Founders - #293: Ray Kroc (The Making of McDonald's)

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

What I learned from rereading Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes----Follow Founders Podcast on YouTube ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best ![2:00] I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems.[4:00] I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night.Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.[5:00] When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.[6:00] It’s not what you do it’s how you do it:Ralph Lauren: The Man Behind the Mystique by Jeffrey Trachtenberg. (Founders #288)Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig by Jerry Shields. (Founders #292)[8:00] I never considered my dreams wasted energy. They were invariably linked to some form of action.[10:00] For me, work was play.[13:00] I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling, and that's exactly what I did.[14:00] Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher. (Founders #242)[20:00] This was the first phase of grinding it out—building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid.[21:00] Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.[26:00] I was putting every cent I had and all I could borrow into this project.[28:00] Perfection is very difficult to achieve and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary.[29:00] If my competitor was drowning, I'd put a hose in his mouth.[44:00] Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. (Founders #248)John D: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers by David Freeman Hawke. (Founders #254)[47:00] The advertising campaign we put together was a smash hit. It turned Californians into our parking lots as though blindfolds had been removed from their eyes.[48:00] Authority should go with the job.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes----Follow Founders Podcast on YouTube ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems. It is a simple philosophy. I find that it functions as well for me now that I'm a multi-millionaire as it did when I was selling paper cups for $35 a week and playing the piano part-time to support my wife and baby daughter. It follows that a man must take advantage of any opportunity that comes along, and I have always done that, too. After 17 years of selling paper cups, I saw opportunity appear in the form of a milkshake machine called the

multi-mixer and I grabbed it. It wasn't easy to give up security and a well-paying job to strike out on my own. My wife was shocked and incredulous. Yet I was alert to other opportunities too when I heard about an incredible thing that was happening with my multi-mixer out in California. I kept getting these calls and the message was always the same. I want one of those mixers of yours like the McDonald brothers have out in California. I got curious. Who were the McDonald brothers and why were customers picking up on the multi-mixer from them when I had similar machines in lots of other places? So I did some checking, and was astonished to learn that the McDonalds had not one multi-mixer, not two or three, but eight. The mental picture of eight multi-mixers churning out 40 shakes at one time was just too much to be believed.

So I flew out to California to check for myself. Something was definitely happening here. The cars began to arrive and lines started to form. Soon the parking lot was full and people were marching up to the window and back to their cars with bags full of hamburgers. Eight multi-mixers turning away at one time began to seem a lot less far-fetched in light of this steady procession of customers. I went over and introduced myself to Mac and Dick McDonald. They were delighted to see me. Mr. Multimixer, they called me. And I warmed up to them immediately.

We made a date to get together for dinner that evening so they could tell me all about their operation. I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night. Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort. That night in my motel room, I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I've seen that day. Visions of McDonald's restaurants all over the country paraded through my brain. In each store, of course,

there would be eight multi-mixers whirring away and padding a steady flow of cash into my pockets. The next morning, I got up with a plan of action in mind. I got together with Mac and Dick McDonald again. I've been in the kitchens of a lot of restaurants and drive-ins selling multi-mixers around the country, and I have never seen anything to equal the potential of this place of yours.

Why don't you open a series of restaurants like this? It would be a goldmine for you and for me too, because everyone would boost my multi-mixer sales. What do you say? Silence. Then Mac McDonald said, we don't need any more problems. We're in a position to enjoy life now, and that's just what we intend to do. His approach was utterly foreign to my thinking, so it took me a few minutes to reorganize my arguments. But it soon became apparent that further discussion would be futile, so I said that they could have their cake and eat it too by getting somebody else to open the restaurants for them. Then Dick McDonald asked,

who could we get to open them for us? I leaned forward and said, well, what about me? When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old.

I had diabetes and arthritis. I had lost my gallbladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me. That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Grinding It Out, The Making of McDonald's, which is the autobiography of Ray Kroc. So something that you and I have discussed before is this idea that the order that you read things in actually affects your interpretation of them. And the reason the first time I read this book, it's been like six years since I read it. I think it was like episode seven of Founders. And back then I didn't know what I didn't know.

And so the past few weeks, I've noticed this really interesting pattern that has popped up over and over again. And it's the fact that it's not what you do, but how you do it. And there's some examples that jump out at you on the last few episodes of Founders, like episode 288 with Ralph Lauren. The fact that he got wealthy, he almost went bankrupt when he was a manufacturer, and then he became one of the wealthiest people in the world when he switched from licensing instead of manufacturing. The early days on episode 290, the early days of Microsoft and Bill Gates. The fact that he would refuse to sell his software for a fixed price and instead get paid for every copy in perpetuity. But when he was buying other people's software, he'd always give them a fixed price and not let them get paid per copy. Then last week on

episode 292, The Invisible Billionaire, Daniel Ludwig realizes in his early career, hey, I can make 4x as much just switching from transporting lumber to oil. And so this idea that it's not what you do, but how you do it has been coming up in conversations with other founders. And then I realized, oh, wait, Ray Kroc is actually a perfect example. I should go back and reread his autobiography because he made more money than other fast food chains by altering his business model where he'd actually own the real estate and then lease it back to the franchisee. And that alteration of his business model actually produced similar wealth effects like like Ralph Lauren changing from manufacturing to licensing, going from almost being bankrupt, in Ray Kroc's case, he could hardly pay his bills when he was just getting 1.9% of the sales of all the franchises, to becoming unbelievably wealthy to when his wife actually

dies a few years after he does, they wind up donating, I think, $1.5, close to $2 billion to charity. And so I'll go into a lot more detail about that in the middle of the book. I do want to pull out two stories from his early life that I think are important, and then we'll get into his early career. We're going to see a huge bias for action. Even from a very young age, he was trying to start his own businesses and make a lot of money. They call me Danny Dreamer a lot. Even later when I was in high school and would come home all excited about some scheme that I thought up. I never considered my dreams wasted energy. They were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade And that last sentence is really important because that all-consuming work ethic that he has as a young man, he maintains throughout his entire life. I'll go over it.

