Charlie Eblen [00:00:00]:

Great things we're doing. We're just putting. We're good. We're in the process of uploading and putting out an entire catering platform from start to finish. It is not as detailed as I, as I really want it to be, but it's. If you follow what we did, then you'll get pretty darn close and can start your own catering company if you want to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:23]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angela Sposito, co founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking It All. We're here today with Charlie Eblen, the founder and owner of Singletree Barbecue. Charlie, thank you for being here, man.

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Charlie Eblen [00:00:52]:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Angelo, I'm happy to be here today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:55]:

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. I know we have quite a few mutual connections that I noticed on LinkedIn, and I kind of got curious, so I started checking your story and we'll get into all that. But know as a restauranteur, you got a podcast. I'm like, okay, this is super cool. I got to pick this guy's brain, and he's got to share some of this knowledge with our listeners, but maybe as a place to just start to set the stage. What is singletree barbecue?

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Charlie Eblen [00:01:20]:

So single tree barbecue is a company that we started right in the middle of a pandemic. So I was a vice president for a restaurant chain, and I had the southeast, and it was all over the place, and from Missouri to Florida to Virginia, all over. And my wife came to me in the middle of all of this when pandemic hit, and I lost my job and pretty much told me that I needed to stop depending on everybody else and start depending on myself. So we decided to open a brand, a company, food truck, catering company, and we named it Singletree simply because of my grandfather. He was a 27 year army veteran, attorney, federal judge, president of the four h club, Shriner Mason, you name it. The man was involved in just about everything. He always wanted to have a restaurant, never opened one. So I thought, what better way to honor his legacy than to name our company after who he was and what he stood for and the farm, and just kind of where I became me.

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Charlie Eblen [00:02:45]:

Right. That's awesome. So single tree it was, and the rest is kind of history we've been kicking away ever since. So running almost three years strong now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:57]:

That's awesome. I got to ask, because obviously, I'm sure our listeners are thinking, what encouraged you? Like, obviously, losing a job was probably some encouragement, but to start a restaurant in the middle of 2020 in the middle of COVID probably stressful. Opening a restaurant anytime is stressful, but I think middle of COVID is extra stressful. So what kind of gave you that confidence to be like, hey, I'm doing this.

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Charlie Eblen [00:03:23]:

So I've been in the restaurant business all of my life, except for five years. I was in the army. I've done everything there is to do in the restaurant business, from run companies to wash dishes, to take the trash out, to cook the steaks and smoke the barbecue, and all of the things right. So just like all of the other executives in the restaurant hospitality industry, I was nobody special. I worked my way up through the ranks to try to continue to do more and make a bigger impact. And it's really all I know from a business standpoint. I'm comfortable in it, and I thought I knew a lot more than I did. Opening your own restaurant brand will really change your mind on how much you know and how much you don't know.

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Charlie Eblen [00:04:10]:

When I lost my job in October of 2020 and I was allowed to stay on the company through Thanksgiving, December that year is when I realized, look, I'm not going to be. It was probably earlier than that. It was probably middle of November, but I'm not going to be able to start this company that I'm thinking about doing and do it all without having a job. And I'm sitting in my office one day, and my wife walks in and she says, so what are we going to do? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm calling all my friends, all my c suite executive Buddies, and saying, hey, who needs a vp? Who needs a dishwasher? Who needs. What do you need? I'm there for you. And I got the same response from everybody. It was, hey, look, man, we love you, but we're in the middle of a pandemic.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:06]:

We're not, right?

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Charlie Eblen [00:05:09]:

Yeah. So I'm telling my wife this one day, and she said, look, why don't we just do our own thing? Why don't you stop depending on everybody else? It's what you love to do. It's what you've done your whole life. You know how to do it. Let's just move forward and why don't we start a food truck? So I was like, honey, you know how expensive that is? That's crazy. We don't want to spend everything we got to start a company. Do we? Long story short, I get on the whole interwebs and start looking around, and I found a food truck that I could, a trailer that I could buy for about 20 grand. I didn't realize it didn't have anything in it, but I could buy the trailer for 20 grand.

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Charlie Eblen [00:05:58]:

So about a week goes by, I had posted on Facebook, and I had gotten blown up from 9 billion people. Hey, you need to start this company, man. This is great. We would love to support you. Your food's awesome. Okay, great. Well, that's great when your buddies are telling you that, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:19]:

But.

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Charlie Eblen [00:06:22]:

You can't retire off of what your buddies tell you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:26]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:06:27]:

So I still had reservations, and I had a good friend of mine call me and say, hey, are you serious about this? I'm looking to invest into something and do something on the side. I was like, yeah, I'm pretty serious. So one thing led to another. We had some pretty serious business conversations around the whole project. And Singletree was born out of drinking a couple of scotches and trying to figure out how we were going to make it happen. That's awesome. And then next thing I know, we got a 30 foot trailer with an observation deck and a big smoker on the back and tvs and this, that, and the other. And we're hitting the ground running, rocking and rolling.

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Charlie Eblen [00:07:16]:

So we got it up. Awesome. And I think it was in April of 21 when we really had the food truck trailer rocking and rolling and going out four or five days a week. And then it's been a rocket ship ever since. Around every corner has been something bigger and newer and exciting and fun, and it's been a blast.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:40]:

That's really cool. And for people listening, we have a lot of restaurant operators that listen in. And so I would like to just share maybe some of the experiences. So opening from scratch, obviously, I'm sure we're going to go through a lot of experience just on the operational side. And you being vp, you have got a ton to share. But in terms of opening something from scratch, can you walk us through that, what that looked like? So you got the idea, you got the name, which is inspired from your grandfather's farm, and a really cool story behind that, you know, barbecue. So what do the steps look like? Step one, you're like, okay, cool. I think I got this investor.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:14]:

He's in, I'm in. Let's start.

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Charlie Eblen [00:08:17]:

What does that look like when the realness kind of hits the fan? Right when you go from, man, I got a really cool idea, right? To execution, to, okay, now we're doing it. The world changes, right? So the hard part for me was I was vice president of operations for the southeast. So my level of systems and processes and functionality of operation and what times we open and what times we close and all the things, all of the procedural things was like, oh, yeah, I can write that in about ten minutes. No big deal, right? You mean I got 144 got to worry about now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:09]:

Good.

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Charlie Eblen [00:09:10]:

It's not 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 sqft building. Okay, great. I got 144 of them. Awesome. My business partner, we were writing a performa for the first year and trying to get sales projections down. That was one of the first things that we were looking at was, okay, well, what do we think we can do? We really need to plan out year one, year two, year three, five, see where we're going. And I told him, he said, well, how many events a week do you think you can do? And I went, I'll be out every day. I'll take Sundays off.

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Charlie Eblen [00:09:49]:

No big deal, man. You learn real quick. That's hard to do. When you're the guy that's prepping, when you're the guy that's cooking, when you're the guy that's selling, when you're the guy that's cleaning and you're the guy that's dragging the trailer and parking it and cleaning it up, putting it up and storing everything. So the learnings, for me, there was a lot of things we learned on the front end from permitting and taxes and all the insurance and everything that you got to have and how to be covered. And some places need this insurance, some places need that. Trying to get all of that squared away was challenging because I had never done that side of the business before. I always had a department that took care of those things.

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Charlie Eblen [00:10:42]:

We had an opening team that took care of those things. So learning all of that was fun and challenging at times because we did things backwards, right? We went and got this permit before we got that permit that we needed to get the next permit. So you had to go in circles sometimes to figure it out, but you figure it out. One of the hardest things, though, for me to learn was I always thought that I was one of the hardest workers in the room. I always thought that I worked really hard. I've never shied away from working hard. So it doesn't bother me to work hard, right? But when it is 100% your dollar and your dime, you don't realize how hard you're going to work. You don't realize that if you got to pay your light bill and you don't have any events coming in, you realize how hard you'll work to go get those events to pay the light bill.

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Charlie Eblen [00:11:40]:

Right. It's just a total different mindset. Last couple of weeks, we've been talking a lot about burnout with people. I've had a lot of people ask me inside the restaurant, inside the four walls that come and see me, whatever it may be, podcast, phone calls, et cetera. How do you prevent burnout? Well, for me, there's no plan b. Burnout is not an option.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:07]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:12:07]:

That's how I prevent it. There's just no option. Right. It's not an option to be tired. It's not an option for you to sleep in. Right. It's what you do. So it's a different world.

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Charlie Eblen [00:12:25]:

I had never experienced that being in the corporate side of the business, and that was one of the hardest things, is how do you operate when you're exhausted and you don't have a choice?

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:36]:

Well said.

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Charlie Eblen [00:12:36]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:37]:

It is different. And it's funny because when obviously entrepreneur, myself, and bob behind a WISK. But even prior to WISK, I had other tech related companies in the hospitality space. And I remember in the earlier days, when I was in my early 20s, I'd have friends that just got their first corporate job, and they'd all say similar things like, oh, you're so lucky. You're so lucky you can make your own hours. And in my head, I'm like, you guys don't get it. You guys are so lucky. You have a nine to five because it's like your own hours basically just means seven days a week as long as you can stay awake.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:10]:

It was funny, but it's a mindset.

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Charlie Eblen [00:13:12]:

Yeah. I came into the restaurant yesterday, and I didn't get here until I think it was like, 130 maybe. And I got a little girl in the back named Emma that works for me, and she's worked for me since we opened the restaurant. And I love Emma to death. And she was just playing. But it was funny how she looked at me and she goes, oh, you sleep in today. That's what I've been doing. I've been sleeping.

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Charlie Eblen [00:13:44]:

Forget the last 6 hours of phone calls. I've been on nonstop. Don't worry about that. I've been laying down in a bed. That's what I mean.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:53]:

Yeah. That's funny. That's awesome.

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Charlie Eblen [00:13:55]:

It's a different world.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:56]:

Yeah, I hear you. You said it best. It's a totally different mindset to work for someone, even if you're a hard worker. But once it's your own baby, it's a different mindset. And I'd love to hear from you. Right? Come up with this awesome name. You got experience in the industry. You got experience in the barbecue world.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:14]:

So what do you guys do to kind of first start attracting customers? Right? So you got the name, you understand the operational side. Now you're getting close to opening time. What are you guys doing to be like, all right, how are we going to get the word out, the brand out? Like, I'm curious to hear some tactics or tips you may have.

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Charlie Eblen [00:14:33]:

It's really a funny story. We were probably doing four or five events a week, scraping around, getting every event that nobody else wanted because we were the new guys on the block, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:46]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:14:47]:

We weren't charging minimums, so I would go anywhere, I didn't care.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:53]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:14:54]:

And I kept getting the question over and over again, well, what's your minimum sales that you have to do? $50 pay for the fuel that I to get there? We're good, right? And I just didn't know. We start doing all these events and I'm thinking we're killing it. And then I'm finally getting into some of these events. And the biggest thing that I did from day one was I said that I was not going to sell anything other than the perfect plate of barbecue. And I went to event, and I'll never forget it. I went to an event with my business partner, and we pull in and I think I had like six or seven briskets. We had a whole bunch of pork and ribs and all the other stuff as well. But I think I had six or seven briskets.

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Charlie Eblen [00:15:46]:

And I pulled them off the smoker that morning, put them in the hot box, let them rest. The event was at like four or 05:00 that night. And I pull all the briskets out, get to the first one. We've already sold the plate that we're going to use. I haven't looked at it yet. And I open up the brisket and it's just absolute garbage. Just absolute garbage. I don't know what happened.

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Charlie Eblen [00:16:19]:

I don't know if the smoker got hot overnight and just burn them, whatever it was, but it was garbage. So I told my partner, I said, man, I can't use this one. So I threw it away, went and got another one. Same thing. Went and got another one, same thing. I get down to the last brisket and it's fine. And the way I had them stacked in the smoker, it was on the very top out of all of them. So it was a cabinet smoker on my food truck at the time.

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Charlie Eblen [00:16:53]:

So you stacked them all up and all the other ones took all the heat except for the top.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:59]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:16:59]:

And they cooked.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:00]:

Oh, God.

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Charlie Eblen [00:17:00]:

So I had one brisket for this entire event, but I threw them all out. I threw all of them out except for one. Got that plate sold. I told him, I said, look, we probably got ten plates of brisket. 15 plates of brisket is about all we got. And I get to the very last one, I had to throw all of them away, get to the very last one, and it's the only one that's okay because all the other ones took all the heat.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:23]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:17:23]:

So it didn't burn it. If I sell those now, it's going to lose me thousands of dollars later. And it only cost me a couple of hundred now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:31]:

Right?

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Charlie Eblen [00:17:31]:

And that was something. Who, my business partner, never worked in the food service in his life. Always been in it, never worked in a restaurant, never washed dishes, never did anything in the restaurant business. And it was very difficult for him to understand. But what happened by doing things like that was we started building a name very fast on never getting a poor plate of food. Always getting. Our execution was extremely high because our menu was super simple. I wanted to be able to look, if you go to 100 food trucks, out of those hundred food trucks, 90 of them or 95 of them are going to be amazing food.

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Charlie Eblen [00:18:23]:

They're going to have chefs behind them that can really cook. Right, 100 of them. It's going to take you 20 minutes to get your food. Takes forever. I've never gone to a food truck, and it just takes forever. It didn't take forever to get it right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:40]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:18:41]:

And it drives me crazy. You got so many people that are so talented running these amazing trucks, and they got tons of chef experience and tons of experience in the hospitality industry, and they're just like, yeah, you'll get it when you get it. And I just like, what's going on? Drives me nuts. So I wanted to set ours up to where we got known for undeniable hospitality and the perfect plate of barbecue. Right? That's what I wanted. I wanted, at the end of the day, when you uttered the word single tree barbecue, that's what you thought of holy cow, how nice are those people? And holy cow, how good is that food? Those are the two things I cared about, and they're the two things that I really care about today. So we built a name on that and all of a sudden people started calling and hey man, I got an event. It's going to be about 1000 people.

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Charlie Eblen [00:19:42]:

Would you be interested? Yeah, I'd love to come. Sure. Hey man, I got an event. It's going to be 1500 people. Would you be interested? Yeah. So instead of having to do 8910 events a week, I could do five and still have some sanity.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:04]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:20:05]:

So we started doing that and just kept on going and kept on going. And then slowly started adding stuff to the menu, slowly starting putting our, like really putting our spin on barbecue. It essentially wrote my brick and mortar menu for me to where when we opened this, I had the bones of our full menu in 24 hours. It was tightening some things up and twisting some things here and there and from a portion size standpoint and just what it would look like on a plate versus togo box.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:47]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:20:48]:

But I mean, it was super simple to do and people expected it. I thought we were open as brick and mortar and we'd do $3,000 a week, $4,000 a week. Only closed on Mondays, half a day on Sunday. I thought we'd trickle in until people got to know us and we opened up almost with a $20,000 week our first week. It was incredible with me and two other employees and my wife had operation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:23]:

That's awesome.

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Charlie Eblen [00:21:24]:

So it was pretty crazy, but I really started, we got to that point and I kind of skipped over it. I ended up meeting a gentleman by the name of Sean Walshf. Sean owns Cali barbecue Media in San Diego, which you know, and just an absolutely incredible guy. He's huge in the storytelling, an immense pusher of social media. Tell your story because nobody's going to come and tell it for you. And I'm mid 40s, man. I had a Facebook, Myspace. Okay, we'll post.

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Charlie Eblen [00:22:11]:

We keep up with our friends and family through there and all the kids are on TikTok and Snapchat and all these other things. And a couple of years ago I got on Twitter and kind of liked it for a little while but then fell apart. Sean gets on a Instagram live with me one day. We had a Zoom call scheduled and he texted me right before and said, hey, let's just get on Instagram. We'll go live on Instagram and have the conversation. And I was like, okay, sure, okay, whatever. I get on Instagram and we're talking and I just felt really awkward that I'm having this conversation with a guy about business. He's like, man, you can ask me any question you want.

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Charlie Eblen [00:23:10]:

What do you got? I know you're building a barbecue restaurant and all these things, like, what are you doing? Tell me your story. So we had a whole 30 minutes conversation, and I said, well, what do you think the difference maker for you was? And he said, he essentially told me he got over himself and started making videos and putting it on social media. And I was like, oh, okay. And I didn't realize at the time that, how awkward I really felt when I was holding my phone up to me and trying to record myself. I knew it felt weird, but I didn't really think much about it. But the more that I did it, the more comfortable I got with it, the better my content got, the more content that I got and the more of a following that we created. And I started getting messages from people, started doing more podcasts, got on the local news, created my own podcast, which was insane to begin with, to start there. But I really saw how technology and social media and all of that is really blending with the hospitality industry and how there's ways that we can do things and use the technology around us to not only provide hospitality, but make our hospitality better and really use the tools to make our guest experience even that better.

