Tampa liquor store chain owner modernizes his way to an $11M business

Trey Lawson never really thought about going into the family business.

His father, Frank, owned four liquors stores in Tampa where Lawson, like many a youngster whose parents own a business, worked during holiday breaks and when school was out.

Photo by Mark Wemple

But beyond that, he never gave much consideration to taking over one day. 

So following high school he left Florida and moved to Boone, North Carolina, to attend Appalachian State University. There, he got a marketing degree and went into the real estate business.

“I didn’t even have a thought about the stores,” he says. "At all."

Things were going well in North Carolina, and he was happy selling houses, condominiums and townhouses in a community called Echota. But about three years into his residential real estate career, Lawson began missing home.

A self-professed “huge sports fan,” he missed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tampa Bay Lightning. And Tampa was changing, too. “I knew I wanted to get back,” he says.

But Lawson wasn’t sure in what capacity that was going to be.

Then while at work one day, the phone rang.

“Dad called me and he was just like, ‘Hey, I know you're really happy doing what you want to do, but if you have any interest in this business, I want you. I want to kind of give you the first opportunity at it,’” Lawson says.

“He goes, ‘I’m going to sell it regardless. So if you don't have any interest, no big deal. But if you do, this is your time.'”

This was 2018.

Frank Lawson first came to Tampa in 1990. He had been living in Atlanta, where he grew up, when he was hired to manage a liquor store in Tampa. He liked the business and bought out the man who’d hired him.

By the time Frank called his son, he owned four stores locally.

Trey took his father up on the offer and came back home.

They worked together for a year, Trey learning the business from Frank, and in that time the son who’d given no thought to the family business came to a surprising realization. “I quickly loved it.”

Now, eight years later, Lawson has helped transform the business his father built. Today, there are six stores and two bars. And rather than each store operating under different names, they all adopted the Liquor Depot moniker in 2020 and the company works as a chain.

Frank is still involved and sharing his insight, but Lawson has adopted innovative marketing strategies, including launching a Barrel Hunters program which rewards loyal customers, and has embraced single barrel releases to create a loyal clientele.

The company has $11 million in annual sales.

And while some of the bars have been rebranded — one has a Christmas theme, one has a lumberjack theme — Lawson says the "liquor stores for me is the bread and butter.”

“That's what I really love,” he says. “That's where I feel the most attached to, and the community that we've kind of built from that, is my favorite thing.”