There's multiple highlights that I have where it's just like you won't believe his insane schedule. He makes it very clear in his autobiography that work was his number one priority throughout his entire life. And he makes no apologies for that, even though it destroys a lot of his personal relationships. And one more thing from his early life is when he drops out of high school because he wants to serve in world war one the united states had entered world war one and the war effort was very important everyone was singing over there and that's where i wanted to be my parents objected strenuously but i finally talked them into letting me join up as a red cross ambulance driver i had to lie about my age in my company was another this is this is crazy i'd remember this from the first this is

one of the paragraphs that jumped out that i still remember from the first time I read this book six years ago. In my company was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in his camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney. And so the war ends, he refuses to go back to school and he starts his career as a salesman. And this is what he mentioned earlier, that he's going to sell, that he sold paper cups for 17 years. And this is the first indication that we get

that he's going to maintain an insane schedule throughout his career. It wasn't easy. I pounded the pavement in my territory from early morning until 5 or 5.30 in the afternoon. I would have worked longer, I suppose, but I had another job waiting for me at 6 o'clock, playing the piano at a radio station. I had to arrive at the station at 6 p.m. and then play for two hours. I then had a two-hour break from 8 to 10 p.m., and then I returned to work until 2 o'clock in the morning. A few hours later, at 7 a.m., I'd be off with my sample case

in pursuit of paper cup orders. The only break in this routine was on Sunday, which was my day off from selling paper cups, but we had afternoon hours at the radio station. So he just told you he's working from essentially seven in the morning till two in the morning with a two-hour break from eight to 10 p.m., and he's maintaining that schedule

for almost seven days a week. And he's married at this time. I think he got married when he was like 18 or 19. As you can imagine, his wife is not gonna be happy about this. They actually married for 35 years and his decision to go all into McDonald's actually causes them to get divorced. And so it says, Ethel used to complain about the amount of time I spent away from home working. Looking back on it now, I guess it was

kind of unfair, but I was driven by ambition. I was determined to live well and have nice things, and we could do so with the income from my two jobs. And so Ray starts the book saying, hey, every person is responsible for their own opportunity. And when you see an opportunity, you got to chase it. The problem with the cup business is it's really slow. He's selling it in Chicago in the winter. And so he's like, I don't make enough money during the winter. I got to find another job during that period. And in the newspaper, he says, I had been reading about the business boom down in Florida.

Newspapers compared the rush down there to the gold rush of 1849. This is in the mid 1920s, right before the Great Depression. There's this huge speculative real estate boom that's happening in Florida. And so he's worried that everybody's going to get rich and he's not. He convinces his bosses at the paper cup company to let him work down there during the winter and he'll come back for the busy season. So he goes down and he says, I got a job selling real estate. Everything I'd been hearing about the real estate boom was true. And so he's a young kid, he's in his early twenties and he's trying to figure out, okay, where can I get customers? Like, where do I have an edge here?

And so he does something clever here. He says, I went to the Miami chamber of commerce and I looked up the names of tourists who came from the Chicago area where Ray was living and grew up. I'd call them and fill them in as one Chicagoan to another on an exciting development that I found in this land of crazy speculation. And his strategy worked really well. The problem was his timing was bad. Just when I was getting into the swing of selling these lots, the whole business vanished.

And so now he doesn't have a product to sell, but he still has his piano playing skills. So he's going to get a job, and this job is going to lead him to go to jail. So he becomes a piano player at this nightclub on Palm Island called the Silent Night. This is happening in Miami. Today, Palm Island is still there, but now it is a really nice enclave of single family homes. And so Ray loves his new job because he's making a ton of money. Soon I was averaging $110 a week. That was really good money in those days. Why is he making so much money? Because the place is illegal and he's working for a bunch of gangsters.

The place itself was fabulous, gorgeous, glamorous, and illegal. The owner was a rum runner who bought the illicit booze he served from the Bahamas. A doorman was posted at the entrance gate to screen guests as they arrived. Before opening the gate, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maitre d' bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. And those are the agents that are enforcing prohibition, which is currently the law of the land at this point in history. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside, there was no evidence of liquor

in the place. And so this goes on for a while, Ray is ecstatic until he gets popped. One night, the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. And so he winds up getting out of jail and heading back to Chicago. He says, I had left Florida in the nick of time. The club closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped up into the news once in a while as time went by because Al Capone built a home there. And so when he gets back to Chicago, he does something smart. He says, okay, no more multitasking. I'm all in on one thing and one thing only. I'm gonna pick the best opportunity and go all in on that.

When I returned to Chicago, I started selling paper cups again. I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling and that's exactly what I did. And so when I got to that part, the note I jotted down for myself is actually this quote

that I keep on the home screen of my phone. And it's a quote from the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, describing Michael Jordan. And it says, a guy that was totally focused on one thing and one thing only. And so at this point in his life, he has to deal with a devastating tragedy. And that's the early death of his father. He was just explaining this huge speculative real estate bubble that was happening right before the Depression. And as I reread this highlight several times, what popped to my mind is that quote that I tell you over and over again that comes from episode 242, which is the biography of Francis Ford Coppola. And it says, you can always understand the son by the story of his father, the story of the father's embedded in

the son. Even Ray says he had, the story of the father's embedded in the son. Ray, even Ray says like he had the psychopathic drive to have financial success. And even though he achieved great wealth later in life, even after he had that wealth, he still had that psychopathic drive to keep doing more. And once you understand how his dad's life ended, I think that makes more and more sense. And so Ray's dad's got a job that he doesn't really like, wants to make more money. He's not making enough money. So he's like, hey, I'm going to, he essentially began speculating in real estate. And so at a time where if you make a hundred or a couple hundred bucks a week that you're doing fantastic, his dad is like buying lots or houses for 6,000 and then selling it a short time for 18,000. And so in a story that's old as time, he confuses luck with skill and holds on way too long and gets caught up in the bursting of this huge speculative bubble.

