YouSaid · the spoken record

Danny Meyer

lines on the record: 115
first: 2023-04-06
most recent: 2023-04-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can find it there, and it's called the Lockhart link. So we get an amazing sausage from Lockhart, Texas and put it right on top of a shack burger. I wish we had those in New York, but only in Austin.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or at a shake shack near you, by the way, at the Shake Shack in Austin, we have a burger there that we only do in Austin.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really grateful to you and thank you for sharing me with your amazing audience. And I hope I'll get to see you in New York.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go support your local restaurants and your local butchers and your local fruit growers, et cetera. You cannot know how important for the economy and also for the emotional fabric of a community. Restaurants are. Restaurants provide a place for the community to come together and do their social life, to do their business life, to do their personal life. We saw what life looked like when we didn't have restaurants during COVID. And it gets to the human desire to connect with people. People are so eager to be with people. And so the more you can do to support people who work in the food industry, that's my hope.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, the other thing I'll just say is that you've clearly gotten the sense I live my life within the 40 yard lines. I don't live my life on the five yard lines where you can't hear people yelling at each other from the five yard lines of a football field. And I know that we've gotten so tribal in this country, so tribal with everything that if you're not all the way on one side or the other, you're wrong. And that's just not how I look at life. Just gives me great joy to find how can we make progress together? And it starts with assuming the best in people.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think that's who I am. I don't think it's something I've ever thought consciously about, but I do know that it's not just about being optimistic, but it's about being hopeful. There is a difference between hope and optimism. I think that hope is an active act. And look, I think it's so much this gets back to growing up. My parents got divorced after 25 years, and I'm watching all these conversations and there's two truths to every single conversation. And I think one of the gifts I got as a kid was getting to cherry pick the good stuff from each of my parents and leave the bad, didn't make them bad people. It's just like you pick and choose, but you start from a standpoint. This person actually means well. Their intention is to do the right thing. And we're all flawed. We all make mistakes constantly, but that's not a reason to vilify.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't we please have a charitable assumption about one another? I think I'd put that on there. I feel like when we go into a conversation with somebody or read about somebody and we assume the worst as the starting point, it doesn't usually end up very well. On the other hand, when you assume the best intentions, you just never know. It's very possible that you hadn't communicated, understood what someone really meant. And I feel like going into any relationship or experience with a charitable assumption is such a helpful thing.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to have a good conversation with you. So we had a great breakfast, and I'm going, all right, finally got Seth back in my good graces here as he's leaving the restaurant. After breakfast, I don't know what happened, but he banged into our clear door. The door was so clean that day. He banged into it and broke his nose.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope Seth won't mind this story, but he once told me exactly what was on his mind. He had a pretty bad service experience at one of our restaurants, Mileino. And he told me. And I've known Seth for a while. Love him. And I felt so badly and I said, I got to write a great next chapter on this. I got to figure out something. So I invited Seth to have breakfast with me at Mileino. And he didn't want to talk about the service mishap. He said, I gave you the gift. You go deal with it. That's your problem. Go figure that out.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, outside of our cookbooks and setting the table, which is the most gift I give, because someone's got to give it, I love marketing. I just love marketing because marketing is understanding the other person. Marketing is a dialogue. It's a lot like hospitality. And I love Seth Godin's books. And I would say that I've given many of his books, but probably the one that I've given the most is This Is Marketing. He's just so brilliant at getting to the essence of what something really is. He thinks marketing is when you can convey that people like us do things like this. And that sounds so simple, and yet it's so deep, actually. I believe that the biggest longing people have is to belong. And so great marketing actually doesn't just sell you something. It makes you feel like you belong to a tribe.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then there's your hospitality performance. And how did you make everyone else feel while you were doing it? That's worth 51 points. I think we both know 51 is a little more than 49. I don't want to get a 51 on my test. That's a failing grade. If I don't do the technical stuff right, if the food sucks or it took too long, doesn't matter how nice I am. I'm 100, but I will tell you right now that the only way I've learned to become essential and to burrow our way into people's hearts is the food better be damn good. But more than anything else,”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we want 100% employee, just like all of our employees would like. I want to get 100 on my test. I think that happened probably three times when I was a kid, but doesn't mean I didn't want it. And so it's our way of basically saying, great, you want 100 on your test, here's how you get it. Cool thing is there's only two ingredients in this recipe. There's your technical performance, how well you do the job you're paid to do. The most points you can get for doing it perfectly is 49.