Dan Thiessen and the value of what gets left behind

A sawmill is very good at producing things nobody ordered. Alongside the useful boards come shavings, sawdust and awkward leftovers. In 1999, Dan Thiessen and his sons started a business around giving that material another job. The company became Dansons. Its better-known descendants, Pit Boss and Louisiana Grills, would eventually put the family’s work beside dinner tables a long way from the mill.

The sequence matters. Barbecue lends itself to a handsome origin story: smoke rising, friends gathering, someone arriving with an opinion about brisket. Thiessen’s business began further upstream. Animal bedding and pellet fuel came before the backyard brands. The useful question was what wood could become after somebody else had finished with it.

The business in the leftovers

Thiessen grew up on a farm in southern Manitoba, one of 14 children. He became a bricklayer and entered his first business venture in his early twenties. Those are practical beginnings for a career that would involve fuel, metal, heat and the stubborn business of making an appliance behave itself.

Dansons’ name supplies a small family diagram: Dan plus sons. Jeff and Jordan joined their father in founding it. A corporate naming consultant might have taken longer and arrived somewhere less informative. The arrangement put family relationships inside the business from the start, with all the closeness and responsibility that implies.

A cold-weather question

A Canadian patio can give an outdoor appliance a fairly stern examination. Thiessen wanted a pellet grill that could be used in harsher conditions throughout the year. That ambition gives his product thinking a specific setting. The appliance had to answer to the weather as well as the person holding the tongs.

The technical connection came from heating equipment. Jeff has described his father incorporating a pellet stove burner into a grill. Knowledge could travel with the component: a business working with fuel and the machinery that burned it could apply that experience to cooking. The move followed an existing competence into a different use.

That is a satisfying piece of engineering logic. A pellet can warm a room or help cook a meal, depending on the apparatus around it. Changing the apparatus changes the customer, the occasion and the product on the shop floor. The material remains recognizably itself.

The later Founders models make that relationship between fire and control visible. A lever gives the cook access to direct flame; the cooking chamber also handles indirect heat. Rear exhaust directs circulation through the chamber. The details are small enough to disappear into a sales specification, but together they describe the work the machine is supposed to perform.

Louisiana Grills later made the Founders Series a tribute to Dan. Its features brought together direct and indirect cooking, connected controls and attention to the movement of heat and smoke. The family connection had become part of the product’s public identity. A father’s early design work could now be discussed through a cooker someone could actually buy.

The part they had to let go

The route was expensive in ways a finished grill cannot advertise. Jeff has recalled a father in his late forties committing his available resources to Dansons, then enduring years of difficulty. During the financial crisis, advisers recommended bankruptcy. The family decided to keep going.

In 2012, they sold the heating-appliance manufacturing arm and concentrated on grills. Jeff remembers the decision as painful at the time. In his later telling, the narrower focus became an advantage. Survival required the family to release a business they had worked to build.

There is a distinction between persistence and keeping every part of an enterprise forever. The Thiessens stayed with the company while changing what it would do. The story resists the tidy version of perseverance in which the founder simply repeats the same action until the world applauds.

Jeff’s account also gives faith a central place in his father’s decisions. Prayer, work and a belief in providence belong to the family’s explanation of those years. Dan’s persistence appears there as a lived family example, observed by the sons who had to make the next decisions alongside him.

Old friends, new complications

Thiessen’s connections in the pellet business extended well beyond his own household. In 2018, Pit Boss brought BBQ Bob into the company’s orbit. Bob and Dan had known each other since the early 1990s. The partnership joined product development and the more outgoing work of demonstrating what a grill could do.

Another relationship reached a more conspicuous turning point that year. Joe Traeger, the original pellet-grill developer, visited Dansons about a charitable opportunity. Dan donated a grill. Their acquaintance went back roughly a quarter of a century, to their days as friendly competitors. A conversation about giving helped open a conversation about working together.

