Let him cook: How Weber Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle went from upstart to the biggest name in grilling

It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder. This is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition. 

Today I’m talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Weber Blackstone, a full circle moment for Decoder. Roger was our first-ever grill CEO on the show back when he was the CEO of just Blackstone — a griddle company he started in 2008 that exploded in popularity during the pandemic, when videos of smashburgers went relentlessly viral on TikTok. 

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Blackstone grew so fast and so furiously that Roger was able to buy Weber a couple of years ago, a legacy company that had fallen on hard times. Fun fact: We asked Roger to come on the show last year to talk about the merger, but it was stuck in antitrust review at the Federal Trade Commission.

So Roger and I talked about that, what competition review entails for grill companies, and what it takes to manufacture these products overseas and import them into the United States in an age of high tariffs and high energy prices that are pushing consumers down market. 

We also talked about what it means to merge with Weber, a storied company with iconic products that had become pretty stuck in its ways and pretty siloed. Roger now seems very eager to break those silos down and create a better combined company with a new culture. As I said, there’s a lot in this one — including whether the chip market is affecting Weber’s connected thermometer business.

It’s pure Decoder bait through and through, and Roger was great in this episode. 

Okay: Weber Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Roger Dahle, you’re the CEO of Weber Blackstone. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you. Good to be back.

I am thrilled to have this conversation. Five years ago, in 2021, we thought it would be so fun to talk to grill CEOs in the summer because one of our theses here on Decoder is that all these companies have the same problems, and also, it’s the summer, and we should go talk to grill companies.

At the time, we made a list of all the companies we wanted to talk to, and we put Weber at the top because they were the big brand name. They said no. And I said, “We’ve got to talk to Roger at Blackstone, because I’m watching TikTok every day and Blackstones are going viral on TikTok.”

So we started with you. You were our first ever guest in this series, and now you’re the CEO of Weber. I feel like that is just about as perfectly full circle as it gets. So thank you so much for coming back.

I didn’t see that coming when we talked a couple of years ago.

A lot has happened. Weber was bought by private equity. You had a SPAC that came and went, you didn’t go through with it, and then you bought Weber. Let’s just talk about how all of this came together.

Blackstone’s been around since 2008. We won’t go through the whole history. People can go listen to our last interview if they want to. You started the company in 2008. You went super viral in 2021. You did a lot. How did you end up in the position to combine with Weber, which really turned out to be more of an acquisition?

So, it’s interesting. I have to go back to 2015. Blackstone was growing so fast that I needed to get a manufacturing partner that I could rely on and trust, and I knew a family from Taiwan that had facilities in mainland China, a father-son combination. They’re good friends. They had never been in outdoor cooking before. So we started together, and they in fact became an equity partner in the business in 2015. They were building for me a little bit before then. 

The business was so successful and grew so rapidly from 2015 through 2020 that… The father of the father-son combo was at retirement age, and he wanted to slow down. So they were looking to sell their equity in the company, which started this whole process of me going into the financial markets, talking to investment bankers, and going through that whole process, which led to almost going public via the SPAC.

During that time and through some of those roadshows, I met Byron Trott, who owns BDT. He has owned Weber since 2010, if you can believe it. So his company has held onto that position for over 16 years now. He loved the story of Blackstone, and we actually went through a pretty serious process with them about a potential acquisition of Blackstone.

So, Weber would acquire Blackstone?

Originally, yeah. But it just wasn’t right. The timing wasn’t right. There were just a few things that didn’t line up at the time, so we ended up not doing that transaction. That’s when we almost went public via the SPAC, and then, as you know, the financial markets fell to pieces. Weber and Traeger, coincidentally, had already gone public, and their stocks had a horrible experience. They came out, ran high, and then went really low. So, the SPAC deal didn’t work.

At that point, I did find a financial partner — a private equity group that took possession of my Chinese manufacturing partner’s shares. That was in 2022. And then in 2024, we continued to grow at Blackstone and had phenomenal success. We were very fortunate. Again, we had accomplished in two years what that financial partner thought would take five. So we decided to test the waters and see what the next transaction looked like.

Byron found out that I was thinking of that again, called me up, and said, “Let’s do a merger. Let’s not do an acquisition, but let’s merge these two companies together.” So we came to an agreement by the end of 2024, and then we had to go through the antitrust process with the Federal Trade Commission, and that took until May of 2025. So we’ve been merged together now for just barely over a year.

It’s funny, we asked you to come on the show last year for this episode because we’d heard about all this, and I thought, “This is fascinating. We have to get Roger back.” But you declined because you were in the middle of this antitrust review process. 

I’m curious about that. This is the Trump administration. They’re historically very friendly to deals. This is not Lina Khan’s FTC. Why did it take so long? Why was it so complicated? This isn’t like a big tech deal. This isn’t Paramount.

It was an easy deal. Unfortunately for us, we signed our agreement in December, and that’s when the clock started ticking with the FTC. Well, they’re not going to get anything done in December with all the holiday breaks. They have 30-day windows to look at your deal and say, “Yes, you can merge, or “No, we want to take a further look.” So they extended that until the end of February.

Then they extended it one more time because all the commissioners and the new administration hadn’t been appointed yet. So we just really got stuck in no man’s land because they have five commissioners in Washington, DC, as I understand. I think two were in place or three, but they needed all five to be in place. As soon as they were fully staffed, they called us up and said, “Yeah, your deal’s fine. Go ahead.”

Wow.

So it just took a minute. I think we were just in the middle of the transition with the new administration.

Yeah. I look at the grill industry, the outdoor cooking industry, as you call it, and there seems to be a surplus of competition. There are infinite brands showing up constantly.

Last year, we had the CEO of SharkNinja on the show. They had just put out a grill because they saw an opportunity in the space. Do you feel like you’ve reduced competition by acquiring Weber? Do you think that the competition’s getting more ferocious?

Competition is always there. And the other thing about our industry is that in outdoor cooking, every major retailer has their own in-house brand, a private label. I could own every outdoor cooking brand in the world, and I still couldn’t affect the consumer retail price because my customer is really in charge. They walk into a store or go online, wherever they might find our products for sale, and if they don’t like the retail price, they don’t buy it.

So the FTC is really focused on competition and making sure the consumer is protected, which I love. I think I have no problem with that. I want the consumer taken care of and protected as well, but my business is very competitive. There’s always somebody new coming along, like SharkNinja, who’d never been in the business before, and then people who’ve been around for a long time, competitive companies that have been around for a long time.