Father seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to picking property. He was so busy pyramiding his landholding, so throwing more money into it, though he'd somehow failed to see whatever warnings there might have been of the impending crash. When the market collapsed, he was crushed beneath a pile of deeds he could not sell. The land was worth less than he owned. This was an unbearable situation for a man of my father's principled conservatism. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1930. He had worried himself to death. On his desk the day he died were two pieces of paper, his last paycheck, and a garnishment notice for the entire amount of his wages. And so, as I mentioned earlier, Ray is going to sell paper cups for 17 years.

One of his customers, this guy named Earl Prince, is actually going to invent the multi-mixer. So Ray's going to jump from selling paper cups to selling the multi-mixer. As we already know, the multi-mixer is what leads Ray to the greatest opportunity of his life. So he says, we're selling the multi-mixer. I want to go over just that. He talks a lot about his first marriage. And I think in describing the relationship dynamic between him and his wife, we actually understand a lot about who he was as a person.

And so he says, the multi-mixer was the invention that really made big volume milkshake production possible. And it changed the course of my life. So he mentioned earlier that the reason he made a good deal of money from selling paper cups with the course of my life. So he mentioned earlier that the reason he made a good deal of money from selling paper cups with the introduction of prohibition, there was like this huge boom in America at the time for these soda and milkshake fountains.

You'd see like stores would pop up everywhere. They'd be in like inside of Walgreens. And so this huge explosion in that industry actually helped him because they needed the paper cups that he was selling. And so his customer goes to him and says, hey, why don't you leave Lily Tulip? That's the paper cup company that he's working for. And just go, we'll go into business together. I will make and manufacture the multi mixers and you can sell them. And then

we'd split the profits. And so Ray's super excited about this business opportunity. He believes in it. But when he tells his wife, she thinks he's crazy. Ethel was incredulous at the idea that I would give up my position and go off on a flyer like this. You are risking your whole future if you do this. You are 35 years old and you're going to start all over again as if you were 20. What if the multi-mixer turns out to just be a fad and fails? You have to trust my instincts on this, I said. I'm positive that this is going to be a winner. I want you to help me. Come down and work in the office for me and together we will make it a terrific business. I will do no such thing, she said. But Ethel, I need your help.

She absolutely refused to help. I felt betrayed. That was when I began to understand the meaning of the word estrangement. It is a terrible feeling and once it appears, it grows like dry rot. Ethel did not deter me though. When I have my mind made up about a business deal, that's it. That's not the last time they're going to fight about Ray's ambition over and over again. He does do some crazy stuff when he just said, hey, you know, if I have my mind made about a business deal, that's it.

He puts his money where his mouth is. He'll mortgage his home to go and raise the money needed for his business. We'll get there in a minute. I do want to bring up one thing though. He brings in the multi-mixer contract to his actual employer because originally he's like, hey, maybe we could sell this together. They don't have an interest in it. So when he tells his boss, hey, I'm going to strike on my own. I'm going to go into business with Earl. They won't let him because they have the contract. The actual multi-mixer contract is with his company, but he's their best salesman. So he's like, if you don't let me do this, I'm going to quit anyways. And so they work out a deal that winds up being a terrible deal. And so this bad deal actually leads Ray to mortgaging his house to buy out his partner,

but we're not there yet. Says what we worked out was a deal in which I got the multi-mixer contract and the company got 60% of my new company. It was a satanic setup, but I didn't see that then. And so he sets up this new company to sell the multi-mixer. He calls himself a one-man band and he just starts hitting the streets. I was having a lot of fun back in 1938 when I struck off on my own. I was a one-man band and I traveled all over the country. Sales were not bad considering the newness of the product, but I was extremely unhappy with my financial setup. I determined after a little more than two years that I was going to have to get that 60% back somehow. And so he keeps pushing the points like what's your buyout number, what's your buyout number. He's going to do the same

thing for the McDonald's brothers. That's why I'm reading this section to you. And keep in mind, the company gave him $6,000 of startup capital. He's doing all the work. Two years later, this is what they tell him. I don't know how he kept from choking on his own bile as he mouthed the figure, $68,000. And so Ray's disgusted by the situation, but he wants out. I didn't know where the hell I was going to raise that money, but I had made up my mind to do it. In the end, most of the cash came but he wants out. I didn't know where the hell I was going to raise that money, but I had made up my mind to do it. In the end, most of the cash came from my new home. I managed to get an increase in the mortgage, much to Ethel's dismay.

I don't think she ever got over the shock of discovering that we were $100,000 in debt. And it's during this period of his life that he first mentions why the book is titled Grinding It Out. For me, this was the first phase of grinding it out, building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute in the futile sense for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid.

Without the adversity, I might not have been able to persevere later. I learned then how to keep problems from crushing me. I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time, and I would not let useless fretting about a problem, no matter how important, keep me from sleeping. I knew that if I didn't sleep well, I would not be bright and fresh and able to deal with customers in the morning.

And so think about how crazy this is. He sold paper cups for 17 years. He starts selling the multi-mixer in 1938. Now this is in the early 1950s and he realized, uh-oh, I'm in a dwindling business. And he knows this because he spends his time traveling around talking to his customers. So his customers are restaurants, drugstores, soda fountains. And little by little, they're either downsizing or eliminating selling milkshakes or sodas completely.

And so he has a few year window to be like, okay, well, I'm going to either be in a decreasing business or I have to find something else. And this is the punchline, the upshot of all this. I knew that I had to find a new product. At this point, he'd been selling the multi-mixer for 15 years. It was not long after that, that I became intrigued by the stories of the McDonald brothers and their operation that kept eight multi-mixers whirring up.