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a beautiful concept, and that's how that culture has been brought up. And I've learned a lot from it, but I do believe that the kind of people we hire who we call 51%ers, people who have a high hospitality quotient, genuinely are happier themselves when they do something that makes you feel good. But that's no reason that they should be penalized relative to this marketplace in terms of how much money they can make.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did not factor into your schedule. And so a lot of people who in order to make their money had to work weekends, sometimes away from their family, they could actually have a schedule that was a much better balance of life. So there were some wins in this. But at the end of the day, we just couldn't make the math work. And it just didn't seem right to tell our staff stop, you must tell our guests no thank you. That was a pretty awkward thing. Going back to Japan for a minute, they have a wonderful culture, very different from ours, and they call it Omo Tenashi, which is their word, which is so much more than hospitality. It's the providing of hospitality and service without expectation of any further reward in anticipation of someone else's needs.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Base wage. Obviously we were not doing tipping. So you could actually get a raise through the whole thing. So if you look at our staff, we factored in longevity, but sometimes the longest serving servers are the ones that most need to go because they're just overripe and they've lost their smoke. But we definitely factored in longevity because here's the thing. The way you make the most tips in a restaurant is generally through longevity because you get the classically the Thursday, Friday, Saturday shifts and classically you don't get the Monday, Tuesday lunch kind of thing. What was great, and this was a win for everybody, was that while longevity would factor into your base rate,”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really tough, and you want to take a communications lesson, just try rolling out hospitality included, hit your restaurants because tipping is such a deeply held American way of life, both for the people providing the service and for the people on the receiving end. This was a really tough thing to break, and not many restaurants joined us in this. A couple tried and a lot of them folded their hand well before we did on the whole thing. But what we did do, and I feel really good about this, was to do the same thing we do with our cooks. So you get a raise based on merit if you're a cook. If you're a server, you're getting the same adjusted minimum wage no matter what you do. And so we created learning opportunities with our team and we had several tiers of learning opportunities. And if you got to a different tier, you got a higher...”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After about two weeks of this, I said, and by the way, we had no vaccine at this point, so any server working there, serving someone who's not wearing a mask while they're eating, this was a dangerous time in New York. And I finally said, this is inhumane. This is not being on our employees' side. And so I said, guess what? We're going to resume tipping. But in so doing, we as a company will start to pay a percentage of our revenue every night to our cooks who are tip ineligible. I don't think that should be our responsibility, but I did not want to erode the gains we had made. And so now that's where we are. So our servers are making tips. And if we have a really busy night, our cooks are really happy. They're benefiting. They're not just like in so many restaurants where on a busy night, you're watching the waiters counting their”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New Yorkers who had been locked up in their apartments for all these months, unable to go to restaurants, they could only get curbside pickup and delivering that kind of thing. We're so incredibly grateful for our servers who are willing to come out and serve them on the sidewalk that they were literally throwing $20 bills at our servers, $50, $100 bills to say thank you. And now I'm telling our servers, not only can you not accept that, but you have to tell our guest you may not say thank you to me.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could have gone out of business and had to lay off a huge number of our team members. So finally in the summer of 2020, New York made it legal to open your restaurant with a certain number of outdoor tables. We weren't going to make any money, but it was going to helpfully get the city back up on its feet. And I was a big proponent for the city, for the whole industry. And I saw this really amazing dynamic happen to him”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tax credits, like real money that they pay us, the federal government pays you to accept tips. Does that seem crazy or what? And once we eliminated tipping, we had to forego, and the reason they did that is that probably 15 years ago, when the government realized they were not collecting a lot of taxes based on tips because people were hiding what they were making, they actually brought the restaurant industry under their cloak and they said For every tip dollar tip you report to us that your servers are making, we will pay you back a certain percentage. And so that's why they pay restaurateurs to take tips because they want the tips reported. But so we gave up a million bucks in making this choice. I just wanted to do the right thing. So now all of a sudden COVID happens.