Last year, Dan and I discussed our options for getting him away from his then job at Central Refrigerated. He was working a lot more hours than we were originally told when we moved to Pasco and we were unhappy with the changes going on in the company. We started looking for self-employment options and one franchise stood out and seemed to say "Pick me!". After a lot of thought and prayer, we decided to go for it and open our own Dickey's Barbecue Pit here in Tri-Cities. So last December, we signed the papers and began the long process of obtaining funding, a location, a contractor, and equipment.
Almost 9 months later, our store finally had its Grand Opening! We couldn't be more thrilled! Our Dickey's is in Kennewick, WA, which is about 15 minutes from our house. Here's pictures of our store!
My mom drove up the day before our opening to help me with the boys.
The lines for the 1st day of our Grand Opening were crazy!! It was out the door and around the corner!
Ethan and Austin enjoyed getting drinks in their Big Yellow Cups and breaking in the ice cream machine.
Good picture of Dan the Manager!
We had the local radio station out for our opening as well. They helped us with our drawings for $500 gift cards and FREE Dickey's Barbecue for a year! We also had a big article in the local newspaper and several clips on the news. It was pretty fun!
Our store did phenomenal during it's opening weekend too. It was crazy!! We had projections for what kind of volume to expect for our opening weekend and we blew all of those out of the water. We were running out of food and borrowing from the nearest stores in Pendleton, OR (about 1 1/2 hours away) and Spokane (about 2 1/2 hours away) and still unable to keep up with the amount of customers. The Dickey's corporate promoters and trainers we had in town for the opening were absolutely amazed at how well our store was doing. We had to triple our food orders just to keep up!
We ended up being the highest grossing franchise in the company (440 stores) for our weekend--and we were out of half out meats by the end of the weekend! Words cannot describe how blessed we feel to have such awesome support from so many of our friends and from the Tri-Cities! If we didn't have what you wanted to try, we have it now!
Thank you to all the friends and family who have expressed their support throughout this whole process!
We love you!
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