Skeeter Miller, founder and president of County Line Barbecue, has spent more than five decades finding new ways to keep a Texas barbecue institution moving forward. What began as an unconventional barbecue restaurant outside Austin grew from serving just a handful of dinners each day into a destination known for scratch-made food, full service, and memorable hospitality. In this conversation with Zack Oates, Skeeter shares how listening to employees, adapting with guests, and continually creating new experiences have helped County Line stay relevant for 51 years.

From 20 Dinners to 800 (03:46)

“We went from 10 to 20 dinners a day to 7 to 800 dinners a day.”

Skeeter remembers the Texas Monthly write-up that transformed County Line from a struggling restaurant into a packed destination almost overnight.

Why 51 Years Requires Change (08:25)

“You have to be willing to change.”

Skeeter explains why longevity doesn’t come from repeating what worked decades ago. Listening to employees and adapting to what guests want has helped County Line evolve its menu and business over the years.

Turning Events Into a $4 Million Business (10:55)

“What can we do to make the experience for those people besides just coming and eating different, better and more things?”

Skeeter shares how employee ideas helped County Line expand into private events, growing the program from roughly $100,000 in annual sales to nearly $4 million.

Turning Barbecue Into an Experience (12:29)

“Let’s do the rib rub experience.”

After realizing that guests traveling from around the world couldn’t easily take homemade barbecue sauce home, the team created a customizable rib rub experience that guests could make, personalize, and travel with.

Creating Revenue Guests Actually Enjoy (15:22)

“They use the rib rub experience and the barbecue sauce experiences as team building.”

What began as an event add-on became an experience companies could use for team building, giving County Line another revenue stream while making events more memorable.

Who Deserves an Ovation? (17:57)

Skeeter recognizes McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality for its attention to service and personalized details. He recalls visiting one of its restaurants for his wife’s birthday and finding a personalized birthday card waiting at the table, an example of the thoughtful hospitality he believes makes guests want to return.

Links:

https://www.instagram.com/countylinebbqsa/?hl=en

https://www.linkedin.com/in/skeeter-miller-61716926/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/county-line-incorporated/

https://countyline.com/

Transcript

00:00:00:06 – 00:00:26:09

Zack Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast. I’m your host, Zak 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.

00:00:26:10 – 00:00:46:04

Zack Oates

Learn more at Ovation Up. 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. Skeeter, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:46:08 – 00:00:51:21

Skeeter Miller

Hey, I’m honored to be here. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for us to get together. But we’re here.

00:00:52:00 – 00:01:15:21

Zack Oates

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 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.

00:01:15:23 – 00:01:41:16

Zack Oates

And 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 I 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 used to this day. And also, congrats on a recent 51st birthday of County Line, which is just legendary.

00:01:41:16 – 00:01:43:06

Zack Oates

So yeah, tell us about County Line.

00:01:43:09 – 00:02:09:10

Skeeter Miller

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 a group of guys wanted to do a barbecue restaurant in Austin that 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.

00:02:09:10 – 00:02:27:06

Skeeter Miller

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 Austin. It was the very first one on Caves Road.

00:02:27:06 – 00:02:43:04

Skeeter Miller

It was out in the country. Bruce, that 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.

00:02:43:04 – 00:03:07:24

Skeeter Miller

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? We’re not a part of it. 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 and a beautiful setting.

00:03:08:01 – 00:03:26:22

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:03:26:22 – 00:03:46:14

Skeeter Miller

So it was like we 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 a hit or miss. And so he would do ten, 20 dinners a day and at one point was down on BC’s road picking up glass bottles. That’s when you could turn him in for a nickel deposit.

00:03:46:15 – 00:04:02:24

Skeeter Miller

So that’s how bad it 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. And we had an old gas pump that the beer lines went up.

00:04:02:24 – 00:04:11:09

Skeeter Miller

And so that said it was hot beer, but it was good. So we went from 10 to 20 dinners a day to 7 to 800 dinners a day.

00:04:11:11 – 00:04:13:21

Zack Oates

Oh my gosh, with just that right up.

00:04:13:22 – 00:04:34:08

Skeeter Miller

Just sit right up. It was wow. Unbelievable. And 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, 700 restaurants in Austin. Now there’s 8000, you know, and we’re basically our restaurants are now in the city, not a destination.

00:04:34:08 – 00:05:10:24

Skeeter Miller

So back then the weights were 2.5 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.

00:05:11:01 – 00:05:14:02

Skeeter Miller

Until you get the fire, the smoke out of the building.

00:05:14:04 – 00:05:14:24

Zack Oates

No way.

00:05:15:05 – 00:05:34:07

Skeeter Miller

No, no, no, I’m not kidding. Till you get the smoke out of the building and you get the fire under control, well, Bruce is in Rick right there spraying the the briskets with the 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.

00:05:34:10 – 00:05:52:08

Skeeter Miller

We’re going to serve these briskets. And they said, it’s just baking soda in this fire extinguisher. It’s going to 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.

00:05:52:08 – 00:06:03:19

Skeeter Miller

So I was dishwasher and a busboy, 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.

00:06:03:21 – 00:06:10:00

Zack Oates

No way. Oh my gosh, so real. That real charred finish did it,

00:06:10:02 – 00:06:31:02

Skeeter Miller

Yeah, that did it in Sunni way. We just to continue. We’re making enough money to where they wanted to open a second location. 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.

00:06:31:03 – 00:06:32:09

Zack Oates

Oh, interesting.

00:06:32:14 – 00:06:50:16

Skeeter Miller

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 and then I got home and I thought, where the hell was 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.

00:06:50:16 – 00:07:08:06

Skeeter Miller

Come together right there, and we sit six feet over the line in New Mexico. So we actually operate as a New Mexico business and 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.

00:07:08:06 – 00:07:13:00

Skeeter Miller

So I actually opened a liquor store that is attached to the building. It had to be attached.

00:07:13:01 – 00:07:13:23

Zack Oates

Oh, interesting.

00:07:13:24 – 00:07:20:24

Skeeter Miller

Yeah, very very interesting. Bill opened it for about 120,000, and it did 2.5 million this year in liquor sales, which.

00:07:20:24 – 00:07:22:02

Zack Oates

Is pretty. Oh my God.

00:07:22:06 – 00:07:50:00

Skeeter Miller

After that, we came to Austin. We did the county line on the lake. We went to Albuquerque, opened up to county line in Albuquerque, up on the side of a mountain. We’ve got two in San Antonio fly right 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 kept to cook something for 18 to 20 hours, you really have to be on top of it.

00:07:50:00 – 00:08:08:11

Skeeter Miller

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 set 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.

00:08:08:11 – 00:08:09:22

Zack Oates

Oh yeah, money.

00:08:09:24 – 00:08:24:03

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:08:24:05 – 00:08:25:12

Zack Oates

That’s amazing.

00:08:25:14 – 00:08:43:15

Skeeter Miller

The key is in this maybe one of your questions. I’m not sure 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, is that you have to be willing to change.

00:08:43:17 – 00:09:05:10

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:09:05:10 – 00:09:23:12

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:09:23:14 – 00:09:29:08

Skeeter Miller

So it puts the onus back on them. Now they’re invested in it. You know what I mean? They’re investing.

00:09:29:10 – 00:09:30:02

Zack Oates

Yeah.

00:09:30:04 – 00:09:50:05

Skeeter Miller

The growing of it. They want to promote it. So that’s been the key because our menu from when we first opened its 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.

00:09:50:05 – 00:10:09:23

Skeeter Miller

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 ten 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?

00:10:09:24 – 00:10:15:08

Skeeter Miller

I mean, so those are some things that we’ve changed over the years. And so it’s worked well.

00:10:15:13 – 00:10:44:14

Zack Oates

Interesting. 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 candy 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.

00:10:44:15 – 00:10:55:16

Zack Oates

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 was a great experience for me. But yeah, I would love to hear your story behind it.

00:10:55:17 – 00:11:17:04

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:11:17:06 – 00:11:41:14

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:11:41:14 – 00:12:07:02

Skeeter Miller

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. Wow. Yeah. So they’re always coming up with ways for besides the private event because we have a beautiful setting.

00:12:07:03 – 00:12:29:15

Skeeter Miller

What can we do to upsell? What can we do to make the experience for those people besides just coming and eating different, better and more things? And so they started adding, we have a long run that comes. We have a lady that comes in, 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.

00:12:29:17 – 00:12:47:16

Skeeter Miller

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 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.

