This content was created by Vishen Lakhiani. This content was uploaded by Vishen Lakhiani. This is a YouTube video titled "The Former Co-CEO Of Chipotle Tells The Secret To Making Money | Monty Moran" created on June 17, 2021. It features a conversation between Monty Moran and another speaker discussing the philosophy behind successful business ventures, using examples like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, and the origins and growth of Chipotle as a business model focused on quality and passion rather than just profit.
Chapters
If your goal was to make a lot of money, that is the first indication that you are not going to make a lot of money. People talk way too much about money and dollars and numbers. What is it? Why is Elon Musk successful? Because he wants to make money? Well, that can't be the case. Elon wasn't worried about money. You know, Elon was passionate and wanted to do something that he was thrilled to do and that he thought would be awesome for the world. You know, I mean, the iPhone, you know, Steve Jobs was trying to make this incredibly designed, amazing thing that everyone would love and totally be thrilled with and think was perfect and wouldn't be able to live without. And his passion was to build an amazing, amazing, incredibly well designed product. I find that the people who are thrilled and excited about something and allow themselves to go in the direction that they're thrilled to go tend to be people who become quite, you know, quote unquote successful. Now, of course, because he was so fascinated and passionate about doing something beautifully well, money followed. And that's almost always the case with anyone who makes a successful business or makes a lot of money. It wasn't money they were trying to make. They were trying to make something incredible.
What if this could change the world? A burrito? Yeah. You are so weird. It could. It could change how we plant things, water things, grow things, pick things, move things, and transportation things.
What?
That's not a thing. It could make our farmers happier, more organic, more real, more soil helping, less carbon emitting and world changing, changing. Are you still talking.
Delicious food available to everyone? You know, what's in all of this food? Food that nourished the freshest of the fresh. Come in.
You're going to be hearing that sizzle. That's how you know that we always have fresh food.
Fresh is what you stand for.
Exactly.
That's what we wanted to do. We wanted to change the way people think about meat, fast food. It wasn't money they were trying to make. They were trying to make something incredible. Steve and I knew each other in college. Steve was an amazing chef, really, really great cook. And in college, of course, I was broke and he started inviting me to these dinner parties he'd have at his house. And he'd cook these amazing meals. I mean, something that you'd get at, you know, a white tablecloth, super high end restaurant. When Steve cooked in the kitchen, he cooked with such incredible focus and determination and every detail mattered. He was a real artist with what he did. I was so fascinated to learn it. That I would jump in and say, how can I help? At some point he was saying, hey, I'm going to start this restaurant. I'm thinking of, you know, having this burrito restaurant. He had myself and my dad and a couple other friends over to his house one time to make these burritos and see what we thought. He had put together these burritos and we sat down to eat them and God, they were unbelievable. They were way too good. Not too long after that, opened the first Chipotle on Evans street in Denver, Colorado. Very small, 850 square foot unit. And it just took off. And Steve was behind the counter cooking himself and making these beautiful burritos. Steve's reason for building Chipotle was actually because Steve wanted to open a white tablecloth restaurant, a really high end restaurant. And he knew that the economics of that were very, very troublesome. Like most of those restaurants went out of business quickly. So he built Chipotle to be something that he thought had a high degree of likelihood of success, that could be a cash cow that could produce enough money so he could do what he really wanted to do, which have this high, high end restaurant. But when it was that successful, okay, well, let's just do one more. Okay, he did a few more. And the second one was more successful than the first, by far. The third one was hugely successful. Okay, maybe we have something here. Then, you know, we started really focusing on expanding more and more because people were calling for Chipotle in all their various neighborhoods. Hey, bring one to my neighborhood. So it was a neat problem to have that people wanted us to expand. Chipotle was able to change the way people think about neat fast food so that the people all over the country and other countries where we have Chipotle could start to say, well, if we want to eat quickly and we have to, and we don't have much money, it doesn't have to be something that isn't a very high end experience. It can be something really special. And that was, I guess, it sort of democratized good cooking.
