The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How a daughter-in-law became chain’s CEO
Leader of large group of restaurants’ secret: She’s a terrible cook.
Earlier this year, Laura Rea Dickey was named CEO of Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants Inc. – not all that startling until you realize that Rea is her maiden name.
She’s the 38-year-old wife of Roland Dickey Jr. and daughter-in-law of Roland Dickey Sr., the iconoclastic patriarch of the nation’s largest barbecue chain that dates back to 1941.
Her ascension to mistress of the barbecue pit is an anomaly on another front: She’s a terrible cook.
“That is not the part of the business that I impact, I promise,” Laura says. “It’s a Dickey’s family tradition that the men cook. So I got on board with that really fast. I can make reservations and a martini, and that’s it.”
That may be true for the kitchen, but Laura holds considerable sway when it comes to technology, big data and marketing. In her previous role as Dickey’s chief information officer, she built an eight-year road map for bringing the family’s slow-smoked barbecue business into the lightning-speed digital age.
Such advanced technology is a must for a company that’s in a torrid expansion mode.
Four years into it, every restaurant operator can tap into pointof-sale analytics, study data heat maps and market directly to cus-
tomers via the proprietary Smoke Stack system that Dickey’s co-developed with iOlap, a Dallas-area big data provider.
Dickey’s and franchisees can spot on the spot what’s working in the 565 stores and what’s not to make adjustments on the fly.
In Georgia, there are 10 stores, with five in metro Atlanta.
Customers can order online and have their food delivered by third-party services, such as Grubhub and Doordash. Come September, a customer app will use beaconing technology so that you can pick up your order curbside without getting out of your car.
Currently, the five company-owned Dickey’s Barbecue Pits, including the original in Dallas, are test driving Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service before it’s rolled out to all of its stores by the end of the year.
Not that long ago, the original flagship was still using a cash register and faxing in sales reports.
At the beginning of the year, the family formed Dickey’s Capital Group, an umbrella company that owns its various investments including the barbecue company.
Roland Jr., 43, moved into the holding company’s top slot and Laura moved into his.
“Laura’s a perfectionist. She makes sure all of the details are tended to,” her husband says. “She brings high energy, creative vision that is absolutely remarkable.”
She’s hardly the lone female running the barbecue business. Twelve of its 14 top execs are women.
“We’re not a bunch of fat guys grilling meat,” Roland says.
One of those women is Renee Roozen, brand president.
“My career had been in restaurants owned by private equity,” she says. “Meeting Roland Jr. and Laura cemented the deal for me. Decisions aren’t driven by a dollar checkbook. They’re driven by what’s right for the brand.”
Last year, Dickey’s opened 87 restaurants, bringing the total to 508 at year end, and it reported systemwide sales of $421 million.
As of earlier this month, there were 565 Dickey’s stores with another 109 in the pipeline.
California is its hottest market, and Hawaii is about to get its first taste of Texas barbecue when one opens on the Big Island in the coming months.
Laura is still trying to convert the folks in Alaska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Dickey’s is the largest single restaurant purchaser of beef brisket in the country, buying about 10 million pounds (or 5,000 tons) of it each year.
The first Dickey’s Barbecue Pit was founded by Travis Dickey, a World War I veteran, who enjoyed serving beer as much as he did barbecue. The original location, a converted schoolhouse, is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Dallas that has never shuttered its doors, changed ownership or moved locations.
“We have never remodeled or renovated the core part of (it) intentionally,” says Laura. “It had a couple of fires, and the original pit actually fell off the back of the building in the ‘60s.”
Her father-in-law, whom she calls Senior, designed the second pit that’s still smoking meats today.
Senior’s side of the clan bought out Martha Dickey, widow of his brother, T.D., after his death in 2011.
Laura, who migrated from Oklahoma City to Texas Christian University in 1997, has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. “If someone were to sum me up, I hope they’d say, ‘She had a curious mind.’ That more than anything is what attracted me to philosophy,” she explains.
Roland and Laura were working professionals when they met at a bar. “We migrated to each other because we were both too old to be there, and we had business cards,” she says. “So it was like, ‘Oh, you have a business card, I have a business card. Perhaps we can talk.’”
Laura is a strategic thinker — right down to picking her wedding date. She chose Oct. 28, 2006, because that was the Saturday before Halloween, and she figured that having a holiday bookmark would help both of them remember their anniversary.
Dickey’s was blowing and going, having just passed the 130-store milestone in 2008, when the economic lights went out on the restaurant industry.
Roland Jr., who was president of the barbecue business, asked Laura to step to the family plate. She’d been doing strategic planning, data analysis and marketing for clients of The Point Group, and he wanted her to bring her expertise to shore up Dickey’s and then some.
While other restaurant companies sought shelter hoping to weather the storm, Roland and Laura decided to crank things up.
“She came in with that marketing and community experience and really got things stepped up,” says Roland “That put us on a sharp trajectory of growth, and we’ve never looked back.”