Jason LeVecke

Jason LeVecke and his family are owner/operators of over 130 restaurants and convenience stores, including Carl’s Jr., Hardees, Pizza Patron, and Bill’s Ghost and Spirits, across 8 states. He is a grandson of Carl’s Jr. Founder, Carl Karcher, who started in Los Angeles, California with a hot dog cart, a seventh grade education, hardly a penny to his name and a dream.

Jason is a native Arizonan who spent his formative years at the knee of his grandfather learning the values of a hard work ethic, integrity, improvement, persistence and leadership. He and his family have carried those values into both their business and community efforts.

Jason started his working career on the front lines of the restaurant business, working as a cook and cashier at a Carl’s Jr., eventually working his way up to General Manager of various Carl’s Jr. Restaurants.

His sense of duty and love of country led him to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. He graduated from the Defense Language Institute as an Arabic Linguist with Top Secret Security Clearance and earned two Naval Achievement Medals during his enlistment.

Jason is, of course, most proud of his family. Following Jason’s service in the military, he, his wife Andi, and their four children returned to Arizona and started a business with their family, together the LeVecke’s grew two Carl’s Jr. Restaurants into the large and fast growing enterprise they own and operate today.

In addition to his business success, Jason is also an outspoken and passionate leader of free market principles. Jason’s commitment to freedom and the free market has also led him to create the Golden Door Initiative, an organization committed to promoting the values of liberty, freedom, opportunity, and entrepreneurship. Always remembering that the justification for Liberty is in what it does for the least of us.

The Golden Door Initiative derived its name from the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. - The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Jason believes that the United States of America remains the shining city upon a hill that John Winthrop wrote about nearly 400 years ago, and a theme that was eloquently carried on by President Ronald Reagan.

As Jason has said, “No other country has provided so much opportunity to so many. When difficulty is upon us, rather than turning to those other systems of governance that millions have risked death to escape, we must commit ourselves to finding ever more creative ways to solve our problems with using freedom as our toolbox and our weapon. Failure is not an option. We are to offer rights endowed upon us by our Creator, that no man or government has right to take away, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May God bless those that defend it and those that seek it still.”