At the September 9 Rotary Club of San Antonio luncheon, Jim Guy Egbert, president and CEO of Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, told how a San Antonio family business still smokes over Hill Country live oak — and how he became the first person outside the Miller family to run it.
A third-generation San Antonio native, Egbert earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from Texas A&M University. After AT&T and a decade in commercial real estate — including the Miller family's own properties — he succeeded Balous Miller as president and CEO in December 2016. The company now operates about 80 restaurants across San Antonio, Austin, and Corpus Christi and employs more than 4,500 people.
His talk covered three threads: how Bill and Ila Faye Miller built a commissary-fed chain from a backyard poultry business; the leap from real estate into the CEO job; and the new West Side plant meant to carry the next generation.
From Eggs to a Commissary
The Millers started around 1950 selling eggs and dressed chickens door to door, Egbert said. The first brick-and-mortar store opened in 1953 at Goliad and South Cross. As the four Miller children came home from college, barbecue overtook fried chicken as the brand, and in the early 1970s the family bought a downtown commissary at 430 South Santa Rosa that was never designed for food production.
That commissary is the engine: smokehouse and pits, a full bakery, logistics, and a warehouse. The pits burn 100 percent Hill Country live oak, with crews cutting four to six cords of wood a week. Brisket smokes 16 to 18 hours and goes back on the pit if it does not hit a minimum 30 percent shrink. Seventy to 85 thousand tortillas leave the plant each day. The company expects to sell 27 million iced teas and more than 10 million pounds of fried chicken this year — chicken, not barbecue, is still the top seller.
An Unexpected Ask
Egbert told the club he had wanted commercial real estate since junior high. After leaving AT&T around 2006, with a second child on the way, he spent months without a closed deal and kept going. Over the next decade the Miller family became his most important client. One day Balous Miller asked him to meet at Store 84 — not to talk sites, but to ask whether he would be considered as a successor.
His wife was a hard no at first: the real-estate dream was finally working. Egbert's conditions were faith and family first, and a unanimous board vote. This December will mark ten years in the job. He called it the hardest decade of his career — running a family business as an outsider — and the most rewarding, because so many San Antonians had their first job at Bill Miller. Plant manager Dale Sims, hired nearly 50 years ago at Store No. 4 as a teenager buying iced tea, now oversees about 460 people at the plant.
A New Plant, Same Fire
Downtown had reached 110 percent of capacity. A new facility at Highway 151 near Highway 90 and Loop 410 was designed before 2020, paused for the pandemic, then built in two phases after costs doubled. The warehouse opened about two years ago; production has been there a little over a year and can support 160 stores. A video showed the family moving live coals from the old downtown pits to the new ones — a fire, Egbert said, that has not gone out since the early 1970s.
Quality and portion size do not get cut to hold price, he said, and the company has gone more than a year without a price increase. The third generation now owns the company; Balous's son, Terrell Miller, serves as board chairman.
For a hometown club, the claim is local: Bill Miller is still a San Antonio operation, still feeding the city from its own kitchens.
