Ray Kroc > Quotes

“Luck is the dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”
― Ray Kroc

“The quality of an individual is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.”
― Ray Kroc

“The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.”
― Ray Kroc

“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

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?”
― Ray Kroc

“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

“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

“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

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“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

“None of us is as good as all of us”
― Ray Kroc

“I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“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

“One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life. That”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

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

“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

“You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. We demonstrated this emphasis on details, and saw it pay off, in our approach to hamburger patties.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“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

“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

“if you believe in something, you've got to be in it to the ends of your toes. Taking reasonable risks in part of the challenge. It;s the fun.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“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, 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. The armistice was signed just before I was to get on the boat to ship out to France.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“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

“but I would have rights to franchise copies of their operations everywhere else in the United States. The buildings would have to be exactly like the new one their architect had drawn up with the golden arches. The name, McDonald’s, would be on all of them, of course, and I was one hundred percent in favor of that. I had a feeling that it would be one of those promotable names that would catch the public fancy. I was for the 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, signed by both brothers, and sent to me by registered mail. This seemingly innocuous requirement created massive problems for me.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“Ethel was incensed by the whole thing. We had no obligations that 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 didn’t want to hear about the McDonalds or my plans.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“She dutifully attended McDonald’s gatherings in later years, and she was liked by operators’ wives and by women on the staff, but there was nothing more between us. Our thirty-five years of holy matrimony endured another five in unholy acrimony. I”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“we were accused of having torn down a Greek Revival “landmark” building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so we could build a McDonald’s on the site. The writers failed to mention that the building was a wreck. It had been vandalized and burned before we bought it. The city of Cambridge had refused to designate it as a landmark building.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“I had memorized the procedure when I watched the McDonald’s operation in San Bernardino, and I had done it exactly the same way. I went through the whole thing once more. The result was the same—bland, mushy french fries. They were as good, actually, as the french fries you could buy at other places. But that was not what I wanted.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“One of my suppliers told me, “Ray, you know you aren’t in the hamburger business at all. You’re in the french-fry business. I don’t know how the livin’ hell you do it, but you’ve got the best french fries in town, and that’s what’s selling folks on your place.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's