Photo courtesy of Five Guys
Five Guys founder and CEO Jerry Murrell
Ask Jerry Murrell what he does at Five Guys and he will tell you, cheerfully and at length, that the answer is almost nothing.
"I get a lot of credit for doing things, but I don't do much," he said in a recent interview from the company's Alexandria headquarters. "Janie and the boys do it all."
That is a generous accounting, but it is the one Murrell has stuck to for four decades. Five Guys turned 40 this year — the company opened its first carry-out counter in Arlington in 1986 — and in that time it has grown into a global chain while remaining, in its founder's telling, a family business that never stopped acting like one that happens to sell hamburgers.
The company is the largest locally based food and beverage chain in Greater Washington, according to Washington Business Journal, with 1,900 total locations and 64 in the DMV region.
A hamburger place in northern Michigan
Murrell grew up in northern Michigan, where a local hamburger stand made an impression that lasted the rest of his life. The man behind the counter sold one thing.
"He had a little grill behind the glass, and he had a big pile of onions there, and he just made hamburgers," Murrell said. "If you asked him for a hamburger with onions, you got a lot of onions. And if you asked him for a hamburger without onions, you still got a lot of onions."
The place was always busy. That stuck with him.
"I thought, you know, if you make a good hamburger, people will come and eat it," he said.
His mother had put it more plainly. "If you could make a good hamburger, serve good drinks or give a good haircut, you can make money in America," Murrell recalled her saying.
Murrell eventually made his way to Northern Virginia for a corporate career, working for firms including Merrill Lynch. But the hamburger idea never quite went away, and in 1986 he put it to his three oldest sons.
The five guys of the name are the Murrell sons — Jim, Matt, Chad, Ben and Tyler.
"I said to them, 'Well, what do you think about opening a hamburger place?'" he said. "And I was surprised that they were enthusiastic about it."
The oldest, Jim, carried most of the load in the early years, Murrell said, because his brothers were still in high school. "They went in and took the bull by the horns and started serving hamburgers."
Nobody told the kids what anything cost
Photo courtesy of Five Guys
Jerry Murrell, founder and CEO of Five Guys, in the early days.
The company's now-famous approach to ingredients — fresh beef, never frozen; hand-cut fries; regular toppings piled on at no extra charge — was less a strategy than a consequence of a decision Murrell and his wife, Janie, made early on: they did not tell their sons what the food cost.
"We just said, you serve what you think the people like, and Janie and I will worry about paying the bill," Murrell said.
The first store sat next door to Brenner's bakery in Arlington. The boys walked over and bought the most expensive rolls available.
Photo courtesy of Five Guys
The Murrell boys in the kitchen, in the early days of Five Guys.
"I think we were paying about five times what McDonald's was paying," Murrell said. "But people liked the rolls, and the kids said that's what people like."
The same logic applied everywhere else. The boys picked premium toppings. They decided the beef couldn't be frozen, because freezing changes it. Nobody was checking their math.
"Everything we paid for was a lot of money, but the kids weren't cautioned about that," Murrell said. "We told them to spend anything they want to spend."
It made life difficult for the company's purchasing agent, who at one point staged an intervention over mayonnaise. The boys insisted on a particular brand from a supplier in New York who was hard to deal with and wanted cash on delivery. The purchasing agent argued there was no meaningful difference between mayonnaises and set out to prove it.
"He blindfolded our whole family," Murrell said. He lined up 11 mayonnaises and had everyone taste them.
"My whole family picked the same mayonnaise," Murrell said. "He figured we had some kind of trick up our sleeve, but we didn't."
'We're having a meeting'
Photo courtesy of Five Guys
In the kitchen in the early days of Five Guys.
The family-business dynamic is not always polished. Murrell tells the story of a Five Guys salesman driving a prospective franchisee to one of the stores in the chain's early expansion years. Two of the Murrell sons were out front — one with a mop, one with a broom — locked in combat.
The salesman jumped out of the car and asked what they were doing.
"We're having a meeting," one of them answered.
"A lot of feelings get opened up in those meetings," Murrell said. "And we let it happen."
The company does have a more conventional version. The family sits down with Five Guys executives every Tuesday, a standing meeting that keeps the seven owners — Jerry and wife Janie Murrell and their five sons — talking about more than the day's operations.
