When Randy Garutti announced his plan to retire as Shake Shack’s CEO last December, ending a nearly 20 year-long run—he’d been considering an exit for nearly five years, waiting for the right moment. That moment has arrived. “It’s time for the company to benefit from the next generation of leaders,” he wrote in a letter to staff last December.
The first generation of leaders includes Garutti and Shake Shack founder and Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) founder Danny Meyer, who brought a fine-dining background and priorities to what was once a single hot dog stand in Madison Square Park. The cart officially became Shake Shack in 2004. (Other names under consideration included “Dog Run” and “Custard’s First Stand.”) At the time, Garutti was working as director of operations across USHG’s portfolio of fine-dining restaurants, wearing a suit and tie at Gramercy Tavern one day, and cooking burgers for Shake Shack the next.
It took Shake Shack four years to open its second location, on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Garutti spearheaded the effort, discovering and securing the space, then just four blocks from his apartment. Sales surpassed the original location as soon as it opened. In January 2015, the company went public with 63 restaurants, and the stock price has more than doubled in the years since. Shake Shack now has more than 500 restaurants and is considered a trailblazer in the “fast fine” space—nicer than a fast food restaurant, but more casual than a traditional full-service restaurant.
Asked about success, Garutti contextualizes every milestone. Shake Shack opened years before the iPhone, he notes. It later came of age during the look-at-me social media generation; posting a photo from the line at Shake Shack was seen as a form of social capital. Garutti realized the concept would go big, he says, when Shake Shack opened in Kuwait in 2011.
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