Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019)

Jerry Murrell's mother used to tell him, you can always make money if you know how to make a good burger. In 1986 — after failing at a number of business ideas — Murrell opened a tiny burger joint in Northern Virginia with his four sons. Five Guys now has more than 1,500 locations worldwide and is one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," we check back in with Hannah England, who turned a common parenting problem into Wash. It. Later. — a water-tight bag for soaking soiled baby clothes before they stain. (Original broadcast date: June 5, 2017) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here. So you know how there's a place in your town or city where they do amazing pizzas, or barbecue, or tacos, so great that the line snakes out the door? Well, that's kind of what Jerry Murrell had in mind when he wanted to open Five Guys. One place, burgers and fries, keep it simple. And he deliberately looked for a hole in the wall, somewhere kind of out of the way, because he thought, if you can get people to come there, then you know you've got something pretty great. We first ran this episode in June of 2017. It's a really fun one, and I hope you enjoy it.

• 0:38Guy Raz?

  How did you even know how to make a burger? I mean, were you a good home chef? Was anybody in your family a good chef?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Listen, if you come from my hometown, you can't make a burger, you can't live. So, I mean, we knew how to make burgers. I knew how to cook a potato. That was about it.

• 0:54Guy Raz?

  You knew how to grill a burger and how to fry potatoes?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:57Guy Raz?

  And that's all you really needed to know how to do?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  That's all we knew.

• 1:04Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:18Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a tiny, family-run burger joint in suburban Virginia became one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in American history.

• 1:34Guy Raz?

  So Jerry's going to move a little closer to that mic, right? Yeah. So Jerry, get a little bit closer.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40Guy Raz?

  And can you see me okay?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You ready?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:44Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:46Guy Raz?

  Introduce yourself, please. If I met you at a party, I'd say, who are you? What's your name?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'm Jerry Murrell.

• 1:51Guy Raz?

  And what do you do?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Sell hamburgers.

• 1:56Guy Raz?

  So this is the founder of Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Jerry Murrell is 73 years old, and it's been a long journey to get to where he is today. He was born in a small mining town in northern Michigan. And Jerry says when he was a kid, his dad wasn't around that much.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  He was an adventurer. He wasn't very family oriented. He was a stunt pilot. That's probably why my mom and him got a divorce fairly early.

• 2:25Guy Raz?

  Jerry went to Catholic school as a kid, where he says he was not the best student.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I was a terrible student. I didn't like school. In fact, I can remember the nuns used to say, you know, you're going to end up selling hamburgers someday, so if you don't work hard.

• 2:40Guy Raz?

  Anyway, Jerry did get through school, and eventually, he went on to study at the University of Michigan.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I got scared there. I said, my God, how am I going to make it in this world with all these smart people around? In fact, I was more intimidated after I got out of college than ever.

• 2:57Guy Raz?

  So after college, Jerry moved back to his hometown, and he married his high school girlfriend. He got a job selling life insurance, and they had three sons. But the marriage didn't last. His wife ended up leaving and taking the kids to Florida. And for Jerry, that was a low point. Kind of floated around for a while, lived in different cities. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with his life. But he was sure of one thing.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Well, one thing I was sure of is I was going to get my kids back.

• 3:28Guy Raz?

  You wanted your kids to live with you?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:31Guy Raz?

  How are you going to do that?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know yet.

• 3:33Guy Raz?

  Around the mid-1970s, Jerry was offered a consulting job in the DC area, so he took it. And he moved to Alexandria, Virginia. And that's where he met his second wife, Janie. And after his situation stabilized a bit, his kids did actually come to live with him. And it was also around that time when Jerry decided to become a financial planner.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  I was shocked at how much money there was in the DC area. So I said, I'm going to go back in the financial planning business. And I got my degree from Brenner, and I started selling financial products to people in the DC area.

• 4:13Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And that's what I did.

• 4:16Guy Raz?

  So the boys move in with you.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18Guy Raz?

  All of a sudden, you've got five people, a household of five people.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And that was basically what you did? You were a financial planner?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I was a financial planner. I tried a few businesses. I started a oil business in Texas and I did a couple of other dumb things. I tried to start a water business of all things. I thought selling bottled water back then would have been a good idea. And everybody laughed at me. I had a hard time raising money.

• 4:41Guy Raz?

