Overview
Jon Rolph is President and CEO of Thrive Restaurant Group, which owns and operates over 150 restaurants including Applebee’s, Carlos O’Kelly’s, HomeGrown, Modern Market and BakeSale. Thrive is the nation’s second-largest Applebee’s franchisee. The restaurants are in 15 states across the Midwest, Carolinas and Appalachia.
Jon was a two-time Student Body President at Baylor University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2001. After graduating, Jon worked with college student leaders as an intern for the National Student Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C. He returned to Kansas in 2002 to work in the family-owned businesses started by his father and his uncle, David, and Darrel Rolph.
Jon has held several key positions in the company, including restaurant-level operations, V.P. of Administration and Marketing, and COO of Carlos O’Kelly’s, eventually succeeding his father as President of Sasnak Management, which was rebranded in early 2019 to Thrive Restaurant Group.
Jon has served on the boards of several local and national organizations, including the Wichita Children’s Home, United Way of the Plains, the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce, Chairman of Visioneering Wichita, the Center for Combating Human Trafficking, and the Wichita Metro YMCA boards. His current board memberships and affiliations include Vice-Chairman of the Greater Wichita Partnership, Board of Directors of INTRUST Bank, Chairman Centralized Supply Chain Services (CSCS), Chairman of the Applebee’s Franchise Business Council, Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, and serves as Chairman of the Kansas Board of Regents.
Jon and his wife, Lauren, are both 5th-generation Kansans. They have been married for over 16 years and have six children, ages two to thirteen.