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can get up to eight weeks of paid time off. Wanted to put all that in the price. And we didn't want to scare people away from dying at our restaurants. And we wanted to leave some money for our investors. So we tried it at one restaurant, the modern really hard, but it worked pretty damn well. Amazingly, the guests did not balk. They loved not having to buy their coat back from the coat check at the end of the meal because everything was included. And then every four or five months, we'd roll it out at another restaurant. And we started to see our profit started to erode a little bit, but damn it. I was gung-ho on making this thing work because the good news was we were getting better cooks. And I knew we were doing the right thing. There's another thing that I should add is that in making this choice, we actually had to forego a million dollars in federal.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's why I wanted to call it hospitality included. And I wanted our staff to understand that. And so the math was really hard because by the time I included everything on the menu price, I don't want to bring our waiters down. I just want to bring our cooks up by 20%. Oh, by the way, I also wanted to bring our starting manager salary up because one of the worst things about the tipping system is that you cannot afford in most cases to promote yourself from being a great server, to being a manager without taking a 25% pay cut. That's really screwed up. There's nowhere to grow. That's a dead end for waiters. We're going to raise our manager's wage. Oh, by the way, we're also going to put in a retirement plan for our team. We're going to put in a family leave policy so that when people are pregnant or people have a baby, both the birth mother and the birth father.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has to include the cost of whatever it is that menu item is, right? The chicken and everything that came with it. It's got to include the cost of the linen, the flowers, the rent, the insurance. It includes everything except paying the person who brought it to your table. You're going to pay that two and a half hours after you start your meal. You're going to get your bill and then you're going to go into your other pocket and add 20% to that, but you're going to do it. With hospitality included, I said everything's included. And I purposely called it hospitality, not service, because the way I look at it is I want you to feel like you're paying for how we made you feel. I want the food to be free, the drink to be free, and when you look at that big number at the bottom of your thing, you got to feel like, man, I just got a $350 hug.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turkey, and I said. I am now declaring tips to be a drug, and we've got to get off this drug. And if we can't change the rules, we're just going to stop taking tips. And we came up with this idea called hospitality included. And my goal was that we would narrow the gap between what a cook could not make and what a server could make. I didn't want to punish our servers, but I wanted our cooks to get to make more money so we could attract more cooks. Otherwise, New York City is the preeminent dining capital in America was definitely going to be threatened. So we established this idea, did some really, really hard math. And I'm telling you it was incredibly hard because you've got three legs on the stool. You've got the consumer who's looking at menu prices that now include everything. So if you go to a typical restaurant in America, the menu price”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the cook's gonna make zero more money. And what I had noticed was that every year the waiters were making increasingly more money. Why? Well, because menu prices only go up and what's a tip if not a multiplier of the menu price. And cooks hourly wages had remained stagnant. And so you may say, well, why don't you just raise the cook's wage? Great. Every time I raise the cook's wage, I have to increase the menu prices, which only increases the disparity because now the tipped employee makes more. So I was really tired of trying to argue that New York State or many, many other states should change their laws so the tips can be shared. And so I said, screw it. I'm just going to take this into my own hands. And I came to a meeting one day with my senior leaders. And I played one of the worst John Lennon songs I've ever heard called.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody out onto the sidewalk, and I was mortified. It's like, you cannot do that. And yet here I was because of the tipping system where they were getting the adjusted tip minimum wage back then, which was $2.21. And if they didn't get a tip, they weren't going to be able to pay their rent. So I understood it, but it was just, I hated it. But then later, now bringing it up to the mid-2015 time, I said, you know what? I'm so tired of this system. where we are legally prohibited from allowing tips to be shared between waiters and cooks. Cooks work at least as hard as waiters. The guy who made the risotto stirring the risotto like crazy didn't work any less hard than the guy that brought it to the table. And by the way, if somebody's going to have truffles shaved on that risotto and therefore the price is going to go way up, the waiter is going to make a whole lot more money.