Who Owns Texas Roadhouse?

Texas Roadhouse is one of the country's largest casual dining chains, dominating steakhouse sales and beating out competitors like LongHorn and Outback. The late Kent Taylor, the chain's founder who opened its first outlet in Clarksville, Indiana in 1993, was also the initial owner. He raised $300,000 from three doctors based in Elizabethtown, Kentucky — John Rhodes, Patel Desai, and Amar Desai — who helped fund early outlets.

When the company went public in 2004, its major equity holders (who each held over 5% of the company's shares) included the founder and his initial investors. Since then, Texas Roadhouse has grown to over 800 restaurants across nearly a dozen countries, with two additional restaurant brands under its umbrella: Bubba's 33 and Jaggers. As is true of most large, publicly traded companies, owners now include institutional investors like BlackRock, Inc., Alliancebernstein L.P., Capital World Investors, and others.

While ownership of Texas Roadhouse has evolved over the years to encompass growth, the company still sees its late founder as a leader. "In my opinion, Kent is the owner of this company. [There's] only been one owner of our company," the steakhouse chain's CEO, Jerry Morgan, told Nation's Restaurant News in 2024. Many of Texas Roadhouse's most distinctive quirks, from each outlet's unique mural to the shrewd strategy of remaining closed for lunch most days, stem from its founder.

Texas Roadhouse's owner-operator model is a key building block of the company. The manager of each outlet invests $25,000 and signs a five-year employment contract in exchange for 10% of the location's profits in addition to their regular pay. Therefore, managing partners learn to function like fractional owners of the chain and have a genuine interest in the company doing well (as opposed to simply treating it like a job).

The chain's leadership, in its annual "fall tour," confers with these managers for planning future company strategy. "Our innovation is keeping our managing partners at the center of our universe, providing them with the tools to provide a great experience to our employees and our guests," CEO Jerry Morgan explained to Nation's Restaurant News in 2024. Morgan himself was Texas Roadhouse's first-ever managing partner. The company's president, Gina Tobin, also joined the company about three decades ago as a managing partner.

Texas Roadhouse also works to inculcate an "ownership mentality" in its employees through various profit-sharing setups and company stock allotments. According to the company, this is all part of a broader, people-first strategy that traces back to Kent Taylor. It's not all rosy, and Texas Roadhouse has received negative press in the past over employee complaints. However, its founder cultivated a bottom-up approach that gives Roadies (as Texas Roadhouse calls its staff members) a sense of ownership and ultimately leads to positive long-term business outcomes.