From left to right: William Peecher, Jerry Murrell and Sam Chamberlain. | Photo by Peter Clancy.
There is a door just off the cafeteria at Five Guys headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, marked by an unusually large, vertical, red neon sign just to its left that says, “TEST KITCHEN.”
The door opens to a brick wall. It’s a joke for a chain that hardly needs a test kitchen, given that it has only added one product to its menu in 40 years, shakes, in 2014.
Five Guys has an almost religious devotion to the simplicity of its concept, to the point that it has a large, visible joke built into the design of its corporate offices. That devotion extends to its global restaurants, where the chain is equally reluctant to add even new ingredients to its menu to cater to local tastes.
That devotion has served it well over the years. Five Guys emerged from a pack of upstart chains coming out of the Great Recession to become the largest of the so-called “better burger” brands. And over the past decade it has had some sneaky success outside the U.S., opening locations everywhere from the U.K. to Singapore to the Middle East.
Last year, it crossed the $1 billion international sales threshold for the first time, more than any other fast-casual chain, including the much-ballyhooed Shake Shack, the burrito powerhouse Chipotle and brands like Wingstop and Panera Bread. It was enough to earn the chain the Restaurant Business Global Restaurant Leader of the Year. The award will be presented next week at the Global Restaurant Leadership Conference.
In so doing, it has bucked the traditional strategy behind global growth. Its predecessors on the world restaurant stage, chains like McDonald’s and KFC and Burger King, are almost chameleons, blending in with local markets by adding new products, changing service styles or altering names. Five Guys, on the other hand, is virtually indistinguishable in Dubai, London or Singapore from Dallas, Los Angeles or St. Louis.
“We haven’t changed anything from what we did for 30-plus years in North America,” said Sam Chamberlain, president and chief operating officer for the Alexandria, Virginia-based chain. “We haven’t changed our menu. Our approach to the business, our approach to marketing and PR has all been the same. So I think a lot of brands, when they go overseas, they feel the need to adapt to that local culture or society, and we’ve just stuck to our guns and done the same thing over and over again.”
The kids’ decision
Jerry Murrell, the CEO of Five Guys and the patriarch of the founding family, steps more deliberately than he once did. He is in his 80s, though his memory is sharp. He is quick with a joke or with a laugh and he tells a lot of stories, not all of which we can print. When we asked him what he did before he got into the restaurant business, Murrell responded, “I was a gangster.” (He was a financial planner.)
But when the subject turns to the company, and particularly his sons’ role in it, Murrell pauses to wipe away tears, like he did when he said this: “I don’t know if I’ve ever really cooked a hamburger myself. One of my big problems when I talk to guys like yourself is, I try to tell them that the kids built Five Guys and they always go, ‘Oh, Jerry’s being humble.” But I’m not. The kids really did build Five Guys.”
Five Guys was founded in Arlington, Virginia, in 1986. As the story goes, Jerry Murrell and his wife Janie gave their sons a choice of what to do with their college savings: Go to school or start a business. They chose the business.
Jerry Murrell ran a couple of restaurants while he was in college. And he was “addicted” to the food business. “My mom always told me when I was younger that, in the United States, if you could serve a good drink or give a good haircut or cook a good hamburger, you’d always make money,” he said.
When the kids decided to run a business, a restaurant seemed a natural. Murrell used to take his kids to a place in Ocean City, Maryland, that served only fries to long lines of customers. When he suggested a French fry concept to the boys, they said he needed something else to go with them. And then Murrell recalled a hamburger stand from his youth, run by a man known as Push-Em-Up Tony.
“He always drove a nice car and he had a little stand and a picnic table in there and a place for sodas, and he was always busy,” Murrell said. And so burgers it was.
They ultimately named the restaurant Five Guys after Jerry and the couple’s four sons Jim, Matt, Chad and Ben. And then the youngest, Tyler, was born, and the Five Guys became the boys. So, in effect, Jerry Murrell reproduced himself out of a spot on the company moniker.
The first restaurant was small and had no seats. And it made money on the first day. “We opened at 11. We didn’t have a customer until 20 minutes to 12,” Murrell said. “But after the first customer came in, within a couple of hours, the whole place was packed.”
“There’s a lot of things in Five Guys that we’re fanatical about, and we wouldn’t change. So we just kept doing it that way, and here we are.” -Jerry Murrell.
Too expensive
The Murrells’ boys took to the restaurant right away, and have been the driving force behind a lot of the company’s strategies since then.
Most notably, to hear Jerry Murrell describe it, the five are maniacal about the ingredients the restaurants use. It’s not something they compromise. And so almost from the get-go, Five Guys had a reputation as an expensive place for a burger and fries. It’s a reputation the chain had almost from the moment it opened.
That’s not a bad thing, they maintain. “The one thing we never told the boys is how much anything cost,” Jerry Murrell said. “That ended up being a saving grace for us, because they would buy Heinz ketchup or Kraft mustard. And they would buy their hamburger from a friend of mine that sold nothing but hamburger meat to high-end restaurants. So we were paying way too much for hamburger, way too much for everything. But it’s what the kids thought the customer liked.”
If Janie Murrell, who handled the company’s books, said they needed more money coming in, Five Guys simply raised the price. If the price of tomatoes skyrocketed, they kept serving tomatoes. One time, when someone suggested using a different type of mayonnaise, Jerry, Janie and some of the kids took a blind taste test and selected the mayo they had been using.
