Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Obviously, we're excited to be here with you today. Hopefully, many of you, if not all of you, have got a chance to read the news that hit the wire this morning. We're making some big announcements, and we'll expand on some of that today. I'm happy to have Katherine Fogertey , our CFO, with me today to talk through our results from 2024, but more importantly, to talk about the future and how excited we are about what we're building at Shake Shack. Shake Shack has been around now for 20 years. It's hard to believe. It still feels like a startup, new brand in the industry. It's been 20 years since Danny and Randy opened up the first Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in New York. It's been 10 years since the company has gone public.
So we have a lot to celebrate. We're going to be celebrating the 10-year anniversary later this month. But today, we're here to really talk about the future and how excited we are about what's going on at Shake Shack. So here's some cautionary notes for you all. I'm sure you have that memorized. So it's really exciting to be at Shake Shack. I have been here now for almost eight months. It's hard to believe. And we've spent those eight months really putting our plans together, building a long-range plan that we feel great about, and laying out what it's going to take for us to achieve our lofty aspirations. So today, we're going to share some of that with you. So you can see there's a lot going on there.
I just love that video because I think it really helps to frame kind of where we're going and also where we've been, and as we're coming up on our 10-year anniversary of being a public company later this January, I think it's important for everybody just to remind themselves on what we had aspired to do when we went public 10 years ago, so Shake Shack, very big brand, but if you can imagine, 10 years ago, there were only 31 domestic company-operated Shake Shacks that existed at the time, and less than half of that was actually in the comp base, so the company had this really, really big dream that one day we would be able to achieve at least 450 Shacks, and it's really exciting today to sit here with 329 company-operated Shacks. We know we're getting close to that.
There are so many amazing restaurants in our system. We've grown. We've evolved. We've changed. But we've kept to our commitment to providing amazing returns on capital for our investors. Can I go to the next one? OK. So also, for people who haven't followed the story over the past 10 years, just a reminder of, with those 450 units, what we had committed to investors and what we had held ourselves to as far as unit economic components. So first of all, those 450 Shacks, we had goaled ourselves to kind of 2.8 million -3.2 million in AUVs. We had goaled ourselves to those openings would generate about 18%-22% restaurant profit margin. We would invest on a net basis $1.5 million -$2.5 million to build them.
And overall, we wanted to, with our investments and new restaurant builds, we wanted to generate kind of at least this 30%-33% cash-on-cash returns. Now, when we just closed our books and looking back over the past year, the Shacks that are in our comp base, we generated $4 million. We exceeded that target of what we were trying to build here over the past 10 years. We just reported out today our restaurant profit margin. We're at about 21% overall, 21.4% for the full year. We've spent on average $2.2 million to build them, so within that range. And our cash-on-cash returns have exceeded that 30%-33% benchmark. So as Rob talked about, we have 20 years of opening up amazing restaurants. And we have done a great job of committing to these targets. And now, passing it over to my esteemed colleague.
So we talked about and we released today is that we now believe that we can deliver 1,500 Shake Shacks, company-operated Shake Shacks in North America. It's really amazing to think when Danny and Randy put that 450 target out there 10 years ago. That was aspirational. That was something that they thought maybe someday we can possibly get there. And here we are 10 years later. And we're on the verge of hitting that. And so how are we going to get from this 450 number that we're almost already at today, almost 330, up to 1,500 Shacks? It's four times where we are today. So it's obviously going to take building on the great legacy and foundation that was put in place at the outset of Shake Shack. But it's going to take some changes, too.
It's going to take some new ways of thinking about how we can be what we aspire to be. And the targets that we've put in place for these 1,500 Shacks are not significantly different than what we're delivering today. If you look at the numbers that we put out today, we anticipate growing our revenue in the double digits, low teen growth consistent with what we're executing today, system-wide unit growth also in the low teens, restaurant-level margins at least 22%, and then Adjusted EBITDA growth. It won't be necessarily the 48% that we delivered last year. But it's still very aggressive in the low to mid-teens. So we feel great about our ability to deliver these numbers that we have committed to today. And we've put out our three-year targets, obviously. In addition, it's really our long-range plan is our three-year plan.
We feel really confident about our ability to hit that. The 1,500 number isn't going to happen in the next three years. We're really confident about our ability to deliver these long-range guides over these upcoming three years. The reason why we have so much confidence is because we have a playbook. It's not rocket science. It's not some new AI technology. It's a lot of fundamental things that we're working on that are going to give us what we need to be successful. The first piece is building a culture of leaders. The biggest barrier to our ability to achieve 1,500 company-operated units is having enough people to run them. We can find the real estate. We can build the Shacks. We can build the supply chain capacity. What we really need are people that can effectively run our Shake Shacks.
And so right now, we have 330 units thereabouts. We've got 330 general managers. If we're going to build 45 next year, we need 45 new people, including turnover, to go and run those Shake Shacks. And so that's an increase of about 20% of that general manager population. And the way we feel comfortable doing that is the way we've always done it. We've always put our team members first. We've always cared about the development of the people running our restaurants so they can take care of our team members, and they can take care of our guests. So here's a video of kind of what it feels like to be a part of Shake Shack.
It's worth it to like where you work. It's fun. It's welcoming. It's motivating. It's a place to celebrate and to feel rewarded. Sure, at times it can be challenging. But it's also where you'll learn new skills and perfect the old ones. It can take you places. And it can open new doors. So while it's worth it to like where you work, it's even better to love where you work. Be a part of something good. Join the team. Shake Shack, worth it.
So at Shake Shack, Enlightened Hospitality, which starts with our team members, has always been in the core of everything we do. That's not going to change. But we need to accelerate that. So we're putting the infrastructure in to do all of that. And really what that entails is developing the talent, building a leadership pipeline, and making sure that our leaders of tomorrow are building the acumen to be able to run a $4 million revenue business. And we're really proud of the fact that Shake Shack's not like a lot of other restaurants. We're not just preparing food. We're actually making the food. We're actually cooking. And so we have an appeal for people that aspire to be culinary leaders to come and work at Shake Shack.
That's only going to continue to grow as we continue to grow and penetrate into markets in a much bigger way. Building that pipeline is job number one. Job number two is operations. Everything at Shake Shack starts with the food, but then quickly goes to operations. I mean, how you deliver the food, how you deliver Enlightened Hospitality can make all the difference. We are really excited about the way we're evolving our operating model. We're getting more efficient the way we manage our restaurants. We're working on new processes, new equipment that can conceivably help us be faster. Really proud of the progress that our teams have made. Up until a year ago, Shake Shack didn't even measure speed of service. Today, we're maniacally focused on it.
And that focus has led to significant improvements in our speed of service, which is going to mean a lot more as we go into suburban markets and leverage drive-throughs in a much bigger way. So we're really excited about the advancements we're making there. Sorry. And so we talk about it in terms of people, performance, and profit. The people we already talked about, building the culture of leaders, building tomorrow's GMs, performance, the metrics and the KPIs that we use. And if we do all that right, we're going to deliver profits. And it's been amazing to see the improvements in margins over the last seven months, just having a little bit more focus on how we're operating our restaurants. And that's what gives us the confidence to go in and open a lot more restaurants. We're building labor management tools.
We just implemented a new labor model in Q4, which we're really excited about. We've built a new scorecard where we say, here's what it takes to be successful at Shake Shack. When Stephanie Sentell, our new COO, showed up at Shake Shack, she asked her teams, who are your best operators? And they didn't have an answer. They said, well, what do you mean? The best from a retention standpoint? The best from a guest service standpoint? The best from a profitability standpoint? So her first job was building a scorecard where everybody's going to be measured on the same criteria. And we rack and stack every Shack, 330 Shacks top to bottom. And so now the folks that show up in the bottom know they're there. And it's not about berating them for being there.
It's about helping them understand what's different about what they're doing from the people at the top, and so we can continuously improve and make all of our Shake Shacks the best in the system, and a big part of the profitability and the margin enhancement is driving comps. Everybody in here is focused on comps. And we have gotten a lot better at driving comps at Shake Shack, and we're only going to improve. We're going to focus on culinary innovation, strategic culinary innovation, where we're going to build a strategic calendar that not just brings in new guests, but also optimizes the tickets that our current guests create. We're going to work on our core menu. We have opportunities like adding combos. We've talked about adding combos. That's going to improve our speed of service. It's also going to improve our value equation.
And then our digital footprint, we've gotten really good at targeting guests with surgical incentives that give them what they need to come back more often. And the last thing I want to talk about on this front is we're investing heavily in our tech stack to what Danny calls connecting the dots. Enlightened Hospitality was all about connecting the dots, understanding your guests in a way that made them feel like they were the most important person in the restaurant. Well, we're trying to do that from a digital standpoint. We're connecting every channel so that when a guest comes in, whether it's in our kiosks or our third-party delivery or our web or app, we know who they are, what they've purchased, and how we can deliver what they need to get them to come back more often and spend more while they're there.
Build & Operate our Shacks, the fourth strategic priority. This is really important. This is about how we get to the 1,500, and all the things I've talked about to this point, driving the margin, enhancing our margin, improving our operations, are what really allow us to have confidence that we're going to deliver 1,500 Shacks. Because the biggest part of this is we need to go in to places we haven't really been in before. We've just started over the last three or four years to really go out into suburban America and open drive-throughs. We didn't have that optimized out of the gate.
Today, we're working to do that, but we're also going beyond that. We're looking at smaller footprints so we can go into real estate that we didn't previously have access to a nd that's going to open up the aperture and give us the access that we need to go and expand rapidly. But it only works if we can get the cash-on-cash returns that we're getting today. And so in order to do that, we need to be able to deliver consistent margins with where we are today, with smaller Shacks doing less volume. And that's why when we put our long-range guide out, we give that range of $2.8 million-$4 million because we will be going into different places than we have been in. Usually, historically, it's kind of the corner of Main and Main for Shake Shack.
We'll be looking at other places to go. But we still have to deliver the returns that we expect. And we're going to do that because we've got great margins. We've got great operations. And we are reducing the cost of our builds. I mean, if you look at what we've done just over the last couple of years, our development and procurement teams have done an amazing job. We reached an all-time high of a net cost of 2.6 just two years ago. This year, we've wrapped up with an average of 2.2. And we've already committed to another 10% reduction next year. So as we continue to hold on our AUVs, improve margins, and decrease the cost of the assets that we're building, we're going to continue to deliver great returns for our investors.
I n order to do that, we've had to do a couple of things. So our development process, we've gotten smarter about our real estate. And we're getting improvements and cost reductions just from the scale. I mean, when we had 200 Shacks and building 20 a year, we weren't able to get the same pricing on the materials and the same scale benefits. So as we get bigger, it's only going to get better and improve the cost at which we're spending. And so with that, we have a ton of confidence in our ability to deliver the numbers we put out today. But Katie's going to walk you through that in a little bit more detail.
Oh, great. It's a very exciting time to be at Shake Shack and to be sharing all of this wonderful news with you. And all of the work that we've been doing to enhance our data and analytics and just get smarter in understanding our business really does set the foundation for continued long-term growth. I want to just share some of the highlights from the fourth quarter. All of the pre-announcement news is in the press release today and more details in the back slides here. But the overarching theme is that we ended 2024 with broad-based strength across the business. We grew total revenue by 15% to $329 million. We grew Same-Shack sales by 4.3% with really strong performance by our sales-driving initiatives and all of our strategies in place.
We also had a really great end of the year in development with a number of very strong openings from the team. Our AUV for the whole entire company across the board is $4.1 million. This is one of the leading AUVs across the restaurant industry and something we're really proud of, and with all of our focus on growing frequency and going forward, we're very positive about that momentum. On the profitability side, the work that we've been doing for now several quarters and the improvement in the business overall, we drove almost 300 basis points of improvement to our restaurant margin, ending with the fourth quarter at 22.7%. This is the highest fourth quarter margin that we've had since 2017, so it really just shows that the strategies at place are setting the stage for continued long-term growth.
And as we talk about all the time, and with our target here to grow units by about four-fold, it really does feel like we're just getting started. And finally, on the Adjusted EBITDA side, we expect to end the fourth quarter with $46 million in Adjusted EBITDA. I hate to end on this point because it's such an amazing point. But we grew Adjusted EBITDA by nearly 50% year- over- year in the fourth quarter. It's just tremendous performance across the board. And then here's some highlights for 2024 overall, just taking a step back. We had mid-teens revenue growth. We are approaching nearly $2 billion in system-wide sales with 579 Shacks globally across our company-operated and our licensed business. We had 76 new openings across the board last year with 43 on our company-operated side.
Restaurant profit margin, we expanded our restaurant profit margin by 150 basis points last year to about 21.4%. This was driven by some improvements that we've had in the supply chain, a lot of the work that we've had in operations with really refining that labor model and just getting tighter on how we're managing the overall system, as well as other profitability improvement plans. There's still, when we look at what's to come, we're very excited. Then finally, at about $175 million in Adjusted EBITDA, that's 33% growth year -over- year. We expanded our EBITDA margin to 14% of total revenue. We're really proud of all of the work that the company has been underway. Now looking to 2025, we've guided for another year of mid-teens revenue growth. We're expecting to grow revenue by 16%-18%.
We're anticipating about that 3% growth in Same-Shack sales. We're goaling ourselves, and with our pipeline in place, we're targeting opening 80 to 85 new Shacks across our company-operated and our licensed business. About 45 of those will be company-operated. That's 14%-15% year- over- year unit growth, also among the best in the industry. And with all of the work that we have in place and the improvement in the business overall, we're expecting another year of restaurant profitability margin expansion by about 60 basis points to approximately 22%. And then last but not least, we're expecting to grow our Adjusted EBITDA by about 14%-20%. So mid to high teens on that side to $200 million-$210 million. So a lot of great stuff underway here. We're really excited about the strategic priorities and our path to execute.
Yeah. I mean, and I would just close with our strategy is about driving top-line sales growth while still maintaining or growing our margins. The thing I get really excited about is the marketing team. It's like a guerrilla marketing team, right? We don't have big national media budgets, but they're out there driving top-line sales growth, leveraging surgical targeted promotions to drive transactions while we're still growing margins. And that's going to be our goal. And I think we've evidenced over the last few years that this brand continues to have pricing power, but we hold that very closely. Our goal is to minimize the amount of pricing we have to take. We will mitigate inflation to maintain our margins, but we want to continue to improve our value perception in the marketplace.
And the things that I've talked about that are going to help our operations, help our speed, like combos and other things that we're doing on our menu management side, all have intentionality around improving the value perception while continuing to enhance our margins. So with that, I want to thank you all for being here today. I want to thank you for your interest in our company and our brand. We have an amazing executive team. We're building not just a restaurant pipeline, but a talent pipeline that's going to help us achieve these lofty aspirations we announced today. So thank you all.
Thank you.