Then, on top of it, I have my retail customers with their own private label brands. So if retail prices get out of hand — or if they think they’re too high or if they think a product has been more commoditized — they put their private label brand on it and offer it to their customers.

Do you supply any of that private-label stuff? I don’t think Home Depot is actually manufacturing some grills. Do you supply any of that white-label product?

I don’t, but I know most of the suppliers, the factories in Asia, who do.

Are they competitive with you? Are they price sensitive to you? There’s just a market that I think is so physical, the products are so big, and then they do turn. People buy new ones kind of all the time. So it’s just a different kind of competitive dynamic to have the white label supplier right there, and so top of mind for you.

Yeah. It’s really a go-to-market strategy that each retailer deploys, how they think about it, what retail prices they want to offer their customers, and what features and benefits they want to offer at those price points. So if they can better serve that price point and that feature set using their own label, they will.

But if a brand… for example, with Blackstone, for a long time, none of my customers carried an in-house griddle, because they wouldn’t sell. They put them out there, and people would step over them, around them. I don’t mean physically, I mean over the price point to buy a Blackstone. So we were very fortunate that way.

But if you look at gas grills, Lowe’s, Home Depot, most of the retailers, even Walmart, carry a house brand because they can offer their customers the value they want at that retail price point. So it’s really a merchandising strategy that they use, and I think it works. I think it’s great for the customer. It’s tough right now at retail, as I’m sure you’re aware.

Oh, yeah. I want to come to manufacturing the products. You’ve mentioned China several times already. Obviously, that’s changing that dynamic. We’re in the heart of summer. I’m sure this is the high season for you. It’s not getting easier. I want to come to that, but I just want to stay in the deal for one second.

Weber is the household name. As I said, we made the list of grill CEOs, and obviously, we put Weber at the top. You are now the CEO of Weber. My understanding is that Weber’s business was not doing very well, that there was some inherent flaw in that business.

We’ve done a lot of episodes about private equity takeovers and how the PE firms tend to extract the profits and not invest in innovation, especially for big legacy companies. Was that your assessment of Weber? Was that the opportunity?

No. BDT is a phenomenal financial partner. I mean, I love working with them, and Byron Trott is at the top of the list, I think, behind the scenes in that industry. Weber, in my opinion and in my assessment, when we took over and started being able to look… Because until we had FTC clearance, 100 percent clearance, we couldn’t really see anything other than public information. 

But it’s a typical legacy type company with a big brand, great presence, great product, phenomenal quality, and really good people. I love the people who were working there and the culture that they had. But in my opinion, there had been some C-suite turnover that was way too high, and different philosophies on how to serve the customer, so as a result, expenses got way out of hand. And then, as you know, a private company versus a public company, the cost structure is completely different, and there’s a lot of expense in being a publicly traded company that hasn’t come out of the business yet.

So the product sell-through-rate at retail, and the perception among user-customers has never been better. It’s extremely well off, but the profitability of the company was challenged and needed a different approach. I think it’s why Byron wanted to merge us, because we just do things completely opposite of the way they had done it traditionally at Weber, and especially over the last… I’m going to say seven years. 

For many years, the Stephen family, with George Stephen as the founder of the business… His son Jim took over as CEO for a long time until they sold to BDT. They’re a great, profitable business. From 2019 to 2020, they did extremely well. So it was really the last five, six, seven years. 

I just want to clear up the timeline here for listeners because you’re talking about BDT a lot, and they’ve been in and out of Weber for a long time. It’s true. So they bought a majority stake in Weber in 2010, then Weber IPO’d in 2021. It didn’t go well, right? They only raised $250 million. I think their target was $500 million. 

In 2022, BDT took Weber private again. So then they were full owners, and then obviously in 2024, you announced you were going to combine. Were they sort of immediately looking for a buyer, or was it just that you showed up and they happened to know you quite well?

I don’t think they were really looking for a buyer. The merger made a lot more sense, especially by combining the strengths of both companies and then just cleaning up. It’s a phenomenal opportunity. We have a legacy brand, and Blackstone is innovative, disruptive, and still growing. So yeah, it’s a great combination. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

Tell me about the mechanics of this. You’re saying the way you do things is different from the way Weber had done things traditionally. They are a legacy brand. They’ve been around since the 50s. There’s a world in which they just have to keep selling Weber Kettles, and that is the thing they have to do. It’s literally the logo.

I have a Summit grill, one of the fancier grills. My father-in-law bought it for me ages ago. The thing has been rocking and rolling for a decade. What does Blackstone do differently that Weber wasn’t doing, which created the opportunity?

We’re an entrepreneurial-led business, and that’s the way I like to think, operate, spend money, and not spend money. I don’t think Weber’s alone in this. Whenever you get a company that’s been around 70 plus years, you start getting too structured, layered, and siloed, and that’s completely opposite of the way we do things. 

Let me explain it this way. Part of the culture at Blackstone that I’ve always tried to instill is that if you’re walking through my parking lot, you work at this company, and there’s a piece of garbage on the ground, you bend over and pick it up, put it in the garbage can. Not because you have to, but because that’s what you do, that’s your culture. You want to make this a great place to work, a great environment. When I got to Weber, I wondered if that was the culture, and what I found out was that it was not.

And not that they wouldn’t bend over and pick up a piece of garbage, they’d be more than happy to do that. They’re not too proud; it’s not beneath them. But if they do that, they fear that they might be taking the janitor’s job away. And so out of respect to their coworkers, as strange as this sounds, they stay really siloed. They start here, they end here, and this is what I do. And if I try to expand beyond that, it throws off the whole system of the way we do things. It’s very, very structured. Everything has to be tidied up and put in place perfectly before the next step can even begin to happen.

At Blackstone, we’ve always done speed to market with new products. New product development to me is critical and essential. I can’t take three years to get a new product in a box; it has to take three months. So those are the differences that I’m talking about — philosophies, speed to market. They’re using a MAP policy, and we’re not. I’ve never had a MAP. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that policy.

Can you explain that to the listeners?

So MAP stands for minimum advertised price. And so, Weber sells a $499 gas grill, and everybody’s the same retail. They can’t control retail prices, but what they can do is say, “This is what we want you to advertise it for. If you do that and maintain that advertised price, you will be eligible for the rebate you get from our advertising department.” So nobody can control retail prices, that’s anti-competitive, but you can have a MAP policy with your retail customers.

Everybody’s at the same retail price that sells Weber, whether you buy it at Walmart, Lowe’s, Ace, or Home Depot. Wherever you buy it, if it’s the same grill, it’s going to be at the same retail price point. I’ve never used a MAP policy with Blackstone, and I don’t want to cause confusion with my customers.