00:12:47:18 – 00:13:14:24

Skeeter Miller

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 bucks 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.

00:13:15:01 – 00:13:34:05

Skeeter Miller

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 we do all our marketing in-house.

00:13:34:08 – 00:13:53:01

Skeeter Miller

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 marketing. And so they said, well, let’s create our own label. That company is let’s say it’s ovation, and they’re coming here and they’re going to have a group of people together. How do they want their logo?

00:13:53:01 – 00:14:01:16

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:14:01:17 – 00:14:02:17

Zack Oates

It’s nice.

00:14:02:19 – 00:14:21:07

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:14:21:07 – 00:14:38:14

Skeeter Miller

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 I’m glad you said something about it, because when I run into people now, they go, hey, when, when are you going to do that again? I’m out of my spice.

00:14:38:16 – 00:14:39:17

Zack Oates

Yeah, yeah.

00:14:39:19 – 00:15:02:08

Skeeter Miller

So anyway, that’s been something that’s been very helpful. And they do a lot of things as upselling. We tried to geared 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. And so we upsell our bar packages with Texas things.

00:15:02:08 – 00:15:19:23

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:15:20:04 – 00:15:20:21

Zack Oates

Oh, cool.

00:15:21:01 – 00:15:22:19

Skeeter Miller

So anyway, just.

00:15:22:21 – 00:15:45:15

Zack Oates

And like I hear this and I think that this has been a little bit of a nontraditional podcast for my regular listeners. And I think that’s beautiful because the stories that you’re telling, there are so many principles that if you are smart business person, you’re going to hear that and you’re going to be like, I could do something like that, right?

00:15:45:15 – 00:16:08:24

Zack Oates

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 catering event, they know that everyone there is going to want some sort of gift.

00:16:09:01 – 00:16:23:17

Zack Oates

And it’s like you don’t need to get them AirPods. They want a county line. You 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 going to be like. And it’s been fun to use it at home.

00:16:23:21 – 00:16:29:13

Zack Oates

And it’s like you said, it’s a nice bottle. It sits there out on my like, very front kind.

00:16:29:14 – 00:16:47:02

Skeeter Miller

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 rib rub experience and the barbecue sauce experiences, the team building, and they break up into teams. And then I come in and judge which one is the best one. And then.

00:16:47:07 – 00:16:47:22

Zack Oates

That’s cool.

00:16:48:02 – 00:17:15:03

Skeeter Miller

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 river of experience on our website, and we’re flying and taking for 750 people.

00:17:15:03 – 00:17:21:18

Skeeter Miller

We’re going to do a rib rub experience for caterpillar at their property in their city. And so it’s exciting.

00:17:21:21 – 00:17:43:21

Zack Oates

I love that and I love this. The 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.

00:17:43:21 – 00:17:57:09

Zack Oates

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? Who deserves an ovation?

00:17:57:11 – 00:18:19:11

Skeeter Miller

There’s a company here. McGuire. They have a lot of higher in 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.

00:18:19:15 – 00:18:38:01

Skeeter Miller

We made a reservation at their new restaurant called the Kimberley. 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.

00:18:38:06 – 00:18:38:22

Zack Oates

Oh, wow.

00:18:39:01 – 00:18:59:08

Skeeter Miller

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.

00:18:59:10 – 00:19:21:13

Skeeter Miller

It’s very expensive. And so, you know, if you go to Perry Steakhouse, you realize you’re going to spend 150 bucks a person to go eat. But when you come to County Line and you’re going to spend quite a bit to come there and eat, because beef is so expensive, center of the plate is so expensive, they don’t expect that when they go to a barbecue place, they expect a very.

00:19:21:13 – 00:19:48:11

Skeeter Miller

So when you come in knowing their name known, 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 flower dress on and it might be ugly to you, but tell her, where did you get that dress?

00:19:48:11 – 00:19:56:17

Skeeter Miller

You look amazing. It’s like you’ve made that person’s day. And so, I think that restaurant company has done a great job.

00:19:56:19 – 00:20:13:04

Zack Oates

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. Parently it was you. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Given Ovation.

00:20:13:06 – 00:20:17:16

Skeeter Miller

Thank you. Zach, I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for all you do.

00:20:17:18 – 00:20:40:04

Zack Oates

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked 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, SMS 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 ovation.com.