Couple Finds Success with BBQ Franchise Business
Cooking up smokin’ steaks is easy and much more satisfying than fancy catering, Rick Ivey and his wife realized when their catering company was asked to do barbecue for an upscale wedding in 1999.
One year and $7,000 later, Ivey opened Virginia BBQ out of a former dress consignment house in Ashland, Va., and began cooking up typical barbecue fare like Texas beef sandwiches, chicken barbecue sandwiches and corn bread muffins.
After a writeup of the restaurant in the Richmond Times-Dispatch as the best barbecue in town, business exploded, and Ivey soon opened a second location. “We had lines out the door,” he says. Ivey currently owns eight franchises in Virginia, with a ninth opening in Delaware in about two weeks…