So what we’ve done, successfully, is developed products of families that we sell to our retail customers, and that way everybody kind of has their own product. It works great because we merchandise with the retail customers to their customers, and that’s really what we try to focus on: the end user. It’s the people who are walking in and laying down a credit card to buy a griddle or a grill, they’re expensive.

This is not a spur-of-the-moment decision that people make. This is an expensive product that they buy that needs to last for a long time. So they take their time to make a decision. And so we like to give our retail customers features and benefits, and the value proposition that they’re really trying to get for their customer who walks into their retail store.

Can I make the comparison to tech companies? This is why I love doing the grill episode every year. You’re describing a lot of things that you obviously thought about very deeply in your corner of the industry. Tech companies do this all the time. The Samsung Galaxy S26 is actually slightly different for every carrier, so they can play these same games with MAP, right? Apple won’t do it. 

The iPhone’s the iPhone, and maybe there’s like radio differences, but the iPhone’s the iPhone. You see, there’s competition in the market in that way. With Blackstone, I think it’s the culinary line at Lowe’s, but it’s not at Home Depot. You’re literally making different products, or at least different branding, for all of your partners. 

You’re also describing what I would call pure Decoder bait, that Weber had this extremely divisional organization that was very process-driven, and you have — I want to ask you the question more directly — a more functional structure. You’re really product-led, product development-led.

All that comes together, but you’ve got to change the culture at Weber. You’ve got to go into this company that has a different business process, right? You’ve got to take your company, which approaches the retailers like Apple, and go into a company that approaches the retailers like Samsung, and then you’ve got a functional structure, and you’ve got to go into a very rigid process-oriented divisional structure. It’s been about a year. Did you just smash glass and make all the changes? How does this work?

A little bit. There were some hurt feelings here and there, and kind of on both sides. That’s been really interesting to me, watching the way the team at Blackstone reacted to this and the team at Weber. One thing I absolutely knew, and it’s proven to be true, is that I was going to find people at Weber who were just dedicated, phenomenal employees who may have a little bit of pent-up ideas, ambition, and wanting to do things differently, and that’s certainly been the case.

So I got to unleash those people and let them go do things the way they thought that they wanted to and the way that they thought would be better. This is a better way to serve our customers. Let’s do it this way instead of that way. So that’s been really fun. But I did hire a consulting firm to come in and help me with the integration, and it was a good decision.

I didn’t really start hard on integration until November of last year. I took the first four or five months to try to learn, see, understand, and get to know people. And candidly, I had to really evaluate the C-suite that merged together and see how that all worked, and I had to make some changes there. So it took a minute from the top, really integrating my C-suite and then moving it out to the rest of the organization, and really, we’re still in that process. It’s going to take me another year to fully get that done, but the results are phenomenal, and the momentum has been building, and it’s really coming together.

Most people are never going to hire a consulting company to manage an integration. This is a pretty high-order thing to do. Very, very few people have to make a decision on which consulting company to pick. How did they pitch you? How did you decide?

When I had my previous financial partner, a week after we closed the deal with them, which goes back to 2022, they parked their consultant in my office in Utah because they wanted to see how they could help improve. He worked for that company, but he had spent his career with one of the really big consulting companies in the US. You could probably guess which one. So he was really, really sharp, and I learned a lot from him.

When I went to hire a consulting company, I called him up and asked for recommendations because he still hires them to this day. When they invest in a company, they bring a consultant in to kind of help if they’re integrating or just trying to improve the process. So I called him, he gave me four names, and gave me the contacts for those four names. I called each company, and then I just took them through an interview process, just like you would when hiring somebody.

I also included two of my board members who have had a lot of experience with integration. They stepped in, and together it was a pretty easy decision for us, which way we went, and it turned out to be a really good decision. They’ve been really, really helpful.

One of my tropes here on Decoder is that culture is really important, and structure really defines your culture. I’ve had people just straight up disagree with me. There are CEOs who are like, “No, no, no. Culture is its own thing; you can change the structure as much as you want. The culture just comes from leadership.”

You’re integrating two very different cultures, two very different structures. It sounds like you know what you want, right? You’re going to change both companies; it sounds like both sides are ever so slightly going to get to the outcome you want. Is it more of telling everyone to pick up the trash culture change, or is it more of a structure change?

Let me answer that this way. A lot of people advise me, and they’re like, “When you start doing this integration, you want to take the best practices from Blackstone and the best practices from Weber and merge those together.” I said, “Well, I don’t know if that’s what I want. What if the best and the best are just mediocre and not the best? I want world-class.”

I want benchmarks of the best finance department, the best operational team in the world, at whatever company. I’ve really tried to approach it from that viewpoint. And then the culture… I think culture comes from everybody unifying, having a common goal of what they want to do, what we want this company to become, and having enthusiasm, excitement, and pride.

So when you come to work, whether it’s Monday or Friday or any day in between, you’re really excited to get in the office and get going because you’re going to make a change. You’re going to impact the business, it’s going to be exciting, and it’s going to be rewarding for the employee. That’s really kind of where I’m keying my focus.

So let me ask you the Decoder questions now. It sounds like you have a ways to go on this integration. How are you structured now? Is it two different companies? Is it one company, two divisions? How is that working?

One company with two awesome brands is how we’re structured.

Under that, are you sharing R&D? Are you sharing product development?

Yeah, and kind of by centers of excellence, if you will. We have a beautiful office in Chicago, out in the suburbs. We have a new office here in Utah for our headquarters that we just built. I was doing that anyway; it just coincided with the merger. We have R&D facilities here in Logan and in Chicago, and then we have teams around the world.

Weber has a big organization in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), and we have a manufacturing facility in Poland that is state-of-the-art and about four years old. We also have operations in China, and we’ve moved to Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand for manufacturing. So we have staff and people there as well.

We’re keeping it based on centers of excellence and where expertise lies because nobody in Logan had ever built a gas grill before. We’re not going to really take those engineers and try to expect them to get up to speed, and vice versa with griddles in Chicago.

Well, Weber had built a griddle. They built the Slate. They went after a bunch of your influencers. There’s like a tiny little scandal in the grill influencer world that Weber had done a bunch of integrations. Are you canceling the Slate?

No, because they’re still consumers who love the Weber brand, but we’ll merchandise it by feature benefit, and value proposition based on retail price point and retail placement. So if you look at our industry, we’re small as far as the number of doors that sell our product. Well, I shouldn’t say it that way because there are a lot of doors, but there’s Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ace, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, and then it goes way down from there as far as potential volumes with retail customers. 

