UP in SMOKE
The BBQ King of Country Thunder looks back on lost opportunities ●
Tom Montoya and his wife, Michelle, were headed into their best April yet in 2020. They could always count on April as a banner month for business, thanks primarily to Country Thunder Arizona, where the Casa Grande couple had spent the past eight years serving up burgers and barbecue to the huge crowds that gathered at Jimbo’s and the Pit. ● And 2020 was supposed to be their first year at the Long Beach Grand Prix and two major California music festivals, Coachella and Stagecoach. Then, COVID-19 started moving dates around as events were rescheduled or canceled.
“All I do for a living is events,” Montoya says.
“So, unfortunately, I’ve been out of work since March of 2020. We don’t have a restaurant or anything, so this is all we do. I have $600,000 worth of equipment sitting on the side of my house right now. And it’s been sitting there over a year.”
Montoya and his wife are looking forward to their first event in 14 months, the 10th Annual Arizona Balloon Classic in Goodyear the weekend of April 30-May 1.
Getting by without major events has been tough
But it’s been tough to hang on long enough to fire up those grills again.
“We’ve sold equipment, borrowed money, done just about everything just to keep paying bills, odd jobs here and there,” Montoya says.
They’ve driven to Pinetop on several occasions to set up a barbecue stand in the lot of a little shopping center for the weekend, but that doesn’t bring in the kind of business they’re used to making at these huge events.
“We’re been applying for small businesses loans, but if you’re not making monster money, these huge companies, you tend to get passed over,” he says. “So we learned to tighten the reins. We eat at home. We don’t run around.”
Country Thunder has always been one of their bigger events in Arizona, but they also do a lot of work in California and Nevada.
Montoya says, “There’s probably five or six major companies I work with. And certain things pop up here and there. We’re more or less word of mouth. We get phone calls, ‘Hey, a guy told me you could do this event.’”
The company is geared toward large-volume events.
“My big barbecue is over 100 feet long set up,” Montoya says. “The grill itself is over 40 feet.”
The Montoyas put in the work themselves
The Montoyas travel to all the events they book.
“Me and my wife are very .... how can
I say this? Old-fashioned,” Montoya says.
“If we’re not there, we’re not gonna be open. Because we believe as you grow, these big companies where you have employees to go out and do your stuff for you, nobody’s gonna do it at 100% like you are. So it’s either me or my wife at every event that we do.”
This month should have been their 10th April in Florence, where they run four food stands, two in the main concert area — or the bowl, as Country Thunder calls it — and two in the campgrounds.
Jimbo’s is a staple at Country Thunder
But the date, originally scheduled for last April, was rescheduled a third time to October.
Gerry Krochak, Country Thunder’s director of marketing and media relations, calls Montoya “the barbecue king of Country Thunder.”
Both Jimbo’s, his hamburger stand, and the Pit, his barbecue stand, have been on the same spot for eight years.
“Jimbo’s is an icon,” Montoya says. “People are like, ‘Oh my God, let’s go to Jimbo’s!’ ‘Where you at?’ ‘We’re in front of Jimbo’s on the corner!’ I’m pretty sure I’m the longest-running guy at Country Thunder.”
It’s a fun gig.
“It is probably one of the biggest parties that I’ve gone to,” Montoya says. “Wednesday night, they let the campers in. And they don’t stop until early Monday morning. There’s always somebody partying, somebody going.
It’s a party that don’t ever stop.”
It can get a little crazy, but Montoya says it’s rare than anyone has caused him any trouble.
“You can’t fit 10,000 people out there and not have some issues, but 99% of the time, they’re just there to have a good time,” he says.
“They’re drunk cowboys having fun. They’re not obnoxious. They’re not mischievous. They’re not tearing stuff down. It’s a very happy, very outgoing group. They’ll hug you and want to tell you their life story. And they’re so drunk, they can’t stand up straight.”
$20,000 during the Country Thunder weekend
The first time Country Thunder was rescheduled to October 2020, Montoya wasn’t that concerned.
“I thought, ‘We’ll get it in October. We’ll be fine. We just have to button up, put everything away, save up. We got two, three months and this will blow over. And the October event will be awesome. We’ll be fine.’ And then the snowball just kept getting bigger “
The Montoyas can make anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 in a single Country Thunder weekend. And they’re clearly not the only people making money off of that event. Or losing money when it doesn’t happen.
In 2019, more than 140,000 people attended Country Thunder Arizona over four days, for an average of 35,000 a day, including fans, staff, working personnel, law enforcement, press and vendors.
There were 7,362 campsites, including campers, RVs, tents and staff housing.
T-shirt vendors sold more than 25,000 items, including artist merch and Country Thunder gear.
The Montoyas have worked events for years
The Montoyas launched GCF Foods 12 years ago. Before that, they were in the amusement business, doing games at carnivals and fairs.
“My wife is actually third-generation carnival people,” Montoya says. “The Arizona State Fair, my wife’s family, they’re all associated with that. My sister-in-laws and family are all in the amusement business. So we’ve all been taking a beating.”
The couple’s daughter was born in 2005.
In 2007 or ‘08, Montoya says, they started to think about the fact that they had two more years before their daughter started school.
“Back then, I would travel 10 months out of the year, all over the country — Florida, Minnesota, Louisiana, everywhere,” Montoya says. “And we decided, ‘What, are we gonna be traveling all the time?’”
So they sold off all their equipment and started GCF Food with a focus on local events.
“That way, I could come home every night or almost every night, maybe a weekend gone,” Montoya says.
“We started doing stuff in Arizona at what used to be Firebird Raceway. And then when it got so hot here, in the summertime, our daughter wouldn’t be in school. So we would go to California and do some stuff there.”
They started small with a hamburger stand and what Montoya calls an “old, decrepit” 8-by-10-foot trailer.
“We cleaned it up, put some paint on it and started selling hamburgers,” he says. “And it grew and grew and grew. Now we have probably 12 different stands.”
Now that events are starting to return, it could be hard to get in on the action.
“You have so many people that have been sitting around doing nothing,” Montoya says.
“So the events that are happening, everybody wants to do it. So the promoter will overbook the venue. And the vendors, they don’t understand that you’re actually losing money because the venue’s overloaded. They just see the money coming in.”
Then, when the bills arrive, Montoya says, “They find out ‘Oh my God, we did this event and with the food costs and staffing and travel and motels, doing that event cost $1,000.’”
That makes it even more important than it was before the pandemic to choose those gigs wisely.
“It’s got to be a good event,” Montoya says.
“You’ve got to be smart because you do go into panic mode and just want to do events. ‘I don’t care what it is. I just want to do something. I’ll drive 500 miles and sleep in the bed of my truck.’ You’re not looking at it logically.”
“If we’re not there, we’re not gonna be open. Because we believe as you grow, these big companies where you have employees to go out and do your stuff for you, nobody’s gonna do it at 100% like you are. So it’s either me or my wife at every event that we do.” Tom Montoya