What the hell? I thought I'll go see for myself. So I booked my 52-year-old bones onto the Red Eye Special and flew west to meet my future. And so one of the most important decisions that the McDonald brothers made early on is that they made every detail perfect, and then they'd limit the number of details they had to perfect. This is something you can see that the present corporation totally got away from, but I thought this description was good. It was a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu, the prototype for legions of fast food units that would later spread across the country. The simplicity of the procedures allowed the

McDonald's to concentrate on quality in every step, and that was the trick. Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect. And so from the very beginning, Ray makes two crucial mistakes. One, he acts as his own attorney. And two, he accepts just a terrible deal. This is again, he's known for like accepting these bad financial deals at the beginning and then trying to figure out a way to wiggle himself out later. But there's one specific clause in the contract that is going to cause the disintegration of the partnership between the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc later on. And he says, I was further contractual clauses that obligated me to follow their plans down to

the last detail too, even to signs and menus. But I should have been more cautious there. The agreement was that I could not deviate from their plans in my units unless the changes were spelled out in writing and then signed by both brothers and sent to me by registered mail. This is never going to happen, by the way. This seemingly innocuous requirement created massive problems for me. A man, he says, there's an old saying that a man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer. And that certainly applied to me in this instant. I was just carried away by the thought of McDonald's drive-ins proliferating like rabbits. Also, I was swayed by the affable openness of the McDonald's brothers. And so he

says the meeting was extremely cordial. I trusted them from the outset. And then he goes into what he agreed on financial terms. And again, this makes sense. I'm not criticizing him here when he says, hey, the agreement gave me 1.9% of gross sales from franchisees. So he gets that's his whole thing. I'm going to make 1.9%. He's got to kick up half of a percent to the McDonald's brothers. So really he gets 1.4%. They're selling hamburgers for 15 cents. And so eventually he hires this guy, Harry, to work with him. Really, they're more like partners. And Harry's like, hey, you don't build an empire off of 1.4% of a 15 cent hamburger. But now that I've read this over

and over again, I realized, oh, well, keep in mind, at this point, he's signing this. He's not thinking he's going to make a ton of money by building this huge franchise system that McDonald's becomes, right? He's like, oh, I'm just going to create more demand for the multi-mixer. If I can set up a bunch of McDonald's stores all over the country, all of them will have to buy eight multi-mixers from me. That's an important point. He does not realize the sheer scope. There's no way he could, right? Like McDonald's becomes one of the largest companies that ever existed, but he does not realize the size and scope of the opportunities right in front of him yet. We'll get there in a

minute. The brothers were to get a half a percent out of my 1.9%. I just told you that if they had played their cards right, that a half a percent would have made them unbelievably wealthy. I'll get into more details of how he buys them out on that later as well. But this part is important because it explains his mindset. I kind of just gave you a summary of that a minute ago. I've often been asked why I didn't simply copy the McDonald Brothers plan. They showed me the whole thing, and it would have been easy matter to patent a restaurant after theirs.

The idea never crossed my mind. I saw it through the eyes of a salesman. Here was a complete package, and I could get out and talk up a storm about it. Remember, I was thinking more about prospective multi-mixer sales than hamburgers at that point. And then he also mentions the fact that he liked the name. This is something he repeats over and over again. I think product names, company names are actually really important. I think other people discount that. There was also the name. I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald's was exactly right. I couldn't have taken the name. Meaning if he did it on his own, he couldn't

have taken their name. And so the fact that Ray goes all in on McDonald's is what kills his marriage. Ethel was incensed by the whole thing. We had no obligations that would jeopardize, that we would be jeopardized by it. Our daughter, Marilyn, was married and no longer dependent on us. But that didn't matter to Ethel. She just did not want to hear about McDonald's. It closed the door between us. I had no time to bother with emotional stress. I had to find a site for my first McDonald's store and start building. And you're going to see this guy's a little nuts when it comes to the women in his life. He's going to be married multiple times in the book. And just the way he jumps into these things, I'll tell you more about that in a minute. So from the very first

time, he violates this order, this clause that they have in the contract that, hey, if you're going to make any changes, you have to notify us in writing. We have to sign that it's OK, and then we have to mail it back to you. And for some weird reason, they would agree over the phone, but they would never actually put it in writing. So this causes him that he's going to wind up being in default right from the very beginning. And again, this is partially Ray's fault. He jumped into business. He's in a partnership with people he doesn't really know. I called the McDonald boys and told them about my problem. Well, you need a basement, they said, so build one. I reminded them that I had to have it documented by a registered letter.

They poo-pooed it and said it was all right and go ahead. I went ahead with the building, telling myself that when I got breathing space, I'd fly out to see the McDonald brothers and get all the contractual details wrinkled out once more. Or ironed out once more, excuse me. That would have worked had the McDonalds been reasonable men. Instead, they were obtuse. They were utterly indifferent to the fact that I was putting every cent I had and all I could borrow into this project.

When we sat down with our lawyers in attendance, the brothers acknowledged the problems but refused to write a single letter that would permit me to make changes. And so Ray and the McDonald's brothers would have weird interactions like this. We have told you by telephone that you may go ahead and alter the plans as we discuss, said their attorney. But the contract calls for a registered letter. If Mr. Kroc does not have one, he's put in jeopardy, said my attorney. That's your problem, the response would be. It was almost as though they were hoping I'd fail.

This was a peculiar attitude for them to take because the more successful the franchising, the more money they would make. And so Ray has no choice but to go ahead and open his first McDonald's store. Keep in mind, he is still working full time selling multi mixers at the same time that he's developing the first store. So this is, again, another example of this crazy schedule that he would maintain. He was doing this when he was 17. Now he's still doing this in his 50s. I would drive down to the DePlaines location each morning and help get the place ready to open. The janitor would arrive at the same time that I did.

