From 20 Dinners a Day to a Texas Institution with Skeeter Miller of County Line

The key is, and this may be one of your questions.

I'm not sure if we did things the way I did them 51 years ago, um, 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, 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 is 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 it.

The growing of it, they want to promote it.

So that's been the key because our menu from when we first opened is 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.