The Kentucky Company, the story of its founder, who turned from a two-dollar worker to a billionaire today, is the story of an old man who made a fortune, and the story of this person can be considered more motivating than the McDonald's story. And so that you can imagine for a moment that a 65-year-old man is the age at which he is supposed to retire and take care of his grandchildren and see them grow up, is the age at which the idea of a dream ignited to start a chain of restaurants sweeping the world and reach more than 92 countries in the world.
Old Harland Sanders who invented Kentucky
Colonel Sanders was born on September 9, 1890. He became an orphan at the age of six. At that time, there was no choice but to go out to work for his mother, and here you will know that sometimes the calamity that you see is a superficial view of life and you do not see the whole picture, perhaps the wisdom of that will become clear to you after years. Imagine with me, my friend, that when his father died, Sanders was the one who took responsibility, especially since he was still young. This responsibility was to take care of his younger siblings. His brother who was three years old and his younger sister. Sanders was the one who brought food for his brothers because his mom was often at work.
With the passage of days, months and years, and he still brought food for his brothers, these circumstances made him learn to cook against his will. He was still young, and after he reached the age of seven, Sanders was a professional chef, as if he had graduated from culinary university. This is what will turn him into a global empire owner.
From a two-dollar worker to the Kentucky Empire
One day he worked on a farm for two dollars a month, and at that point he was just a ten-year-old. Then he went into several jobs in subsequent years and served as a soldier in Cuba for a period of 6 months.
He worked in the railway fire brigade, leaving no work except and working in it, including that he worked as a boat driver in the Ohio River, in the sale of tires and in insurance, and also worked as an administrator of a car service station.
Although Sanders was practicing these jobs, he always thought with ambition and said to himself that his future will be better and that success is just around the corner. These ideas did not leave him for even a second even though he was only getting 16 cents an hour emptying coal cars. While the people around him never encouraged him. Hence, you should take wisdom and turn away from frustrated and pessimistic friends who find a problem for every solution and not the other way around.
During his career, Colonel Sanders developed his cooking skills which he loved so much since he was a child
How did the idea of Kentucky Fried Chicken come to light in Sanders' head?
In 1929 a car service station was opened in Kentucky. While he was working, one of the street vendors told him, “My brother, there is no good restaurant in this city to eat in.” He said these words to him with all intent, and the seller did not know that he was the owner of the spark that ignited Colonel Sanders’s ideas and the rise of the chain of restaurants that revolutionized the fast food industry.
Sanders had the idea, and he noticed that the problem was a golden opportunity that many people overlooked.
Sanders said: "I have thought carefully, and indeed, the best thing I have done and have done without interruption over the past years is cooking, and I am confident that if I start selling what I cook, my food will definitely not be worse than what the restaurant owners in the city do."
Based on this idea, Sanders transformed that small room in Kentucky - which was nothing but a store behind the service station - into a small restaurant through which he sold meals and food to people passing by.
The most important thing he sold at this small restaurant was fried chicken and fresh greens. Soon after, his small restaurant started gaining fame in the area, and the demand for it increased. So, he shut down the gas station and turned it into a restaurant called "Cafe Sanders". In the late 1930's, his small restaurant had a capacity of 142 people, and this was a major development.
Colonel Sanders was fond of fried chicken. But he considered frying chicken the classic way was slow and not very practical. Even frying the chicken in oil does not give the taste he imagines and wants to achieve. And in 1939 he discovered a strange method that no one had preceded. It was what I considered the best way to fry chicken, and it was with a pressure cooker.
The magic mixture that gave chickens its fame
In that same year the pressure cooker was invented. This new cooking method takes less than 10 minutes to cook delicious and tender chicken, without losing its flavor or aroma, and without oil. As the days went by, Sanders was developing the way to cook chicken until it fell again, in a way that added to its flavor. This time he developed a mixture of herbs and spices to combine with chicken, and it really worked.
In the year 1940, when Sanders turned 50 years old, I mean to imagine that he is fifty years old and still carries ambition and delusion and still has a dream and purpose in life.
His friend John Brown says of him, “He was not a dreamer, but a man who sought with all his faculties to be known and a man of stature and value. Despite his success domestically, he was not at ease. And he wanted it to be much bigger than he is. ”
In 1935 a very tempting offer came from someone to sell his restaurant for $ 164,000. Sanders refused. Unfortunately, after a few years, the maps of the area in which the restaurant is located were changed, and the highway was diverted and no longer passes through the town where the restaurant is located.
Sanders was on a date with a catastrophic failure
That was no longer strategic, and sales of the Kentucky Fried Chicken were starting to decline. What happened was that he sold the restaurant at auction for $ 75,000 and became iron again. He lost everything so he decided to retire and start living from what he was saving on Social Security.
After the misfortune of losing everything, the colonel decided to retire and spend his social security savings. The first check was of 105 dollars. He felt the taste of defeat, but the strange thing about this person was that he simply did not give up.
“The best thing about the colonel is that he never thought of withdrawing,” says John Brown. When he got the check, he sat down and said to himself: “Take it easy, Harland, there is one thing you can do better than others in this world. It's frying chicken, and that's what you'll do for the rest of your life. ”
Sanders used to go out in his car and pass by every restaurant owner he saw in front of him, enter him and meet his owner, and if the owners of these restaurants accepted his idea of fried chicken in his own way and with his magic mixture, "the original Kentucky mix", he would agree with them to take 4 cents for each chicken that is cooked and sold in his own way and mixed.
Continue like this wandering around from restaurant to restaurant. Within two years, he managed to convince 5 restaurant owners only. “When you tell a restaurant owner that their chicken is not up to par, he feels offended and dismisses the idea,” says Sanders. Before showing it and even trying it, but the delicious mixture really made the chicken more delicious in his eyes and he was telling the truth. ”
When the wife is the best support for your back
No one could lie and say that chicken never tasted bad. A mixture of 11 kinds of herbs and spices. “It was tough days,” he says of the colonel. I used to mix herbs and spices as well as cement in the building. My wife Claudia was my right-hand man, the box maker and the store supervisor. It is also the one that delivers the orders, and the garage was the store. ”
His wife mixed these herbs and spices, wrapped them, and mailed them. And this mixture that gave Kentucky a tremendous fortune was and is still secret until this moment and only a limited number of people know it, and of course being aware of this secret recipe is a very serious responsibility, because if it is exposed, it is possible that the Kentucky Company will be destroyed overnight, and these people Those who know the secret recipe have signed an agreement that prevents them from disclosing it to anyone, even if his father or son, and everyone who discloses it puts himself on the line.
Kentucky reached the world but decided to sell the company
In 1963, the number of restaurants reached 600, and when Sanders reached the age of 73, he was too old to take responsibility with his wife alone and 167 workers, so he decided to sell the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. He decided to sell everything for $ 2 million to a group of investors including John Brown Jr. and Jack Massey, while remaining as the spokesperson for the company for a $ 75,000 lifetime wage and appearing in his usual white uniform for a decade in the company's ads.
Colonel Sanders died in 1980, and was buried in Louisville. In 1986, PepsiCo bought Kentucky for $ 850 million, and in 1995 the number of restaurants reached 9,000, and the number 9,000 was in Shanghai.
Sanders traveled from 1952 to 1980 more than 250,000 miles a year, traveling from country to country to personally pursue his company, meaning that he had little left so that every year he would cut the distance between the earth and the moon.