46 Business View Magazine - October 2016
mer – he was 17 years old, working at a hospital. His
name was Corey Tisdale. By day, I installed grills and
gas logs and fireplaces, and by night, we sat in the
back room and I studied all of the HTML and the stuff
that helped the other websites get ranked, and he
wrote the code. In the first part of 2001, the first three
months, our site took off and we did a million dollars
the first year and thought we were rich. And from that
point on, it just kept on getting bigger and bigger and
bigger.
“Business was so good that I wanted to get out of the
storefronts and so I gave the Grill Store & More name
to a buddy of mine who owned a hardware store and
he moved the stuff into the hardware store and it be-
came the Grill Store & More. We moved into a five-
bedroom house and we started doing our internet op-
erations. It was just me and my wife. The garage was
filled with cast iron and grilling accessories and copper
cookware. Then we ended up buying a building, and
then over two years, we expanded into nine buildings,
increasing our employees, and then, about five years
ago, we moved into a 45,000 square foot building and
started working out of it. And we also ended up open-
ing a store because we had a lot of vendors giving us
