Page 153 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Courage

make the right decisions and, in working with the staff, the
courage to believe in my convictions.
Owners, too, showed courage. It’s easy to dismiss this today,
as the brand is so successful, but one has to understand what dur-
ing those early years individuals were giving up to change careers.
In the book Behind the Arches, John F. Love writes about “fran-
chisees that set a pattern for the type of operator on which Kroc
would build McDonald’s. They were giving up jobs in other
careers, risking on McDonald’s all their savings and, typically,
all the money they could borrow from friends and relatives.”
While a good number rose through the system and had a
sense of what they were getting into, others did not, risking
everything for the chance to be an entrepreneur within the
McDonald’s system. Take Sam Samaha, an owner/operator
since 1973. “I was 45 when I started,” Sam told me. “I had a
good job and I left to buy a McDonald’s, and my wife said,
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‘What the hell are we doing?’ I was leaving a job with a good
corporation and ongoing into something completely unknown.
But I think you have to have a sense of wanting to have your
own business. Entrepreneurship. I knew my limitations; I think
you have to put that along with courage and be willing to invest
your time as well as money and take a chance, which in this
case worked out very well.”
As a McDonald’s veteran owner/operator for the last 19
years, with six restaurants, Ron Bailey stated, “I think as a fran-
chisee, leaving a career and leaving what was a great job to fol-
low a vision—and that vision was an opportunity—offered to
me a chance where I can step out of the box. And stepping out
of the box, especially as an African American, I was limited in
terms of what I could do. We both have to have courage:
McDonald’s to have faith in me, and me to venture out, and not
just venturing out in the neighborhood, but going clear across
the country to an unknown area.”