Travis Kelce won’t be sitting through any depositions over this one. But the car wash chain he quietly bought into back in 2020 just got dragged into a proposed class-action lawsuit over bonuses that a former employee says never showed up in full.
Tristen Cole Reeves, a 28-year-old from Converse, Texas, filed suit against Club Car Wash Operating LLC on May 27 in Bexar County District Court, asking a judge to certify the case as a class action on behalf of roughly 100 current and former employees he believes got shorted the same way he did. The suit, assigned to state District Judge Nadine Nieto, seeks more than $2 million in damages.
According to Reeves’ complaint, he signed a written employment agreement last year promising him a bonus once he hit certain performance benchmarks. That payment was due in March. Instead of the full amount, Reeves says he received a quarter of it, $7,257 against a promised $29,028, a shortfall of $21,771. He claims the explanation came during an April 28 Microsoft Teams call, when an area manager and a regional manager told staff that bonuses would be paid out at just 25 cents on the dollar.
Reeves says that when he tried to pull up his own employment contract through the company’s employee portal to check the terms, his access had been locked, restricted, or wiped. His attorney sent a preservation letter to Club Car Wash’s management and registered agent on April 29, then followed up days later with an email to the company’s vice president of operations requesting a call to discuss the missing bonus money. Roughly two hours after that email went out, Reeves says he was fired over what he describes as a manufactured policy violation. His lawsuit pursues breach of contract and unjust enrichment claims. Club Car Wash has not yet been served and did not respond to requests for comment.
Here’s where the Chiefs tight end enters the picture, sort of. Kelce is not named as a defendant, and nothing in Reeves’ complaint accuses him of any wrongdoing. But he does have skin in the game. Club Car Wash announced Kelce as a new investor and partner in December 2020, a deal formalized through a press release the following February. Kelce said the move gave him a chance to work with partners who knew the express car wash business inside and out, and the partnership was tied to his foundation, Eighty-Seven and Running, which supports underserved youth. It’s a far lower-profile line on Kelce’s balance sheet than the Rolls-Royce Ghost he and Taylor Swift are regularly photographed climbing into after Chiefs games, but it’s arguably done more for his bottom line.
That distinction, investor versus operator, matters. Club Car Wash Operating LLC is structured the way most multi-unit service businesses are: a limited liability company with outside investors who put up capital but don’t run day-to-day operations. Wage and bonus disputes get filed against the entity that actually employs the workers and controls payroll, not against every name on a cap table. Unless a plaintiff can show an investor exercised direct control over employment decisions, or that the corporate structure was a sham used to dodge liability, minority stakeholders like Kelce stay legally insulated from exactly this kind of suit.
The chain’s growth explains why bonus math might be getting complicated in the first place. Club Car Wash started as Tiger Express Car Wash in Columbia, Missouri, in 2006, rebranded in 2019, and then expanded fast: Kansas and Illinois in 2020, Nebraska in 2021, then Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin in 2022 through acquisitions that folded in chains like Speedy Splash and Rapid Express Car Wash. By 2025 the company had opened its 250th location across 13 states. Acquisition-fueled scaling like that tends to inherit a patchwork of pay structures and management habits from whatever chain got absorbed along the way, and mismatched bonus formulas are a common casualty.
This also isn’t Club Car Wash’s first proposed class fight. In 2024, two former maintenance technicians filed a federal lawsuit alleging the company misclassified salaried maintenance staff as exempt from overtime, seeking to represent techs across 11 states. That case settled before a judge ruled on collective-action certification, with Club Car Wash denying liability but agreeing to fund up to $600,000 for roughly 52 eligible technicians. Notice the different legal playbook this time around. The maintenance-tech case leaned on the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires proving hourly workers were denied overtime. Reeves skips that framework entirely and sues in state court for breach of contract and unjust enrichment, a route that avoids the wage-claim process most Texas workers have to exhaust before suing over unpaid wages, and lets his attorney pursue class certification under Texas civil procedure instead of the narrower opt-in mechanism the FLSA requires. It’s the kind of legal maneuvering that plays out across the industry any time a company would rather settle than let a court test whether the claims actually hold up, not unlike motorsports teams walking back claims they couldn’t prove in court.
None of this threatens Kelce’s investment in any existential way. A $2 million exposure is a rounding error against a chain now pushing 250-plus locations, and if the case gets certified, it’s the kind of dispute that typically ends in a settlement fund rather than a shuttered business. But it’s a useful reminder that when athletes and celebrities put their names and money behind car-adjacent businesses, whether that’s a car dealership network that outran its own bookkeeping or a car wash chain scaling faster than its payroll department can track bonus formulas, they inherit exposure to the operational messes even when their names never show up on the docket. For Reeves and the roughly 100 workers he says are in the same boat, the more interesting number isn’t the $2 million ask. It’s whether Judge Nieto agrees there are enough of them asking the same question to make it a class.
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