And if there was nothing else to be done, I'd help him. I'd never been too proud to grab a mop and clean up the restrooms, even if I happened to be wearing a good suit. So the reason I read that sentence to you, he repeats this over and over again in the book. Like he's like a neat freak. He would explode if the bathroom was dirty or if there's like litter in the parking lot. So he says, but usually there were a lot of details to be taken care of in terms of ordering supplies and keeping the food operation going. So I'd write out detailed instructions for Ed. Ed's the guy that he hired to run this first store.

Ed came in at about 10 o'clock in the morning and then he'd open the store at 11. I would leave my car at the store, walk a few blocks to the train, and then take the train to Chicago and be in my office before nine o'clock. This is where he's selling multi-mixers. Shows up to McDonald's early before they open, helps it get set up, then goes selling multi-mixers all day. When he's done with that in the evening, he goes back to McDonald's. In the evenings, I would commute back and walk over to the store. I was always eager to see it come into view. My McDonald's! Exclamation point. He's super happy about this. But sometimes the site pleased me a lot less than other times. Sometimes Ed would have forgotten to turn the sign on when dust began to fall, and that made me furious. Or maybe he brings up the

litter again. Or maybe the lot would have some litter on it that Ed said he hadn't had time to pick up. Those little things didn't seem to bother some people, but they were gross affronts to me. I'd get screaming mad and really let Ed have it. But perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary. And I think it's actually important to pause there, and I think one of the most important parts of this autobiography is that Ray is not trying to get you to like him. In fact, I would argue if you read this book and you get to the end of it, you're not going to say, hey, Ray sounds like this great guy. I'd like to be friends with him. I think it's much more likely to get to the end of the book and be like, oh, wow, this guy's driven, persistent, ruthless, and willing to destroy anybody that gets in his way. This is a

very old book. It was published in 1977. They made a movie about the book where Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc. You can watch it on Netflix. It's called Founder. And there's a line in that movie that I think is demonstrating the point I'm trying to make to you where he says, hey, if my competitor was drowning, I'd put a hose in his mouth. He does not hide that side of him. He just referenced like even leaving a little piece of the trash and I'm going to explode. I'm going to get in your face. I'm going to yell. And his justification is get in your face. I'm going to yell. And his justification is that, hey, perfection is very difficult to achieve, but perfection is what I wanted in McDonald's, and everything else was secondary to me. And so this is the part where the most important person in the McDonald's story, not named Ray Kroc, appears.

And this is this guy named Harry Sonborn. And Ray admits, without Harry's idea, McDonald's would have never grown into the company that it grew into. And so I'm going to tell you the way that Ray describes Harry's idea. And I'm actually going to read you the summary of Harry's idea from the movie, which I think is absolutely fantastic. And it says, this is the move that made possible McDonald's dramatic growth. It started our evolution as a company whose business was developing restaurants and selling franchises to operate them. Our aim was to ensure repeat business based on the system's reputation rather than on the quality of a single store operator. This would require a continuing program of educating. This is going to sound basic to us now because this is the world we live in now

where there's a ton of franchises for everything, but this world did not exist at the time they were building McDonald's. This would require a continuing program of educating and assisting operators and a constant review of their performance. It would also require a full-time program of research and development. I knew in my bones that the key to uniformity would be in our ability to provide techniques of preparation that operators would accept because they were superior to methods they could dream up for themselves. But research and development and staff to supervise and service operators effectively takes money.

That's a big problem, because what is he getting now? It takes more than 1.4% of a 15-cent hamburger and some fries and shakes. The only practical way for McDonald's to grow as we envisioned would be for us to develop the restaurants ourselves. We could plan a strong system in which locations could be developed by McDonald's as part of an overall,-range nationwide marketing program. It would make the right to operate a McDonald's restaurant far more valuable to a potential operator than if we were franchising only a name. Actually getting into the restaurant development business was a seemingly insurmountable problem. Harry's solution, the formation of Franchise Realty Corporation, was to my mind a stroke of financing genius.

When Harry came up with a way to make it possible, I backed it by going into Hawk for everything I had. My house, my car, you name it. And this part is exactly why I wanted to read this book right now in the sequence that I'm reading it in, given what I told you about Ralph Lauren, Bill Gates, and Daniel Ludwig at the beginning. It is not what you do. It's how you do it.

Let me go to Harry's fantastic summary of this idea that appears in the movie. And he's talking in the movie. He's talking to Ray. He says, you don't seem to realize what business you're in. You're not in the burger business. You're in the real estate business. You don't build an empire off of a 1.4% cut of a 15 cent hamburger. You build it by owning the land upon which that burger is cooked.

What you ought to be doing is buying up plots of land, then turning around and leasing those lots to franchisees who as a condition of their, are permitted to lease from you and you alone. This will provide you with two things. Two things that, at this point in McDonald's history, Ray Kroc does not have. Number one, a steady upfront revenue stream. Money flows in before the first stake is in the ground. And number two, greater capital for expansion, which in turn fuels further land acquisition, which in turn

fuels further expansion. That, that right there is how they go at this point. They have maybe a few dozen McDonald's to by the time the book ends in 1977 to 4,000 to today, 40,000. This changes everything because now they have access to capital. Before, Ray's trying to get loans for expansion. They're like, okay, well, what do you own? Well, I own the contract that lets me build franchises. And they're like, what do you get for that? And they're like, 1.4%. And so bank after bank and lender after lender are like, no, no, no, thank you.

But by owning the real estate and then leasing it back opens up these giant pools of capital. First, they start out doing like regular mortgages. And then Harry's like, oh, wait, we got to target, they start targeting life insurance companies. And there's a line in the book on that. It says, we're doing fine with these bank mortgages, Harry said, but we're going to have to get some big institutional investors to back us. Harry went after life insurance companies. And so if you look back at Ray's life up until this point, it's fascinating. You know how Steve Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward. It only makes sense looking backwards.

