Instant success in just eight years.
Hi everyone, Angus Pryor here, multi award winning practice growth specialist. I’m in Sydney at the moment I’ve just been to a conference and the keynote speaker was a guy called Peter Ritchie. Now Peter Ritchie was the CEO of McDonald’s, when McDonald’s was brought to Australia back in 1970. And he finished his CEO 25 years later, he was on the board, et cetera, et cetera. But he’s he made a really interesting comment about this instant success in eight years. He said after McDonald’s had been going for about that time, people were like, Oh, that’s amazing. Your overnight success. Here are some of the facts before that point. They were reporting loss after loss every year for the first eight years. At one point, their losses were $15 million. This is back in the 70s. What is that in today’s dollars 30, 40, $50 million dollars? They had such massive problems with the union back in those days, that he literally had to shut some of the stores, wait until he could get franchisees to come in, so that they could sit them up and kind of win the kind of media battle about these. And he just talked about, you know, McDonald’s in the US their position was like, why are you guys even in Australia, it’s such a tiny little country. But through perseverance and never ever giving up. He turned the business from zero to $2 billion in 25 years.
Now, look, I’m not saying that McDonald’s has done a great thing in terms of the you know, nutrition, etc. But from a business point of view, there’s a lesson there, which is about never ever giving up. He mentioned that Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s in the US that he was actually bankrupt back in the early 60s. In fact, at one point, McDonald’s couldn’t even make payroll. They sent an email to all their employees to say, oh, by the way, we’re changing to a monthly pay cycle just so they could make payroll. And eventually they did. Here’s the message, you know, instant success in eight years. No, it’s more of a case of never, ever give up. Catch you next time.