Danny Meyer's Promote-From-Within Playbook: 80% of GMs Began as Hourly Staff

Eighty percent of general managers at Union Square Hospitality Group started their careers as hourly workers, according to founder and executive chairman Danny Meyer — the clearest evidence of the promote-from-within culture at the center of his 41-year restaurant empire.

The statistic is one of several revelations in Meyer's new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, which goes on sale today. It arrives 20 years after Setting the Table, the influential management text that popularized "enlightened hospitality" — a framework that ranked employees first and investors fifth among five tiers of stakeholders.

Meyer says the earlier book was incomplete. "I had never scaled anything. I had no experience having a second version of anything, never mind over 700 versions of something like Shake Shack," he told Fortune's Diane Brady in an interview yesterday. "I had also never closed a restaurant."

That gap between the two books defines the new one. Meyer's failures, and his handling of them while continuing to grow, form the core of the volume. The intervening two decades brought shutdowns alongside expansion: fine-dining icons like Gramercy Tavern and The Modern, the sale of Eleven Madison Park, a catering business, fast-casual ventures, and newer concepts such as Ci Siamo, which will soon open in Boston.

Meyer stepped down as CEO in 2022, handing the role to restaurant veteran Chip Wade. The succession, he admits, took more than one attempt. "I had a couple of false starts with it before," Meyer said. It worked the third time because he built a process for empowering others and learning to let go. The method was disarmingly simple: "What are all the things on the calendar that someone else on our team could do at least as well—or maybe better—than I can?"

He retained the founder and executive chairman titles, plus a set of responsibilities he describes with a common initial. "They all start with C. I still am our chief culinary officer. I'm our chief cultural officer: everyone is responsible for culture, but the buck has to stop with me. And I'm our chief creative officer, so when we have a new restaurant opportunity, I'm in the room helping to create what that concept should be," Meyer said.

The most consequential number concerns his workforce. "For 80% of our hourly workers, it is the first job they've ever had, and for 80% of our general managers, they started off as hourly workers," Meyer said. In an industry where turnover routinely exceeds 70% annually, that pipeline from first job to general manager functions as both a retention tool and a leadership factory — and it explains how a company running hundreds of Shake Shack locations and a portfolio of upscale restaurants can keep its culture intact without depending on outside management hires.

Meyer acknowledges he is often accused of optimism, and he does not dispute the temperament. "I'm just as tired as anyone I know of uncertainty, cynicism, negativity, skepticism, bad news," he said. He cannot fix the tax code or the tariffs, though he did apologize to Canada for the latter after detecting Brady's accent. What he can control is the question he starts every day with — the same one that titles his book.

He has also stayed in New York despite the city's persistent challenges, and he frames the friction as an asset. "No one is here by accident. It's way too challenging," Meyer said. "I think we all are getting our knives sharpened on the edge by being around so many strivers, and I just find that so energizing."

For operators and entrepreneurs watching labor costs climb and management talent thin out, Meyer's model offers a testable proposition: that a company which treats its first-job hourly hires as future general managers can scale past 700 locations without losing the culture that made the first location work.