Let me actually pull a full quote because I think repeating it from time to time is actually valuable. I think Steve said this at his commencement address. But he says you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life. So Ray goes from selling paper cups, which leads him to selling multi-mixers, which then leads him to discovering

McDonald's Brothers, which then leads him to setting up more McDonald's stores so he can sell more multi-mixers, which then leads him to meeting Harry Sonborn. And Harry leads him to the true business innovation that is going to be responsible for all of Ray Kroc's wealth. There's no way you're connecting those dots looking forward. And so in addition to his financial genius, I think having somebody that truly believes in the opportunity that you're pursuing

the same way you do is very valuable. We see Harry thinks about this opportunity, the size of the opportunity, just like Ray does. I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino. That's where the very first McDonald's was, where the McDonald brothers lived. Made a trip to San Bernardino about the time where we were really starting to roll. And Dick McDonald asked him what he thought of the future, what the future of McDonald's would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F.W. Woolworth. So that's not going to make that's going to mean nothing to most people. But if you read stories about the early American retail industry, F.W. Woolworth was a gigantic company.

It was one of the most successful American retail companies starting in the late 1800s and gigantic in the middle of the middle 1900s. And so with that background, you're going to see Dick McDonald's response is going to make a lot more sense. Let me read this to you again. When we were really starting to roll, Dick McDonald asked Harry what he thought about the future or what the future McDonald's would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F.W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray. But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go and he knew how to get there. And so at the beginning of all this, they have a tiny, tiny team at headquarters. And so Ray's going to ask for an unbelievable amount of sacrifice. I'm just going to tell you what I wrote before I read this to you.

Missing your kid's birthdays to sell 15 cent hamburgers is whack. But again, Ray does not hide who he is. Unfortunately, he convinced other people to make the same sacrifices. And I'll tell you why that's so tragic in one second. I felt deeply indebted to Harry and June. June, I think, was the first employee of the McDonald's Corporation, what's going to turn into McDonald's Corporation. She's actually, when they go public, the first woman ever allowed on, I think it's the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange.

So it says they worked tirelessly. I knew that both of them were neglecting their family obligations completely so that they could stay on top of things in a rapidly building operation. June later told me that all the while her two boys were growing up, she never made it to one of their birthday parties or graduation ceremonies. How do you think her kids feel about that? And when I tell you in one second, how do you think if June was alive, we could talk to her how she felt about it? I'll get there in one second. I was in the same boat.

It was a little easier for me, perhaps, because of my continuing Cold War between Ethel and my daughter and me. So again, he's saying I got shit relationships with my daughter and shit relationships with my wife. My total commitment to business had long since been established in my home. I gave them stock, 10% to June and 20% to Harry, and ultimately it would make them rich. Now, why did I ask you how her kids feel about it? You know how her kids feel about it. How does June feel about it? A few years from now, Harry and Ray are going to have a falling out. Ray is going to kick Harry out of the company, and they wind up not talking for almost a decade. And shortly after that, he said he made June retire because she was part of the old guard and she wasn't with the new way they were doing

things. That's another way of saying he fired her. Yeah, she got to keep her stock. She was still rich. But this person saying, hey, miss your kids' birthdays. Every single one of your two boys when you're growing up, miss them for me, is the same person a decade from now that is going to fire you. Missing your kid's birthday to sell 15 cent hamburgers is whack. You got work to do. That's fine. Wake up earlier when your kids are still sleeping. Work after they're sleeping if you have to. But don't miss their birthday party. And so something also that he mentions in the book is how different people will treat you. At the very beginning, he starts trying to sell these franchises. You know, he's 52, 54 years old, and he's a member of a country club.

And people are like kind of laughing at him. They're like, they thought he was nuts. Like, why are you going and trying to sell hamburgers? And then once they start seeing that McDonald's is going to turn into like this massive success and the growth happens so fast, they're like, oh, McDonald's is like this overnight success. And he's got an interesting response to that. And he says, people have marveled at the fact that I didn't start McDonald's until I was 52 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 30 years is a long, long night. So some of their franchisees are absolutely fantastic. Some are con artists. One con artist causes them to lose about $400,000. And taking that negative, they actually realize, oh, wait, we have to protect our downside here. So they actually do something really interesting and something that Ray was previously against.

And so they decide one way to protect their downside is actually by owning a group of stores themselves. And so up until this point, Ray was adamant about not selling stock, but he did want to protect his downside. So it says in the course of our loan discussions, the idea emerged that we should build and operate 10 or so stores as a company. If worse came to worst, we could always retrench and operate our company stores under some other name. Remember, at this time, he still partners with the McDonald's brothers. So if he's saying if they enforce like this default on the contract, well, we own these stores. This is a separate company. We could just start new under different names. So that's what he's talking about there. And so a bunch of these insurance companies are willing to lend him money to do this in exchange for they want 20 percent. They want 22 percent of our stock in exchange for

one point five million dollars. I fought with the idea of giving up any part of the stock in exchange for $1.5 million. I fought with the idea of giving up any part of the stock in the company. I had struggled so desperately to build, yet the appeal of $1.5 million was irresistible. This is in 1959. So it says they wound up doing this deal. The three insurance companies make a ton of money on this. It says they sold their stock a few years later for between $7 and $10 million. So they turned $1.5 into $7 and $10 million. However, if they waited until 1973 to sell, So what's that like 14 years in the future? They would have gotten over five hundred million dollars for it. And it's a good thing he did this because the fights with the McDonald's brothers continue.

This time they're fighting over advertising. The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald's the biggest and best. They were content with what they had. They didn't want to be bothered with more risks and more demands. We asked them to contribute one% of their gross sales towards an advertising campaign that would benefit our stores and all of them as well. But they would have nothing to do with it. All I could do for the time being was to live with it. And so this is something that Ray's going to repeat several times throughout the book. He has an intense belief in advertising because he saw how effective it was for the early growth in McDonald's. In our business, there are two kinds of attitudes toward advertising and public relations. One is the outlook of the begrudger who treats every cent paid for an ad program as if they were strictly expenditures. My own viewpoint is that of the promoter. I never hesitate to spend money in this area because I see it coming back to me with interest.

So they saw it as another expense. He saw it as an investment. So I mentioned earlier that this guy, when it comes to like his love life is a little nuts. He's still married to Ethel. They're estranged, but they're still technically together. He's going to try to steal this guy's wife and the white there. It's a husband and wife that actually are one of the franchisees. And so because of the fact that they're running one of the stores, he winds up talking. Her name's Joni. He winds up talking to Joni on the phone all the time. And then he just decides, hey, like he's trying to convince her, hey, leave your husband.

And he's like, oh, I guess I have to get divorced first. This guy's nuts. So he says, this led to long telephone conversations between Joni and me. I would be tingling with pleasure from head to toe when I hung up the receiver. Feeling this way made it impossible for me to go on living with Ethel. I moved out of our home. The next step was to propose to Joni that we both get divorced and marry. She says no, but this goes like, he's going to wind up, this is what I mean about this guy's nuts. He winds up preventing, he's like, okay, I guess I got to divorce first. So he gets divorced. Joni says no. Then he's going to marry somebody else for like five or six years.

Then he has another shot at Joni. So he divorces that lady, too. This is wild. And then again, in his divorce settlement with Ethel, we see what he really believes in. So I bought my freedom from Ethel. She wound up getting everything I had except my McDonald's stock. So the tension between him and the McDonald's brothers keeps growing until he's just like, OK, just name your price.

I need to get the hell out of this contract. How do we do it? Very similar to when he needed to get out of the contract for $68,000 when he was selling multi-mexers. I called Dick McDonald and asked him to name their price. He did. And I dropped the phone, my teeth and everything else. He asked me what that noise was. And I told him that was me jumping out of the 20th floor of the office. They were asking for $2.7 million. Needless to say, Ray does not have $2.7 million at this point in his career. This was going to really take some financial wheeling and dealing. So they wind up getting in touch with this guy. He's actually a financial advisor

to Princeton University, Howard University, Carnegie Tech, the Ford Foundation, and about 12 educational and charitable institutions in total. These 12 charitable and educational institutions are going to lend him the $2.7 million. They call these guys the 12 apostles. And in return for the $2.7 million of cash that they get to buy out the McDonald's brothers, the 12 apostles want the McDonald's brothers what they were getting, the half a percent of gross sales of all McDonald's stores. And the reason I'm reading this to you is because it's just crazy when you have a business that's working, how much value creation can happen in 5 know, in 5, 10, 15 years.

It was an extremely successful deal. The 12 apostles wound up making $12 million on it. Okay, so they do $2.7 million. $2.7 million in, they get $12 out. But here's where it gets real crazy. Remember that we've been forking over half a percent to the McDonald brothers all along. Anyhow, the total cost of this transaction to us was about $14 million. And it was peanuts compared to what the corporation earned in the years that followed by retaining that 5% instead of paying it to Mac and Dick McDonald.

On today's system-wide sales, which is in 1977, on today's system-wide sales of more than $3 billion, that half a percent would be $15 million a year. And so you and I have talked about before the fact that if you understand why you have to understand why somebody's doing something and if you understand why they're doing it their actions will make a lot more sense to you. I always use a reference of the fact if you go and study John D. Rockefeller's career

he literally believed that he felt money making was a God-given talent and that he had to make as much money as possible so that he could give away as much money as possible. And so viewed through that lens of his belief, it makes sense about why he made the decisions he made in his career. Ray's a very extreme dude.

He's not hiding it. And the reason being is because he views McDonald's as his religion. He uses the word faith. He says, I have a whole album of mental snapshots from this time period. Turning through them brings back a rush of memories, not nostalgia, but reaffirmation of my faith in McDonald's. I speak of faith in McDonald's

as if it were a religion. That is exactly the way I think about it. I've often said that I believe in God, family, and McDonald's, and in the office, the order is reversed. That makes sense. So now when you're like, hey, dude, why are you getting this guy's face? There's like a little piece of trash on the ground. Are you throwing shit in your office? Are you banging on the tables? Are you kicking out partners? Are you firing people have been with you for 25 years? It is a religion to him. And if he feels you're getting in the way for the constant growth and expansion of that religion, he will view you as a problem and stop at nothing at solving that problem. And it's because he has this religious zeal for McDonald's. Just like when Harry was talking to

Dick McDonald, he's like, oh, I think we'll be bigger than F.W. Woolworths. He's like, this guy's a nut. There's examples in the book where Ray says the same thing. He's sitting there talking to me. He's like, hey, listen, one of these days we're going to be a billion dollar company. The person he's talking to, they're having lunch, was frozen by that statement and stopped in mid-bite and looked at me with a funny Popeye expression. And that religious zeal, he never lost it. Like there's a line in the afterword that's written after Ray dies, like seven or eight years after the book is published. And it says, even in the last few years when he was confined to a wheelchair, he still went to the office every day.

And so eventually he moves out from Chicago to California. He feels California is going to be more valuable, the most valuable state for McDonald's, almost more than any other, all the other states combined at this point. But he's displeased with how slow the growth is. So this again goes back to his belief in investing in advertising. As we solved our supply problems in California and built more stores, business gradually picked up, but it remained far lower than it should have been. So this guy named Nick that is working for him came to me with a proposal for a television advertising campaign. The project was going to cost $180,000 and he wanted to pay for it by raising the price of hamburgers a penny. This is a terrific plan, I said, but we're not going to raise the price. It demonstrated precisely how an ad campaign would repay its costs many times over while failing to spend the money would cost us much more in the long run.

So again, he's echoing back to this argument that he was having with his former partner, Dick McDonald. Dick is no longer in the picture anymore. So if Ray says we're going to spend advertising money, they're going to spend advertising money. This is the result. It turned Californians into our parking lots as though blindfolds had been removed from their eyes. And so business is booming. They're expanding everywhere. And he is miserable. And this is what I mentioned earlier. When it comes to his love life, this guy is a little nuts. All this progress was very rewarding. I should have been elated. So he's talking about he's making a ton of money. He's got this beautiful house on the hill in California, franchises dotting all across the country. And yet he says, I should have been elated. So he's talking about he's making a ton of money. He's got this beautiful house on the hill in California.

