Welcome And Why Skeeter Matters

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give and Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I get to chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation, the AI feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what's actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com. And today I am so excited because this podcast has been like a year in the making. We have the founder of County Line Barbecue, absolute institution in Texas, and still the president, Skeeter Miller.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Skeeter, welcome to the podcast. Hey, I'm I'm honored to be here. I'm sorry it's taken so long for us to get together, but uh we're here.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

We're here. We made our work. I know our calendars are really crazy, a lot of traveling. And it's funny because we've been able to hang out at like the uh Texas restaurant board meetings and things like that, just trying to get this together. But living in Texas, obviously I've been to County Line and then I recently went there. I went there for a trip, and then we went down to County Line and had a great time building our own barbecue rubs. And uh you do some really fun stuff there. So, first of all, for those who aren't familiar, why don't you explain a little bit about County Line and then uh talk to me about the rub experience because that was like a really cool thing that that I brought home with me and still I use to this day. And also, congrats on a recent 51st birthday of County Line, which is just legendary. So, yeah, tell us about County Line.

Building Upscale Barbecue In Austin

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Yeah, super hard to believe. It's been 51 years. But 51 years ago, there was a group of us that my best friend Randy Goss, his older brother, and and a group of guys wanted to do a barbecue restaurant in Austin that uh most barbecue places were, you know, an old place that had plastic silverware and paper napkins and an old three-legged dog laying out front. And you had to walk through a buffet line to get it. There was no, we wanted something different, and we wanted something that was upscale. We wanted things to be made from scratch and made from scratch every day, not something you make on Monday and serve all the way to Sunday, you know. And so that's when we came up with the county line in in Austin that was the very first one on B Caves Road. It was out in the country. Bruce, the one of the founders, was my business partner forever until he passed away. But he lived across the street from it, and it was an old speakeasy, and that's where all the legislature used to come out there, and there was gambling, and it was during prohibition, and there was a still out there, and the the last person hanged in Texas committed a murder at a wedding out there, you know. And let me straighten it out now. We didn't own it at the time, okay? So we're not a part of that. So we wanted something, it had a beautiful view, and we wanted something that we had waiter service, we had cloth napkins, we had real silverware in a beautiful setting. Basically, it was a destination setting, and then we wanted to have a bar because Liquor by the Drink had just opened up to where you could actually have a bar. And so we opened up and it was a struggle because there was it was just a little two-lane road that led out to the restaurant. We just had enough money to rub two nickels together, so it was like we were we were learning. And one of the partners was Harry Bell. He said he knew barbecue, we trusted him, but he didn't. And so it was uh hit or miss. And so we would do 10, 20 dimmers a day. And Bruce at one point was down on BK's Road picking up glass coke bottles. That's when you could turn them in for a nickel deposit. So that's how bad it

The Review That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_00 3:48

was. And then all of a sudden, Texas Monthly wrote us up and said, Here's this hidden secret out in the hill country. You can go out there, you got waiter service, it's great barbecue. They get beer out of a gas pump. That we had an old gas pump that the beer lines went up, and so that's that you get it. It was hot beer, but it was good. So we went from 10 to 20 dinners a day to seven to eight hundred dinners a day. Oh my gosh. With just that write-up. Just that write-up. It was unbelievable. And that we took off. And I mean, it was so busy, and people loved it, you know. And the cool part about it was, Zach, is that nowadays, you know, that back then there were six, seven hundred restaurants in Austin. Now there's eight thousand, you know, and we're basically our restaurants are now in the city, not a destination. So back then the weights were two and a half hours, three hours, you know. People were there, they weren't leaving. Okay, there was not another option down the street, which was great. But we were super busy. So our pits were these brick pits, and they were archaic and they caught on fire all the time, all the time. One of my favorite stories, I come in and Bruce and Rick were there, and there was a fire, and the people in the restaurant weren't leaving. And the ones that were seated, they picked their tables up and went out in the parking lot and said, We'll just eat out here until you get the fire, the smoke out of the building. No way. No, I'm not kidding. Until you get the smoke out of the building and you get the fire under control. Well, Bruce is and Rick right there spraying the brisket with uh fire extinguisher, which is basically baking soda. Okay. And so they said, Skeeter, go in there and wash these off. And I go, Well, wait a minute, we're gonna serve these briskets. And they said, It's just baking soda in this fire extinguisher. It's gonna be fine. And I said, Okay. So all of us did a job in the restaurant. Like Rick was cooking, Bruce was in the bar, I was a dishwasher. So I went and did what he said. I washed them all off. And I was so I was a dishwasher and a bus boy. So I would bust the tables and go back, and I could hear the customers would saying, My God, this is the best brisket we've ever had. And I was like, Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

No way. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

So that real, that real char finish did it, huh? Yeah, that did it. And so anyway, we just to continue, we're making enough money to where they wanted to open a second location.

Expansion Stories And The Franchise Lesson

SPEAKER_00 6:17

And Bruce had gone to the University of Texas in El Paso, and there was a location in El Paso. So they asked me, they said, Do you want to go out there? And because one of us stayed in each of the cities to run it once we opened it. Oh, interesting. That's the way it went. So they said, Do you want to go to El Paso? And so I said, Yeah, I'll go to El Paso. And so I and then I got home and I thought, where the hell is El Paso? I didn't know. I go out to El Paso, and the cool part about that restaurant is it's in the heart of El Paso, but it's the New Mexico and Texas line come together right there. And we sit six feet over the line in New Mexico. So we actually operate as a New Mexico business, have a New Mexico liquor license. And we call that one the state line since it's right on the state line. And also the liquor, the liquor license we have to purchase there, and it had a package store piece to it. So I actually opened a liquor store that is attached to the building. It had to be attached to it.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Yeah. Very, very interesting deal. Opened it for about $120,000 and it did $2.5 million this year in liquor sales, which is pretty cool. Oh my gosh. And then after that, we came to Austin. We did the county line on the lake. We went to Albuquerque, opened up the county line in Albuquerque up on the side of a mountain. We've got two in San Antonio, Flyright Chicken, and then we did a slew of franchises: Denver, Oklahoma City, Colorado Springs, Amarillo. And the thing that we learned about franchising, and I'll just say this briefly, is just that when you have to cook something for 18 to 20 hours, you really have to be on top of it. And people just don't want to spend that much time. So I was spending so much time on the road keeping the franchises in line that I finally we sat down all of us partners and I said, guys, this is killing me. And besides that, we could own these ourselves and be making all the money. Not new money. And so as their leases ran out with their operations, we didn't let them continue. So we don't have any more franchises, which is nice. So we have six county lines. I think the youngest county line is 39 years old. So anyway, that's wow. That's amazing. The key

Staying Relevant Through Employee Feedback

SPEAKER_00 8:26

is, and this may be one of your questions, I'm not sure, is if we did things the way I did them 51 years ago, we may not be in business. And the reason why I say that is because the success, in order to be successful for 51 years, in my opinion, is that you have to be willing to change. You can't keep in the same paradigm. You have to look at what's going on around you. And how you really understand it is you have to be engaged with your employees. You have to be with them. You have to be talking to them all the time because they're the boots on the ground. Okay. And I'm more of a trench general than a desk general. So I like to be in the middle of it. I'm always talking. So they're always saying, and this is what the customer's asking for. This is what we should do. Why don't we try this? And a lot of times I go back to them and say, okay, it's just going to cost some money. So I want you to work up the ROI on this, on how we're going to implement it to make it work. So it puts the onus back on them. Now they're invested in it. You know what I mean? They're invested in the growing of it. They want to promote it. So that's been the key because our menu from when we first opened, it's a lot larger than it used to be. We've got fryers, we've got grills. When we first opened, we were ribs, brisket sausage, no pork ribs, beef ribs because they were cheap, potato salad, coleslaw, beans, homemade ice cream, and we had a grill in a bar, and that was it. And now our menu is really, really grown because, you know, if you got a party of 10 and one of them's a vegetarian, you better have something for the vegetarian. You better have something for the vegan. You better be putting stuff in your potato salad that is vegan friendly. You know, I mean, so those are some things that we've changed over the years. And so it's worked well. Interesting.

