I was an overnight success all right, but 30 years is a long, long night.
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.
Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself.
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.
I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.
It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.
I wasn’t prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.
Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.
If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard, it is impossible to fail.
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.
I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.