Assignment 1 Bus 508 Entrepreneurial Leadership

Assignment 1: Entrepreneurial Leadership

Business 508: Contemporary Business

When starting a business there are many factors that one must take into consideration. Several businesses succeed and several fail yearly, but you have to chart out an exact plan of action that will help your business to prosper. An outlined objective and a solid foundation are two good things to start building your business around. An objective will give you focus and a solid foundation will give your objective room to develop. These are steps that the founding family of Five Guys Burger and Fries, The Murrell’s, learned early in the business world and their success has landed them as one of the fasting growing restaurant chains in their industry.

Five Guys have a humble philosophy which is to focus on a quality product and to provide excellent customer service to the best of their ability. Five Guys doesn’t believe in having a menu with a plethora of items to choose from because they feel that degrades the quality of their products and they only want to serve the best to their customers. They have no freezers only coolers because nothing they serve is ever frozen and they also have simple advertising and décor which is much different than most of their competitors. Their menu is kept simple and only consists of well done hamburgers, french fries, and hotdogs. The CEO and founder, Jerry Murrell, stands behind keeping the menu to what their best at and trusts this is the only option for their franchise. “He sees the demise in other restaurants when they start to offer too many items and they get away from their core” (Burke, 2012).

The first Five Guys opened back in 1986 and upon opening Jerry Murrell had one initial objective, to keep his family together. When his two eldest sons decided not to attend college and help open a restaurant with their father, Jerry’s first objective was already met. To the Murrells’s family was important and to this day the family makes all...