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's like three of them living in a studio apartment commuting all the way from Queens. And we can't pay them any more money because we don't have any more money to pay them. We're trying to give them free metro cards, but that's not going to keep them. So the only way they can make a living is to be waiters. And something I'd been thinking about for many, many years was how much I did not like the tipping system. Initially, in the early part of my career, I didn't like the tipping system because there would always be a situation in these early days of Union Square Cafe or Grammarcy Tavern when a tourist from Japan or from France or Great Britain where there's not a big tipping culture would either leave no tip or they'd leave a pretty shitty tip. And it would be so demoralizing for the waiter. There was one occasion where one of our waiters actually chased”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had faced a major, major shortage in really good cooks. This was probably starting in about 2012, 2013, 2014. And I'll never forget I went to one of the restaurants we closed, which was a really good restaurant, but I think we got a subpar location for it. It was called North End Grill. And I'll never forget going into the restaurant one night. And I said to our general manager, Kevin, and I said, Got him, service has gotten really good here and I'm so proud. I spoke to four different servers and they all told me that they had graduated from the culinary institute of America. And I said, how are we getting so many people who want to be professional servers? This is great. And he goes, boss, I wish I could tell you that was the truth. He said, these are all people who wanted to be cooks, but they can't afford to be cooks.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People's lives. I want people to say my life got better because that restaurant existed. Doesn't matter how long. And God forbid the restaurant goes out of business. I want people to say, I just lost a little something when that restaurant closed. There's so many restaurants, dry cleaners, whatever, that come and go, and it's like, who cares? There's so many songs if I never heard it again, I'd be fine. But there's those handful of songs that when I listen to them, I'm grateful for the person who wrote it. I'm grateful for their life. My life got better because that song existed. And I can't even imagine my life if that song had never been written. That's my more than longevity. It's essentiality that I think matters.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had to close about three of them during COVID. And I think that learning to fail fast and to realize that if you hadn't tried the thing in the first place, there would neither have been a success or failure. So the real failure would have been not in trying. But not everything has to go on forever. The late restaurateur Joe Baum had this great expression that I love and I don't love. But he used to say that the definition of a classic restaurant is one that can outlive its original lease. That was a goal of mine for a long, long time. And we frankly, we've done that with almost all of our restaurants. I now have a different goal of my own, which is I want our restaurants. And I think your podcast is this as well. And we all have songs in our lives that are like this or pieces of art or movies or books. But I want our restaurants to become essential.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Return on their original investment. They got all their money back, plus a couple pennies. So if you're going to close a place, at least that was the way to do it. And the biggest learning I had was there's no shame in closing. Since closing tabla. I would say we've probably opened 15 restaurants and we've probably closed another six.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Told our landlord, told the community, we invited all of the alumni of the restaurant in to come cook with us. So we celebrated the restaurant. We hosted job fairs for all of our team members, not just with us teaching them how to interview and working potentially in our other restaurants, but again inviting Famous chefs who had once cooked with us or general managers who had once worked with us to come in and hire our staff. We hosted three fundraisers. We brought in Indian chefs from around the country to do a fundraiser for earthquake victims in India. We did a fundraiser for Madison Square Park. So by the time this was done, we paid our landlord everything. We actually even paid our investors, I think they got it.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting a promotion. And I finally gathered the courage to do what I should have done two years sooner. I'll never forget the day. I've said, look, what if we could distinguish ourselves as much based on how well we closed a restaurant as we had with how well we had opened the restaurant? And so we started writing a list of, all right, what are all the ways that we could look back on this and say we did it the right way. First thing was We told our whole staff now that sounds, well, why is that such a beat? Well, sadly in our business, sometimes the first time a staff learns a restaurant's going out of business is the day they go to work and see a padlock on the door because the restaurant is dead afraid that no one will work there. No one wants to stay on a sinking ship. So we told our staff quarter of year ahead of time.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tableau was a great Indian expression and a very groundbreaking way in New York City using fresh green market ingredients. We had a fantastic chef who sadly died during COVID. Floyd Cardot's groundbreaking restaurant lived for thirteen years, probably should have closed it at year eleven. We had just hit the Great Recession, and we started to lose money. It was our biggest restaurant in terms of numbers of seats. We had 283 seats on three different dining rooms, two different levels. I was so afraid of closing it, so afraid of talking to the team and saying we couldn't make the restaurant work that I kept it open for two years longer than I should have. And that was the restaurant where for two years we had people working out of loyalty. No one was making a raise.