  This is in the early 80s?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Late, middle 70s.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  The worst one was oil because I started a company and I went down to Texas and found out that they were waiting for me because I was from the east and they're gonna take all my money. And then my wife and I went into the real estate business and we were experts at buying real high and then went until it crashed and trying to get rid of it.

• 5:05Guy Raz?

  Okay, so if I get this right, you were doing financial planning as your main job, but you'd had like all these business ideas that you would try out on the side?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14Guy Raz?

  And basically, none of them worked out?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Right, right. I really didn't know what I was doing.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I'm just lucky, I'm just lucky that I got in the hamburger business.

• 5:31Guy Raz?

  So how does Five Guys begin? What's the genesis of it?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  You wanna hear the short side or the long side?

• 5:37Guy Raz?

  No, I want the long side.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Well, where I grew up, there was a guy named Push'em Up Tony. And Push'em Up Tony had a little tiny hamburger place with a pitting table in it. And he had a grill and he didn't sell anything except hamburgers. And he always seemed happy. And it stuck in the back of my mind because people used to come from all over town to get hamburgers there. And then when I moved to Washington, I saw something I just couldn't believe was Ocean City, Maryland. And they had a place and they were selling boardwalk fries. There's a place there called Threshers. And there must have been 20 places selling boardwalk fries, but only one place had a long line.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And that was Threshers. The line was 100 feet long all day long. So me and the kids, that got into our mind like hamburgers and fries. Keep it simple, might work. And that's where the idea came from.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? Did you, I mean, did you go to your wife and say, let's try a burger joint?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  What'd you say?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Probably the same thing the banks said at the time. You guys out of your mind? But we, we did it a little different. We said, let's not put a lot of money into it. And let's find a place where the rent is real low, out of the way, where nobody can see it. And everybody said, why would you want to do it that way? And we said, well, if we can put it where it's hard to find, but if we can get people coming there, then we know we got something.

• 7:18Guy Raz?

  And this was in 1986, right?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  So where was the first location?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Columbia Pike and Glebe Road in Arlington.

• 7:26Guy Raz?

  Arlington, Virginia. And it was like a little place and rent was cheap. And what was, how much money did you have to put up to?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Our first story, we put $35,000 in.

• 7:34Guy Raz?

  And what did that cover?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 7:37Guy Raz?

  The, the rent and the equipment?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  The equipment. We found junk equipment, rebuilt it ourselves. It was a stand up only. And Chad and Matt were still in high school. In fact, Chad was, I think, maybe 13 or something. And I said, I got some money saved up for college, if you, you know, if you want to go to college. And they pretty much said, no, we'd rather do something else.

• 8:06Guy Raz?

  Wait, go, go back for a second. You sat your kids down and you had your kids' college fund and you said to them, hey, look, I got this college money. I will send you to college or you cannot go to college and we can use it to open up a burger joint.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:20Guy Raz?

  Were you, I mean, you can imagine today, like a parent saying that to their kids and then other parents saying, you're mortgaging your kid's future on this burger joint?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:31Guy Raz?

  Did you have any of that feeling in your mind, like, maybe this is not a great idea?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:35Guy Raz?

  No.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  No, if something was telling us it was the right thing to do. Probably you look back on it was probably a silly, it was kind of.

• 8:42Guy Raz?

  It was kind of crazy.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  It was crazy. It didn't seem crazy to us. For some reason, we all seemed to be on board with it.

• 8:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And now I was really surprised because the kids jumped right in and worked hard and Janie worked hard. She kept all the books and I was amazed how the, how the kids jumped into it.

• 9:00Guy Raz?

  And what is the story with the name? How did, how did you come up with?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Well, one of my lawyers said you should incorporate and you need to have a name as he fills out the papers. Well, we were, this was so well thought out that we didn't have a name. So, me and Janey and the boys said, hmm. We had three sons, plus one more son with Janey. My fifth son wasn't born yet. So it was four sons and me. So we said, well, we'll call it Five Guys for now and then we'll change it. Soon as we get the papers filled out, we'll change it. And the lawyer said, okay.

• 9:35Guy Raz?

  Okay, so on your first day, the, the opening day, 1986, did you, did you guys have like a, like a grand opening?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  No, we didn't. And when we first opened up, at 11 o'clock, there was no business at all until quarter to 12. And then one person finally walked in, and, and 12:30, we were, we were almost packed.

• 9:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And we made money from our very first day. And we were breaking even, and we were paying our rent.

