Company: FWRG
Filing Date: 2025-03-11
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001789940-25-000010
Chunk: 48

Company: First Watch Restaurant Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-11
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 48
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 a significant amount of time and money on training our employees. Any inability to recruit and retain qualified individuals may result in higher turnover and increased labor costs, and could compromise the quality of our service, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. Any such inability could also delay the planned openings of new restaurants and could adversely impact our existing restaurants. The inability to retain or recruit qualified employees, increased costs of attracting qualified employees or delays in restaurant openings could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. 

In recent years, the restaurant industry has experienced aggressive competition for talent, wage inflation and pressure to improve benefits and workplace conditions to remain competitive. In addition, our existing wages and benefits programs, combined with the highly competitive wage pressure resulting from the labor shortage, may be insufficient to attract and retain the best talent. Our failure to recruit and retain new restaurant employees in a timely manner or higher employee turnover levels all could affect our ability to open new restaurants and grow sales at existing restaurants, and we may experience higher than projected labor costs. 

Failure to maintain our corporate culture as we grow could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. 

We believe that a critical component to our success has been our corporate culture. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team. As we continue to grow, we may find it difficult to maintain the innovation, teamwork, passion and focus on execution that we believe are important aspects of our corporate culture. Any failure to preserve our culture could adversely impact our operations, including our ability to retain and recruit personnel and to effectively focus 

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on and pursue our corporate objectives. If we cannot maintain our corporate culture as we grow, it could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. 

Unionization activities may disrupt our operations and increase our costs. 

Although none of our employees are currently covered under collective bargaining agreements, our employees may elect to be represented by labor unions in the future. If a significant number of our employees were to become unionized and collective bargaining agreement terms were significantly different from our current compensation arrangements, it could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, a labor dispute involving some or all our employees may harm our reputation, disrupt our operations and reduce our revenues, and resolution of disputes could increase our costs. Further, if we enter into a new market with unionized construction companies, or the construction companies in our