Rick started cooking barbecue at the ripe age of twenty years old while a student at UNA. He left his passion of playing college football and began to focus on building a business and spent countless hours in the formative years doing just that. So many hours, that he had to finally make a decision as to quit school and focus on just the business or quit the business and focus just on school. The business won out and the rest is history.

Freed to give all his time to the venture, he did just that. Sometimes upward of 80-90 hours weekly for the first 10 -15 years. The business didn’t make a dime for the first five years and Rick lived without taking any pay for many years. He decided in 1984 to open a second outlet in Lawrenceburg in the parking lot of the then K-Mart & Kroger complex. He was determined to make it or go bust. trying. This move was a success and increased the visibility of the operation and things began to turn around. At this point Rick’s true visionary ability began to be implemented. His strong work ethic, his truly caring attitude toward those he worked with and his customers, and his belief that he was never too important or too busy or too good to not be right there in the middle of each and every day of operations from cooking on the pits, to making sandwiches at lunch and dinner, to catering, to sweeping the floors, to roofing the building, to plumbing, to training others,….and the list goes on.

In 1986 he bought a house adjacent to the original Rick’s location and converted it into apartments in which he lived in one and had his office in another. His fiancée of 7 years, who was an RN and had worked in the business since high school with him, took over the books and payroll at that time and initiated the first corporate office and purchased the first computer to assist them in their book-keeping. They were married a few years later and lived in the apartments until expecting their second child.

Rick’s Barbecue, Inc. has met a great deal of adversity during our thirty years of growth. Much has been uphill and of the adage “two steps forward and three steps back” One long term employee stated once that she had never encountered anyone that seemed to run smack into a brick wall at each turn like we did. This only strengthened our determination to succeed and kept us humble along the way. Despite several floods, one that literally floated our fuel tanks out of the ground during construction, and several fires, one that almost destroyed our original building and one that did destroy the Florence location and forced closure for a number of months, we have survived and are better for it . We realize how quickly something can be gone or go awry. Rick’s attitude toward the whole process we call business is a great blessing because he says quite often, “ If it is all gone tomorrow, it has been a fun ride! I’ll pick up and do something else and believe I can be successful at whatever that is, because success starts from within with a passion for what ever it is you are doing”.

We have been so blessed that we can get up each day and look forward to putting our feet on the floor. It may not all be good always , but the good , especially in people, out weighs the bad over time. and with each obstacle, we have learned instead of complaining, to ask God what He desires for us to learn from it and suddenly takes on a new light. We have been blessed with four beautiful children along the way who all have helped in some way in our business. Our oldest is currently a freshman at UNA in the entrepreneurial business program. We also have a high school junior, an eighth grader and a fifth grader. Who knows what tomorrow holds or knows if they decide to enter into our business, what heights they can take it to. We believe that people are one of two places in life. They are either building a foundation for others to stand upon or they are standing upon a foundation that someone else has built. We are trying to build that foundation for others to stand upon and grow upon and exceed the blessings we have had. Remember it is never about the money, but the passion and opportunity you have and can create for yourself and others around you.