By Gabrielle Terrett

The Vicksburg Post

Sometimes coming from a small town is all the motivation that is needed to move on to something larger than ourselves.

While some may think the opposite, Nick Jones believes this statement is true. Jones, a native of Georgia, yearned for more and as a result received just that.

He started off as a team member at Chick-fil-A during his younger years, and today he is the owner and operator of Vicksburg’s Chick-fil-A. His story is one that will inspire anyone that humble beginnings do not always mean humble endings.

Jones grew up in Southbridge Georgia, about 20 minutes south of Atlanta, and graduated from Southbridge High School.

“For undergrad, I went to the University of Georgia, a business school there in Georgia and Terry College for grad school where I graduated with a business degree in management,” Jones said.

Jones also joined the Army ROTC, where he received his Army commission. He also met his wife while at the University of Georgia.

The couple moved to Vicksburg in May 2013 to open the Chick-fil-A franchise. Coming out to Vicksburg was a choice made by Jones that relied strongly on his relationship with Chick-fil-A.

“We moved out here because of Chick-Fil-A,” he said. “I’ve been with Chick-fil-A since I was in high school. I started off as a team member in Southbridge years ago and kind of worked my way through that. I worked there through college and I worked at a corporate office for a number of years after college in between my Iraq and my Afghanistan deployment years and then I applied to be a Chick-fil-A operator and here we are.”

Volunteering

Along with being the owner of a restaurant, Jones is also involved in the community in a number of different organizations.

He is a deacon at Crossway Church and currently the chairperson for the Vicksburg Warren County Chamber of Commerce.

He has served in the Mississippi National Guard for the last 16 years.

“I’ve been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan various times, both combat deployments, and I just made major last year,” Jones said “I’m currently the commander of the unit in Grenada.”

Jones believes in volunteering and stresses the importance to his employees, regularly offering opportunities for students to gain volunteer hours and leading by example when doing so.

“All of the boards and different things I serve on we do a ton of volunteer work,” said Jones. “We do our windshape camp every summer with Crossway Church, Elevate Church, Highland Baptist and Crawford Street United Methodist. It’s usually 250-300 students who come in. It’s an arts, sports and all kind of different camps put together.

“Recently, we (Chick-fil-A) did a Fall Festival to raise support for our windshape camp and we had about 20 or so volunteers who came out to help.”

Team effort

Though he has seemingly done it all, this humble spirit refuses to take credit for any of it. In fact, his inspiration is a group of people he works with everyday.

“I think being able to have a group of team members in my restaurant each day that just show love for the guests and their community is something to be proud of,” Jones said. “I’m just proud of the team I have here at Chick-fil-A and how they interact with our guests everyday. With our mission statement here being ‘To be the brightest shining light towards our guests and our community in order to revolutionize our community.’ and I’m proud that they do that each and every day.”

Each day Jones approaches life with a positive attitude and strives to shine his light on everyone he interacts with.

“I think that if you ever stop learning you probably aren’t alive,” he said. “So I think the way that I’ve always continued to do that is to always be hungry to learn more and to hunger for wisdom. You also have to surround yourself with people that think bigger and that think not about themselves but about others. With Chick-fil-A being as we are I’ve been able to constantly surround myself with people who think of the world at large and not just work on their little piece of the pie but growing the pie larger.”