Ambition, persistence, vision and ability to seize opportunities and take massive action ultimately drove Ray Kroc to transform McDonald’s into the mighty behemoth it is today.
Raymond Albert Kroc was born in 1902 in Illinois and is often mistaken as the founder of McDonald’s which is not far off. The former CEO of the successful chain helped build the empire into the most successful fast food company of all time.
Up until he was 52 years old, Kroc was a salesman. He sold multi-mixers for restaurants until he encountered the McDonald’s brothers in 1954. As soon as they met, Kroc knew he had stumbled on a goldmine and had every intention to expand the chain to thousands of restaurants across the globe.
He franchised the first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois on April 15, 1955 which became the birth of the franchise system, one of the most valuable American retail brands and an international fast food empire. Kroc successfully convinced the McDonald’s brothers to sell the franchise rights to him and later became CEO of the entire business. He worked with the chain right up until he died of heart failure aged 81 in 1984.
In 1999, he was included in Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, a compilation of the 20th century’s 100 most influential people. Today McDonald’s is valued at more than $88 billion, with over 14,000 restaurants in the United States and over 23,000 in international locations.
Kroc leaves behind more than burgers, with life lessons on entrepreneurship spirit, unbeatable business concepts and life-changing behaviours. His words will forever serve a solid foundation for others to grasp any opportunity they can with ambition to scale up their very own empire.
1. There’s almost nothing you can’t accomplish if you set your mind to it.
2. It’s a matter of having principles. It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.
3. If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.
4. While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
5. Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
6. Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
7. The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.
8. That’s the name of the game … pleasing the customer. If we ever lose sight of that fact, we’ve lost the ball game.
9. You’re only as good as the people you hire.
10. If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard, it is impossible to fail.
11. You’ll learn more about a road by travelling it than by consulting all the maps in the world.
12. You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.
13. The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
14. A man must take advantage of any opportunity that comes along…
15. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.
16. I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems. It is a simple philosophy.
17. Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
18. All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment.
19. It is impossible to grant someone happiness. The best you can do… is to give him the freedom to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a by product – a by product of achievement.
20. We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.
21. If you do it first class and you don’t compromise values, and you don’t compromise quality, and you don’t compromise service, and you don’t compromise cleanliness, then everybody else who is the competitor has got to play catch-up.
22. The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.
23. If you believe in something, you’ve got to be in it to the ends of your toes.
24. If anyone stood to gain by our success and suffer if we failed, it was our suppliers.
25. I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand.
26. Taking reasonable risks is part of the challenge. It’s the fun.
27. If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth.
28. “We have an obligation to give something back to the community that gives so much to us.
29. The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
30. The more I help others to succeed, the more I succeed.
31. My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach. Stress your own strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness and value, and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up.
32. When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?
33. Competition can try to steal my plans and copy my style. But they can’t read my mind; so I’ll leave them a mile and a half behind.
34. I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.
35. To be successful, you must be daring, be first and be different.
36. If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
37. I believe that if you hire a man to do a job, you ought to get out of the way and let him do it. If you doubt his ability, you shouldn’t have hired him in the first place.
38. The key to success is being in the right place at the right time, recognizing that you are there, and taking action!
39. I became a real entrepreneur, crazy enough to take the risk of losing everything.
40. Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
41. McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.
42. Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
43. When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull. That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain.
44. Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.
45. Our aim was to insure repeat business based on the system’s reputation rather than on the quality of a single store or operator.
46. We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
47. I guess to be an entrepreneur you have to have a large ego, enormous pride and an ability to inspire others to follow your lead.
48. In business for yourself, not by yourself.
49. No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client.
50. There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.
51. People have marvelled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonalds until I was fifty-two years old and then I became a success overnight. But I was just like a lot of show business personalities who work away quietly at their craft for years, and then, suddenly, they get the right break and make it big. I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.
52. Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.
53. If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.
54. The thing that has made this country great is our free enterprise system. If we have to resort to this – bringing in the government – to beat our competition, then we deserve to go broke.
55. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way – of survival of the fittest.
56. We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business.
57. Its easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.