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Charlie Eblen [00:24:59]:

I was one of the only food trucks that was really thinking about the business that way. There was not a lot of food trucks that really think about their hospitality. They're thinking about, how can they get the food out faster, right? And they don't really think about, okay, well, yeah, these people got their food. Well, what are you doing after that? Do you talk to them? Do you check on their food? Or you just let them walk off? And I'm walking out of my food truck after we get caught up and going, hey, man, how'd you like your brisket sandwich? It was great. How'd you like that redneck taco? Oh, it's great. Well, thank you. I really appreciate you guys coming to see us. And I had event coordinators asking me why I wasn't inside my food truck.

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Charlie Eblen [00:25:50]:

And I said, well, I'm checking on the guest.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:52]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:25:53]:

And they would go, what do you mean? I had a brewery owner tell me that I didn't have to come help him bust tables. I said, well, it's my food.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:03]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:26:04]:

He goes, that's funny. Nobody's ever done it before. I said, well, yeah, but these guests are. Yeah, they came to see you, sure, but some of them came to see me. You just have to be a benefit. It was really interesting. One of my first ever employees thought I was absolutely crazy when I told her she had to come out of the food truck and go bust the tables inside the brewery. She thought I was nuts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:31]:

That's funny. I love it because there's some awesome nuggets. So just to recap, so for people listening, one great nugget to take away is definitely the idea of around reputation. I love that about you and the story behind not wanting to sell stuff that was probably passable, but that's not the rep you're trying to build. And the losses you were going to have in the cost of goods was probably not. Probably was definitely not as much as reputation. So that's, I think, a massive nugget. And then the other one, which I love is the shout out to Sean Walshev and the idea of telling your story.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:04]:

And I think for people listening and we could probably get a bit deeper into this, but I think that's a super important one. And I love that you were like you said, old school, maybe had a Facebook account. That's about it. Because hopefully that can inspire people listening because it's like you don't have to be the most tech savvy person, you just have to start. And it was funny because you're talking about holding the phone and feeling awkward. I went through the same journey and I'm like a pretty tech savvy guy, but I hated being in public. And you always think everyone's looking at you, but it's like nobody cares. But I'd cringe at myself when I would pick up my phone and record.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:39]:

And it's one of those things where for people listening, my advice is it's just reps. The more you do it, it just gets a bit less awkward and less awkward. And then eventually you're like, okay, it's doable now, but it's like, you just got to do it. You just got to start.

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Charlie Eblen [00:27:53]:

The thing I tell all the entrepreneurs that I meet and run into is people enjoy you being awkward. They do, because they understand how awkward it is. You can come through my restaurant on a Friday night and I'm standing in the middle of the dining room holding my phone up, looking like I'm taking a selfie, right? It's so funny because I did it a couple of months ago. I don't know, I think I deleted the picture by accident. But we were absolutely packed. I had like 2030 people at the front door. And my restaurant is not big. I have 67 seats.

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Charlie Eblen [00:28:37]:

We're 1700, 1800 square feet. It's not a very large place. So when you start stacking up at the front door, it really gets crammed.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:46]:

Right, right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:28:50]:

I'm standing kind of back by the bar area, and I'm taking a selfie just to kind of post to my stories and say, you all better hurry up and get down here. We're about to run out, and people at the front door are pointing at me, laughing. Literally, they're pointing and laughing at me as I'm doing it. And I thought it was. I didn't realize it until after I had posted it in the whole nine yards, but it was hilarious to me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:18]:

Yeah.

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Charlie Eblen [00:29:18]:

And you get past that, and what really got me past it was probably last year. Was it last. Yeah. Last year, my son got selected for a baseball tournament in pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And so we went up there, and it was really kind of the first weekend that I had ever really taken away from the store and not been here. And so I was super nervous and super stressed the whole weekend, and it was great to be able to watch my son play ball in this pretty large baseball tournament, but I'm super stressed. But Sunday morning, before the tournament starts, we walk into whatever breakfast restaurant they wanted to go to that day, and it's a buffet. And I go up, and I'm scrounging through the buffet and picking out what I want, and I kind of look over my shoulder, and this guy is just staring a hole through me.

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Charlie Eblen [00:30:29]:

I mean, an absolute hole through me. And I'm like, okay, all right. So I turn back around, I finish getting my stuff, and I start walking back over to my table, and I get about 10ft away from my table, and he goes, aren't you Charlie? Yes, sir. I'm 3 hours away from home, right? And I got somebody calling my name out in the middle of a restaurant, and he goes, buddy, I got to tell you, you got the best damn brisket I've ever had in my life.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:57]:

Wow.

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Charlie Eblen [00:30:58]:

3 hours away, I was just kind of blown away. One that he loved my food. Right. That made me extremely happy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:08]:

Right.

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Charlie Eblen [00:31:09]:

But then even more so that I got nothing. Single tree on. I'm decked out in all baseball gear, ready to go to a baseball tournament. And this guy recognized who I was and took the time to say thank you for what I do, right. So it just kind of reaffirms. He was like, man, we talked for a couple of minutes. Super nice guy. But, yeah, he was like, man, I love watching what you're doing, how your brand is growing.

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Charlie Eblen [00:31:35]:

I've been following you since you had your food truck and all the things that you've done and the impact you're making in the veteran community and just in our community in general, it's amazing. We appreciate you. That's so cool. And all of it was from he's watching us on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and all the things to where he sees all the stuff that we're doing and he sees all the stuff that we do day in and day out. And he's a supporter of not just my food, but the brand and what the brand stands for and how we're trying to make an impact and make the world a better place every single day. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:13]:

That's awesome.

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Charlie Eblen [00:32:14]:

It's incredible.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:16]:

Yeah. And it's really cool because I think for people listening, I think there's a lesson there. It's not just like, okay, you did a bit of content or whatever. It's like, no, this was a big part of your strategy. You started telling your story. And it's not just that you have amazing barbecue and you have your own podcast, but I was checking out online. I know you also are really achieving amazing sales but also getting recognized from platforms like entrepreneur.com, which I think is like, for the people listening, it's not just, all right. There's this barbecue guy I'm interviewing who was doing all right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:46]:

It's like, no, this has started from a truck to now, the actual brick and mortar to look.

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Charlie Eblen [00:32:53]:

I went from November of 2020, buying a little small smoker to fit in my backyard and smoke turkeys for the holidays, trying to figure out how I was going to pay my bills to now I have a food truck, a brick and mortar, a podcast. I was just selected to be a customer advisory board member for toast. Awesome Pos system. I'm one of two barbecue guys that were selected to be a part of this board for a publicly traded company. Right. We've been on entrepreneur.com. I've been on every local news station multiple times. I was on channel two a couple of weeks ago.

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Charlie Eblen [00:33:37]:

Right? We have our own podcast. Yeah, it's great and I love it, but that's to tell stories and highlight other people just as much as it is my brand. My co host is a local high school teacher, teaches construction at the high school we graduated from. Super great guy has some amazing things and very large impacts that he's making in people's lives. And look, at the end of the day, man, it all comes from being able to tell my story. If I didn't get over myself, really, and go tell my story, then we wouldn't be where we're at, and the people that we know wouldn't know where we are, who we are, what we're trying to know. I tell people all the time that I'm trying to become the nike of barbecue. If you know anything about Phil Knight, he didn't set out to make running shoes.

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Charlie Eblen [00:34:40]:

He wanted to be the streetlights for the guys that ran at night. Right. He wanted to make better equipment so people could train harder and longer. He wasn't trying to build this multi billion dollar brand that happened once Michael Jordan came on, really didn't have anything to do with Phil Knight. You know what? It's. He was trying to impact his community, and he did so, and now he's able to impact his community, which is the entire world. And it all comes from being able to tell a story about how this one kid who joined his company and helped him grow a brand that makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:26]:

And I know community is a big part of your mission. I see it on your site. I see it everywhere. You're mentioning it today. So I'd love to know what are some ways maybe you and your team at Singletree barbecue support your community any.

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Charlie Eblen [00:35:41]:

In every way we possibly can. So I try to do, at least once a year, I try to do a can drive for a group called the Atlas program. There's over 900 children in Rutherford county that are homeless.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:57]:

Oh, wow.

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Charlie Eblen [00:35:58]:

All in our school system homeless. So we try to raise money and cans and anything we can to donate to that organization, because kids don't have the choice. And, look, sometimes it's not the parents fault, either. Circumstances happen. Things happen, and you got to adapt and overcome, and they're down on their luck during a certain period. So we try to help with that as much as we possibly can. I'm also a board member of a nonprofit called minutes wisely. Minutes wisely is an organization that helps with the prevention of veteran suicide.

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Charlie Eblen [00:36:33]:

I don't think there's enough people in this world that take the time to just say, hey, man, everything okay? Anything I can do for you? As a veteran, I know it's very difficult for us to raise our hands and say, hey, I need help. Whether you went to battle or not doesn't make a difference. The difference in the military world and the civilian world is very tough, and sometimes it's hard to come back and adapt because you're so used to certain disciplines and certain structures that you just don't have in the civilian world. So that's a big part of who I am. We do a big event every year called the veteran barbecue bash in September. I try to do it in and around September 11 to just kind of remember all the people that died for our freedoms. And so we do everything we can to raise money for local veterans for that specific event. We're heavily involved in youth sports.

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Charlie Eblen [00:37:41]:

I think kids sports. Having the right coaches and having the right people and having the right disciplines in your life as a child will help you grow to be a better person and be able to impact other people's lives in a positive direction. Right. So I've picked a couple of coaches here in town that I really am passionate about how well they coach and their disciplines and the things their priorities are. My priorities. I probably can't afford to spend the money that I spend on these people in these organizations. But you know what? I only got one life and I'm going to make the largest impact I can possibly make on the people that are around me every single day. Man.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:25]:

Love that.

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Charlie Eblen [00:38:26]:

I'm a business owner and I believe it's not a nice thing to do. It's a responsibility to make the community around me better. Right? I love that. It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a community to build a business. And if I'm not helping the community as much as I possibly can, how dare can I ask them to come spend their money with me?

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:49]:

Wow. Well said. Well said. No, listen, it's good to hear everything you're doing. It's really amazing. So it's not just a tagline that says, yeah, we care about community, it's like you're actually doing it. And I think that's awesome. Really cool to hear how you got from that corporate life to starting from nothing to building this up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:09]:

And then I think it's a really inspiring story for people listening. Any kind of advice just to kind of give them a little push in the right direction to start telling their story. Any tactical advice you'd give them on how to start? They're like, I don't know what to film. I don't know where to start. Any initial guidance?

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Charlie Eblen [00:39:28]:

So it's going to sound generic, but I'll tell you this, it's about the truest thing you can possibly tell anybody. Everything you do is content. Everything, whether it's a phone call, whether it's a text message, whether it's a picture, whether it's a video, whether it's you knitting a hat, a handkerchief, right. Sweeping the floor, cooking brisket, whatever you do, everything you do is content. And what I will tell you is, the question is always the same thing. Well, what should I video? The answer is yes. That's the answer, right? Yes, video. And you know what? It's probably going to suck.

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Charlie Eblen [00:40:18]:

And that's okay. It's fine. I've been doing it for years now, and my videos still suck on a regular basis. They do. But you'll learn. There's apps out there that you can use. You can get cap cut, you can get video, you can get canva, you can get all of these things that you can use to give you a template to make it. I am awful at editing videos.

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Charlie Eblen [00:40:41]:

I got a ten year old that will spend four or five days on editing a video to put on TikTok, and it looks amazing. And I tell him all the time, I'm like, why don't you help me?

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:52]:

Yeah, exactly.

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Charlie Eblen [00:40:54]:

Do mine. And he's like, well, just send me the videos, dad. I'll do it for you. Okay, great. You're going to get a workload. I'm going to start sending them. But at the end of the day, man, to build a following, tell a story, wake up in the morning and take a picture before you comb your hair and say, I didn't feel like working out today. I didn't feel like going to work today.

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Charlie Eblen [00:41:19]:

I woke up this morning, I didn't feel like going to the gym. I didn't feel like coming to work. I wanted to stay home. I wanted to hang out with my wife, maybe go have lunch, cuddle with the dog on the couch. I didn't want to do that, but I forced myself to do it. I got up. I had the discipline to get up and go do it and make it happen and make the videos and post the videos and do the things everybody's always so concerned with. Okay, well, I got to make these videos for my business.

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Charlie Eblen [00:41:55]:

Well, you go to Singletree Barbecue's website. There's my dogs on there. You go to our Instagram or Facebook or TikToks or any of those. There's baseball pictures and videos on there, right? There's pictures of us drinking bourbon and smoking cigars on the back porch when it's just me and the family hanging out. For me, this is my life. It's not a business venture. One of my driving factors for the last three years is I had a quote unquote, friend of mine look at me and my wife and say, how's that little food truck venture going for you? My life is doing pretty well. Thank you.