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  And you didn't have any employees, right? Because everybody was in the family.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  We had a couple employees, but mostly it was the kids. And we were paying them some. I think at the time, we were paying them $7.50 an hour, something like that.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  How did you even know how to make a burger? I mean, were you a good home chef? Was anybody in your family a good chef?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Listen, if you come from my hometown, you can't make a burger, you can't live. So, I mean, we knew how to make burgers. And from where I'm from, is, Posen was right near us, and they raised potatoes. I grew up on a farm that we raised a lot of potato. I knew, I knew how to cook a potato, and I knew, we knew how to cook a hamburger. That was about it.

• 10:38Guy Raz?

  You knew how to grill a burger out of fried potatoes?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:41Guy Raz?

  And that's all you really needed to know how to do?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  That's all we knew.

• 10:45Guy Raz?

  Where did you guys get the ingredients from? Like the potatoes and, and all this stuff? Like, how did you know how to source this stuff?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  We went to Thrashers in Ocean City and looked on the potato bags. And we found out they came from Rigby, Idaho. A guy named Rick Miles was a small potato dealer out there. So we got ahold of him. And we said, would you sell us potatoes? We did not know at the time that he was small. Now he's become a multimillionaire because we buy all our potatoes from him.

• 11:17Guy Raz?

  And what was so special about his potatoes?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  They were sold by Thresher's in Ocean City.

• 11:23Guy Raz?

  So you thought, hey, if there's a line outside this potato joint, their potatoes must...

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Must be good. Right. Must be good.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  What was Five Guys offering at that time? Was it burgers with all the toppings and all that stuff?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Well, what we did with the kids, Janie and I would not tell the kids how much we were paying for the product. We'd said, whatever pickles you want to put on the hamburgers, you guys pick the pickles. So they would try different brands and different pickles. And finally, they'd end up with the most expensive pickles there were. And we wouldn't say anything about it. We'd say, okay, if that's the pickles you want, buy those pickles.

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  They would just buy them at the supermarket?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, at first.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Then we said, we'll buy the most expensive cooking oil you want to cook in. And it was peanut oil because that's the way they cooked them out in Ocean City. They wanted to buy this bread from a little baker in Arlington that made really good bread. Brenner's Bakery, they're probably the best bakery in Arlington at the time. But for a restaurant business, that'd be expensive. We were paying about seven times for a hamburger bun as McDonald's was then.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  And what was a burger going for in 1986?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I think we were selling something for like three times, four times what McDonald's was selling for, which everybody said we were crazy, we wouldn't make it that way. But we didn't let the kids know how much we were paying for any of the food. So they would just go out there and whatever it was, if they liked it, that's the way it was.

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  And what was the thinking behind that strategy?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  The thinking was that they're going to pick the best product. They're going to pick what the customer likes, what they liked. Give you an example of how ridiculous it is. The kids liked a certain kind of mayonnaise because it was thick and it would hold things together. And we were buying our mayonnaise at the time from a guy up in New York City that was really hard to get along with. And so when we hired our first purchasing agent, he said, there's no way that mayonnaise is this important. No way, because this guy was so hard to deal with. So we had all the family come in and do a blind mayonnaise taste. And to this day, I can't eat mayonnaise by itself.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  So we had like nine different dishes with mayonnaise and you tend to take a little spoon and everybody would taste the mayonnaise blindfolded. And he'd say, I'm going to prove to you that you can't tell the difference in this mayonnaise or any other mayonnaise, you know? And after the, after we took our blindfolds off, my wife, myself, and all the boys picked the same mayonnaise.

• 13:51Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  He couldn't believe it.

• 13:53Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And that was the mayonnaise we were getting from New York. So, uh, Jamie and I, what we would do was at the end of the month, we'd look at the sales and then we'd look at how much we paid for the food and we'd say, we got to raise our prices. The kids didn't know why we were raising the prices, but we would always say, food costs would stay around 30%. Whatever we got to do, if we got to raise prices, we raise prices. And we said, if we have to worry about price, we don't want to be in this business.

• 14:22Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you've, you've got this first burger joint, right? And, and how did, how did people find out about it? How do people even know about it?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  The only way would be somebody else telling them.

• 14:33Guy Raz?

