It happened to be located on the site of Harry and Esther Snyder’s former house. “If you are going to grow your organization,” explained William Martin, who devised the University’s initial training manual and curriculum, “you need a training program, and that’s the bottom line. That was Rich’s motivation for the University. He really understood that.” Originally built as a full-service drive-through restaurant (if bigger than a typical In-N-Out store), the University was where management-level employees could receive instruction and learn how to run a unit in a real-world environment.* It also allowed the company to reinforce its own particular methodologies and strategies. The concept was not entirely new. In 1961, McDonald’s had founded its own Hamburger University in the basement of one of its restaurants in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. A full-time training center, Hamburger U was originally set up as an instructional program for its licensees, intended to ensure uniformity in every aspect of the McDonald’s system.