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As if closing a restaurant is failure. And it was the stupidest thing I could have possibly written because closing a restaurant is not failing. And it's also nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to be proud of to keep a restaurant open forever. It is or it isn't. So Tabla, I guarantee you, I was so falsely proud with what I had written that I kept Tableau and I was so afraid of my dad's, you know, I didn't want to go down the path of being my dad. You telling me that something, I couldn't make something work here?”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say that I was probably the first, most pivotal. Experience for me was closing the first restaurant I ever closed, which was Tablea, an Indian restaurant. Interesting that I'm using an Indian film to talk about this. Tableau was about 13 years old. And if I regret one thing that I wrote in setting the table, it was actually in the very first paragraph of the book. And I proudly stated at this point we had been in business for about 20 years. And I proudly stated how many restaurants we had opened. And then I super proudly stated, and in all that time, we've never.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many, many, many. Every day we have micro failures. There's a really good movie called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I don't know if you've ever seen it. So it's a terrible title because I can almost never remember it. I want to say Carnation Chrysanthemum, but it's the best exotic marigold hotel. Takes place in India. There's two great lessons from that, one of which I think answers, there's probably more than two, but one of my favorite lessons is that the only real failure is the failure to try and that the measure success is how we cope with the disappointment.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like you cannot work here. You've betrayed integrity. You've betrayed someone on our team. You've betrayed one of our guests. You've betrayed our investors. If you cross any one of our stakeholders, that's a very different conversation. Lack of integrity. But if it's just not the right fit, number one, it shouldn't be the first time they've heard about it. And they may not love the conversation. Who in the world wants to be exited? But I'll tell you one thing I feel really good about is that We have a pretty small industry and invariably if you're someone who left our business on your terms or on our terms, you're probably going to be serving me in a restaurant sometime in New York. And I feel really good that I never mind seeing these people. It just feels like as long as it's clean and we were honest with each other, it tends to work out in the end.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so almost right that you keep kind of jiggering it around to make it right, even though you know it's not right and the piece knows it's not right. And what starts to happen is the paper on top of the jigsaw piece starts to fray a little bit. And in fact, the jigsaw puzzle, if you keep trying, starts to fray. Well, that's what we do too often with employees that are almost right, but they're not really the right fit. And it ends up not being good for the puzzle or for the puzzle piece. So I try to explain that to people. If you get that conversation with me, chances are probably 80% that the next conversation is you're a beautiful jigsaw piece, but you should probably be part of a different puzzle. It doesn't make you wrong. It doesn't make you bad. Now, if it's someone who actually did something bad, that's a very different conversation.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've all done jigsaw puzzles, and like the more challenging they are, you get to this point where it's starting to take some shape, but you still have a lot more pieces that you haven't put together than what you have in your little shape there. And invariably, you're going to come up with a piece that looks like it's right. And you put it down, and it's almost right.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing is it shouldn't be the first time you've had the conversation. There's nothing worse than when somebody feels like they got whacked in the back of the head and they're just shocked because you had never had the conversation. You hadn't had the tough conversation that said either your performance or your behavior. It's one of the two are not measuring up. And that's another reason that we have to be really clear about what excellent performance looks like and what the wanted behaviors are, which we're very, very clear about. By being upfront with people and not having this be the first time you're having the conversation takes a lot of the emotion out of it. It doesn't mean someone's going to be happy, but it basically sounds like actually something that I've said on a few occasions, not in the time I'm actually exiting somebody, but in the time leading up to it, is I use what I call the jigsaw puzzle analogy.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the behaviors I don't want. So I've now learned that the culture you have in your organization is the sum of all the wanted behaviors that you celebrate, minus all the unwanted behaviors that you tolerate. And I've learned that the hard way because people think I'm full of crap. They can read anything I write about our culture, etc. But if I'm tolerating behaviors that don't promote either the excellence or well-being of the team, then everything I've done on the positive side should be called into question.