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Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's QUOTES

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's QUOTES

1 " As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

2 " I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night. I "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

3 " There's almost nothing you can't accomplish if you set your mind to it. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

4 " Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct of achievement. 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. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

5 " In essence, the message was always the same, “I want one of those mixers of yours like the McDonald brothers have in San Bernardino, California.” I got curiouser and curiouser. Who were these McDonald brothers, and why were customers picking up on the Multimixer from them when I had similar machines in lots of places? (The machine, by this time had five spindles instead of six.) So I did some checking and was astonished to learn that the McDonalds had not one Multimixer, not two or three, but eight! The mental picture of eight Multimixers churning out forty shakes at one time was just too much to be believed. These mixers sold at $150 apiece, mind you, and that was back in 1954. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

6 " I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV’s Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

7 " I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

8 " I’ve always dealt fairly in business, even when I believed someone was trying to take advantage of me. That’s one reason I have had to grind away incessantly to achieve success. In some ways I guess I’m naive. I always take a man at his word unless he’s given me a reason not to, and I’ve worked out many a satisfactory deal on the strength of a handshake. On the other hand, I’ve been taken to the cleaners often enough to make me a certified cynic. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

9 " 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. This is easier said than done. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

10 " You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

11 " A little bit of luck helps, yes, but the key element, which too many in our affluent society have forgotten, is still hard work—grinding it out. Ray "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

12 " One day June took some papers down to the army personnel office that was processing Louis’s classification. When she left, he had been exempted from the service, but she had been sworn in! She was very patriotic and just got carried away. As a WAC she studied electronics at Northwestern University and learned trigonometry and calculus and God knows what else. She had to do it by intensive tutoring, because she had no special aptitude for higher mathematics. But that’s the sort of person she was; no challenge was too big for her. If she didn’t know something, she’d burrow into library books and find out. June "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

13 " After we got McDonald’s going and built a larger staff, they all called her “Mother Martino.” She kept track of everyone’s family fortunes, whose wife was having a baby, who was having marital difficulties, or whose birthday it was. She helped make the office a happy place. It "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

14 " After seventeen years of selling paper cups for Lily Tulip Cup Company and climbing to the top of the organization’s sales ladder, I saw opportunity appear in the form of an ugly, six-spindled milk shake machine called a Multimixer, 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. But my success soon calmed her fears, and I plunged gleefully into my campaign to sell a Multimixer to every drug store soda fountain and dairy bar in the nation. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

15 " Another piece of paper discovered among my father’s effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist’s report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service–related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy’s prophesy would eventually prove to be. In "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

16 " ostentatious "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

17 " In 1930 I made a sale that not only gave Lily Tulip Cup Company a big boost in volume but also gave me an insight into a new direction for paper cup distribution. I was selling our little pleated “souffle” cups to the Walgreen Drug Company, a Chicago firm that was just starting a period of tremendous expansion. They used these cups for serving sauces at their soda fountains. Observing the traffic at these soda fountains at noon, I perceived what I considered to be a golden opportunity. If they had our new Lily Tulip cups, they could sell malts and soft drinks “to go” to the overflow crowds. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

18 " One day I said, “Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don’t take up a stool. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I will give you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it’s not going to cost you anything to try it.” Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn’t long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

19 " The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen’s store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

20 " A good executive does not like mistakes. He will allow his subordinates an honest mistake once in a while, but he will never condone or forgive dishonesty. It "

― Ray Kroc , Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's