Ask Jerry Murrell what he does at Five Guys and he will tell you, cheerfully and at length, that the answer is almost nothing.
“I get a lot of credit for doing things, but I don’t do much,” he said in a recent interview from the company’s Alexandria headquarters. “Janie and the boys do it all.”
That is a generous accounting, but it is the one Murrell has stuck to for four decades. Five Guys turned 40 this year — the company opened its first carry-out counter in Arlington in 1986 — and in that time it has grown into a global chain while remaining, in its founder’s telling, a family business that never stopped acting like one that happens to sell hamburgers…