It’s a relatively small customer base, and so we have to do business with everybody, number one, and I want to please my customer. Again, I really try to focus on the end user, and we have extremely dedicated Weber customers. We want to offer them products, but there’s no reason, for example, for the Weber and Blackstone brands to both have a $150 griddle. That’s really more of a Blackstone price point. But if there’s a retail customer who wants an upgraded griddle, and they want the Weber brand and a longer warranty experience, then a $799 Slate is probably the answer for them.

So let me ask you about that, just the development of that product as you combine the companies, and you combine these cultures. Every year, I just look at the product catalog of Blackstone, and everything seems brand new. It’s almost like the company is starting from scratch over and over again.

Weber is very classic. That cattle has really not changed, and the Summit Grill that my father-in-law bought me 10 years ago and the Summit Grill today are virtually identical. Actually, the big difference is that I think the new one can accept griddle plates and mine can’t. It’s fundamentally the only difference.

That’s a different approach to product development. Are you going to have one product development team that drives a roadmap for both brands? Or does Weber get to have its own griddle development team because the price point is different?

No, we have one R&D group. We have consolidated that. It was one of the first departments I wanted consolidated, even though it wasn’t the easiest because we have great talent in both offices now. So have a VP over R&D, and then it staffs out from there. We assign development groups based on grill type, basically.

We’ll have product management, industrial design, and engineering for gas grills, for griddles, but if we have a group working on griddles, they can work on either brand and vice versa with gas grills. If Blackstone decided to ever get into gas grills, that team would develop that for Blackstone.

So this reminds me of General Motors CEO Mary Barra, who we had on the show, and how she has Buick, Chevy, and Cadillac, and there are shared platforms for those cars, and then there are brand teams that build on top of those platforms. Is that the model that you’re going after here?

Pretty much. There are companies where… Black+Decker may be one. I’m not 100 percent sure, but they might have a DeWalt team, and they don’t share resources with, say, the Stanley team. But I don’t know. I’m just using that as an example.

I mean, you could go down that road and have that model. They even have salespeople dedicated to a brand, or some companies do. I’m not going to retail that way. If I go into Costco, my sales team that calls on Costco, the commercial team, they’re representing both brands to the buying teams there.

And then I’m assuming on the rest of your functions, IT and legal, that is all just long since combined?

Correct.

You said something really interesting. I just want to come back to it really quickly. You said there were hurt feelings on both sides. What were the hurt feelings on the Blackstone side? Weren’t you just the winners? It feels like you’re the conquering heroes here.

No, I mean the reality is that everybody can improve, and everybody can get better. One of the things that I’ve really fought hard to maintain is making sure that at Blackstone, we didn’t get complacent because we’ve had a lot of success for a long time. We’ve had a great run. That can breed complacency.

You’d better wake up every day and feel like you’re starting at the zero-yard line and you’ve got 100 yards to go. Nobody gets to start at the 10-yard line. So that was some of the “Oh, we’re Blackstone. We know what we’re doing, and Weber’s been old and slow.” No, I won’t put up with that kind of attitude. So that’s a little bit about what I was referring to.

How many people are in the combined company? How many employees do you have?

About 2,100.

And how’s that split between Weber and Blackstone?

A high majority at Weber. And keep in mind, there are two factories there. And so there are a lot of employees in the factories, both in Poland and the United States.

Will that division maintain that some are Weber people and some are Blackstone people, or are you going to have a central company and then the two brands express themselves differently?

A central company is what I’m driving for. This is one company with two awesome brands.

How would you define the Weber brand, and how would you define the Blackstone brand?

The Weber brand serves the customer more on a premium level, and it is for when you want to cook seriously, you want to take your time, and you want to craft. Crafting is kind of the word I use to describe Weber. Blackstone is fast, fun, easy, and variety. Weber is more for the crafting style of food.

I feel like I could waste an hour on that, but we’re going to let that one go because I don’t want to run out of time. I need to ask you another Decoder question. I think this has changed for you over time. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework now?

I make decisions by consulting with my executive leadership team. I love to bring everybody together when there’s a tough decision. Let’s say it’s a marketing decision. I expect my finance guy to chip in and make a contribution to the comment. If it’s a finance decision, I expect the sales guys to chip in, or my commercial leaders to chip in and talk about it.

So I try to get everybody together and really go through a counseling process. I think we make better decisions when we get all of our brains working together, and then I’m the final vote decider. If I don’t like what they all think together, then I’ll decide what I think is best. But I have found over time, and over a lot of experience with making good decisions and making bad decisions, that better decisions are made when I get everybody working on it together.

You mentioned you had to make a lot of decisions about people, right? You said “there were hurt feelings on both sides,” and you wanted to really evaluate their C-suite and their people, and maybe they were doing things better than the Blackstone side was. Making decisions about other people is really hard. It sounds like you just had to make a lot of decisions on who to keep and who to move on from. How did you make those choices, and how did you communicate those choices?

So we went through quite an elaborate process with the executive leadership team, and they each took responsibility for their areas. They went through working with our consulting company line item by line item, job function by job function.

One of the variables that was taken out is where people lived. I don’t care where they live. I don’t care if they’re in Poland, Chicago, Logan, New Zealand, or Australia. We really went through and looked at job functions and where they could be best performed. Then, the harder decisions are where you’re just looking at where we’re duplicated in staff and how we make those decisions. But that’s the process that we went through.

Tell me one of those. Certainly, you had VPs of sales, for example. You had to make a choice. What was the framework for making that choice?

It was so different depending on each function. There wasn’t one set of “these are the variables you’ll use to make a decision for everybody.” So again, the variables were so unique depending on the job function that one hat didn’t fit all.

One of the easier ones, although it was very difficult from a personal standpoint, is that Chicago is my center of excellence for the finance department, and we had duplication in Logan. So accounts payable, accounts receivable, those kinds of teams needed to be consolidated, and the folks in Logan got more impacted from losing their jobs than the folks in Chicago did. That’s one example where it was maybe a little bit easier to decide about, because the finance department’s staying out there.

Do you want the Weber brand to rub off on the Blackstone brand, or do you want them to grow independently?

Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s really part of our go-to-market strategy. We really believe both brands serve different purposes, and that’s what I want the team to focus on: what purpose does Blackstone serve, what purpose does Weber serve to the customer, and what does my end-user customer expect from both of those brands to deliver? Because there are some nuances, some differences.

I’ll just say this: it’s been five years since we’ve spoken. You’re playing a different character now, right? You’re the CEO of a much larger company. You’re obviously thinking very hard about how to manage Weber and integrate it correctly. You just have a much bigger problem to solve.

The last time we spoke, you were on an upswing of rapid growth, particularly during the pandemic, right? The Blackstone was a viral sensation on TikTok during the pandemic. You were just trying to move as many units as you could, and you had a lot of ideas about how there’d be recurring revenue for Blackstone as people bought more and more accessories for the griddle.

I think you said, “You can cook on these three meals a day, and we see people making pancakes and then they’re making dinner, and we’re going to sell the pancake cakes, and then we’re going to sell the dome to melt the cheese on the cheeseburgers.” That was such a huge part of your focus then. You weren’t just going to sell one griddle; you were going to sell an entire lifestyle.

Now you’ve got this other big company, which has its own lifestyle associated with it, its own kind of brand image, its own moments in Americana, and you’ve got this much bigger problem to solve. Is the thesis still the same? That you’re going to buy a Blackstone, and then I’m going to buy one set of accessories, another set of accessories, and then Alexis Ohanian is going to make dinosaur pancakes with his kids on Instagram, and that’s going to sell even more? How does that work, as your role has gotten so much bigger?

The thesis is still a lot of the same. Accessories are a very important part of our business, especially on a griddle, because there are so many things you can do on a griddle that you need those accessories. They’re a pretty important part of it.

The other interesting thing is that with the retail marketplace the way it is right now, the way it is today, tariffs heavily impacted us last year, and we’re still feeling the results of that from Liberation Day. And then on top of it, we had to move manufacturing facilities to Southeast Asia. That was not flawless, I should say. We had plenty of headaches there. And then just this summer, with gas prices going up the way that they have, that really affects our customers.

They may not be able to afford a new griddle right now for Father’s Day, but they certainly can go buy two or three accessories that Dad’s always wanted. The accessory business is a huge part of our business, and translating that over and sharing that concept with the Weber teams and helping them understand that McDonald’s wouldn’t make it if they couldn’t sell french fries; you’ve got to sell the fries with the hamburger. So accessories are a really critical part of our overall business for both brands.

The interesting thing about the griddle market… When you said that to me, I was a new griddle owner five years ago, and I was like, “Yeah, I want to buy 10 spatulas and four different hamburger smashers, and let’s do it.” Now I have all that stuff. Do you have to invent new things for me to try to do on my griddle? How does that work?

It’s interesting. We don’t try to invent new things just so you’ll buy something else from us. Everything we built in accessories — and we learned this the hard way because at first we’re like, “Oh, let’s do this, let’s do that” — when we put those products in the market, they wouldn’t sell.

So when we put a product in the market that’s a new accessory, it is coming from a lot of consumer feedback. We get great ideas from YouTube and TikTok, and we watch what our customers are doing, how they’re modifying things, and how they’re making it easier and simpler. It’s all consumer-driven on the accessories.

What’s an example of that?

Well, the spatulas themselves, right? So sometimes they’re thick and not flexible, and those are great for hamburgers. But sometimes they’re softer and more flexible, so those are great for pancake flipping, and especially if you’re doing eggs, scrambled or fried. You just mentioned a dome, a melting dome. People were using cake pans when we first saw that on YouTube. They were drilling a hole in it and adding a handle that they got from somewhere, so they could lift it on and off the griddle. 

Over time, as products develop, especially in our accessories line, we learn from one year to the next, working with our retail customers. You had 50 accessories, and here are the top 10 sellers, and here are the bottom 10 sellers. Let’s go through item by item, talk about what worked and what didn’t work, and what we need to learn from our customers to modify, get rid of, improve on, and change for next season. That’s kind of the process we go through.

All those accessories are made overseas. You’ve mentioned overseas manufacturing, tariffs, and Liberation Day now several times. It’s interesting, you have competitors that are public. Traeger is a public company. They’ve had to just loudly say that tariff policy and trade policy have hurt their business. It sounds like that’s the same for you. Is that something you’re actively lobbying for, or something you’re just dealing with?

Not lobbying, but dealing with. It affected the whole industry because everybody builds overseas, except interestingly enough, Weber, because we have a factory just west of Chicago, in a suburb called Huntley, and we still build most of our Kettles for the US market in Huntley, Illinois.

We’ve maintained that, and it’s really challenging. It’s very difficult to maintain a retail price point that my customers want to pay for a Kettle. We’ve upgraded the quality of that thing. It has a 10-year warranty on it. That’s amazing. A Kettle gets hot with coals and everything in it that you put in there. It gets beat up and abused, but we build it at a quality level that we can maintain a 10-year warranty on it.

We also built Kettles for the European market in our factory in Poland, and we wanted to expand manufacturing. And then with tariffs and everything else… A tariff gets announced, and the cost of steel goes up the next day, coincidentally, right? Big surprise. But demand goes up for it. So markets are still reacting to the demand. It just continues to kind of chase itself on profitability and where you can and can’t build a product. But we work every day, still trying to build in the US and continue to figure that puzzle out.

I’d love to build more in the US if I could, and this is not a particular product, but if something retails for $600 or $300, the customer votes with their credit card, and they vote for $300 because the quality’s the same.

The theory of the tariffs is that they’ll bring up the prices of the overseas products to the same level as the prices that you would have to charge if you made them in the United States. It doesn’t sound like that’s actually pushing you to manufacture more in the United States.

I’m trying to push more for manufacturing in the United States, just to have more control of my supply chain. That would be my biggest motive there, but I have to be profitable. Tariffs have certainly started to even the playing field and make it more attractive to build in the US. We’re actively reviewing opportunities, like I say, to continue to build more product here in the US.

I don’t think you have too much of a chip dependency or a RAM dependency. Weber owns iGrill, which is their connected platform. I don’t think Blackstone has a huge connected platform, but for Weber, part of their strategy was to get smarter and to make it easier to cook. Has that affected you? Or do you stare down the barrel of Nvidia buying all the chips in the world and say, “This is really hurting our iGrill portfolio”?

It hasn’t impacted us because we haven’t expanded into that category deep enough to where it would impact us, but we did buy another technology called June Ovens, Weber did, and it has some phenomenal technology for cooking. It’s just really super expensive, and so we’re still trying to figure that puzzle out.

But as a result of that technology, we’ve greatly expanded our connected devices and our thermometers, and then you’re going to start seeing some electronics on some of our high-end Summit grills that are just unbelievable. And really, I think the biggest application for technology and outdoor cooking is with pellet grills, because on a griddle, it takes you two minutes to cook a hamburger, right? I don’t even have time to hook up, and my meat’s done. But if you’re smoking something, you’re going to take four, eight, or 14 hours to cook something. The connected device is really beneficial and helpful.

