If someone had told brothers Stephen and Chris Smith 10 years ago that they’d one day be the owners of a high-end outdoor kitchen business, they most likely would have laughed.
Back then, both were successful mortgage bankers working for some of the biggest financial institutions in the country. Then came the Great Recession.
“We had to reinvent ourselves,” Stephen tells Business Report in its new Entrepreneur feature.
After being laid off, both were forced to find new career paths. Research showed promise for the outdoor kitchen market, so they decided to get in on the ground floor of the new and growing trend.
“I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I was a banker, and I made a lot of good money,” Stephen says. “That was what I was going to do—until it went away.”
The brothers launched FLO Grills outdoor kitchen company in 2007 as an e-commerce company. To save money in the beginning, they learned to code and ultimately built 12 successful e-commerce websites, through which they sold nearly 20 different manufacturer lines of grills and kitchen equipment.
Nearly two years later, the brothers had to weather yet another dip in the economy, which put many of their producers out of business and led to decreased profit margins.
The Smiths decided to develop their own line of outdoor kitchen equipment from scratch to insulate the business from future market fluctuations. They created FLO Manufacturing by purchasing a Clearwater, Florida-based aluminum cabinet welding company they’d been using for years, which cleared a path for franchising FLO Grills.
Now headquartered in Austin, Texas, FLO Grills currently has nine franchises across the country, but the Catholic High grads still hang onto their Baton Rouge roots. Stephen is president of FLO Grills and owner of its Baton Rouge location, where he has to compete with the largest supplier of outdoor kitchen equipment in the country: ShoppersChoice.com.
“The biggest challenge in the outdoor kitchen industry right now is that it is so popular, you get so many people trying to get into it,” he says.
Chris, FLO Grills’ CEO, works out of the Austin headquarters, where he handles the training and construction aspects of the business.
The brothers have set an ambitious goal of opening 25 new franchise locations over the next three years in a push to position FLO Grills to be the number one outdoor kitchen company in the country.
Read the full Entrepreneur feature. Send your comments to editors@businessrpeort.com.