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Charlie Eblen [00:42:43]:

Appreciate you. We're doing all right. We woke up this morning, we went and did an event, and now we're hanging out with you. It's funny when you change the mentality and flip the switch of it's not a job, it's a life. I get less quality time with my family now than I ever have, but that quality time that I do get now is ten times better than it ever was because it's us. Right? That's awesome. We were on my podcast last night, and my co host kind of did a round robin questions for me because I don't get interviewed too much anymore. But he said, at the end of the day, what do you want out of all this? And when it comes down to it, I want my wife and kids to be proud of me.

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Charlie Eblen [00:43:44]:

That's all I want. I don't need money. I don't need fame. I don't need a fancy car. I don't need fancy clothes. These shirts I wear all the time are from a company called Poncho, and they're amazing and I absolutely love them. And they partnered with us, and I get tons of shirts that, I mean, they're amazing shirts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:05]:

That's awesome.

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Charlie Eblen [00:44:06]:

They're way too nice for me to be having, but they believe in us and I believe in them and we wear them and I try to shout them out every chance I get. Same thing with toast, right? They're an amazing company. But at the end of the day, I don't need the new boots or the new Jordans or the new iPhone. I just need my wife and kids to love me and be proud of what I'm doing every day.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:30]:

Well said.

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Charlie Eblen [00:44:31]:

And if I can do that, then I'm the most successful person in this world.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:35]:

Well said. I love, love that. That I. And for people, I do want to end out by allowing you to plug all the socials, all the stuff. So for people to find where you're at, what are some, I guess, website, maybe some of the social channels you're pretty active on.

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Charlie Eblen [00:44:53]:

Yeah. So the website is ww dot singletreebbq.com. If you are local, there's order now buttons there. There's link trees to all of our socials and everything on there as well. My social handles on all platforms are at Singletree BBQ. All of them are the same except for Twitter. That was my personal Twitter account. That is just what is it at, Charlie? But if you type in Singletree, you can find me that way, too.

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Charlie Eblen [00:45:28]:

We have a podcast. Our podcast is called Singletree Nation. We're on Spotify, we're on Apple, we're on all the platforms wherever you like to listen to your podcast. And then we are also on YouTube where all of the long form video. Get that out in a second. Will all be posted on there as well. If you like looking at my ugly mug when we're talking about all kinds of fun stuff, we got some great things we're doing. We're in the process of uploading and putting out an entire catering platform from start to finish.

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Charlie Eblen [00:46:08]:

How to build and grow a catering platform from start to finish. It is not as detailed as I really want it to be, but if you follow what we did, then you'll get pretty darn close and can start your own catering company if you want to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:27]:

Wow.

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Charlie Eblen [00:46:28]:

We're trying our hardest to build in public and help everybody around us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:32]:

That's super good.

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Charlie Eblen [00:46:33]:

Put our money where our mouth is.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:34]:

I love that. I love that. And just on my end, I also wanted to shout out, because I know you talked about toast once or twice, and we love toast. We partner with toast as well. Actually, we integrate with toast, and we've been integrating, I think for like, maybe five years now. But recently, like a couple of months back, we just kind of got reacquainted more on the marketing side of how to push some stuff together because we do well with wist, does well with full service restaurants and bars. And so we kind of just got reacquainted on that side of things. And now we're doing a bit of co marketing stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:04]:

So all this to say, toast, from what I've seen, is awesome. And the clients we have in common seem to be really happy. So it's really cool to be talking to someone who's on their customer advisory board and really happy to have shared this time with you. I'm going to be putting all these links in, same thing. This goes on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, et cetera. We'll be linking all your links so people can follow you and follow your journey. With that said, I think you have an awesome story. From corporate world to restarting, from humble beginnings to growing what you did today, being on entrepreneur.com, really cool stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:37]:

So, Charlie, Evelyn, thank you for being here today. The founder of Singletree Barbecue, it was awesome to hear your story.

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Charlie Eblen [00:47:46]:

I appreciate it. Angelo, thanks for having me. And anytime I'd love to come back and if you get bored and you want to come hang out with us on Singletree Nation, let me know, okay?

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Angelo Esposito [00:47:54]:

I would love that. I would absolutely love that.

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