Contemporary Buisness

Entrepreneurial Leadership

“Five Guys Burgers and Fries: Ingredients for Success”

Student Edward Chrzanowski

Professor Wade Ferguson

23 January 2013

Introduction

. According to Boones and Kurtz (2012), business can be defined as all

profit-seeking activities and enterprises that provide goads and services necessary to an

economic system. (pg. 5). Likewise, according to Boones and Kurtz ) 2012) ,

Entrepreneur is defined as a person who seeks a profitable opportunity and takes the

necessary risks to set up and operate a business. Leadership, according to Boones and

Kurtz (2012), is defined as the ability to direct or inspire people to attain certain goals.

(Pg. 233).

Jerry Murrell and his sons opened Five Guys Burgers and Fries in 1986. Its first store

location was in Arlington, Virginia. The Buisness started when Jerry Murrell and his

wife gave the choice to their four sons even to go to the college or start a business, and

the sons choice was to have their own business then they make it grow year after year.

After researching this subject, I think Five Guys philosophy was to concentrate solely on

food and serve freshly made food to its customers. This philosophy came under the

criteria of Factors of Production. According to Boones and Kurtz (2012) , Factors of

Production is defined as the four basic inputs for effective operation: natural resources,

capital, human resources and entrepreneurship. (Pg. 7). I believe this is their philosophy

because according to the reading, their approach to reaching their customers and maintain

them was through concentrating on food, by giving the customers fresh products and the

choice to choose. This is the role of the Factors of production as in the natural resources

state, it speaks of production inputs that are useful in its natural state, just as the beef for

the burgers at Five Guys. Capital is another key factor and this includes information and

other physical facilities needed for the production, just as the Five Guys restaurants were

designed for this.

Human resource is the next input and just as the others are, this also is very important in

the economic system. Human resource is anyone who works with the business and the

entire staff at Five Guys has played a very integral role in their success.

Finally, entrepreneurship is the other Factor of production. Entrepreneurship is the

willingness to take risks to operate the business. The operators of five guys showed

this when they took risks in their products, some of which worked and others did not.

An example of this Factor of production is in the production of Apple Ipod touch.

According to Tim Heese (2011), the factors of production are very important in the sales

of the Ipod Touch and just as the operators of Five guys took a risk to in their products to

give customers something new, so did the owners of Apple in the making of the Ipod

Touch.

What are the original values for the start up company and how it remains strong today?

After reading the article, I found the values for the start up company to be that they did

not just want to offer the same product but that they wanted to offer something better. In

this case, the vision f seeing what the customers needed was very important. According to

Boones and Kurtz (2012), Vision is defined as the ability to perceive marketplace needs

and what an organization must do to satisfy them. (pg. 23). This goes with Five Guys

because before the start of the company, the owners realized what exactly the

marketplace was missing (in freshly made products) and offered that to the customers

who accepted and continue to accept it. An example of this is the Icloud Apple service.

According to Joe Desposito (2012), the Icloud service is a