Advice Line with Danny Meyer of Shake Shack

Guy Raz (0:00)

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Hello and welcome to the Advice Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, former guest on the show who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298.

Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. All right, let's get to it. This week, I'm joined by legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer, founder of the Union Square Hospitality Group. Danny, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you, Guy. If any of you listening have ever eaten out in New York City, there's a chance that you know Danny's story. He is the man behind Union Square Cafe, Grand Mercy Tavern, the modern, and he's the guy who took a single temporary hot dog stand in Madison Square Park and turned it into Shake Shack, which is now a global publicly traded burger empire. Danny, you were last on the show in June of 2020 For those of you who haven't heard the story, we will put a link to it in the show notes, so check it out. That was a crazy time. The world was sheltering in place, and dining rooms were dark, and it certainly felt like a long time ago. I think in 2022, you stepped down to become executive chairman of the Union Square Group. So first of all, before we get into that, just kind of give us an update about what's kind of going on in your life right now.

Danny Meyer (2:17)

Yeah, well, I actually stepped up to become executive chairman. A lot of people thought I was retiring, which could not have been further from the truth. Right, and by being executive chairman, which was actually a term I had never even heard of before, it gave me the chance to continue to come into work every day, but to spend more of my time on fewer of the things, but those things that uniquely lined up with my gifts. So really it has to do with the culture of the company, the culinary product of the company, and then all of the creative outlets we have for new businesses. That's what I spend my time on. Whereas before I was the guy, hopefully making the trains run on time. I'm just not doing that today.

Guy Raz (2:57)

You have a new book out. Congrats. What Could Possibly Go Right? A big part of the book is about building an enduring culture and keeping teams aligned. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about culture?

Danny Meyer (3:12)

I think culture at its most basic is a word to describe how we do things around here. Every company, whether it's intentional or not, every family, every fraternity, sorority, every sports team, there's a way they do things around here. I think the biggest way to build culture is to have a common set of behaviors that everybody in the organization understands that they are responsible for really emanating. So for example, I actually traveled a long way. I used to think that what we really needed was family values, and we had those in place for about 15 years. And I wouldn't argue with any of them, but they weren't specific to our culture.

And the other problem with that guy was that it was disingenuous in retrospect to call them family values because a business is not a family.

And I noticed that every time we held someone accountable to the point that there just wasn't going to be a place for them on our team going forward, people would go into deep grief because you don't fire a family member. And so the big transition I had was really evolving from family values to expected behaviors is the shorthand where everybody knows exactly what you're talking about. They know exactly what you're expected of them. And this is the equation that I figured out is our culture is ultimately all of the wanted behaviors that we celebrate actively minus all of the unwanted behaviors that we tolerate.