focused on how we can grow into franchising. We put in place some really strategic things from a purchasing perspective that really helped the operations.

We knew if we were going to hit our goals for growth, the brand needed to be refined one level extra. And so 2025 was really about that. So now we're kind of launching into not only continuing our company's growth, we still plan on opening locations, at least one this year.

And then beyond that, finding the right people to partner with to really grow Dillas. Our vision is to be the brand for primo quesadilla meals. So that's very big.

Nick: What prompted that decision to step back and tighten things up? You’d already built a strong business. What made you say, “Let’s go back to the drawing board”?

Kyle: I grew up in operations. After graduating from the University of Texas, I spent seven years at Raising Cane’s before starting this business. Operational refinement is my jam. It's not necessarily about our franchise customer. It's more about the customer at the unit level at this point. And we weren't getting the accuracy we wanted.

We're in the high 90s, but we want to be known for accuracy, right? And then, our speed of service was not good enough. And if we wanted to be the best in the world at quality convenience, I was like, well, we can't do that with these mid four-minute drive-thru times. We got to get the high threes on average. And so that is what it was all about, going to the operators and say, ‘Hey guys, these are the goals. This is where we need to be.’

And they said we had to get this chicken product to save time and put people on the line faster. And you've got to be able to do this thing with the brisket. And what we really need is to simplify the menu a little bit, but customers are having trouble working fast enough. We're having to walk through a lot of different things. 

Maggie: I think not only did it hit the metrics, but we hit a glass ceiling a little bit. We felt like we couldn't push through.

Kyle: Yeah. It was like little things would break here and there. It doesn't seem complicated because all we sell is quesadillas. But there were still a couple of things that were going to stop us from achieving the throughput and the long-term AUVs that we knew we could unlock. And we want to make that decision now while we're relatively small. It's easier to do at a $20 million level than it is to do at a $200 million level. And so we decided, let's do it because now that we have this locked in, we don't need to change much.

Nick: How much of that comes from your experience at Cane’s? Did that blueprint influence this?

Kyle: I think in the beginning, coming from Raising Cane’s and wanting to be extremely focused, we knew we were a different brand. We’re not Raising Cane’s. We’re truly one of one. We’re the only quesadilla QSR, and we have the highest AUVs in that category. We’re kind of a unicorn, and that creates a lot of opportunity for success. The concept is unique, and it generates a lot of customer trial. What we didn’t necessarily have early on was broad brand awareness.

So we started out very simple. Customer feedback, however, told us we needed more — more variety, more flexibility. We allowed the concept to grow for a while, and once it reached a certain point, we stepped back and said, “OK, now we need to refine this based on what we’ve learned over the past several years.”

Raising Cane’s absolutely taught me operational efficiency and throughput. But the biggest takeaways for me were around community involvement, culture and how those elements translate into marketing. Those softer skills drive sales, not just the idea of selling food as fast as possible. We could sell quesadillas faster if we were willing to sacrifice some of what we do on the service side, but we’re not. Everything has to work together.

So yes, coming from that background was an advantage, and I was able to apply certain concepts. But Dillas is its own thing. I’ve hired people from Raising Cane’s and had to explain that this is different. We use more fresh product, vegetables and ingredients that appeal to a different customer base.

Nick: What are your current average unit volumes?

Maggie: We’re right around $2 million.

Nick: One thing I noticed in another assessment was how community involvement and local marketing can create massive swings in performance. Does that community-first mindset help push this brand past $2 million?

Maggie: It’s really how we built the business, right? When we opened the first one, we didn’t have a marketing budget. We knew the product was high quality, delicious and craveable.

So all we had to do was get it in people’s mouths. We were at every pool event. We would stand out in front of the football field and hand out free limeade samples or little samples of chips and salsa — anything just to get it in someone’s mouth. That organic growth happens when you start getting people to try it.

That was the biggest piece, right? Then they’ve got to talk about it. You have to deliver on the unique, extreme experience that’s going to be craveable and delicious, so they’ll come back and tell someone else about it.

That’s how we started, and we continue to do that. We have bigger marketing budgets now than we did back then, but it’s still the No. 1 focus of our marketing. Local store marketing and community involvement are so critical.

Kyle: Super critical in building relationships. What I’ll say about it is that in those early days, when you’re trying to drive trial, get feedback and be involved in the community, our purpose has transitioned into building community through Primo quesadillas. Early on, we made the decision not to ask, “Who are we going to target?” but instead, “Who are we going to help?” When you go in with that mindset and you walk into a school and say, “Hey, how can we help?” the response is often, “We need food for this,” or “We need prizes for the teachers.” That’s how you start to build community.

That community then ends up building the community inside your restaurant. It’s become a twofold thing, where the communities inside our restaurants are just as important. At the end of the day, our amazing team members are serving customers who come back. They’re building genuine relationships and connections. This is a relatively simple business. Somebody comes in, has a good experience and tells a friend. That friend comes in and tells a friend. Word-of-mouth marketing is the best form of marketing, and we’ve leaned on that heavily by staying involved in the community in a lot of different ways.