  They said, there's this great burger place, this little like walk-up shack, you got to try it.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Right. That's the only way they would have found out about it. There was a place in DC, when I first moved here, I had an office downtown that, lunch and breakfast, but it was downstairs and it was an alley. And it was nothing on a door, if I remember right, just a steel door coming off the alley. But, um, all the offices around there would go to this place and it was on marked and it was in alley. And, uh, I was always impressed with the fact that that guy could do that much business up there. And I knew him, I knew how much money he was making. And he sold it. And within three months, it was gone. The people were going there for the food and it was working. And I said, well, heck, if that guy can do that, then, you know, I'll just, we'll just

• 15:22Speaker 01

  open up in a corner and if people like us, they'll come. And if they don't like us, they won't, and then we won't be in the business.

• 15:27Guy Raz?

  Coming up, how Five Guys did stay in business and how they grew way beyond Virginia, even though the last person who wanted to do that was Jerry. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  This is Peter Sagal. When we began Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we dreamed that our rude jokes would be, in the end, the appropriate way to talk about the news. And look, it happened. Listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 16:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So Jerry and his sons opened up a tiny burger joint in Arlington, Virginia. And at first, people knew about it through word of mouth. But of course, eventually, newspapers started to write about the burgers, and then the lines started to get longer. So Jerry and his family started to think about opening a second location. But they needed the money to finance it.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  I can remember going in the bank, and they said, "You're gonna do what?" I said, "Well, I'll open another hamburger place." And they laughed at us. But so my sons said, "We got friends that their parents got a little bit of money, and they know Five Guys is doing good. Maybe we'll ask them for a few thousand." So we got, eventually, we got about 150, 200 people that would be willing at any one time to give us money.

• 17:12Guy Raz?

  But not as investors, just for loans?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  We did it a different way. We did it as investors. We'd say, "Give us $5,000. We'll give you a certain percentage of the gross, not never the profit, because there was always too many ways to cheat people that way." So what I said, "We'll give you a certain percentage of the gross. We'll give you the money every single month. And anytime you want your money back, you can have it." And everybody said, "Well, that's stupid, because if you have a blip, everybody's gonna come in and ask for the money back." But my method and my madness was also that I said to them, "Anytime I want to pay you back, I can." Because I knew someday, if this thing was successful, I was gonna get better financing. And I could go back to these people and pay them back anytime I wanted.

• 17:56Guy Raz?

  So you never gave them-- so they weren't equity owners?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Not in a real sense. We just made a note, said-- If this store does 20,000 a week, you get a certain percentage out every week. And we gave them the money exactly on time every month so that we could always go back and ask for more money.

• 18:13Guy Raz?

  So how much money did you, did you raise for, to do store number two?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Well, for store number two, we probably only had to raise maybe, maybe 150,000. But we had, we had a lot of people that just wanted to throw money at us.

• 18:26Guy Raz?

  Because they liked the burgers, they liked what you were doing?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Well, they liked the fact that we were making money and they were getting paid every month. I had about 75 people I didn't even know on that list. And I used to say to everyone, don't put your money in somebody else's business. And they were just, it seemed like a lot of people saw something in Five Guys.

• 18:45Guy Raz?

  Were you fully committed to this? Or did you, were you still doing financial planning?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  I was still doing financial planning.

• 18:51Guy Raz?

  What, at what point do you say to your kids and your wife, you know, I'm going to give up my job and I'm going to focus on Five Guys full-time?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Well, that was almost the day I got hit in the head with a broom. I must've been having a bad day at the office or something. And I went home and I said to my wife, I quit. And she said, you've got to be crazy. And I said, no, I'm done. I'm not going to work anymore. I'm just going to concentrate on the burger business. And she was pretty upset.

• 19:22Guy Raz?

  Because she thought this is too risky?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:25Guy Raz?

  And, but you thought, ah, I think we can make this work.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Well, I just, I, I thought it was fun.

• 19:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I always told my kids, I said, you don't have to be in this business. If you want to be, make sure it's fun. Pick something you like to do in the business.

• 19:38Guy Raz?

  Okay, so, so now it was like the entire family focusing full-time on Five Guys.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:44Guy Raz?

  What, what like roles did everybody play?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Well, Janie is like a general. I mean, she is very organized. She runs the office and everything. But my kids were able to go to investors and so I, I kind of, if it wasn't for them and my wife, there would be no Five Guys. I didn't build Five Guys. I used to sit around thinking, God, look at this thing is growing so fast. I can't believe it, you know? They came up with most of the new ideas and they pretend they listened to me.