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the person where you just go, you know, you're way better than this, but for some reason, you're just choosing not to bring it here. And so that's going to have a pretty short life as well. But by actually naming all four of those things, it really, really helps us to have these conversations. And we tell people up front, they see that mirror. So it's not the first time you're having this conversation. It gives you a language to say, here's where you are right now and it's not working. And I'll say probably the greatest lesson I've learned about anything has been really trying to understand how do you scale culture. And I've kind of come up with this equation in my own mind that took me a long time to get to. I used to think that by rewarding the behaviors I wanted, that was the best way to fuel the culture I wanted. And now I look at it a little bit differently because that's turning a blind eye sometimes.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're going to have to learn that this isn't working, and that's going to be a very, very short, that's got to be a short window because the longer that person stays on the team, everyone else on the team says, why should I try if they keep batting that person in the lineup instead of benching them or sending them to the minor leagues, why should I try? The hardest one I find is the can but won't.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too often we ignore those people because, oh, that's easy. We don't have to worry about Johnny because he always gets it right. But you really want to water those flowers and celebrate them. If you have someone who can't but will, I'm going to coach them and I don't mind saying this, but the wick on my candle is pretty long for someone who will. Because if you can teach them how to do the thing and they're willing to do it and they've got the right approach, the right hospitality attitude. Once they learn how to do it, you're going to have a loyal employee for life because you stuck with him. Now on the other hand, so let's say that's a But let's say you've got someone who can't and won't. I'm going to put the candle underneath their rear end.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so basically, if you have someone who will but can't, that's a very different thing than someone who won't and can. You know, I could go through all of them, but what we've basically done, Tim, is that we have an action point and a timeframe for each one of those. So if you've got somebody who... Can and will. I want to celebrate that person. I want to replicate that. Those are my flowers. I really want to water them.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in the bottom left, it says will, and in the bottom right, it says won't. So you basically have someone's technical abilities that can and can't. And then you have somebody's emotional willingness or aptitude, and that's will and won't. And so what we've been able to do, we've actually created mirrors, which we put in the locker rooms of our restaurants because we're not trying to keep this a secret. The mirror has all four quadrants. And so when you go put on your uniform every day, you get to look at yourself in the mirror if you so choose and see this quadrant.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to ask yourself, what will this do to the fabric of that group, that troop that's working together? So I was able to come up with the help of some restaurateurs in California. They gave me this model that I just absolutely love. And we've turned it into something that we do. And they basically created a four-quadrant thing. You've seen these axes many times with the y-axis and an x-axis. In one of the quadrants, there's the word can Say the upper left hand it says can and then in the upper right it says can't”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who shouldn't have been on the team? So a big thing happened over time and not too far on the rearview mirror either. And that was this thing that I've already alluded to, which is that, number one, it's a business, not a family. One of the great things about the restaurant business is that it does feel family-ish to people because you spend so many damn hours working with each other. But it's not a family. So it's a good thing, but it's a double edged sword because when you fire somebody from the family, also known as your restaurant,”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've gotten much, much better at it as the years have gone by. I mean, I'll never forget the first people I had to fire when I was 27, 28. I'd lose sleep for days, literally days. I even went on my honeymoon knowing that I was going to have to fire someone when I came back from my honeymoon. I really regret that. I really regret that I hadn't done it ahead of time because that's not something that I should have been thinking about on the honeymoon. You know, the early days, I really looked at our business as if it were a family. Again, the way I grew up, it's like my job was to keep the family together. I would be great at somebody wasn't working out at one position. I'd find a different position and move them to anything to keep them because it felt like I had somehow failed if someone was leaving our company. And I was really, really good on the other hand at rewarding great performance, but I was pretty damn bad and or slow at exiting people.”
2023-04-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming Setbacks, The 6 Traits of Exceptional People, The 4 Quadrants of Performance, Lessons from Hospitality Excellence, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT