8 People Who Matter
If Ells is the food person at Chipotle, co-CEO Moran is the people guy. It’s his task to drive the company’s employees to safely prepare, assemble, and serve Chipotle’s food at a pace that can exceed 350 transactions per hour. “[Without] dramatic improvements in throughput,” Moran told investors before the outbreaks, using the restaurant-industry term for serving customers quickly, “we would not be able to achieve such phenomenal same-store sales.”
Moran has been a trusted confidant to Ells since Chipotle started. Moran served as Chipotle’s outside general counsel before joining in 2005 as COO to help scale operations. Following the company’s 2006 IPO, Ells increasingly relied on him, and when Ells decided to move to New York full-time in 2008, Moran essentially took over the company’s Denver headquarters.
By the time Moran was elevated to co-CEO in 2009, the company had moved to a new office on Denver’s Cherry Creek River, where the mood became more “corporate” and “tense,” sources say. Dogs were no longer allowed, and executives initially moved to an area locked to most staff. “It was the