A Five Guys spokesperson Molly Catalano, a 20-year veteran of the company, described the arrangement as its own form of quality control: seven owners means seven people paying attention, and because each of them has staked out a different corner of the business, they generally know whose call a given decision is.
Why Alexandria?
Photo courtesy of Five Guys
Five Guys started out in 1986 in Arlington, Va.
Five Guys' corporate offices are now at 1040 Duke St., after years in Lorton. Murrell said the company jumped at the chance to move into the city.
"Alexandria is one of the most beautiful cities in the world," he said. "It's got an old history. It's on the river. We love the water. It's a beautiful place to operate out of."
The company frames the move as a return rather than a relocation. Nearly all of the Murrells live in or near Alexandria or have at some point, and Five Guys considers the brand to have started in the area.
The Duke Street offices also sit within easy reach of Metro, the highways and the airport — a practical consideration for a company that brings franchisees and employees in from around the world.
He and Janie live in Alexandria as well, near the hospital, and franchisees come to the city for training. The Murrells' lives revolve around burgers, but they have their favorite dining spots around town — though Jerry thought it best not to say which ones.
The 40th birthday that got out of hand
Murrell does not describe it as a marketing win.
The chain's 40th birthday buy-one-get-one-free offer on Feb. 17 drew crowds Five Guys says it wasn't prepared for, prompting a do-over promotion in March and about $1.5 million in bonuses for store employees.
"It was just the opposite of a success when we did it, because we had no idea we'd get the response that we got," he said. "Computers fell down, supply, everything. We just couldn't keep up."
Asked whether it would have been worse if nobody had shown up, he laughed. "Oh yeah. There were some positive things about it. But the poor crew — they got smashed."
Competition, peanut oil and the new word of mouth
Murrell is not especially worried about the burger wars. He calls McDonald's one of the best-run companies in the world and says he'd never try to compete with it directly.
"There's plenty of opportunity for a small hamburger company like us," he said, ticking off In-N-Out and others. "They all seem to have plenty of business, including us. We don't worry about it too much. We've only got one product."
Some things he does not expect to change. Five Guys cooks everything in 100% peanut oil, which is sometimes hard to source and occasionally expensive — during one peanut blight, Murrell said, the company paid several times what competitors were paying for cooking oil.
"We're not very smart, I guess," he said.
The company famously does not advertise in the traditional sense. It continues a practice it started in the early days, Murrell said, papering Five Guys' walls with clippings from awards, local newspapers and magazines. "That's the only thing we had, and we thought those were valuable."
Word of mouth did the rest — and Murrell says he understands that the mechanism has changed, even if he doesn't fully understand the mechanism.
"I think social media is the new word of mouth," he said. "It's all new to us." That part he has handed off to Molly Catalano, whose job it is, in his words, to get the company good at social media.
No exit plan
Five Guys remains privately held, and Murrell says offers to take it public or sell it arrive regularly.
"On a real bad day, I might say 'yes,'" he said.
He has no succession announcement, either, and no interest in making one. Instead of naming a single leader, the family let each son gravitate toward the part of the business he liked — finance, construction, store design.
"Everybody's kind of got their niche," Murrell said. "And I'm kind of letting go with that."
In practice, that means the brothers defer to whichever of them "owns" the subject at hand rather than routing decisions through a single chief.
Retirement isn't on the table for Jerry. "It's a lot of fun, so I don't want to retire," he said.
The family keeps turning up on the payroll, too. By Murrell's count, roughly 15 relatives now work for Five Guys, grandchildren among them.
What he does outside of work sounds a lot like what he does inside it: family. He loves boats and fishing, and he loves being on the water with his sons and grandsons. He described a trip off Ocean City where the family landed what would have been tournament-winning fish — except they hadn't entered, because entering would have meant killing them.
"I think the luckiest thing that ever happened to me in my life was having five sons and my wife," Murrell said. "She's my best friend."
Asked whether 40 years went by quickly, he offered a line his kids use on him — that he was born before the Dead Sea even got sick.
"It went by pretty fast, and I wish it could be longer," he said. "It's been a lot of fun."
