Raymond Albert Kroc was an American fast-food tycoon. He joined the California company McDonald’s in 1954, after the McDonald brothers had franchised 6 locations out from their original 1940 operation in San Bernardino. Profoundly inspirational Ray Kroc quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.
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Famous Ray Kroc Quotes
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot. Ray Kroc
Luck is the dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. Ray Kroc
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting? Ray Kroc
The quality of an individual is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. Ray Kroc
If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business. Ray Kroc
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. Ray Kroc
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. Ray Kroc
As long as you’re green you’re growing, as soon as you’re ripe you start to rot. Ray Kroc
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. Ray Kroc
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting? Ray Kroc
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else. Ray Kroc
I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night. Ray Kroc
All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment. Ray Kroc
There’s almost nothing you can’t accomplish if you set your mind to it. Ray Kroc
We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it. Ray Kroc
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
None of Us is as Good as All of Us. Ray Kroc
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
As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot. Ray Kroc
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
You’re only as good as the people you hire. Ray Kroc
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
Its easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor. Ray Kroc
I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting. Ray Kroc
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday. Ray Kroc
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
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap. Ray Kroc
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
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out. Ray Kroc
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. Ray Kroc
If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth. Ray Kroc
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
In business for yourself, not by yourself. Ray Kroc
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
Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company. Ray Kroc
You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. Ray Kroc
There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness. Ray Kroc
A little bit of luck helps, yes, but the key element, which too many in our affluent society have forgotten, is still hard wor grinding it out. Ray Kroc
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap. Ray Kroc
One day June took some papers down to the army personnel office that was processing Louis’s classification. When she left, he had been exempted from the service, but she had been sworn in! She was very patriotic and just got carried away. As a WAC she studied electronics at Northwestern University and learned trigonometry and calculus and God knows what else. She had to do it by intensive tutoring, because she had no special aptitude for higher mathematics. But that’s the sort of person she was; no challenge was too big for her. If she didn’t know something, she’d burrow into library books and find out. June. Ray Kroc
All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment. Ray Kroc
After seventeen years of selling paper cups for Lily Tulip Cup Company and climbing to the top of the organization’s sales ladder, I saw opportunity appear in the form of an ugly, six spindled milk shake machine called a Multimixer, and I grabbed it. It wasn’t easy to give up security and a well paying job to strike out on my own. My wife was shocked and incredulous. But my success soon calmed her fears, and I plunged gleefully into my campaign to sell a Multimixer to every drug store soda fountain and dairy bar in the nation. Ray Kroc
If anyone stood to gain by our success and suffer if we failed, it was our suppliers. Ray Kroc
Another piece of paper discovered among my father’s effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist’s report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy’s prophesy would eventually prove to be. Ray Kroc
It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Ray Kroc
In 1930 I made a sale that not only gave Lily Tulip Cup Company a big boost in volume but also gave me an insight into a new direction for paper cup distribution. I was selling our little pleated souffle cups to the Walgreen Drug Company, a Chicago firm that was just starting a period of tremendous expansion. They used these cups for serving sauces at their soda fountains. Observing the traffic at these soda fountains at noon, I perceived what I considered to be a golden opportunity. If they had our new Lily Tulip cups, they could sell malts and soft drinks to go to the overflow crowds. Ray Kroc
You’re only as good as the people you hire. Ray Kroc
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. Ray Kroc
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting? Ray Kroc
One day I said, Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don’t take up a stool. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I will give you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it’s not going to cost you anything to try it. Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn’t long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was. Ray Kroc
If you have time to lean, you have time to clean. Ray Kroc
The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen’s store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Ray Kroc
It’s a matter of having principles. It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor. Ray Kroc
I’d have a store with a row of vending machines in it. You’d push some buttons and out would come your Big Mac, shake, and fries, all prepared automatically. We could do that; I’m sure Jim Schindler could work it out. But we never will. McDonald’s is a people business, and the smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image. Ray Kroc
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. Ray Kroc
I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the system they described that night. Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort. Ray Kroc
We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it. Ray Kroc
One of my incidental tasks at the radio station was to hire talent to build up the programs. One evening a couple of fellows who called themselves Sam and Henry came in to audition. They gave me their routine, a few songs and vaudevillian patter. Their singing was lousy but the jokes weren’t too bad, so I hired them for five dollars apiece. They kept working on their characters and developed a Southern Negro dialogue that was a huge success. That team went on to make show business history, later changing the name of their act to Amos and Andy. Ray Kroc
As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot. Ray Kroc
That winter was a particularly tough one for the paper cup business. Everything slowed down except for the hospital and medical clinic sales, and I didn’t have any of those places for customers. I didn’t do very well, because I thought of the customer first. 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
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. Ray Kroc
It seemed like we averaged a blowout every fifteen or twenty miles. I’d jack up the car and pull off the wheel to patch the traitorous inner tube, and sometimes while I was applying the glue or manning the air pump, another tire would go bang! and expire. The roads were pretty primitive, of course, especially those red clay tracks through Georgia. 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
Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale. Ray Kroc
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else. Ray Kroc
People have marveled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonald’s 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
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday. Ray Kroc
I was doing my solo routine for requests one night, and an old geezer who’d won a bundle at the racetrack that day came in with a doll who could have been his granddaughter but obviously was not. They danced over to the piano in a spastic flutter, cheek to cheek, and the old boy waved a dollar bill at me and asked if I could play I Love You Truly. I just stared at him and shook my head negatively. He was startled and the young girl slapped his hand with the dollar, knocking it into the top hat, and she shouted, How dare you insult him with a dollar, you cheapskate! Then she grabbed a twenty dollar bill out of the bundle that protruded from his breast pocket and dropped it in my lap. Hey, wait a minute, I called. Did you say I Love You Truly? and I played the first few bars haltingly, as though striving to recall them. He nodded vigorously, and I went ahead with the tüne. Ray Kroc
If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business. Ray Kroc
But I paid particular attention to the french fry operation. The brothers had indicated this was one of the key elements in their sales success, and they’d described the process. Ray Kroc
Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. Ray Kroc
In Sarasota, Florida, they ran into a health department ruling that deemed it unsanitary to prepare milk shakes and hamburgers in the same room. In our units, of course, the shakes were made close by the griddles, and it would have been prohibitively expensive to redesign our structure. Syg Chakow came up with the idea of building a glass partition with an inside door so that the shakes and hamburgers could be prepared in separate rooms, yet served to customers through a single window. The health department was satisfied, and our operator was greatly relieved. Harry. Ray Kroc
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. 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
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot. Ray Kroc
I have often been asked to explain the methods I use in choosing executives, because much of the success of my organization has been a result of the kind of people I have picked for key positions. My answers aren’t very satisfying; they don’t sound much different than the rules that students of business administration find in their basic textbooks. It’s hard to come up with real answers because the weight of the judgment is not in the rule but in the application. As a result, I have sometimes been accused of being arbitrary. Ray Kroc