Franchises dotting all across the country. And yet he says, I should have been happy, but the undeniable fact was that I was miserable. I had forced Joni out of my mind after she said she wasn't going to leave her husband. But I could not get her out of my heart. Some people are bachelors by nature. I am not. I guess I need to be married to feel complete. That is why I fell so hard for Jane.

This is going to be wife number two. Joni is going to be wife number three. Her name was Jane Dobbins Green. She was John Wayne's secretary. A mutual friend introduced us. This is what I mean about this guy's a little nuts. We had dinner together the night after we met and the next night and the night after that. We had dinner together five nights in a row. I was enchanted. Within two weeks, we were married. Joni found out about it eventually. One day, I got a telephone call from her, and we had a brief business-like conversation. She ended the conversation by asking, Ray, are you happy? I was shaken and astonished. It took me a moment to catch my voice.

Then I blurted, yes, and slammed down the receiver. So a number of times throughout the book, Harry and Ray are having these fights over this philosophical difference on how to run the company. The series of fights is going to wind up leading to their final confrontation. Remember, to Ray, McDonald's is a religion. And if you're trying to get him to slow down the spreading of that religion, you are then deemed his enemy. We're going to get there in a minute. But one thing Ray believed in was that they should have a decentralized management structure. Harry did not.

Harry didn't quite see things my way in these matters. He wanted tighter corporate controls, a more authoritarian posture. I maintained, this is a good line, I maintained that authority should go with the job. Some wrong decisions may be made as a result, but that's the only way you can encourage strong people to grow in an organization. Sit on them and they will be stifled. The best ones go elsewhere. I knew that very well from my past experience. I believe that less is more in the case of corporate management. And then he explains what caused the end of their partnership. It's lonely on top. I've never felt this so keenly as when Harry and I had our final confrontation and he resigned. The most important problem I had

with Harry was his growing conservatism in real estate development. He was listening to bankers who told him the country was heading into a recession in 1967 and that McDonald's ought to conserve cash and hold down its construction of new stores. Ray is all gas and no brakes. There's no way that he's going to slow down construction of new stores. Harry put a moratorium on all new store development, no more construction. I was opposed to it. I was in our offices the next morning waiting for Harry. When he came in, we went at it hammer and tongs. I forced the issue all the way with the result that he resigned. It was a hell of a mess.

And then Harry, in turn, makes a drastic mistake, probably influenced by his emotions. Harry had a substantial chunk of McDonald's stock, but he was so certain that the company would go down the chute when he left that he sold it all. The sale gave him a few million dollars at the time. Had he kept it, his stock would be worth over $100 million. And then listen to the words that he's going to describe Harry's actions.

So his lack of faith, there's that word again, so his lack of faith in us was very costly for him. And so he has to let a bunch of people go and it doesn't stop there. There was one other thing I had to do to set the situation in the Chicago office straight, and that was to ask June Martino to retire. It was a tough thing for me. June was a wonderful person, and she had been a tremendous asset to the organization, but she was part of the old regime and her approach would no longer work. She held onto her stock, however, and it made her extremely wealthy. Did you catch what just happened there? He fired the woman

who missed all of her kids' birthday parties for the company. And so by now, McDonald's is a public corporation. Ray Kroc is unbelievably wealthy. He winds up buying the San Diego Padres baseball team. He's still with his second wife, but we see that this guy is a little nuts, and he just can't stop. I hadn't seen Joni for five years when we met at the Western Region Operators Convention in San Diego. Truthfully, I didn't expect to be hit by the same wave of emotion that had bowled me over before. But that's exactly what happened. I attended a small dinner party the first evening of the convention, and Joni was there with her husband.

I made sure that Joni sat right next to me. Raleigh, that's her husband's name. Raleigh, you sit down there at the other end, I said. Everyone tittered. They thought I was kidding. Little did they know. And when I made my after dinner speech about how I had tamed all I had ever wanted in life

except for one thing, little did they suspect that the missing element, all I needed to make my life complete, And so Ray says, again, let's both get divorces and get married. When he said this last time, he was married to Ethel. Now he's married to Jane. And this time, Joni says, yes, I didn't want to hurt Jane any more than was necessary, but I had to have a divorce immediately. And then he immediately turns around and marries Joni. Joni and I were married in 1969. At last, I felt like I was a complete person. Now I told myself I could take life a little easier and enjoy it.

I was finished grinding it out. But business is not like painting a picture. You can't put a final brushstroke on it and then hang it on the wall and admire it. We had a slogan posted on the walls around headquarters that says, Nothing recedes like success. Don't let it happen to us or you. I wasn't about to let it happen to me. The key element in individual success stories and McDonald's itself is determination. This is expressed very well in my favorite saying, Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more

common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated idiots. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. That's the spirit that built 4,000 McDonald's hamburger restaurants. Dedicating the 4,000th restaurant was quite a milestone. Now we're shooting for 5,000. Personally, I'm thinking about number 10,000. A lot of people would say I'm dreaming. Will they be right? I've been dreaming all my life, and I'm sure as hell not going to stop now. And he never does stop.

Ray works at McDonald's until the day he dies, even after being confined to a wheelchair. And that's where I'll leave it for the full story. Highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting this podcast at the same time. If you have not yet signed up for the Founders Premium Feed, make sure you do that. That link is in the show notes as

well and available at founderspodcast.com. Signing up gives you access to listen to the Ask Me Anything episodes that I've made and is a fantastic way to support the podcast. If you want to get on my free email newsletter, that link is also in the show notes. I email my top 10 highlights of every book that I read. As always, links below and available at founderspodcast.com. That is 293 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.