“There’s a lot of things in Five Guys that we’re fanatical about, and we wouldn’t change,” Jerry said. “So we just kept doing it that way, and here we are.”
The company has held onto that fanaticism, keeping a simple menu of burgers and fries, even as the chain became a cult favorite in Northern Virginia, and as it started franchising in 2003, which led to explosive growth. By 2012 the company had more than 1,000 locations.
It did this with a simplicity that went well beyond its menu. It targeted less expensive real estate, believing its name was enough of a draw—and in the early days landlords wouldn’t give them the time of day anyway. It used glowing media reviews as its marketing. And it just kept filling its bags with extra fries.
The Five Guys “Test Kitchen.” | Photo by Jonathan Maze.
The London opening
It’s not as if Five Guys is completely unwilling to change. For this, we shift to 2013, when Five Guys opened in Covent Garden in London, the first Five Guys outside of North America.
“It was one of the most exciting days during my time at the company,” Chamberlain said. He was a resident of Northern Virginia and was familiar with Five Guys before he met the Murrell family in 2002. He would later join the company and is one of the many Five Guys employees who have been with the brand for a decade or longer.
Five Guys’ operator in the U.K. is Sir Charles Dunstone, who made a fortune in the mobile phone business.
That location opened on July 4, 2013, which they thought would be funny. Shake Shack, Five Guys’ burgeoning rival at the time, opened the day before. “Our line, it went on,” Murrell said. “We had a line two or three blocks long when we opened up.”
There was already a line when Chamberlain arrived at 6 a.m. He worked the door that day to govern people coming in the door so the restaurant didn’t get overcrowded. “I think I left the store that night at 10 or 11,” he said. “It was just one of those days where the energy and enthusiasm and adrenaline just took over.”
But it was a more expensive, visible location than Five Guys to that point was accustomed to targeting with its expansion. That was largely driven by Dunstone, who taught Five Guys that it was OK to pay for real estate.
“When we were building the brand in the early 2000s, franchising in North America, landlords in Kansas City didn’t know who we were,” Chamberlain said. “We were not attractive for high-profile sites. And so to have Charles behind us, along with the brand at that point, with the 1,000 restaurants in North America, we were able to command a really, really strong site.
“That created a new model for us, where basically in any major international market you go into, where we’re on high street, on the corner of Main and Main. It’s hard to miss us.”
And so outside the U.S., you can find Five Guys in high-end locations, such as the Dubai Mall, where customers can eat a burger and fries with a view of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
“I used to dream about stuff like that in my mind,” Jerry Murrell said.
“This family is more happy when the food is perfect than anything else that has to do with the business—how fast you grow, how much money you make, any of that. If the food is perfect, that’s the ultimate goal.” -William Peecher.
International strategies
One of the people who helped open that Dubai Mall location was William Peecher, currently chief operating officer of international for Five Guys who has been with the company nearly two decades. The Dubai Mall is a busy, visible location visited by people from around the world. “There was a tremendous amount of pressure to make it perfect, but it was incredible,” he said.
Five Guys put together a team of employees in Dubai to help the brand work in the country, where it would build a number of other locations.
The company has offices in Amsterdam, which is where the directors live. But there are field offices in Hong Kong and Dubai to support franchisees in those markets.
“When it gets to actually sending over an experienced team to launch the brand, I find that a lot of companies give their marketing person the international job based in the U.S.,” Peecher said. “They never really have a dedicated team and then the franchisee grabs it and runs with it. We had a team in place on the ground to provide kind-of the color by numbers, every step of the way.”
That team ensures Five Guys maintains the same standards, to ensure employees make eye contact or fix a burger that wasn’t quite prepared right.
The company maintains its same attention to product quality. Some items are non-negotiable. Beef must be a certain quality, along with the base for its shakes, its pickles and mayonnaise. Some items are imported. Others can be manufactured locally.
When COVID hit, Five Guys had to make its supply chain more regional. “We’re trying to localize as much as we can outside the core products that make us different.” Of course, they often have little choice, because it’s just not practical to import some products, so the company has one vendor for pickles in the U.S., for example, and another, based in The Netherlands, for international countries.
The family signs off on any new supply chain vendors. “They taste the pickle,” Peecher said. “Any new beef vendors, we bring them in and have them taste the beef.”
“I’ll tell you,” Peecher added, “This family is more happy when the food is perfect than anything else that has to do with the business—how fast you grow, how much money you make, any of that. If the food is perfect, that’s the ultimate goal.”
Company executives acknowledge the role that other chains have played in its success overseas, such as McDonald’s, which has helped pave the way for burger brands. But Five Guys has also done this its own way: With that aggressive attention to product quality, and a simple menu.
That Five Guys menu of customizable burgers, thick-cut fries filled far more than you could really imagine, and shakes, does not change all that much outside the U.S. There are some exceptions. Do not, for instance, look for bacon in the Middle East.
“If you go to the Five Guys in Korea, Singapore, Australia, you will feel like you’re in Virginia,” Peecher said. “We have replicated our magic all around the world. We haven’t compromised on anything. And I think that’s a very rare thing.”
And it’s no joke.
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