BBQGuys History

The Grill Store & More

For as much success as BBQGuys has generated as an e-commerce company, we actually began as a humble brick-and-mortar store amid the online shopping revolution. The Grill Store & More, founded by Mike and Ladina Hackley in 1998, did exactly what its name promised — provided outdoor cooking and living products to the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, area. Within 2 years, the business opened a New Orleans location to serve a greater portion of Southeast Louisiana. But even as The Grill Store & More took off, the Hackleys couldn’t ignore the endless possibilities presented by the emerging world of online shopping.

BBQGuys.com

At the same time, Corey Tisdale was working to persuade companies in South Louisiana that they had a unique opportunity to establish an online presence and secure their positions before large corporations moved in. In May 2000, a mutual friend introduced Mike and Corey. Within weeks, they launched the first version of what would later become BBQGuys.com. BBQGuys.com was soon joined by sister sites UltimatePatio.com and GasLogGuys.com, operating under the umbrella of ShoppersChoice.com, which quickly established itself as the online leader in outdoor living products.

Awards & Honors

The industry began to take notice, with ShoppersChoice.com landing on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private businesses in 2008. We then earned a spot on the Internet Retailer’s ranking of the 500 fast-growing online retailers, and we haven’t left either list for more than a decade. Along the way, ShoppersChoice.com picked up an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau that we still hold to this day.

Rebranding

Sounds like a storybook ending for a brick-and-mortar store, right? Well, those were only the first few chapters. We turned a huge page in early 2019 when we folded all our sister sites into the BBQGuys brand, a move that has streamlined customer experiences by bringing all our products under a single roof. And that roof is a pretty big one — 110,000 square feet, to be exact. That’s the size of BBQGuys’ Baton Rouge headquarters, which is home to 3 warehouses, a growing sales and support center, our showroom, an outdoor kitchen design service, and all our online operations staff.

Perhaps our proudest moment came shortly after the BBQGuys rebrand, when the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship selected us as a National Small Business of the Week in April 2019. A few months later, the Baton Rouge Business Report named BBQGuys one of the area’s top 100 private companies for the year.

Gaining Velocity

As was the case for most businesses, 2020 delivered numerous challenges to our doorstep. Foremost among them, of course, was the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced us to reconfigure our operations for the health and well-being of our employees. But that period of uncertainty was when our resolve burned brightest — over the course of a few weeks, we pivoted to a work-from-home setup for 160 employees while ensuring the continued safety of our essential, on-site personnel. We even hired dozens of new employees to keep up with rapidly increasing demand, providing jobs for the local workforce in a time of stark economic downturn.

But the strangest year in recent memory also brought some good news: our acquisition by private equity firm Brand Velocity Partners (BVP). With BVP’s brand-building muscle, BBQGuys is on track to further cement itself as the leader in the grilling and outdoor living industry.