• 20:18Guy Raz?

  So I have lived in the Washington DC area for a long time, off and on. And I remember, you know, driving to Virginia in like, you know, 1999, 2000 to get a Five Guys burger in Virginia when it was still just, what, four or five?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:34Guy Raz?

  Locations. 2002, up until 2002, you grew it to five shops.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Five.

• 20:41Guy Raz?

  And were you doing pretty well? Were you all making a decent living at that point? You guys must have been rich.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:46Guy Raz?

  You weren't.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  But the thing is, we had figured out the nuts and bolts of the business by then. Most franchisers start off to franchise. We didn't start off to franchise. We had no idea we were going to do that. We started off to build a family business and we put 17 years into it and we figured out how to do it right.

• 21:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  So when it came time to franchise and, I mean, we had a perfect system.

• 21:10Guy Raz?

  So how did you then at that point say, you know, hey, let's franchise. Let's build this thing out.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  My sons came to me about in the 19, late 1990 and started trying to convince me to franchise. And I was dead set against it, really dead set against it because I didn't think there was any way I could convince other people to do what we were doing.

• 21:34Guy Raz?

  So how did they change your mind?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Well, there was a guy named Mark Mosley that was selling franchises for another company. He'd been watching Five Guys for a while and my kids got me to meet with them. I didn't want to do it. In fact, they bought me a book called Franchising for Dummies. It was written by Dave Thomas.

• 22:00Guy Raz?

  Oh, the guy from Wendy's.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the guy from Wendy's.

• 22:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah, okay.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And so I read it and I, the legal stuff was amazing, all the rules you had to follow and everything.

• 22:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  So, well, they talked me into it.

• 22:13Guy Raz?

  Why didn't you want to do it?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Because when you start franchising, first of all, telling a franchisee that you're not going to worry about food costs, that's pretty, sounds pretty stupid. You're going to tell a franchisee that you're not going to advertise, that sounds pretty stupid. You're going to tell them that you're only going to sell hamburgers and french fries. They're all going to say, wait a minute, we got to be open later, we got to sell alcohol, we got to watch food costs, we got to shop around for our products. And I said, I don't do that. And I said, I got, we buy from people and we're going to stick with them. That was all hard to sell to franchisees. But we, we got through that. And I remember Mark coming in, because he was going to be our salesman. He said he was going to sell, I

• 23:01Speaker 01

  can't remember how many stores the first year that we're going to sell. But I said, no, just cut that in half. I mean, if you're going to sell 50, just cut it down to 25. You don't have to sell 50. And I think within a year and a half, or two years, we sold 3,500. We sold the whole United States.

• 23:22Guy Raz?

  So, so wait, I mean, your burgers were still a lot more expensive than, than like a McDonald's burger?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:28Guy Raz?

  And it took a long, a lot, lot longer to get a burger there, right? Like, it's not instant, it's not, right? It takes longer to get a burger. So, I mean, the business model is different. So, so were you worried? I mean, did you ever think, you know, maybe this works in Northern Virginia, but I'm, I'm not sure this is going to work somewhere else?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It scared the heck out of us. You were talking about the long wait. We used to have a sign in one of our stores that said, if you're in a hurry, there are a lot of really good burger places near here. And everybody said, oh my God, you can't put that sign up. And it helped.

• 24:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  I remember the first franchise store we opened up was in Richmond. And I said, oh, my God, Richmond, nobody's gonna know who we are in Richmond.

• 24:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  I couldn't even sleep the night before. Richmond, that's like down the road 90 miles, it's nothing.

• 24:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  But I couldn't even sleep. I said, nobody's gonna know who we are. Richmond store was successful. And then they said, well, now we're gonna go to North Carolina and South Carolina. I said, no way knows who we are down there. And I said, no way we're going to Florida, because people will never buy that product in Florida, because they're older people. And Florida's got 100 stores in Florida or something.

• 24:43Guy Raz?

  I mean, the idea of going from five stores in 2002 to thousands of stores within a year or two years.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Well, we didn't go to thousands of stores. We sold franchises. Those are still being built out in the United States. We've got about 1,400 of them built out now. But all the territory in the United States is gone.

• 25:05Guy Raz?

  Was that just mind-boggling to you?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Mind-boggling. Mind-boggling. And I was so proud of my kids that didn't go to their head. They're still my kids. They work just like they used to. They work hard every day.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  And what is it, I mean, what's it like to work with your five sons and your wife? I mean, they're all involved in the company. Do each do a different thing for the company?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Well, I have one son that just loves doing stuff in the stores, like making sure they're painted right and decorated right. And he's really into that.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  So that's his job?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  That's what he does mostly. And I got another one that's a fanatic about the food. And so he goes around the world putting on shows on how to cook things right and stuff. And I got another son that he's really into the financing part of it. He grabbed it, and I'm glad, because I don't understand a lot of it, especially it's international finance. So everybody's kind of found their own little niche, you know? And my grandkids, I got four grandkids working the business. They all, some of them like teaching, some of them like working in the field. And one of them just loves taking care of, making sure there's no foodborne illness. She's just a fanatic about it, and she loves doing it. And so I let them find what they want to find.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  And if there's a gap that can't be filled by them, then we'll hire somebody.

• 26:31Guy Raz?

  Is your family still the primary owner of the company?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yes, we own about 75% of the company, me and my family. But we took in a fairly big investor when we first started franchising. They don't interfere in our business at all. They gave us a big chunk of money. They're entrepreneurs too, and they saw something in Five Guys.

• 26:51Guy Raz?

  What percentage of the actual restaurants do you guys own? Does Five Guys?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Out of about fourteen, fifteen hundred restaurants, we have a joint venture in Great Britain and France and Germany where we own with our partner half, that's about sixty stores. And then over here, we own about four hundred and fifty out of the fourteen hundred.

• 27:13Guy Raz?

  So how many countries total is Five Guys in now?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  We're in Great Britain, which I guess is still one country for now.

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  Right, you're in the UK.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And we've got sixty stores there. We're doing France. We just opened up in Champs de Loser. Got a store in Madrid. We got several stores in the Middle East. So I think a lot of people, when they get a little bit successful, they look back and trying to figure out how they did it. I can't figure it out.

• 27:44Guy Raz?

  You still don't know?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:47Guy Raz?

  Do you think a lot of it was luck?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah. Two things I give a lot of credit to. I'm a great believer in intuition, or a higher power, or God, or whatever you want to call it. I'm a great believer in listening to my hunches. And I couldn't have done it on my own, that's for sure. My kids, I'm luckier than heck. I got my kids and my wife, because it seems like to me, without them, we'd have done nothing. But we were lucky, real lucky, real, real lucky.

• 28:23Guy Raz?

  Do you, I mean, really, your vision was not to open up a burger joint. Your vision was to get your kids to live with you when you and your wife divorced.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  Which that was your, I guess, that was your real success, getting your kids to come live with you.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I think so. Yeah, the best thing that's ever happened in my life is my kids. There's no doubt about that. And the best thing that's happened to their mother, which is my ex-wife, is the fact that they're able to do all kinds of wonderful things for her.

• 28:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  So.

• 28:56Guy Raz?

  And you still have a pretty good relationship with her?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So does my current wife. Yeah, we get along.

• 29:03Guy Raz?

  So she's benefited from the success of your sons?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 29:08Guy Raz?

  How did being financially stable and set, how did that change your life? Were you able to do things that you couldn't do before?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Well, most people that I know, I've known since I've been a kid. When I started Five Guys, I let three or four of my buddies that I went to high school with buy stock in my company because I thought it would be a great thing for them because they didn't have money. A little bit, they had a little bit of money, but not much. And one of them, I had a loan on the money. And they're all millionaires now. But we're still same old people. I mean, I just had a bunch of my friends down from Michigan a couple of weeks ago on my boat in Florida. We drink beer together and same as it was 30, 40 years ago.

• 29:56Guy Raz?

  And you can lead a pretty anonymous life. Like, you're not walking around the street and no one's like, "Oh, there's Jerry, the founder of Five Guys."

• 30:03Speaker 01

  No, in fact, my wife always says, she gets upset at me when I'm sitting out in the front yard eating a can of beans or something. And I always wear leave eyes. But no, I don't know how other people look at me, but I don't think any of us put on airs. I hope not.

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  Yes, it's amazing. I was thinking back to what you said earlier, that when you were a kid, the nuns said you were going to sell hamburgers.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:32Guy Raz?

  What about your mom? I mean, what would she have thought about what you did with Five Guys hamburgers?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  My mom liked hamburgers. She probably would have thought that was a good idea. In fact, my mom used to say, "If you can make a good hamburger, or serve a good drink, or give a good haircut, you'll always..."