Nick: Why hasn’t anyone else cracked this category at scale? What’s the moat?

Kyle: Well, it doesn’t really maybe have the broad appeal that you need. The quesadilla also lends itself to being a vehicle for convenience. I think there have been some other places that have popped up, and what they focused on, in my opinion, was the wrong thing.

They focused on really big quesadillas that were either done in a press, or they focused on the delivery aspect. They couldn’t do them fast. And I was like, well, I know how to flow cook because I’ve been trained on that for seven years. So how do I apply flow cooking to this convenient product? You can’t do it if you try to trick it up, right? You can’t offer a tomato basil tortilla. You can’t offer three different sizes of a tomato basil tortilla. You can’t offer spinach tortillas. You’ve got to offer one tortilla.

We do have a mega tortilla, but those are much better for catering and they’re ordered far less. About 85% to 90% of the tortillas hitting the grill are one size. They get the same amount of cheese, and we’re flow-cooking quesadillas. That unlocks the ability to have a drive-thru, and our drive-thru is about 50% of our business. So maybe another quesadilla guy opens and he’s doing $800,000 and thinks, “Man, this isn’t worth it.” Then we get it, add a drive-thru, and suddenly it’s a $2 million restaurant. We can put hundreds of cars through the drive-thru because of the unique process we’ve built around the quesadilla and what we serve.

Maggie: I think the other piece of it that makes it so universal is, let’s be honest, we’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like it when we say we have a quesadilla restaurant. They’re like, “I love quesadillas.” But it’s also, to Kyle’s point, a vehicle. You have the versatility to be able to pivot it at any point. Number one, we have American favorite flavors that are comforting and very common to anyone in the U.S. and beyond — traditional flavors that aren’t all Mexican.

By diverging away from strictly Mexican flavors, it opens it up to anyone as more of a comfort food. And if something happens in the future — let’s say, you know, some disease kills all the cows — we can pivot and use tofu. You can put anything inside the quesadilla vehicle. That gives us the nimble flexibility to do what we need to do as markets change.

Kyle: Yeah, we’ve got a vegan quesadilla, we’ve got a vegetarian quesadilla — all using the same products that are already on the line. Maggie and I, and the team members, I think a really big piece of what I love inside the restaurants is pride, right? You can’t get pride from popping open a bag of something and pouring it in. You haven’t built anything.

Our teams are making the fresh salsa, making the fresh jalapeño ranch, grilling the chicken, grilling the zucchini. Those things bring a level of pride that’s tasteable. And tasteable pride turns into credibility, and that turns into repeat customers. Another thing we’re extremely proud of, from a business perspective, is that our busiest restaurant is in south Shreveport. We’re not only in one state. It’s not like the founders just worked their butts off and sold a bunch of quesadillas in Plano.

We have six locations in Plano, and we’re extremely proud of Dallas, but we’re just as proud of the fact that it travels. When we opened in Shreveport, we were like, “Wow, we might have something here.” This might translate to a lot of different markets. That really got us excited, because I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential. We’ve made the investment in these 11 company restaurants — six here and five elsewhere — to serve as the proving ground to launch a sustainable growth platform with Dillas.

We’ve done all the different real estate. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve signed new leases after others expired. We’re not in year one wondering, “Maybe we shouldn’t do that.” We’ve built every prototype, developed prototype designs, talked to manufacturers and gained a lot of experience.

I think that’s sometimes why franchising gets a bad name — people rush into it. They don’t build an amazing business and then selectively bring in the right partners. Instead, they prove success in a bottle and sell it without an operational foundation, which is what I’m very proud we’ve built.

Nick: Are you surprised this is still somewhat under the radar?

Kyle: We wanted to be extremely confident in the product we were going to put out there. So, blatantly and honestly, we just haven’t worked on marketing it to the franchise community. We didn’t want to put it out there. We wanted to guard it and perfect it so that, when it was ready, like you’re saying, we could have a very deep moat around it. It would be extremely difficult to replicate after we came to market and started expanding into new markets with the right people.

I think that’s a big piece of it. Now it’s ready. The other thing is, a lot of people told Todd Graves he was crazy when he focused only on chicken fingers. Some things take time. I think the segment we’re in with quesadillas mirrors what we saw about 10 years ago with tacos. You saw Velvet Taco, Torchy’s Tacos and others explode with equity money and momentum.

When people ask who our competition is, they expect me to say Chipotle or Torchy’s or something like that, and I don’t. I say it’s the same customer seeking quality convenience. For me, the brands that do that well are Raising Cane’s, Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out — places that do one thing amazingly, have great culture, don’t sacrifice service, stand behind quality products and deliver it quickly. Those are the brands I admire and the type of company we’re trying to build. They all happen to be billion-dollar brands, and I think there’s a reason they’ve been able to achieve that.

