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Ray Kroc Quotes

Article Overview: Ray Kroc Quotes

Ray Kroc Quotes

The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.

I put the hamburger on the assembly line.

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

It’s easy to have principles when you're rich. The important thing is to have principles when you're poor.

We're not in the hamburger business. We're in show business.

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.

Dear Walt, I feel somewhat presumptuous addressing you in this way. Yet I am sure you would not want me to address you any other way…I have very recently taken over the national franchise of the McDonald’s system. I would like to inquire if there may be an opportunity for a McDonald’s in your Disneyland Development.

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.

All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment.

If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

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.

I don't believe in saturation. We're thinking and talking worldwide.

I considered myself a connoisseur of kitchens. I prided myself on being able to tell which operations would appeal to the public and which would fail.

When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot. Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

None of us is as good as all of us.

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.

The success of additions such as the Filet-o-Fish, the Big Mac, Hot Apple Pie and Egg McMuffin…each evolved from an idea of one of our operators. So the company has benefited from the ingenuity of its small businessmen.

I believe in God, family, and McDonald's. And in the office, that order is reversed.

I didn’t invent the hamburger. I just took it more seriously than anyone else...We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.

It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun. Yet, is it any more unusual to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on the hackles of a favourite fishing fly? Or the arrangement of textures and colours in a butterfly's wing? Not if you're a McDonald's man. Not if you view the bun as an essential material in the art of serving a great many meals fast.

Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary for me.

If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. 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.

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.

The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald's the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had; they didn't want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.

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.

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.

Sometimes Ed MacLuckie would have forgotten to turn the sign on when dusk began to fall, and that made me furious. 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.

Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.

Related Articles
  Lesson #4: Use Failure As A Catalyst for Success
  Grinding Out Success: How Kroc Made McDonald’s A Golden Triumph
  Lesson #1: Take Your Business Seriously
  The Burger King: Ray Kroc is Born
  Lesson #2: You’re Only As Good As The People You Hire

Article Tags: accomplishment, assembly line, connoisseur, definition of salesmanship, disneyland, dividend, filet o fish, gentle art, hot apple pie, kitchens, latter day, mcdonalds, mcdonalds restaurants, motel room, national franchise, ray kroc, risk taker, saturation, show business, wayi



Related Forum Posts
Ray Kroc was 52 When He Started! - Wow - thanks Evan! I didn't realize Ray Kroc was already 52 when he STARTED McDonald's - it's a great story to help us all realize that if we put our minds to it we can grow our businesses quickly no matter how old we are! Julie.
Facebook application - Hi Kevin - thanks for the suggestion! The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? I like your idea as well. We've got a rollout schedule of new features for the site that we are working on first before we can get to the Facebook app. We're also not sure how hard it is to integrate into Facebook. It looks like there is a php way to do it which is great because that is our core competency.
Hello, I'm a newbie too - Hi, I was introduced to your site by a friend from a different forum. I had asked the question "how many people became successes after age 45?" and one response led me here. I'm still looking for the answer to that question, I've been studying a variety of things, and I've read Ray Kroc's autobiography, which led me to wonder how many people became a success after the age of 45. So far I've come up with Kroc, Colonel Sanders, and a few singers. Can any one assist me with this? Thanks, Anita
Facebook applications - ....[quote:36s714h1]The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? [/quote:36s714h1] So far my own foray into Facebook has been a complete bust, though I expected that from the start. But if I do an Application for my own particular field of interest, such as Your Favorite Sci Fi movie...that might get people going. So Evan when you figure out how to do this please let me know how complicated it is!!
Drones work at franchises - [quote="RussellWebb":1no28ggu]I think franchising is for the conforming mindset. I understand Ray Kroc of Mcdonalds was quite ruthless with franchisees about adhering to his system. And many of the good franchise systems are based on his principles. Conform, conform, conform.... it's just not in my dictionary.[/quote:1no28ggu] Hi Russell, Have you ever worked for any franchises in the past? And if so, did you find your experience to be a good or unpleasant one? As I've mentioned numerous times before in the forums, I used to work for McDonalds during my undergrad. And while I respected their "military like" operation, I really didn't like being asked to recite store policies (e.g. to list the proper way to assemble a customer's order) on my evaluations. I don't think there's anything wrong with working for someone else, but I [u:1no28ggu]HATE[/u:1no28ggu] the idea of being nothing more than a non-thinking [u:1no28ggu]replaceable drone[/u:1no28ggu]. We're all human beings, so why do franchises treat their employees like "worker bees" (i.e. work them till they quit or die or at least wish for their own deaths)?


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