48 Business View Magazine - October 2016
a hard time because we didn’t have a storefront. And
so, we opened a storefront and that opened the flood-
gates for us to carry a lot more variety of products. And
then we extended another building that was on the
property, which gave us another 12,000 square feet
and, just recently, we built another 60,000 square foot
building.
“And then, I let Corey Tisdale take over the company
as the CEO, and I started another company called
Blaze Outdoor Products. I started manufacturing and
engineering my own grills and selling them to distribu-
tors and also sold to ShoppersChoice as a distributor.
About eight months ago, we acquired a 78,000 square
foot building, because it’s growing so fast. And today,
ShoppersChoice has about 130 employees and Blaze
has about 20 employees and we’re growing Shopper-
sChoice about 15 percent and I’ve stepped back into a
CEO position with ShoppersChoice. And Blaze is grow-
ing at about 38 percent and both companies are doing
extremely well.”
Hackley goes on to explain how becoming an internet
presence propelled his company into prominence:
“I’m a small internet guy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
But because of Google and some of the other search
engines, I have the best storefront in every city, in ev-
ery town, in the United States – virtually. And it’s true.
So, rather than a storefront struggling here in Ba-
ton Rouge, I have the availability to touch everybody
all over the world. And this is where the technology
comes in. Way before anybody started doing this, I
had the idea that we’re going to do sales videos. We
had this 20X20 platform I built in the back of one of
our buildings. So we took a grill and explained how the
grill worked. And then, we would cook on it and show
people how it would cook. Because it was tough times,
both parents were working. So what our analytics told
us was that they were sitting down at night after they
got the kids to bed, and they’re looking at our videos.
