Ray Kroc Quotes
120 Ray Kroc Quotes
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Building dream castles was one thing; actually getting into the restaurant development business was a seemingly insurmountable problem.
Ray Kroc
I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of 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.
Ray Kroc
I couldn’t give them raises to compensate them for their past efforts, but I could make sure that they would be rewarded when McDonalds became one of the country’s major companies, which I never doubted it would. I gave them stock – ten percent to June and twenty percent to Harry – and ultimately it would make them rich. At the time, of course Chicago Transit Authority tokens would have been worth more.
Ray Kroc
If I had a brick for every time I’ve repeated the phrase QSC and V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value), I think I’d probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them.
Ray Kroc
June set great store by her ‘feminine intuition.’ Some people actually thought she was psychic. But I didn’t need a horoscope to tell me the value of her role in our office.
Ray Kroc
Harry was the scholarly type. He analyzed situations on the basis of management theory and economic principles. I proceeded on the strength of my salesman’s instinct and my subjective assessment of people.
Ray Kroc
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonalds, and watch the results in their work.
Ray Kroc
One time a McDonald’s operator came to me with the idea he’d dreamed up to cut costs by producing a doughnut-shaped patty. His notion was to plug the hole with condiments, and cover it with a pickle so that customer wouldn’t notice the hole. I told him we wanted to feed our customers, not fleece them, but I couldn’t suppress a chuckle at the outrageous con artistry of the idea; a real Chicago fast one.
Ray Kroc
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
Ray Kroc
If anyone stood to gain by our success and suffer if we failed, it was our suppliers.
Ray Kroc
Morris Goldfarb [in 1976] said he was certain … that Ray Kroc has made millionaires of more men than any other person in history. I don’t know about that; I appreciate Morrie’s view, but I would put it another way. I’d rather say I gave a lot of men the opportunity to become millionaires. They did it themselves. I merely provided the means. But I certainly do know a powerful number of success stories.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
I wasn’t prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.
Ray Kroc
Even though our stores were booming, and even though our ‘development accounting’ allowed us to show a profit, we had no cash flow. We were in the trough between our heavy outlays for land and buildings and the income in rents from those properties.
Ray Kroc
Years later I learned that Gerry [Newman] had gone home and told his wife, Bobbi, that he had met me that night, and I had to be either a nut or a dreamer or both. Here he was worried about whether we’d still be in business the next week, and I was carrying on about the billions of dollars in our future.
Ray Kroc
A year or so after that incident [Believing Ray Kroc to be either a nut or a dreamer or both], Gerry was offered a job by another drive-in chain at twice the salary he was getting from us. He turned it down. When the disbelieving head hunter asked why, he said, ‘Because you don’t have a Ray Kroc.’
Ray Kroc
There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.
Ray Kroc
Let’s get this straight once and for all. I want nothing from you but a good product. Don’t wine me, don’t dine me, don’t buy me any Christmas presents. If there are any cost breaks, pass them on to the operators of McDonald’s stores.
Ray Kroc
One morning, … I cam to work to find Colonel Sanders sitting outside my door typing away. It was Mary [Torigian] wearing Kentucky Fried Chicken halloween mask.
Ray Kroc
For an operator to insist on peeling his own potatoes in the store instead of using a frozen product was on the same order as insisting on slaughtering his own steers and grinding the hamburger. Not quite as messy, of course, but potato peelings gave us plenty of problems nevertheless.
Ray Kroc
No stable in the world could stink worse than a rich vein of fermenting potato peelings.
Ray Kroc
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
Ray Kroc
[On initial attempts to introduce the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish hamburger] I don’t care if the Pope himself comes to Cincinnati. He can eat hamburgers like everybody else. We are not going to stink up our restaurants with any of your damned old fish!
Ray Kroc
I like people who level with me and speak their minds. I always say exactly what I think; it’s a trait that’s gotten me in trouble plenty of times, but I never have problems getting to sleep at night with a guilty conscience. That’s why I could never be a politician.
Ray Kroc
Not that I think a politician has to be dishonest – but he has to compromise some things he believes in strongly for the sake of political expediency. I could not do that.
Ray Kroc
[On his friend Harry Sonneborn resigning on a final argument] There’s a cross you must bear if you intend to be head of a big corporation: you lose a lot of your friends on the way up. It’s lonely on top.
I can still picture those newspaper headlines announcing, ‘The End of an Era: McDonald’s 15-Cent Hamburger is Now 18 Cents.’ Whew!
Ray Kroc
When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?
Ray Kroc
If a location is good enough to buy, we want to build on it right away and be in there before the competition. Pump some money and activity into a town, and they’ll remember you for it.
Ray Kroc
The real estate wasn’t ever going to come down in price – no way!
Ray Kroc
We are in the real estate business, not the hamburger business.
Ray Kroc
I became a real entrepreneur, crazy enough to take the risk of losing everything.
Ray Kroc
Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.
Ray Kroc
Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat.
Ray Kroc
It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.
Ray Kroc
Where there is no risk, there can be no pride on achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer.
Ray Kroc
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