BusinessReport.com

Mike Hackley has a digital management tool on his computer—not to be confused with the three other monitors sitting on his desk—which reports real-time sales from his company’s 130 retail Web sites. A red, green or white indicator light reveals the profit loss or gain on each item.

“Flooring supplies. Iron skillet,” Hackley says, reciting the day’s purchases. “Someone bought a fitting that they could have bought from a Radio Shack around the corner for a few bucks. It still surprises me the things people will buy online. There’s no limit to it.”

He should know. Hackley, 41, is chief executive officer of BBQGuys.com and ShoppersChoice.com, which together made Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies this year. By 2008, Hackley predicts his online ventures will gross upwards to $20 million annually.

It all started in 2001, when Hackley realized that his actual retail fronts in Baton Rouge and New Orleans—The Grill Store & More—were being severely outpaced by Web-based sales that were originally supposed to be a mere side effort. So Hackley sold his three stores, bought the domain name www.BBQGuys.com at the regular fee—surprisingly, it hadn’t been scooped up—and started cooking. “The Internet, as a business, is just nuts,” he says. “There’s just so much competition now. We got into it at the right time and quickly found out you can only sell so many high-end grills.”

As such, Hackley held a contest in his office three years later to pick the name of the company’s next online venture for a cash prize of $1,000. The winner: ShoppersChoice.com. “I ended up winning,” Hackley says with a laugh.

Today, Hackley owns dozens of domain names that operate 24 hours a day as retail sites, selling everything from gaslights and patio furniture to auto accessories and outdoor kitchens. His company stocks more than 700 items totaling $1 million (about 60% of everything his sites sell) at any given time at three warehouses off Airline Highway near Sherwood Forest Boulevard. And Hackley is looking for more space; he’s shipping roughly 3,800 packages each month.

The growth has been phenomenal by any standard. Hackley initially started with three employees but now oversees a staff of 26. Overhead has changed greatly as well, going from a store-front operation to the online universe—increasing from $28,000 per month to as much as $400,000, largely because of fixed expenses and Internet marketing. The network under

BBQGuys.com was worth $8.9 million last year, up from $2.2 million in 2005.

Hackley says he has a substantial line of credit with a group of banks that he refuses to use, and rejects venture capital money. He says he knows it would help the company explode, but he’s not yet ready to give up so much control. Additionally, the offers have come in hot and heavy this year to sell. Hackley hasn’t heard an offer he likes and really isn’t interested, but takes most meetings anyway. “I’ve probably gained 15 pounds from all the lunches I’ve been eating,” he says.

While it’s not the whole ball of wax, Hackley credits his success in part to intense search engine optimization. BBQGuys.com, for instance, focused on showing up high in the top three search engines for each sale item, whether it is “Weber grill” or “DCS gas grills.” In all, there are about 738,000 Google pages that can link an online shopper with one of Hackley’s sites. He also surrounded himself with people who knew more about Internet sales than him, including his wife, the company’s chief financial officer.

Then there are partnerships, which rake in the big bucks. Hackley’s sites fill orders for the likes of Cooking.com, Shop.com and Amazon.com, where they enjoy a 97% customer satisfaction rating. In fact, BBQGuys.com and ShoppersChoice.com are listed among the top 500 online retail companies, right alongside Amazon, although the latter is atop the heap with $10.7 billion in sales.

Hackley has also created some innovative marketing tools. His sites produce instructional videos—how a grill can be taken apart, how to smoke a brisket and so on—that are posted on YouTube and Google Video in an effort to drive people to the Web sites. Internal research shows Hackley that 5% of the people who watch the videos elsewhere will visit one of the retail sites, of which 1% will actually put stuff in their online shopping carts. “It has been an effective tool for us, and it is the future of online marketing,” says Hackley, who stars in most of the Internet shorts. “And we’re starting to implement it on everything. We’ve learned you can’t rely on grill sales alone.”

As for the future, Hackley says an auto accessories site is quickly becoming a winner for the company. Additionally, he recently launched a program called ZapMyMortgage.com that claims to help people pay off their house faster—like 14 months instead of 27 years. For Hackley, it’s just another way to broaden his horizon in the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce. “It’s just another thing for me to put my hands in,” he says.