Ray Kroc Quotes
120 Ray Kroc Quotes
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I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
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…
Ray Kroc
I believe that if two executives think the same, one of them is superfluous.
Ray Kroc
Work is the meat in the hamburger of life.
Ray Kroc
A salesman without a product is like a violinist without a bow.
Ray Kroc
Each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems.
Ray Kroc
I have always believe that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems. It is a simple philosophy.
Ray Kroc
Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when he was young, according to the watery eye of memory.
Ray Kroc
Perhaps without that adversity I might not have been able to preserve later on when my financial burdens were redoubled. 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.
Ray Kroc
[On not losing sleep worrying about problems.] This was easier said than done. I did it through my own brand of self-hypnosis.
Ray Kroc
I would think of my mind as being a blackboard full of messages, most of them urgent, and I practiced imagining a hand with an eraser wiping that blackboard clean. I made my mind completely blank.
Ray Kroc
I’ve never been too proud to grab a mop and clean up the restrooms, even if I happened to be wearing a good suit.
Ray Kroc
We would induce a property owner to lease us his land on a subordinated basis. That is, he would take back a second mortgage so that we could go to a lending institution and arrange a first mortgage on the building, the landlord would subordinate his land to the building.
Ray Kroc
One of the reasons his [Harry Sonneborn] subordinated lease idea worked so well was that in the late fifties we didn’t have the proliferation of franchise operations and the fierce competition for commercial fringe property that developed in the course of the next twenty years. Another reason was that both Harry and I were pretty good salesmen, and we could romance a property owner with the notion of earning at least a little something from his vacant land.
Ray Kroc
[Getting involved in real estate] This was the beginning of real income for McDonald’s.
Ray Kroc
Harry devised a formula for the monthly payments being made by our operators that paid our own mortgage and other expenses plus a profit. We received this set monthly minimum or a percentage of the volume the operator did, whichever was greater.
Ray Kroc
People have marvelled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonalds until I was fifty-two 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 thirty years is a long, long night.
Ray Kroc
You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.
Ray Kroc
It was then that Harry’s view of the corporation as just a real estate business, rather than a hamburger business, began to crystallize.
Ray Kroc
It is impossible to grant someone happiness. The best you can do… is to give him the freedom to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a by product – a by product of achievement.
Ray Kroc
A man must take advantage of any opportunity that comes along…
Ray Kroc
I plunged gleefully into my campaign to sell a Multimixer to every drug store soda foundation and dairy bar in the nation.
Ray Kroc
Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my mind…
Ray Kroc
[At 52 years of age] I was still green and growing, and I was flying along at an altitude slightly higher than the plane.
Ray Kroc
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.
Ray Kroc
I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand.
Ray Kroc
I daydreamed that I was a piano man too…
Ray Kroc
I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they’d come for was a cup of coffee.
Ray Kroc
[On World War I and his parents] I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course, but even my grandmother could accept that. In my company, which assembled in Connecticut for training, 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 camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney.
Ray Kroc
No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client.
Ray Kroc
It was interesting, but I could see that I was not cut out for a career of peddling rosebuds for farm wives to sew on garters and bedcushions.
Ray Kroc
One day when I went to work, the office was boarded up, and the sheriff had posted a notice that they’d gone bankrupt. That hurt! They owed me a week’s pay plus vacation time.
Ray Kroc
It wasn’t easy. I pounded the pavement in my territory from early morning until 5:00 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 piano at radio station WGES at Oak Park.
Ray Kroc
Ethel [His wife] used to complain once in a while 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 hated to be idle for a minute. I was determined to live well and have nice things too, and we could do so with the income from my two jobs.
Ray Kroc
I used to comb through the advertisements in the local newspaper for notices of house sales in the wealthier suburbs – River Forest, Hinsdale, and Wheaton. I haunted these sales and picked up pieces of elegant furniture at bargain basement prices.
Ray Kroc
[Does history keep repeating?] A lot of financiers and business moguls seemed to be looking at the world through the rose-colored glasses that Tommy Malie sang about, and if great men like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover believed we had reached the point of perpetual prosperity, who was to disagree?
Ray Kroc
Too many salesmen, I found, would make a good presentation and convince the client, but they couldn’t recognize that critical moment when they should have stopped talking.
Ray Kroc
I found my customers appreciated a straightforward approach. They would buy if I made my pitch and asked for their order without a lot of beating around the bush.
Ray Kroc
I didn’t try to force an order on a soda fountain operator when I could see that his business had fallen off because of cold weather and he didn’t need the damn cups. My philosophy was one of helping my customer, and if I couldn’t sell him by helping him improve his own sales, I felt I wasn’t doing my job.
Ray Kroc
Years later I recalled that spare bill in my first motto for McDonalds – KISS – which means, ‘Keep it simple, stupid.’
Ray Kroc
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