Six Weeks Into My First CEO Job, a Global Pandemic Closed of Our Locations
What CEC Entertainment taught me about leading a company when the ground underneath you disappears.
I was honored and excited to start my first CEO position at CEC Entertainment — the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza — on January 20, 2020.
Six weeks later, the world stopped.
By mid-March, every one of our locations across North America and around the world was forced to close for inside dining. Not a soft close. Not a temporary reduced-hours situation. No guests, no kids enjoying the games and prizes. Empty parking lots. Nearly 12,000 employees at home, uncertain when — or if — they'd have jobs to come back to.
If you'd asked me during the interview process what my first six months would look like, I could have told you. I'd have laid out a hundred-day plan I was proud of. A brand-refresh strategy. Investment in the guest experience. A modernization roadmap.
Not one of those things happened.
Instead, we worked as Team to brainstorm our survival. We reopened for delivery and take-out with $5.00 pizzas, then we stood up the nation’s first entire virtual-kitchen delivery brand — Pasqually's Pizza & Wings — from scratch, in just weeks, offering a premium pizza product in addition to our current pizza line. Ultimately, we filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We restructured the balance sheet and recapitalized the company.
Six years later, I felt like I left the company materially stronger than I found it — with the locations open and fully remodeled, a growing international footprint, new business lines running and a great Team leading the Company into its next chapter.
As I face new challenges, I think about what those years taught me.
The first thing you lose when a real crisis hits is your plan
Most business cases written about crisis are written by people who read about a crisis somewhere. It's tidy. It has three neat lessons. The company either "pivots" or "adapts" and comes out stronger.
Real crisis is messier than that.
The first thing you lose isn't revenue. It's the plan you had five minutes ago. Every strategy off-site presentation, every consulting deck, every strategic priority sheet in the drawer — irrelevant. The world you built the plan for doesn't exist anymore.
That's disorienting, especially for people who got where they are by having good plans.
What I learned in those weeks is that leaders who navigate real crisis well aren't the ones with the best plans. They're the ones who can make decisions when nobody has a plan. Who can look at a landscape they don't recognize and act anyway.
Communication is 90% of leadership when the ground moves
Under normal conditions, communication is one of many things a CEO does. In a crisis, it becomes almost all of it. Communication is a two-way street; listening and then leading.
I led more than 12,000 employees through the pandemic. Most of them I never met in person. Many were furloughed for months. Some worked in venues that didn't reopen for over a year.
The quality of every decision I made mattered less than whether people understood what we were doing and why.
I called our field leaders every week. Sometimes twice a week. Not to update them on strategy — most weeks, we didn't have a new strategy. To be present. To answer questions I didn't have answers to. To acknowledge how hard the situation was without pretending I had a road map.
I learned during those years that people can handle almost anything, as long as they know their leader is with them and is telling them the truth.
What I owe the CEC team
The story I've told above makes me sound like I made those decisions.
I didn't.
Every one of those outcomes — the Chapter 11 recapitalization, the safe reopening of all our locations, the Pasqually's launch, the international expansion, the growth trajectory the company is on today — was executed by people who worked at CEC Entertainment during the hardest years in the company's history.
Many of these great leaders and employees are still there. Some retired, some left for other opportunities and are doing incredible work at other companies. All of them showed up during a period when they had every reason not to, and treated the guests — kids having birthday parties, families showing up for a Tuesday afternoon out — like it was still the most important thing in the world.
Because to those guests, it was.
That's what a real turnaround looks like. Not a hero CEO with a plan. A team of people who refuse to give up on the work. As it is said, “Teamwork does make the dream work.”
What I took with me
I left CEC in February 2026 to become CEO of Topgolf International — a bigger role with a larger spotlight in the sports and entertainment industry.
The lessons I took from the CEC years aren't strategy lessons. They're operating lessons.
Listening, learning and meeting the Teams on the ground is first and paramount to building and making the mission unmistakably clear. Communicate more than feels necessary. Trust the people doing the work. Don't pretend to have answers you don't have. And never, ever settle for the plan you brought into the room when the room has changed.
Six years ago, I may have not understood this completely, today, I do.
David McKillips is Chief Executive Officer of Topgolf International. He served as President and CEO of CEC Entertainment, the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese, from January 2020 through February 2026. Earlier in his career, he held senior roles at Warner Bros. / DC Comics, and Six Flags Entertainment.
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