Working for yourself. It must be nice.
Who hasn’t pondered the thought of being an entrepreneur? It’s often described as the most satisfying way to make money. So we found three neighborhood residents who turned that dream into a reality.
Their businesses bear no resemblance to each other, yet the people running them demonstrate striking similarities.
Risk-taking, long hours, penny-pinching and more long hours are all part of the price paid by these owners to receive salary checks with their own name signed at the bottom.
And competition is a constant threat not only to their businesses, but to their families’ future.
Listen up to what these residents say about what it really takes to live the American dream, right here in Lake Highlands.
BBQ Master Shines with Consistency
“The other day, this old lady walked into my store,” says Back Country Barbecue’s owner Frank Hart, “and said to me, ‘I’ve been trading with you since you opened in 1975, and I’ve never had a bad sandwich.’”
This is what Hart, a neighborhood resident for the past 22 years, likes to hear about his restaurant at 6940 Greenville.
“Now that made me feel good,” Hart says.
He counts on that consistency and the high quality of his food to round up crowds and keep them from straying to the herds of barbecue competitors.
“In Texas, everybody is a barbecue connoisseur,” Hart says.
His approach to tackling this tough market is avoiding the shortcuts franchises are notorious for taking, he says.
“We still do things the old-fashioned way,” Hart says. “We still take our time to do it right.”
“I’m real particular,” Hart says. “This is a business where you physically earn every dollar that you make. I love it, but it requires a lot.”
“More than anything, this business is all about getting your hands dirty.”
Hart’s hard work and long hours had a rather large price tag. He suffered a heart attack in 1991, when he was 42 years old.
After his recovery, he slowed down and added several new employees to his staff list to help take on the heavy work load.
“You think you can do it all – but I realized that you can’t,” Hart says.
As a youngster growing up in Dallas, he was exposed to the restaurant wholesale business his father owned. Early on, he wanted to be an entrepreneur – he just wasn’t sure what kind, he says.
It wasn’t until he managed his father’s Catfish Cabin restaurant in Oak Cliff that he gained experience in restaurant management.
Hart and his wife, Martha, opened Back Country at Northlake Shopping Center 21 years ago.
Martha’s parents offered them a vacant restaurant space in the center that had previously been Pig Stands, a Texas barbecue chain the parents owned at the time.
At the same time, Hart’s brother-in-law was opening a sporting goods store, and he was tossing around two names for the place – Back Country and Mountain Hideaway.
His brother went with Mountain Hideaway, and the Harts used Back Country.
The Harts developed the barbecue recipes on their own through a lot of trial and error, Hart says.
He and his two chefs, one of whom (Ernest Griffith) has been with him since the beginning, cook the meat 12 to 20 hours daily and make all of the side items from scratch, he says.
Shortly after opening, customers started asking if Back Country could cater for them, Hart says.
They started catering small parties and events, and eventually their catering business has grown to account for 25 to 30 percent of their overall business, Hart says.
But the influx of walk-in customers took a sharp decline after Tom Thumb Market moved out of the shopping center, Hart says.
So they picked up and moved their restaurant in the summer of 1988 to their Greenville location.
Together, Hart and Martha managed the store, but never saw much of each other because if one of them was managing, the other wasn’t working, Hart says.
So Martha took a flight attendant job with Southwest Airlines to increase the couple’s time together.
The Harts have two children, who sometimes pitch in with the family business, Hart says.
Their daughter, Melissa, is a senior at North Texas University in Denton, from which both parents graduated.
Their son, Trey, is a junior at Lake Highlands High School and plays on the varsity football team.
Hart has coached Little League baseball in Lake Highlands for the past 17 years and says he is a big fan of Lake Highlands’ sports.
Consequently, hanging from the walls of Back Country Barbecue are several framed photographs of Lake Highlands sport teams.
“We gear everything we do to the Lake Highlands community,” Hart says.
Hart says he loves his job, but he hopes his children don’t go into the restaurant business.
For one thing, they’ll never have weekends, he says.
“Personally, I would hope not. It’s a big sacrifice and loss of your time. You live with it night and day,” Hart says.
“Every day it’s a guessing game when opening those doors.”
Father And Son Make Headway In Golf Club Repairs
Whew, what a day.
You drop your golf clubs off at the repair shop, stroll over to the putt-putt course and play 18 holes, then jump into the batting cage for an hour or so, with no commute involved.
Now that’s one-stop sporting.
At least that’s how Broken Iron’s owners Terry and West Sechrist like to see their new location at 10808 E. Northwest Highway.
Originally, they started custom-building and repairing golf clubs at 8694 Skillman, Terry says.