So we did have the CEO of Traeger on the show. He had been a tech executive. He owned a headphone company, and he went and bought Traeger. That’s actually a great conversation, and I encourage people to listen to it. He also had to do a culture change. 

It was a family business, and he pushed really hard to change the culture. Traeger is obviously very successful, but he understood that modality, right? This is going to take a long time, and I can put a lot of technology around it to make that consistent and easy for people. Griddles are what you’re describing. You can make a hamburger in two minutes. It’s great. It’s done. It’s very fast. You can use it over and over again throughout the day.

Gas grills are kind of in the middle, right? You can pretty easily screw up cooking on a gas grill. You can very easily screw up cooking on a charcoal grill. That’s just like a thing people do all the time. Even just lighting the thing is challenging. Do you want to bring technology to bear on those experiences?

Yeah, and we are, and I think one of the greatest technologies to help you with gas grill cooking is having a really good thermometer, an instant-read thermometer. We have those now that connect to the app that we have on Weber. It’s a phenomenal app. You can use it to cook on pellet grills, which we also make under that brand, but we’re going to have connected devices that will connect to the app and help you with the meat temperature. It’s funny you mentioned that because I haven’t cooked on a gas grill for 25 to 30 years, right?

I was going to ask you about this. You were off it the last time we talked. You’re like, “I don’t even need this thing anymore.”

That’s funny. Those are some words I had to eat. I said many times we will never sell a gas grill. Now I’m the leading seller of gas grills. But it’s funny. So in the Chicago area, there are four restaurants with the Weber banner on them. Inside those restaurants, they actually have a section where they have all the gas grills set up, and you can take a cooking class there. And so we went there and ate dinner, then we went back into the area, we got trained, and I was told how to cook a steak on a gas grill, and I loved it. It was amazing. It was really delicious, but I didn’t know how to use it.

Gaining a little bit of knowledge, we’re going to be putting more content out on how to use a charcoal grill, how to start it, how to deal with the coals, how to move them around, how to create a hot zone and an indirect and direct zone. It’ll be all those different kinds of things that people need to learn and may or may not know. So we’re going to have all of that set up.

You know how Blackstone, we’ve been huge on social media. It’s still part of our philosophy. We’re driving more of that same type of philosophy on the Weber brand as well to help our customers. Because when you fire up a really good ribeye on a Genesis, Spirit, or a Summit gas grill, and you know how to cook it right, it’s a pretty darn good steak, I have to admit.

There are a lot of people on the Blackstone subreddit who are going to say that, actually, it’s much better on a griddle.

Well, I know. I love it. And it’s hard not to be biased.

Actually, do you find right now, with the energy crisis and the price of fuels, that more customers are buying charcoal grills?

Well, they’re buying charcoal grills because of the retail price point. They’re not trading from a 36-inch griddle to a 28-inch griddle because of money. They’re going all the way down to a charcoal grill.

Wow.

So yeah, we’re seeing some big trade-down right now.

But you don’t think the ongoing cost of propane is driving that change?

No. Well, it’s part of it. Fuel’s definitely part of it. I mean, I had some reports that I was studying the other day. 

If you’re listening to this, Roger’s literally looking at the reports on his desk right now.

The bottom, almost, let’s see, 50 percent of our consumers are spending 15 to 20 percent on power. That includes electricity at home, gasoline and propane, and those customers are squeezed. If they’re spending 50 percent of their income on housing and 20 to 25 percent on power, they have no money left. It’s a really difficult economy for them right now. So yeah, they’re trading down to charcoal grills because of the price point.

Do you think that represents a growth opportunity? Is that just an opportunity to provide outdoor cooking equipment to everyday Americans? How do you view that statistic?

Well, before I learned this, we saw that. We saw that as a trend developing this year. You mentioned our Kettle earlier, and you mentioned that it’s part of our logo. It is. It’s actually a trademarked logo with the shape of our Kettle in there. It’s iconic to the Weber brand.

I want to see what we can do to get sharper price points on the Kettle because they’ve crept up over time. They can retail for $200, and traditionally, that was a $100 retail item. Now it’s all the way up to $150 to $200. So I’m really focused on what we can do innovatively to help the customer have a better experience at a better price point. 

Can you do that with American manufacturing? It feels like you want to push the price points down, you’re headed overseas, and then the tariffs are going to keep you from hitting those price points.

Yeah, I think we can. I think there’s some innovation that we can put into some of these. As simple as they are, they’re a sheet of steel that’s molded to a half dome on each side, and we put some legs on, and it’s a pretty simple product. But there’s innovation left in there that we can come up with, and I think we can help the retail price points.

You’ve mentioned the longevity of the Kettle several times, the 10-year warranty. The CEO of Big Green Egg was on the show a couple of years ago, and he specifically said about the Kettle that they cost $200 to $300 bucks, I can buy it at the grocery store, and within two or three years, you’re buying another one because they fall apart.

The last time you were on the show, you were like, “It’s outdoor cooking equipment, and in two to three or five years, it’s time to buy a new one.” You’re talking about very price-sensitive customers now. Even at the high end, people are very sensitive to the amount that prices are going up. People do want things to last longer. What do you think about that? I mean, the stuff is outside, it is going to wear at a different rate. Can you make these products last for more than three years? Can you actually guarantee the 10 years across the product line, or is it the Kettle?

No, the Weber gas grills, some of them have a 15-year warranty. The biggest difference there is rust, and Weber grills have traditionally been made with, we call it the burn box, the part that holds the burners, cast aluminum. That doesn’t rust, and that lasts forever. Our hoods on Weber grills are also cast aluminum on the sides with an enamel-coated paint on the top, which doesn’t chip as easily. It lasts a lot longer.

So the Weber gas grill is more expensive than a lot of the cheap imports, but there’s a quality difference. You go pick up one of my gas grills compared to one for $300, you can immediately feel the difference as a consumer.

Do you think you’re hedged against trends? Do you ever worry that smash burgers are just going to go out of fashion, and maybe big gas grill burgers are going to come back around, and you’ll have Weber instead?

I don’t really worry about it because people are always going to eat, and we cook great devices to cook your food on, and we will innovate to lifestyle changes, demographical changes, and economic changes. That’s what I have to do. I can’t control those things. I just have to merchandise around those things and react to them. I don’t like to react. We like to be a little bit more proactive than that, so we try to spot trends where we have time to react to that and make sure that we’re spot on with what the customer wants to pay and buy.

I’m asking that because again, five years ago, when we talked, the Blackstone griddle was a TikTok sensation, particularly smash burgers were a TikTok sensation, and maybe the entire country learned how to make a smash burger that summer.