Maggie: I don’t think any of them were overnight successes, though. That’s the thing. It’s about deliberate growth and planning in a meaningful way — knowing we can sustain the growth and support it around us. Kyle and I operate with high integrity, but I think we’re also a little humble. We’re not showboaters, but we are proud of what we sell. Finding people who see that and value what we’ve built is really who we’re looking for. And there’s certainly a factor of what you talked about — realizing that maybe it’s time to step a little outside our shell, be really proud, stand on a hill and start talking about Dillas.

Nick: Does it keep you up at night knowing how much potential this has?

Kyle: I’m not anxious, but almost eager to get to the point where people are knocking on the door because you’ve done everything right. Yeah, I think so — and we’re ready for that.

As you grow a brand, Maggie and I opened this with a little bit of family money. We bootstrapped it. We had a three-year lease on our first location, and if it didn’t work out, we were going to walk away after three years. Now we’ve got a 20-year lease on that same property.

You go through all these rooms — you have to unlock one room to get to the next. Early on, the fears are things like, “Oh my gosh, how are we going to make payroll?” or “What’s going to happen with this?” Then you move past that and start to see some success and ask, “What should we work on next?”

You refine the P&L. You make the P&L faster. You look at all the line items. You save money, make more money, so you can go to the bank and open another one. We did that. We did that. We did that — and learned how to do it. Then what keeps you up at night changes. It becomes team member issues, or a GM quitting. So you step out of the location and put a buffer between you and the operations with an area leader.

There are all these steps along the way. So in terms of what keeps me up at night, I actually sleep very soundly. At the end of the day, we have amazing company-owned operations that support the entire business. Because we’ve been so patient, franchising allows us to be very selective. We get to have great conversations without desperation. We get to choose operators who care about the community. How lucky are we?

There’s really no anxiety for me because I’m willing to go slow. We’ve essentially opened one unit a year. As you can see, we’re in no rush. We do things the right way, and I think we can absolutely push the throttle when it’s time. What Maggie and I have learned is that scaling is really a food problem. We’ll tie ourselves to extremely capable leaders, build out the departments that start to strain and continue to invest. This is a legacy brand for us. We have a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old who want to work at Dillas. We’re excited to build that for them — and that’s why I sleep very well.

Maggie: Well, I would say that going back to being humble, we also know what we don’t know, to Kyle’s point. If I have anxiety around anything, it’s the chicken-and-the-egg question of how we sidestep that as we grow, sign on new partners and bring the right people in. It’s anxiety and excitement at the same time, because I can’t wait to work with new leaders — their experience, what they can bring to Dillas — and help us grow the brand.

Kyle: We did about $70,000 in our opening week, and I remember walking into the kitchen thinking, “This is chaos.” It felt like everything was happening at once — raw chicken here, smoke rolling there — and I immediately thought, If we’re going to do this every week, all of this has to get fixed.

That moment forced us to circle the wagons and start making changes for long-term growth. Now, what excites me is applying that blueprint to new openings. We have the right architect, an incredible equipment team, and a proven process.

For me, the joy is the ribbon cutting — seeing the line out the door, the drive-thru full, knowing you’ve made an impact on a community. You’ve created jobs, hired 30-plus team members and built something meaningful. I can’t wait to share that moment with new operators, whether it’s their first restaurant or their fifth. The excitement — and maybe the anxiety — is knowing you have something that can change another family’s life. That responsibility matters.

What sometimes gets overlooked in this industry is foundation. A lot of brands look shiny, but they don’t have the operational depth. There aren’t many restaurant brands more than 10 years old that have built this level of foundation, proven it outside their home market and kept refining it.

Nick: Any final thoughts?

Kyle: There’s so much here — legacy, culture, good people — and in some ways it still feels like the restaurant industry’s best-kept secret. Maggie and I live this every day. It’s easy to talk about when it’s your passion. I don’t wake up feeling like I have to do this. I get to do it — to build something, offer it to others and build it together. I will say this, though — I’m ready to stop being called an emerging brand. I’m ready for Dillas to be an established, household name. That’s where we’re headed.

Maggie: You alluded to it a little bit. The really exciting thing about the franchise business is that it’s a completely different business. We have a new customer — our customer is the franchisee. It’s really about reframing our mindset. I’m excited to share this opportunity with other people, like you said, to help them grow a business for themselves. We want to support them along the way and provide any shortcuts or intuition we’ve learned, because starting a business is really hard. But it’s also the American dream. Being able to offer that opportunity and guide someone through the process is incredibly exciting and fulfilling.

Kyle: Yeah, we’ve applied the servant leadership ladder to our corporate operations and our strategy so far. Being able to apply that same servant leadership approach to a franchise community is what I think will really make us different.

It’s like, “Oh, wow, they’re not just a unique, awesome restaurant company — look at what they’ve applied to this franchise company as well.” There’s a lot of blueprint overlap. Typically, people who build good companies build good companies. We’re very excited to build this franchise company with great people.

Nick: Thanks to everyone for joining. I’m excited to see where Dillas goes next.

Watch the full interview above or on YouTube.