Inflation, shortages delay BBQ plan
Skyrocketing construction costs tap brakes on the Bill Miller chain’s new headquarters
Bill Miller BAR-B-Q is still planning to move its headquarters from downtown to the West Side, but it’s taking longer than expected to get to the groundbreaking.
CEO and President Jim Guy Egbert said the plan had been to start construction early this year. But the barbecue chain has pushed back the timeline because of spiraling construction costs and materials shortages — problems currently plaguing countless building projects.
“Contractors, general contractors, construction folks are dealing with the same issues as well with supply chain constraints, with labor constraints and with cost overruns,” he said. “So we’re still in the final budgeting stage of that effort and trying to nail that down before we start pushing dirt.”
Egbert said the company expects to start construction in the “next several months.” It’ll take an estimated 15 to 17 months to build the headquarters.
The corporate office will be housed in a two-story, 335,000square-foot building at 5330 Texas 151, according to an October 2020 filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
The early estimated cost of the project was $60 million, according to TDLR filing. But that was before inflation began running rampant.
“All prices continue to go up, day in and day out,” Egbert said. “To try to gauge where that’s going to end — I don’t know. But definitely commodity pricing, construction pricing continues to go up every single day. We’ve seen that in our stores. We’ve seen that on this project as well.”
The new headquarters will include a dry goods warehouse, a bakery, production plant and commissary. Some employees who currently work at company
locations downtown will consolidate under one roof, potentially increasing efficiency.
“The main driver is the need for expanded space,” Egbert said.
The engineering, site assessments and architecture work for the project are complete.
Once the building is complete, Egbert said, Bill Miller will use the current headquarters on South Santa Rosa Street as a production facility.
“We’ll still have a presence at our current location downtown, and don’t have plans to change that,” he said.
Bill Miller owns two other downtown properties — a multistory dry goods storage and shipping-and-receiving facility at 301 S. Flores and a building at 402 W. Nueva for employee parking and store supplies storage.
Egbert said the Bill Miller family — the chain’s owners — and the company’s board of directors don’t plan to sell any of the downtown properties. However, they haven’t determined how to re-use the South Flores and Nueva Street locations.
The chain operates more than 70 restaurants in the San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin areas, as well as five Laguna Madre seafood restaurants. More locations are planned.