Chandler Lyles left the Air Force and started Lyles Barbecue Company in Lexington, Kentucky with his family. They grew from a roadside tent to over $1M in sales in three years using SBA training and clear family roles. His advice: start small, prove your concept works before scaling.
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My name is Chandler Lyles and I'm one of the owners of Lyles Barbecue Company located in Lexington, Kentucky. Lyles Barbecue is different than every other barbecue joint out there because not only do we have excellent service in a friendly environment, but we really focus on the food here. So that's everything from making the meats and in an authentic, slow smoked, southern way to all of our sides are made from scratch daily.
Chandler kind of caught the bug from me and his mom doing barbecue on the weekends, and he learned a lot by our trial and error.
And then when I separated and my dad and mom retired from the Air Force, we all moved back to Lexington. And we had always wanted to be business owners. We were looking for our own thing, so we decided to open up a little roadside barbecue stand.
Transitioning out of the Air Force bootsta business gave us the foundational knowledge that we needed to understand how to manage budgets and cash flow and marketing, inventory management. All those things, you know, allowed us to not make as many mistakes as we probably would have without the course. The great thing about the SBA is that they're a strategic partner in helping small businesses grow their business.
In business, you've got to get into the trenches and really do the day to day stuff to see if you can make it. But you have a lot better chance of survival if you have a really strong foundation. And that's what a program like Boots to Business with the SBA did for us.
Some of the best advice I could share with individuals getting ready to separate from service and they're thinking about starting a business. Start trying to prove your concept now. See if someone will actually buy your product or service.
Start as small and as narrow as you can. In the beginning, it's going to do two things for you. One, it's going to prove to yourself if you even want to do that business with as little risk as possible. And the second thing is the market's going to tell you if your product's worth it or not. We started in a tent three years ago. In just this short amount of time, we built the business from nothing to over a million dollars in sales with almost no debt on it at all.
If you're thinking about starting a family owned and operated business, then the key is defining everyone's roles and understanding that there's somebody in charge or somebody that's going to be the ultimate decision maker.
I am the ultimate decider. Not hardly, unfortunately, not ever. I have to definitely listen to Chandler, which is kind of an odd dynamic. But at the same time, you know, that's kind of our personalities and the beautiful thing about our family is that everybody really brought something different to the table.
My mom is the heart of the business. She does all the operations stuff day to day. All of our managers report to her and she's really cultivating that environment of when you're eating here, you're eating at her house. My dad is a jack of all trades guy. Without him, our company wouldn't be to this point because he saved us a ton of money doing maintenance. He has helped us do deliveries and without that support and being able to bounce ideas off of him from my position of, hey, what do you think about doing this? What do you think about doing that? That's invaluable, having that sort of experience come to the table. And then my role is the storyteller of the brand. My job is to give you a reason as a first time customer to connect with us and then get into the door. We've done almost zero advertising outside of social media. We've got a full time video guy that does a ton of work for us. We take a ton of photos on our phones making our product look good. We show our staff, you know, we're all about every day telling little stories so that it adds up over the course of time to a big story that your customers connect with. I wouldn't trade the hours spent cooking barbecue with my family on the weekends back in high school for anything. And then to be able to take that feeling and bring it to a larger audience every day at our actual restaurants is really what's made us successful. Running a business is like being on a roller coaster. You know it's going to be fun and you know it's going to be awesome and then once you're on it, it's up and down and it's scary and then it's the best and then it's the worst and it's really all over the place. But by the time 60 years from now, the ride ends, I'm going to look back and go, I'm really glad I got.