Dansons announced that Joe would help develop products, with his son Brian joining in sales. Dan’s public response emphasized the possibilities of bringing experienced people into the organization. His career had put him in a position to recruit someone whose work had helped establish the category itself.

“The reality is: a grill is an opportunity to spend time with family and friends.”

Jeff Thiessen · On the family business, 2022

The relationship also carried a legal complication. Joe Traeger had sold his original business years earlier. Traeger Grills, the separate company, challenged Dansons’ marketing. In October 2019, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction restricting promotional uses of the Traeger name, likenesses and related material. Knowing a founder and having permission to trade on a brand were different matters. The distinction reached the courtroom.

Back to the wood

For all the attention surrounding grills, the business continued to invest in what they burned. In February 2021, Dansons announced a pellet mill and distribution center in Hope, Arkansas. The proposed site occupied a former Georgia-Pacific facility, bringing the company back to the industrial side of its original material.

The announcement described a 335,000-square-foot building on 143 acres. Initial capacity was planned at 100,000 tons, with infrastructure allowing an eventual increase to 300,000. Those were plans for capacity, rather than a report of completed annual production. Even so, they show the dimensions of the operation the family was preparing to support.

Pellet production itself involves a series of transformations. Wood is reduced by hammermilling, dried, reduced again and pressed into shape. The finished pellets are compact enough to handle and feed into an appliance. Turning a loose by-product into a predictable fuel takes machinery and processing before the customer ever opens a bag.

Hope offered existing wood-processing infrastructure and access to a region already working with timber. The facility would distribute grills as well as pellets. A patio brand still needed buildings, equipment, stock and people to get its products to a customer.

That same year, Dansons acquired a 200,000-square-foot headquarters property in Scottsdale for $39 million. The company was preparing space for employees and visitors as well as fuel. A business that had begun with leftover material now had substantial premises of its own.

The table and the transaction

Scottsdale had first been a holiday destination for the family. It became their working base. The family biography published by First-N-Ten describes a routine in which Dan, Jeff and Jordan share lunch, with their offices only a few feet apart. Their working geography is unusually compact.

Dan and his wife, Virginia, have four children: Jeremy, Jeff, Jordan and Julie. The same account describes church on Sundays and large meals afterward. Work and family gathering occupy adjoining spaces in this picture of his life. The company name is easier to understand with that table in view.

On June 7, 2023, W. C. Bradley Co. acquired Dansons US LLC and its subsidiaries. Pit Boss and Louisiana Grills joined a portfolio that included Char-Broil and Oklahoma Joe’s. The transaction moved the grill business into a larger outdoor-products group.

The buyer emphasized a shared foundation in faith, family and entrepreneurship. That language made the match sound familiar even as ownership changed. For Thiessen’s story, the date marks a clear turning point: the family had built an international business valuable to an established industry owner. It also created room for a different kind of work.

Another corner of the backyard

By 2026, Dan was being identified as CEO of Dansons Capital Group. The family was investing again, this time alongside Accrual Equity Partners and Hydro Construction in Shasta Pools. The acquisition closed on August 6. A business known for grills was moving into another part of the same domestic landscape.

The connection began with Jeff’s own pool project. Shasta stepped in to complete a difficult build, and the experience brought him closer to its people. A customer relationship developed into discussions about the company’s future. It is a recognizably practical way to encounter a prospective investment: first see whether the work gets done.

Shasta had been operating in Arizona since 1966. The new owners announced investment in the pool business and plans for Shasta Home Services, extending the ambition beyond construction and renovation. Dan was named to serve as chairman, helping recruit industry talent and develop the platform toward a national business.

The assignment gives his story an open ending with an actual job attached. Grills and pools make different demands on a company. Both enter a space where customers expect to spend time with people they care about. Thiessen’s next work begins there, with another established business, another group of people and another set of things that need to function before anyone sits down to enjoy them.