YouSaid · the spoken record

Jerry Murrell

lines on the record: 54
first: 2019-01-14
most recent: 2019-01-14
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

“My mom liked hamburgers. She probably would have thought that was a good idea. In fact, my mom used to say, if you could make a good hamburger or serve a good drink or give a good haircut, you'll always.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, in fact, my wife always says she gets upset of me if I'm sitting out in the front yard eating a can of beans or something. I always wear Levi's, but I don't know how other people look at me, but I don't think any of us put on airs. I hope not.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. They had a little bit of money but not much. And one of them 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 weeks ago on my boat in Florida. We drink beer together, and same as it was thirty, forty years ago.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God, yeah Two things that give a lot of credit to them. 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 and heck I got my kids and my wife because it seems like to me without them we would have done nothing. But we were lucky, real lucky, real, real lucky.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've got 60 stores there. We're doing France. We just opened up in Sean's de la Zay. 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 try to figure out how they did it. I can't figure it out”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of about 14, 1500 restaurants, we... We have a joint venture in Great Britain and France and Germany where we own with our partner half, that's about 60 stores, and then over here we own about 450 out of the 1,400.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what he does mostly. And I got another one, the fanatic about the food. And so he goes around the world putting on shows and how to cook things right and stuff. 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 as 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. One of them just loves taking care of making sure there's no food-borne illness. She's just a fanatic about it and she loves doing it. So I let him find out what they want to find that there's a gap that can't be filled by them, then we'll hire somebody.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they said well, now we're going to go to North Carolina and South Carolina. Nobody 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely 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. I remember the first franchise storeway opened up was in Richmond. And I said, Oh my God, Richmond, nobody's going to know who we are in Richmond. I couldn't even sleep the night before. Richmond. That's like down the road 90 miles. It's nothing. But I couldn't even sleep. I said, nobody's going to know who we are. And Richmond's Dover was successful.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because when you start franchising, first of all, telling a franchisee that you're not going to worry about food costs, that 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. You know, 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, We buy from people and we're going to stick with them. That was all hard to sell to franchisees. But 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 can't remember how many stores the first year they were going to sell.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of how I read it and the legal stuff was amazing, all the rules you had to follow and everything. So they talked me into it.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there was a guy named Mark Mosley that was selling franchises for another company. He had 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My sons came to me about the nineteen late late nineteen ninety 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the thing is, we had figured out the nuts and bolts. Most franchisors start off to franchise. We didn't start off the franchise. We had no idea we're 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. So, when it came time to franchising, I mean, we had a perfect system.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So I kind of, if it wasn't for them and my wife, there would be no five guys. I didn't build five guys. 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 listen to me.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I just thought it was fun. 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was almost the day I got hit in the head with a broom. I must have been having a bad day at the office or something, and I went home and I said, my wife, I quit. And she said, you 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they like the fact that we're 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 every one of them, 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For store number two, we probably only had a raise maybe. Maybe 150,000. But we had a lot of people that just wanted to throw money at us.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“not in a real sense. We just made a note that if this store does 20,000 a week, you get a certain percentage that 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it was always too many ways to get cheap people that way. So 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 going to come in and ask for the money back. But my method to my manus 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 going to get better financing. And I can go back to these people and pay them back anytime I wanted.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember going in the bank, and they said, you're going to do what? I said, I want to put another hamburger place. And it was just, 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 we'd be willing at any one time to give us money.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 luncheon breakfast but was downstairs, and it was an alley. And there was nothing on a door, if I remember right, just a steel door coming off the alley. But all the officers around there would go to this place, and it was unmarked, and it was in alley. And I was always impressed with the fact that that guy could do that much business up there, and I knew him. I knew 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 we'll just 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kids didn't know why we were raising the prices, but we would always say food costs that 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to this day, I can't eat mayonnaise by itself. So we had like nine different dishes with mayonnaise and take a little spoon and everybody would taste the mayonnaise blindfolded. And he said, 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 we took our blindfolds off, my wife, myself, and all the boys picked the same mayonnaise. He couldn't believe it. And that was the mayonnaise we're getting from New York. So Jane and I, what we would do is 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. No way because this guy was so hard to deal with. So he had all the family come in and do a blind mayonnaise taste.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're selling something for like three times, four times what McDonald's was sound 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at Then we said, well, buy the most expensive cooking oil you want to cook in, and it was peanut oil, because that's where 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 part of the best bakery in Arlington at the time. But for a restaurant business, that would be expensive. We're paying about seven times for a hamburger bunny as McDonald's was then.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what we did with the kids, Janie and I would not tell the kids how much we were paying for the product. We 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 a pickles you want, buy those pickles.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went to Threshers in Ocean City and looked on the potato bags, and we found out they came from Rigby, Idaho, a guy named Rick Miles, a small potato dealer out there, so we got a hold 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 multi-millionaire because we buy all our potatoes from him.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, 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, as Posen was right near us, and they raised potatoes, I grew up on a farm that we raised a lot of potatoes. I knew how to cook a potato. And I knew we knew how to cook a hamburger. That was about it.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 or something like that”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we didn't And when we first opened up at eleven o'clock, there was no business at all until quarter twelve. And then one person finally walked in. And 1230, we were almost packed. And we made money from our very first day. We were broken even and we were paying our rent.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my lawyers said you should incorporate and you need to have a name as he fills out the papers. This was so well thought out that we didn't have a name. So me and Janie and the boys said, hmm, we had three sons plus one more son with Janie. 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 as soon as we get the papers filled up. We'll change it. And the lawyer said, okay.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 kids jumped into it”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equipment, we found junk equipment, rebuilt it ourselves. It was 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 want to go to college. They pretty much said, no, we'd rather do something else.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the same thing the banks said at the time, you guys out of your mind, but we did it a little different. We said, let's not put a lot of money into it. and less find a place where the rent is real. 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to hear the short side or the long side? No, I want the long side. Well, where I grew up. There was a guy named Push him Up Tony and push him up Tony had a little tiny hamburger place 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 it must have been 20 places selling boardwalk fries, but only one place had a long line. And that was Thresher, so 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”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the middle 70s 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 going to 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 wait until it crashed and trying to get rid of it.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a financial planner. I tried a few businesses. I started an oil business in Texas and I did a couple other dumb things. I tried to start a water business of all things. I thought selling bought water back then would have been a good idea. And everybody laughed at me. I had a hard time raising money.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Brenmar and started selling financial products to people in the DC area. And that's what I did.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a 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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It wasn't sure what he was going to do with his life. But he was sure of one thing.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-01-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Five Guys: Jerry Murrell (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT