McDonald’s needs no introduction.
The seeds of this great franchisee were sown in the year 1940 when Dick and Mac
McDonald opened McDonald’s Bar-B-Q drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino,
California. The 15 cent hamburger became staple in 1948 and the world famous french
fries were introduced to the menu in the year 1949. But it was 1954 that changed
the fortune of McDonald’s when a 52 year old multimixer salesman by the name
Ray Kroc visited the brothers to sell more multimixers. Ray Kroc was fascinated
to see the terrific business the drive-in was generating and came to know from
the McDonald’s brothers about their national franchising plans. Ray Kroc soon signed
an agreement which gave him the right to franchise the McDonald’s operations
everywhere else in the United States. Today, McDonald’s has 34,000 restaurants
and serves 6.9 crore people in 118 countries every single day and sells 75 hamburgers every second!! The
book ‘Grinding it Out’ is Ray Kroc’s autobiography on how he went on to create
this hamburger giant and he tells his story with pride and panache…
Ray Kroc’s bazooka moment in life
came when he was 52 years old when many have started planning for retirement
homes, but as Joe Kennedy Sr. said “when the going gets tough, the tough gets
going” and Ray Kroc started his marvelous journey creating one of the world’s
best corporations and certainly the granddaddy of the restaurant business. Kroc
had a tough time initially in his career and started as a paper cups seller for
$35/week and played part time piano to support his wife and daughter. But he
was an opportunistic man & after selling paper cups for 17 years saw
opportunity in the milk shake machine called Multimixers and he grabbed it. Luck,
it was during one of his sales trip that he landed onto the San Bernardino
McDonald’s.
Kroc was smart and never changed
the original name, but was a technocrat in his business and had a deep
knowledge of even the moisture level of the potatoes!! Kroc got on board smart
people to work with him and who stayed all throughout. Kroc trusted his people
but made the two most important decisions about the menu and the real estate
locations. One of the key reasons for Kroc’s success was that he was flexible
and changed as the time and market demanded (It wasn’t until 1966 that the
first in-dining McDonald’s was opened). He remained glued to the McDonald’s
quick service staple food model and never ventured out of his core
competencies. For e.g. McDonald’s doesn’t serve a pizza or a hotdog. Kroc like
all great business creators believed in decentralized operations and a tight
leash on costs.
Below are a few interesting
things by Kroc from the book,
· “So, the risk of seeming simplistic, I emphasize
the importance of details. You must perfect every fundamental of your business
if you expect it to perform well.”
· “It requires a certain kind of mind to see
beauty in a hamburger bun.”
· “My attitude was that 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”.
· “It has always been my belief that authority
should be placed at the lowest possible level. I wanted the man closest to the
stores to be able to make decisions without seeking directives from
headquarters”.
· “After we find a promising location, I drive
around it in a car, go into the corner saloon and into the neighborhood
supermarket. I mingle with the people and observe their comings and goings.
That tells me what I need to know about how a McDonald’s store would do there”.
Ray Kroc gave us a great place to
mingle and in the process did teach us very valuable business and life lessons.
Strongly recommended!!
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