• 30:51Guy Raz?

  Have something to do, yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Have an income, yeah.

• 30:55Guy Raz?

  Jerry Murrell, founder of Five Guys Burgers and Fries. And if you add up all of the restaurants and franchises around the world, he says they are approaching $2 billion in revenue. By the way, for years, Five Guys resisted selling milkshakes. But about two years ago, after considerable debate, some stores decided to start selling them with mix-in flavors like peanut butter, banana, strawberries, salted caramel, and of course, why not bacon?

• 31:30Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today, we're updating a story we first ran about a year ago. And just a quick warning, if you're a parent of small children, you are about to hear about poop and barf because those two things are at the very heart of Hannah England's business. She has two small children of her own. And if you've ever wondered what happens inside one of those family changing rooms, well...

• 31:58Speaker 03

  I walked into the bathroom and there were two moms. One was at the changing station and her baby had just had a blowout, like major, like up the back, all the way to the neck, kind of a thing. And this is going to be a situation that every mom gets themselves into.

• 32:20Guy Raz?

  And by the way, every dad, I mean, I've been there. And here's the thing, once you've cleaned up your kid, what are you supposed to do with all those soiled and disgusting clothes? Especially when you're not at home.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  You know, you kind of just cringe when you have to stick that in your diaper bag. And then when you have to open it after a full day, I mean, it is not pleasant.

• 32:40Guy Raz?

  Not to mention, after the clothes have festered in your diaper bag for a day? It may become impossible to get the stains out of them. Anyway, all of this got Hannah thinking.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  I came up with this idea when I was putting my three-year-old to bed. And I came out to the living room and I just started describing to my sister-in-law and my husband this bag, this soaking bag. And I kept filling in the blanks. What if we could? And what if it had this? And then they looked at me and they're like, well, it sounds like you just invented it.

• 33:14Guy Raz?

  And what Hannah envisioned was a watertight, plastic bag that you could keep in your diaper bag. It would have a soap pod in it, kind of like the pod that goes into your dishwasher, so that when your kid pooped or barfed all over her clothes, you would just throw it in the bag, add water, and voila, the clothes would soak in soapy water while you went about your day.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  And then I kind of just hit the ground running because I thought, I need this in my life.

• 33:42Guy Raz?

  So about two years ago, Hannah started calling manufacturers. They sent her prototypes of the plastic bags, and she and her husband began to test them.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  We'd immediately fill it with water and seal it and hang it upside down in our living room and kitchen to look for drips and leaks because we want these things to be able to hold up in a mom's diaper bag, and that's like going to combat.

• 34:07Guy Raz?

  But in those early days, nothing worked. The bags would break, or the zippers would come undone, and water would get everywhere. So Hannah kept calling around until she found one manufacturer in Wisconsin who seemed to know exactly what she needed.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  And he goes, well, I think we're going with a seal that's actually really aggressive for your utility. And I said, exactly, I want it to be aggressive.

• 34:32Guy Raz?

  A seal so aggressive that you would have to use scissors to get it open. And then Hannah found another manufacturer to make a very gentle soap pod. And finally, she designed the outside of the bags with classy, black-and-white stripes.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I wanted the design itself to not scream like, okay, this is a bag for soiled poop.

• 34:54Guy Raz?

  She then launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise about $12,000. And for a while, it looked like she wasn't going to make her goal. But then, kind of an amazing thing happened. The accounting software company, QuickBooks, found out about her. And QuickBooks has this program where it supports small businesses. And so someone from QuickBooks sent her a message via Kickstarter that basically said, hey, we're going to back you for the rest of the way.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  It just showed up on our Kickstarter thing. And my husband, of course, was going, nope, this is some weird fraud thing. And I laughed at him and I'm like, what kind of fraud puts money into your bank account? Normally, they take money out.

• 35:35Guy Raz?

  Hannah was right. It was not fraud. And in December of 2017, she shipped her very first production run, about 5,000 bags, to those Kickstarter backers. Her company is called Wash It Later. And since we spoke to Hannah last year, the company has moved from her basement to an actual office. And about two months ago, they started selling a grab-and-go version of their diaper bag. It's become an even bigger success than their original product. If you want to learn more about Hannah and her company, Wash It Later, or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to.

• 36:20Guy Raz?

  And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Mia Venkat, J.C. Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candace Lim. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.