You learned a lot in that process. I remember talking to you back then, and you had been spending almost all of your money on television advertising, and you weren’t even doing it to drive sales, if I remember correctly. You were just trying to get people to the website and then take them from there. There wasn’t like an 800 number. You were literally just trying to create brand awareness on television.

You’re talking a lot now about informational content for Weber Kettles and teaching people how to use charcoal and how to use gas grills. Is your marketing effort focused more on social media now, or are you still so heavy on TV?

The spend that we have has definitely changed since we first met, where we were at 100 percent spend on traditional television advertising. Off the top of my head, it’s probably closer to 50-50 spend now on social media advertising and promotion versus just traditional TV. But I’m still on TV, and we’re now taking the Weber brand and putting them back on traditional TV advertising, to drive brand awareness. I still don’t have an 800 number on the Blackstone brand. Just go to blackstone.com. Most people go to their favorite e-tailer and purchase the brand there. 

Here’s something that you’ll find really interesting on Blackstone. We have a really high propensity of people who actually make the full purchase online. Not necessarily on my website, because my corporate website is still a small percentage of my overall volume of business, but the people who now trust and know the brand buy it online. And most of them have it picked up at the retailer of their choice, and a lot of them are having it delivered now as well. They’re not going into the store anymore. They know the product, they know the brand, they know what they want. They go online, they do their research, they make a purchase, and it gets shipped to their house, or they go to the store at 10PM at night and pick it up.

But it’s really interesting if I truly analyze brick-and-mortar versus direct-to-consumer. If I count all of my retailers as direct-to-consumer, that has shifted now to more people buying online than five years ago, in a big way.

I think that’s really interesting because the last time we spoke, it was really the beginning of brand marketing through creators and these integrations. You had on-staff influencers back then who were doing tours at Walmarts. I don’t think you were seeding product at scale, but you were beginning to dabble in it.

You had a Roku app that you had made with cooking content in it. Those were early. You were early to a lot of these trends. These are big trends now at a massive scale. You see ad agencies spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the creator economy in this way.

Mark Barrocas, the CEO of SharkNinja, was like, “We have 10,000 creators that we work with on brand deals, and we evaluate the sentiment analysis of their comments.” Have you gotten all the way that far in creator marketing? Or do you still have on-staff influencers? How are you thinking about this?

Yeah, I will never get that far because I don’t believe in it. I think when you buy and pay for influencers, the consumer picks it out in seconds. The consumer is so savvy and so smart. So, in our content creation, we still have influencers. We’ve expanded it. We have what we call the griddle crew. These are creators and content creators that we’ve seen online. We’ve followed them for a long time. They’re authentic.

If somebody calls me up and says, “Hey, I have 5 million followers, pay me $3 million a year, and I’ll pitch your brand.” We respectfully decline and hang up as fast as we can, quite frankly. We don’t do it that way, and I don’t see a lot of people doing it that way. I tell people all the time that that’s the best way to handle it, but no one believes me. They think they have to go buy their content creators.

Typically, what happens is what you mentioned earlier in the call, where, coincidentally, some of the Blackstone influencers got quote-unquote swiped by Weber. That happens all the time to us because we have these people who start cooking on a Blackstone, and they start getting a great following because people want to follow the brand. They think it’s them, and my competitors think it’s them, and then they go buy them and have them come and hawk their products, and to me it’s fake. It’s not authentic, and I don’t like it, so I’ll never do that.

Have you talked to some of those influencers? Some of them truly had hurt feelings that you hadn’t competed for their attention or their brand integrations because that’s their money. The platforms don’t pay the influencers any money, really. It’s all brand deals, it’s all sponsorships. So it has created a different dynamic on that side of the house for sure.

We had conversations with a lot of them, and some of them came to us, and they negotiated. But I won’t pay that money. And they can be hurt all they want, quite frankly. But I do that for the brand and for the product itself, not to hurt anybody’s feelings, be offensive, or anything to influencers because I wish them all the best. Some of them do really well and do a great job. I think it’s great. It’s a great business model for an independent person. I just have to protect my brand, and the integrity and the authenticity of my brand. That’s what I focus on.

How do you think about finding that next new customer? And maybe it’s different. Blackstone has become a household name. Weber is certainly a household name. It’s the first thing people think of; the logo is iconic. But this is the challenge for everyone now, finding that next new customer who, when we’re all just sort of awash and with feeds full of slop, everything is brand marketing through influencers, maybe we’re not even watching TV as much as we used to… How do you find that next new person?

Do you see a world where you just have to pay Meta for Meta ads? Do you see a world where the content travels organically? This feels like the biggest problem for everyone, and then your sales cycle is long, and the products are expensive and heavy, as you keep pointing out. Where does the next new customer come from?

Yeah, it’s crazy for us. The next new customer still comes at a very high percentage by word of mouth. And all this money we spend on marketing, advertising, influencing, and everything else… When we do surveys annually, which I’ve done now for about seven years, the number one way people hear about our brand on the Blackstone side, which hasn’t caught up yet on Weber, but on the Blackstone side, it’s still by word of mouth. So somebody cooks on the weekend, they invite the neighborhood over, he’s flipping pancakes in the morning, or they’re doing smash burgers or whatever they’re doing. Now the difference is they’ve heard of Blackstone. They’ve definitely seen one, but now they’re experiencing it, and it’s still a big influence on them making that purchase. 

So we’ll continue to try to drive that in different ways and creative ways, and it changes weekly, monthly, daily, almost, that strategy. The marketing team spends hours analyzing results and what worked and what didn’t work, and how we can improve, and where we should spend money. Where shouldn’t we spend money? That is just an ongoing process on a daily basis.

But you’re saying the biggest share is still word of mouth?

Yeah. Isn’t that crazy?

It is crazy. I mean, I would say people have seen me use mine. I’ve watched my friends use theirs, and the number one thing they talk about is, boy, that seems hard to maintain, but on the griddle side anyway. You’ve got to care for it, you’ve got to scrape it. If you leave it over the winter, you have to clean the rust off of it.

That feels like a technology problem that you have not yet overcome, right? The thing will just get rusty, and I love going on the [Blackstone] Reddit, and everyone’s just like, “Cook another pack of bacon and it’ll all be fine.” There’s some aspect of “this thing is harder to use than a regular gas griddle that you can just let deteriorate until you buy a new one.” Do you think about that? Is that part of your marketing?

It’s not just part of our marketing, it’s part of our product development. Interestingly enough, when Weber got into the griddle business as a competitor, I was at least impressed by the fact that they tried to improve on something that was a consumer complaint — rust.

So they came out with the Slate, which is basically a pre-seasoned griddle at the factory, and they came out with a new process on how to do that. It drives the cost higher. It’s more expensive to do, but at least they went after a concern from the consumer. They didn’t just knock me off and say, “Here’s ours, it’s Weber,” they came out with a feature on it.

That makes the industry better. That’s great. As a result, we focus on that a lot because of our customers. While it is definitely a concern, and customers identify that, on the total number of units we sell, the complaints we get about rusting are a really, really small percentage. We have so many cleaning kits and restoration kits, and hundreds or thousands of YouTube and TikTok videos on how to deal with it and how to fix it. In 30 minutes, you can clean up your griddle. It’s really not that hard.

I’m just curious about that because that is the competitive dynamic of having the Weber in the ecosystem at the higher price point. That might be the competitive dynamic that has been removed because you now operate Weber. Do you have other griddle competitors that you wake up and think about every day?

There’s always a griddle competitor. They pop up on Amazon overnight. But yeah, there’s plenty of competition.

That’s the other piece of this that I want to talk about. We’ve talked a lot about manufacturing, and you’ve had to deal with tariffs. You’ve obviously moved your manufacturing around the world. That dynamic still exists, right? If there’s any hot product in the world, you’ve got Chinese manufacturing partners, and you can’t totally control them. That ecosystem knocks off products at extremely high rates, especially if there’s any innovation that differentiates a product. 

That stuff is still flooding into our markets, tariffs or not. It’s still showing up on the internet, one click away. Dupe culture is as high as it’s ever been. Is that a worry for you, the way that it’s a worry for, I don’t know, the headphone manufacturers that I talk to, or any of the fashion retailers we’ve talked to?

It’s definitely a worry. My big advantage is that we have two unbelievably strong brands. You can knock me off, but it’s not a Blackstone, or it’s not a Weber. So that’s a big advantage that we have. But in my opinion, the key is that I can’t just rest on my laurels and say, “Well, I have the coolest brand. Who cares?” What I have to continue to do is innovate my product and stay one, two, three steps ahead of my competition because they’re knocking off, in my opinion, two- to three-year-old technology. It’s how long it takes them because they can’t knock me off overnight.

This is a long lead time production product, and by the time you want to knock me off and you find a source to have it built, and you pay for tooling, which is not cheap, it’s a big capital expense. And then you start buying inventory and minimum quantities. They’re not going to build you 10. You’ve got to buy hundreds or thousands of units to get going, and then your cost isn’t going to be as good as mine. You don’t have the economies of scale that I do. 

So we have a big competitive advantage over knockoffs, if you will. I’m talking about non-branded importers. But believe me, they’re very innovative, very creative. Their speed to market sometimes astounds me. I have a bigger problem on my accessories than I do with the grills and griddles.

Yeah, for sure. You go on Amazon, and the accessory kits are everywhere.

They’re everywhere.

Do you fight with Amazon about that? Do you ever complain?

Off the record… [Laughs] Yeah, it’s definitely a concern.

I mean, that’s the recurring revenue, right? This is the thing we’ve discussed now for a while.

It’s our brand, and those people, whoever they are, don’t care about intellectual property. They don’t respect it. They’re just trying to sell as many units as they can, which is against me, my brands, and other companies. They don’t care. They just knock stuff off and sell it for as long and as fast as they can, and they get shut down, and then they move on to the next product.

Amazon’s a unique case, right? They’re also a big advertising platform. A lot of the answers are, “We’ll just pay for the ads, and we’ll put your results at the top.” That’s the new way Amazon makes money. Is that a game you want to play? You’ve been resistant to playing some of these online retailer games, the influencer games. That’s the game on the Amazon platform.

It is definitely difficult on the Amazon platform. The other challenging thing with Amazon is just their algorithm in particular. If I get back-ordered or if they sell more than they thought and then they don’t have inventory, then the algorithm thinks no one wants to buy it because they’re out of stock. So that’s probably the biggest challenge with Amazon, and it really is difficult to get that overridden by a human. That’s the algorithm, and that’s what it says, and that’s kind of what they stick to.

Well, obviously, I think, as you can tell, I could talk to you about this for hours upon hours. You’re going to have to come back faster than five years. I want to end with a kind of big picture question, and I kind of alluded to it earlier.

The last time we were on the show five years ago, you had been at it for a long time. You started the company in 2008, and you were experiencing this rapid kind of big growth, and you were the disruptor CEO. You were operating every piece of this business. I could tell you were just in the weeds of everything Blackstone was doing because you were in that growth phase, and every single thing mattered to you in a very specific kind of way.

You’re in a much different role now. You’re operating two brands, you’re managing this big cultural integration. How are you thinking about yourself and the character you’re playing now? Because this is a change most people will never experience.

It’s a really interesting question, and a lot of times, from what I’ve seen, not very many entrepreneurs who start a business and are entrepreneurial-minded like I am, like to operate in that type of corporate environment, if you will. I don’t know if I’m different or unique. I don’t know. I’m not really trying to compare myself to anybody, but I just love what I’m doing.

How many people get an opportunity to ride the wave of a disruptive technology like Blackstone into an old category that has been around forever? And then on top of it, you get to manage and take over the best, biggest brand in that industry. So the way I look at it is like, man, this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. So I’m loving it. This is great fun, and I’m sticking around for a while to keep doing it.

How much time do you spend with the R&D people inventing new griddles? Because that was a thing. You drew the first one, I think, on a legal pad, right? How much time do you spend in the product weeds?

Well, I will spend more as soon as this integration is finished.

That’s a good answer. I mean, this is the challenge, right? You get away from the product as you manage the corporation more.

Yep. I force myself to stay in there, and that’s my personal love. My finance guys are smart. I don’t need to spend time with them. Operations, they’ll clean up everything and get it tidy and get it rocking and rolling. I don’t need to spend as much time there. 

I like the product. I love delighting my end-user customers, coming up with innovative, cool ideas, and expanding beyond outdoor cooking. I have way too many ideas in my brain. That makes my board a little nervous at times. They want me to stay focused. But yeah, there’s a lot to do.

Yeah. We haven’t even talked about the pizza ovens, and now you’re saying you’re going to get beyond that. You’re going to have to come back soon, Roger.

All right. Yeah. I enjoy your show, so I’d be happy to come back.

Faster than five years. Well, thank you so much for being on Decoder. Happy 4th of July. I hope you get some time to go cook outside.

That we will do for sure. Thank you so much.

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