Where to begin...

I’m Danny Parkhill and I own Rugged Cross BBQ. It used to be a BBQ joint but it failed so it is now becoming a line of BBQ products.

I couldn’t really find information on how this process actually works so we took notes.

This blog journals our adventure. Go easy on us, we’re new to all this and I don’t have the best business sense but I’m honest and I’m learning.

We did some stuff right and we did some stuff wrong but that’s how you learn.

We started this process 4 or 5 years ago and it is not finished by a long way. 

OK, maybe a little history, about 5 years ago my wife Tammy and I opened a little carry out and delivery BBQ joint in a 2^nd house that we owned…ok, quick note; before you buy a house, make sure to SELL the one you currently own FIRST!! God forbid the real estate marked should crash!!! We couldn’t sell it and renting it proved to be worse. It sat unoccupied 2-3 years. 

My job at Maytag went bye bye and I couldn’t find work. I needed to come up with a way to make a living.

I can do 2 things really well, play guitar and cook BBQ. So we decided that if we’re gonna pay the mortgage on the house then we’re gonna use it and Rugged Cross BBQ was born!!

We remodeled the kitchen to meet health code and away we went!! Well, almost…

West Frankfort, IL is kind of a quirky little town. It used to be quite the place then the coal mines closed and the community never quite recovered. They like what they like and that wasn’t me. It also wasn't KFC or Burger King. Both also failed here.

Don’t misunderstand me, the food was really good and all who ate agreed. I just simply wasn’t their choice.

So the house was 4 blocks off Main Street in a very residential neiborhood. We had hoped it would become a crack house for ribs!! We had several regular customers we would deliver to and a few dozen that would pick up but that’s about it. We decided it was our location.  We began praying that we could get a place out on Main Street. 

Well God smiled and we moved (that will be a future blog) to 414 E Main Street!!!! WOO HOO!!! ½ block west of the high school!! Perfect!!

We loved the location. Parking wasn’t so good but it wasn’t any worse than any other business right… 

Ok, so when you hear the expression “LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION” Throw out whatever is in your head that contradicts that because unless you have a ridiculous marketing budget and can simply dominate the business community, then you’re wrong.

You see West Frankfort is known as "The Furniture Capitol of Southern Illinois" and those stores are all located on the east end. The food is on the west end. I was on the east end across from E.R. Brown Furniture,   “LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION”

You cannot build a successful restaurant on the backs of high school kids’ lunch business. They aren’t even there 3 months of the year. 2-1/2 years later we decided we couldn’t make it. We had done a little advertising but just didn’t have the budget to do what was necessary. The restaurant just didn’t have the support of the community but our BBQ sauce business THRIVED!

 I had been given a recipe for a product a few years before we opened that I had tweaked quite a bit and Holy Smokes did it take off!!!! Apple Chipotle Glaze was a ridiculous success!!!

We looked at having it made by a contract packager but didn’t have the startup money so we decided I would do it myself at the restaurant. We ordered bottles, lids and security seals online and went to it.

Well, I couldn’t make enough!!! I would make the sauce, bottle and shelf them and they would be gone in a day or two and I had 3 other products that were just as popular, Rugged Cross Sauce, Carolina Sauce and All Purpose Seasoning. We needed a better way to do this when Tammy reminded me of a friend she met at her former job at Maytag.

Tammy had also lost her job at Maytag after more than a dozen years as the secretary for the Sr. Dir. of Operations. She met some really good people while she was there. One of those people was Tom Harris from Walker Die Casting. When Tom would come in he would bring with him this WONDERFUL sweet hot pepper relish. He told Tammy that his son makes it and has a company that does that kind of thing called Brothers Fine Foods in Lewisburg, TN. Little did we know that a few years later we would come to know this company quite well.

When we closed we decided we would go with plan B and be a sauce business. We called Brothers and got most of our questions answered. We had not been able to use Brothers earlier because they we only set up to do large batches. We had filed bankruptcy a year before and I had cashed out my 401k to start the restaurant, which later failed. Yes, it was quite a couple of years.

So we prayed. That's what we do. We listened for Gods answer. One day just before halloween, he answered.

I served in Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia with the USAF. One of the people I met in the Air Force was a guy named Carl Johnson. Carl and I got to be close friends through the years and had stayed in touch until I lost his number (that really sounds like a lame excuse after typing it but it’s true!!) we reconnected on facebook a few (like 5-6) years later.  I’m sitting in the restaurant one day and I look up and there is Carl and his wife Lois walking into my place!!!! Carl had looked over my Facebook page and drove all the way to West Frankfort just to eat at my place!

He fell in love with the glaze!! So over the next couple of months we became partners.

Brothers had opened a smaller production line and so here we go!!

Check us out next week to see how the process actually works

Later…