Shake Shack Founder Danny Meyer Says Stop Fixing Weeds, Feed Flowers

Danny Meyer, founder of Shake Shack and founder and executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group, says the leadership rule that reshaped his career came from his grandmother's garden — not from a business book.

Meyer shared the story with Shawn Walchef of the Restaurant Influencers podcast while discussing his new book, What Could Possibly Go Right? The core shift: he stopped spending his attention on problem employees and started supporting his best ones.

Where did the 'feed the flowers' rule come from?

As a child visiting his grandmother Louise in St. Louis, Meyer learned to identify and pull weeds. As he got older, he kept reaching for the weeds even as the flowers grew. His grandmother proposed a different approach.

"Let's feed the flowers," Meyer recalls her saying. "When the flowers are flourishing, they are going to create so much shade that the weeds are gonna die anyway."

Years later, Meyer recognized the same pattern in how he ran restaurants. He was pouring time into trying to change employees who caused problems, while overlooking the people who excelled at their jobs and made their teammates better.

Watching a field of sunflowers gave him a second image for the job. The flowers turn toward the sun, and Meyer realized leaders are the sun. "We want the gravitational pull for all the sunflowers to be in the right direction," Meyer said. "So that's where we need to shine our light."

The takeaway in plain words: where a leader shines attention determines which people grow.

Does profitability conflict with hospitality?

Meyer challenges the idea that hospitality and profitability work against each other. He once believed that focusing on the financial side of his business could get in the way of caring for people. Experience changed his mind.

"You can offer so much more hospitality when you're profitable," he said.

In his view, profit becomes a problem only when owners start cutting what guests value or what employees need to serve them. "You don't get more profitable by cutting muscle," Meyer said. "You get there by strengthening your muscle."

The lesson: a financially healthy company has more capacity to look after employees, guests and suppliers, and cutting what people need usually costs more than it saves.

What does 'collecting the dots' mean?

Meyer also teaches restaurant owners to remember the details that matter to people. The principle comes from his earlier book, Setting the Table: always collect the dots so you can always connect them. The dots are pieces of information about people that can become opportunities to care for them.

He pointed to a longtime colleague, Richard "RC," whom he met when RC managed Wolfgang Puck's Postrio in San Francisco. Meyer's Union Square Cafe regulars wanted tables at Postrio, and RC's guests wanted reservations in New York. Helping each other's guests led to a friendship and nearly 30 years of working together.

"The people who are greatest at the game are the people who care the most about making human connections," Meyer said.

For business owners, the practical version is simple. Notice a new job, a wedding or a hard week — and act on it. It's a low-cost way to build the connections Meyer says matter most.

What should owners take from Meyer's rule?

Three lessons emerge from Meyer's account:

• Audit your attention. If most of your time goes to the weakest performers, your best people may not be getting the support they deserve.
• Treat profit and care as mutually reinforcing. Profit funds hospitality; cutting what people need to do their jobs rarely saves money.
• Collect details about people. Small observations, acted on, build the human connections that compound into decades-long partnerships — as RC's nearly 30-year relationship with Meyer shows.

Meyer's bet, grounded in a garden in St. Louis, is that feeding the flowers beats pulling the weeds.