The Rib Rub Experience Upsell

SPEAKER_02 10:16

I I mean, like, I think that's amazing. And I think I'd love for you to just tell the story because I think this is one of the ways that you've been working on improving the guest experience. Is this experience I had going to County Line and getting the rub, making your own rub. Talk to me about how that started and what problem you were solving, because I think that is going to be very from you and I talking about this, it was just very insightful of how you think about the guest experience and how you think about making money and how you think about it. It was a great experience for me.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

But yeah, would love to hear your story behind it. It's a great question. And that really ties into what I just mentioned is that that idea came from my events team. I'll get to this your question, but we never had private events. We didn't do to go, we were only open in the evenings. We weren't open for lunch. We didn't do catering. There was just so many things that we weren't doing. And so these are things that got suggested by our employees. Hey, we can do this, or we should open for lunch. And so that's how it all went. Well, I hired Vanessa. We were both divorced, weren't married. I hired her because she worked for a large, large company doing private events. And I felt like the manager cannot handle answering the phone and managing the restaurant and trying to promote private events. And when I put her in charge of that, she then hired an events coordinator for every city that we're in. And that's when we started to grow that program into from $100,000 a year in sales for private events to almost $4 million this year.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah. So they're always coming up with ways for besides the private event, because we have a beautiful setting. What can we do to upsell? What can we do to make the experience for those people besides just coming and eating different, better, add more things? And so they started adding. We have a longhorn that comes, we have a lady that comes and she teaches how to rope. We have somebody that comes in, we do chicken shit bingo. And we have the guy that does the leather branding. And then they said, Well, let's do this. The first thing we did was the barbecue sauce experience. And they came up with the way that we were going to get, because I we have a custom blending spice company that blends all of our spices for us. And so they said, Let's, we got all these spices, let's just put the spices out. We'll have a base sauce and let them come through and they get to, we get to teach them how to make their own sauce. And it was extremely successful. It was a big upsell to the private, it was like $25 a person, additional charge for each person that came in that private event, which was substantial. But the problem we ran into was people have come from all over the world to be there for a convention and they can't carry this with them. So what we were doing was is we were helping them out by trying to ship it to them. And we said, man, this is kind of cumbersome. And then they said, well, let's do the rib rub experience. It's something that they can come and do the same way they do the barbecue sauce experience. And they can go through the line and they they really uh we do all our marketing in-house. Everything you see in the county line, we've done in-house. And so I've got two guys that do our graphic arts and and do all of our uh marketing. And so they said, well, let's create our own label. That company is uh, let's say it's ovation, and they're coming here and they're gonna have a group of people together. How do they want their logo? What do they want the label to look like? So we custom make all of the labels for that. The bottle is I wanted a glass bottle. It's authentic, you know, it's nice thick, it's it's authentic. And we start with a base as you went through it, and then they make it. And I mean, I think it's a $20 a person extra, but we just did it for the governor, and it was so it made me so happy because it was the county line logo on the front of the bottle with the county line sticker on the top. And everywhere I saw when I saw the pictures, everybody had their rib rub experience. So that's been something that's really grown for our private events, and and I'm glad you said something about it because when I run into people now, they go, hey, when when are you gonna do that again? I'm out of my spice.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

So anyway, that's been something that's been very helpful. And they do a lot of things as upselling. We tried to gear towards Texas custom vodkas from Texas. People come here from Denmark with a private event with a major company, and they want stuff from Texas. And so we've got Texas gears, and so we upsell our bar packages with Texas things. We've created bandanas that are printed with all of our logos on them, and that's something extra that they want to take home and they pay for. Now we're starting a new one called the Margarita Experience. So the people come through the line and we have all these different juices. They can make their own margarita mix. Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

So anyway, just I hear this, and I think that this has been a little bit of a non-traditional podcast for my uh regular listeners. And I think that's beautiful because the stories that you're telling, there are so many principles that if you are a smart business person, you're gonna hear that and you're gonna be like, I could do something like that, right? And I think that like it's all about thinking about that guest experience of all right, the sauce was a good idea, but there's a lot of travelers. So how do we make that easier for them? And how do we add on a little bit more for these upsells if they're already paying for a catering event? They know that everyone there is gonna want some sort of gift. And it's like, you don't need to get them AirPods. They want a county line do make it yourself rib rub. And like, and it was a fun experience. It was cool to go down the line and to pick stuff up and be like, oh, I wonder what that's gonna be like. And it's been fun to use it at home. And it's a like you said, it's a nice bottle. It sits there out on my like very front.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

It's a one of a kind that you've got in your house. And then, you know, what companies have started doing is they have team building, they use the Real Rub experience and the barbecue sauce experience as a team building and they break up into teams. And then I come in and judge which one is the best one.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

And then that's cool.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

The company has something to give the first and second and third place winners, which is exciting, and they really get into it. And so for folks that maybe were quiet and didn't talk to each other, you know, they're all communicating with each other, and that's a good thing. And companies like it. And we just got Caterpillar, the company just saw our Rib Rub experience on our website, and we're flying and taking for 750 people, we're gonna do a RibRub experience for Caterpillar at their property in their city. And so uh it's exciting.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

I love that. And I love just the creativity, problem solving, increasing ticket value. Like there's just so many things there that are doing it, and it's really fun. So, anyway, kudos to you. And I think that like you've done such a great job of maintaining that backcountry upscale, which is just like a total contrast and throughout these 51 years. And so hats off to you, good sir. And thank you for building such a great institution there in Texas. Last question if people are going to be thinking about following someone else, who should we be following?

Service Details Guests Never Forget

SPEAKER_02 17:55

Who deserves innovation?

SPEAKER_00 17:57

There's a company here, uh, McGuire, they have a lot of higher-end restaurants, and they really, really do a great job. I think the most important thing that I see that they do, which I think is is that I really press hard on in our business, is the service level. I think service is everything. It was my wife's birthday. We made a reservation at the their new restaurant called the Kimberly. Very beautiful place. They spend a lot of money on it. But when we get there, there's a brass little piece on the table and it's got an envelope with my wife's name on it. She opens it up and it's a personalized birthday card. Oh, wow. But I just think that's the piece that that I see when I go to restaurants and things, and they're a busy restaurant, but I'm always looking to see who's in charge, who's running things, who is making sure that that guest experience is so important that those people want to come back. I press that all the time because it's gotten expensive to go out and eat. It's very expensive. And so, you know, if you go to Perry's Steakhouse, you realize you're gonna spend $150 a person to go eat. But when you come to County Line and you're gonna spend quite a bit to come there and eat because beef is so expensive, the center of the plate is so expensive. They don't expect that when they go to a barbecue place. They expect very so when you come in, knowing their name, knowing it's their birthday, having a card on the table that says happy anniversary really makes that experience special. And I tell the hostesses all the time y'all are the first and the last thing that customer sees. I want you to open the door for them if it's available. And when grandma comes in and she's got a flowered dress on, and it might be ugly to you, but tell her where did you get that dress? You look amazing. It's like you've made that person's day. And so uh I think that restaurant company has done a great job.

SPEAKER_02 19:56

So, Skeeter, not only for creating an absolute iconic brand, but for being a legend yourself and for helping us answer Billy Joel's question of who started the fire, apparently it was you. Today's ovation goes to you.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation. Thank you, Zach. I really appreciate it, and thank you so much for all you do.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Thanks

Final Thanks And How To Support

SPEAKER_01 20:18

for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question estimates-based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovationup.com.