What Barbecue Can Teach You About Your Business

Summer is right around the corner, and grills across the country are being fired up for the sole purpose of indulging in that great tradition of barbecue. But like all skills, there is always room for improvement, so there must be a Barbecue University. At Barbecue University, students learn not only the basics of grilling, but also the artistry that separates the amateur griller from the grill-master. Interested in their powerhouse marketing scheme, Lisa enrolled in a class at BBQU and live-tweeted the lessons she learned, and what she discovered may surprise you.

It may not seem obvious, but many of the lessons involved in barbecuing can be applied to business practices. For example,

There’s only so much you can learn by rote in the way of barbecue, and many people attribute their skills at the grill to a mentor. So too with business: often a guide who has trodden the path before you and made his or her own mistakes can be more helpful than any manual. While mentorship can help the next generation thrive in the workplace, it can also create a bond of trust and mutual understanding that brings an interpersonal element into an otherwise un-personal setting.

As important as it is to learn lessons from past mistakes or people who have “been there first”, great achievements are nearly always founded on risk-taking, carefully calculated or otherwise. Whether it be inventing a new sauce or devising an innovative workflow, risk taking and challenging tradition can, in some circumstances, sow the seeds for great rewards.

Like all projects, though, there must be one person to spearhead a new initiative. As Lisa puts it vividly,

Another great lesson comes in the form of something many of us have been told our whole lives:

Certainly in the current economy, many people are becoming much more prudent about the way materials and resources are consumed. Quite simply, many of us can’t afford to be wasteful. Good business practice indicates that if you can put something to good use rather than throw it out, you should.

Product placement is also crucial for retail companies, and a local business in Denver donated a pit barrel to Barbecue University for instructional use. By doing so, they were able to advertise a product through demonstration and endorsement by an established institution.

Finally, one of the most important lessons came in the form of teamwork, in which students had to work as a team to barbecue a Brazilian rib roast. In grilling as in business, when everyone on a team is working toward a shared goal, the results can be spectacular, and in this case, delicious.

-Hilary Adams