It wasn’t until recently the duo found themselves needing more space to meet the customers’ demand.
So they found another location that met their needs. There was only one catch – the building (previously Galaxy Place Park) came with two 18-hole putt-putt courses and six batting cages.
“We started cleaning them (courses and cages) up and decided if we had them, we’d make a go of it,” Terry says.
All this from a guy who spent 20 years as an aircraft missile parts salesman and didn’t even begin playing golf until five years ago after some prodding by West.
“I turned 10 years old, and my uncle got me started hitting balls in a big old pasture. From then on, I went nuts over it,” West says.
Four years ago, Terry and West opened their golf shop after becoming certified by the Golf Club Make Association in Dallas.
At the time, Terry was helping his wife, Marsha, with her salon, Tiffany’s Hair Design (same location on Skillman), and decided he wanted to build something with his hands.
“I’m a tinkerer – always been a tinkerer,” Terry says.
The shop’s new features are an addition to their business goal of promoting golf.
Their neighborhood competitor is now Scotty’s Golf Park, yet they say they don’t feel threatened. Instead, they plan to keep their prices lower than Scotty’s.
Also, West says they plan to hold several putt-putt tournaments of their own.
“The golf shop is what we’re known for, though,” West says.
Their clientele has followed them to their new location, Terry says.
The bond that forms between golfers and their clubs is what keeps their business strong, West says.
“It’s a strange deal. Some of the golf clubs the guys like better than their wives,” West says.
West says he has fixed the clubs of many golf pros, including Jack Nicklaus, Sandra Hanie and Stewart Sink.
“As different as golfers appear, they are all the same,” West says. “Every golfer I know is obsessed with playing better. When they’re out on the golf course, they all become hypnotized by the same deal.”
And West stands by his motto: “Golf to a fool is like jazz to a mule.”
Homemaker Turns Book-Binding Skills Into Profit
Several months ago, an American doctor needed a gift for the King of Saudi Arabia.
The doctor planned to open a reconstructive surgery hospital in the country.
He wanted to impress the king with his work, so he decided to give him a book containing before and after pictures of his previous patients.
Yet this book had to be extraordinary – fit for a king.
So he sought out Lake Highlands resident Pam Leutz to construct it.
Then there’s Pope John Paul. He, too, has a book on one of his shelves whose gild (the gold tips of the pages) was crafted by Leutz.
Leutz is modest about the accomplishments of her home-based book-binding business, The Gilded Edge.
She has had her books displayed at the Dallas Museum of Art, a number of galleries and traveling exhibitions, and been featured in Texas Highways magazine and several other publications.
“There are not too many people who do what I do in this City,” Leutz says, counting maybe 400 custom hand-binders in the country.
She completes roughly 60 projects a year, working strictly off word of mouth, she says.
Books cost anywhere from $40 to $800, depending on the time and materials involved.
She charges $25 a hour, and most books take at least 30 hours to assemble.
She also builds custom-fit design boxes for professional photographers to store photos.
She started binding books for special requests 12 years ago, after she built a studio onto her home of 19 years, near Kingsley and Audelia.
Shortly after the studio was added, she and her ex-husband separated, and she found herself as a homemaker and mother of three.
She decided to expand her personal book-binding into a craft business with another artist, who was a paper marbler.
“I didn’t take it seriously until my husband and I separated,” she says.
But the joint business didn’t work out as planned, Leutz says.
“There’s not that much of a demand. I wouldn’t suggest someone getting into it as a career,” Leutz says. “I was able to build my business pretty well, but not enough to support a family.
So rather than just throw her business out the window, she stuck with what made her happy and kept the business small and looked for an additional job with stable revenue.
With her degree in education, she was able to land a job as an administrative coordinator at SMU.
She was first exposed to the craft when she married her ex-husband, whose family owned a commercial book-binding company in Illinois.
After moving to Dallas 20 years ago, she took an on-going book-binding class offered through the Craft Guild of Dallas for six years.
Hugo Peller, a world-renowned master of book-binding from Switzerland, gave several lessons to her class.
She and three students traveled to Switzerland for a five-week immersion of book-binding with Peller.
“That’s what really changed my life. That was when I really learned how to book-bind,” says Leutz, who describes Switzerland as “fairytaleland.”
She applies what she learned from Peller to her own crafting, she says.
“I think she’s the best around, and she’s a nice person to deal with – you can’t say that about all of them,” says Susie-Melissa Cherry, who owns Calligraphic Art, 5025 N. Central.
“Sometimes people become so commercial that they get away from dealing with the individual. Pam excels in that,” Cherry says.
