Ha, when I started this journey of authorship in the realm of entrepreneurship I considered myself young. Now I'm old.
Hey, you old geezer, from another geezer... here's how an old geezer changed his world, and everyone else's, before he had the internet, the self-help books, or pretty much anything. His story starts at age seven.
1) One summer afternoon, his father came home with a fever and died later that day.
2) His mother, then was forced to obtain work in a tomato cannery, and he was required to look after and cook for his two siblings at the age of seven. The children foraged for food while their mother was away for days at a time for work. When he was 10, he began to work as a farmhand.
3) After he married and had a family, he studied law by correspondence. After a while, he began to practice law, which he did for three years. His legal career ended after a courtroom brawl with his own client.
4) After that, he moved back with his mother, and went to work as a laborer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Later, the family moved to Jeffersonville, where he got a job selling life insurance for the Prudential Life Insurance Company. He was eventually fired for insubordination. He moved to Louisville and got a sales job with Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey.
5) Some years later, he established a ferry boat company, which operated a boat on the Ohio River, between Jeffersonville and Louisville. He canvassed for funding, becoming a minority shareholder himself, and was appointed secretary of the company. The ferry was an instant success. Later, he took a job as secretary at the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana. He admitted to being not very good at the job, and resigned after less than a year. So, he cashed in his ferry boat company shares for $22,000 ($316,000 today) and used the money to establish a company manufacturing acetylene lamps. That venture failed after Delco introduced an electric lamp that they sold on credit.
6) Later, he moved to Winchester, Kentucky to work as a salesman for the Michelin Tire Company. He lost his job when Michelin closed their New Jersey manufacturing plant. However, by chance, he met the general manager of Standard Oil of Kentucky, who asked him to run a gas station in Nicholasville. However, the station closed as a result of the Great Depression.
I'm thinking I don't have it so bad. This guy just can't catch a break!
7) In 1930, the Shell Oil Company offered him a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, rent free, in return for paying them a percentage of sales. He took that job and began to serve meals to supplement his income. Initially he served the customers in his adjacent living quarters before opening a restaurant. It was during this period that he was involved in a shootout with Matt Stewart, a local competitor.
He never backed down from a fight, which served him well in the rough-and-tumble “Hell’s Half-Acre” neighborhood that surrounded his Shell Oil gas station. After he had painted advertising signs on barns for miles around, the aggressive marketing tactic rankled Matt Stewart, who operated a nearby Standard Oil gas station. When he was told that Stewart was painting over one of his signs for a second time, he rushed to the scene with two Shell executives. According to accounts of the time, Stewart exchanged his paintbrush for a gun and fatally shot Shell district manager Robert Gibson. He returned fire and wounded Stewart in the shoulder. Stewart was sentenced to 18 years in prison for murder, but charges against him were dropped after his arrest. As a result of this, this competition was eliminated.
8) In July 1939, he acquired a motel in Asheville, North Carolina. His North Corbin restaurant and motel was destroyed in a fire in November 1939, and he had it rebuilt as a motel with a 140-seat restaurant.
9) As the United States entered WWII in December 1941, gas was rationed, and as the tourists dried up, he was forced to close his Asheville motel.
10) He then went to work as a supervisor in Seattle until the latter part of 1942. He later ran cafeterias for the government at an ordnance works in Tennessee, followed by a job as assistant cafeteria manager in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
11) In 1952, he franchised a recipe he had earlier developed, for the first time, to Pete Harman, of South Salt Lake, Utah, the operator of one of that city's largest restaurants. In the first year of selling the product, restaurant sales more than tripled, with 75% of the increase coming from sales of fried chicken. For Harman, the addition of fried chicken was a way of differentiating his restaurant from competitors; in Utah, a product hailing from Kentucky was unique and evoked imagery of Southern Hospitality.
12) After Harman's success, several other restaurant owners franchised the concept and paid him $0.04 per chicken.
13) He believed that his North Corbin restaurant would remain successful indefinitely, but at age 65 sold it after the new Interstate 75 reduced customer traffic. Left only with his savings and $105 a month from Social Security, he decided to begin to franchise his recipe in earnest, and traveled the US looking for suitable restaurants.
14) After closing the North Corbin site, he opened a new restaurant and company headquarters in Shelbyville in 1959. Often sleeping in the back of his car, he visited restaurants, offering to cook, and, if workers liked it, negotiated franchise rights.
15) Success at last! The company's rapid expansion to more than 600 locations became overwhelming for him. In 1964, then 73 years old, he sold the corporation for $2 million ($15.8 million today) to a partnership of Kentucky businessmen headed by John Y Brown, Jr. (a then-29-year-old lawyer and future governor of Kentucky) and Jack C. Massey (a venture capitalist and entrepreneur), and he became a salaried brand ambassador.
Colonial Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
But, even after success, the story wasn't over. Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964, and after food conglomerate Heublein purchased the company in 1971, the cantankerous colonel began to deride the chain’s gravy as “slop” and its owners as “a bunch of booze hounds.” Although still the public face of the company, Sanders so disliked Kentucky Fried Chicken’s food that he developed plans to franchise “The Colonel’s Lady’s Dinner House” restaurant—which he opened with his wife in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1968—as a competitor. When Heublein threatened to block the plan, Sanders sued for $122 million. The two sides settled out of court, with Sanders receiving $1 million and a chance to give a cooking lesson to Heublein executives in return for his promise to stop criticizing Kentucky Fried Chicken’s food. The renamed “Claudia Sanders Dinner House” was allowed to remain open and is still in operation.
Even after his death, Colonial Sanders is thought to have influence in certain events. Legend has it that Sanders put a hex on the Hanshin Tigers (Japanese baseball team) after the baseball team’s joyous fans celebrated a 1985 championship by tossing his statue, taken from a local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, into an Osaka river. The team’s subsequent championship drought was blamed on the “Curse of the Colonel,” but even the 2009 recovery of the statue from the muddy river bottom has yet to result in another title for the Hanshin Tigers.
One of the most important lessons we can learn from all of this, is the following:
It has been said, of the his early career, that Colonel Sanders heard 1009 "no"s before he heard his first "yes".
Ok, let me repeat that.
He was turned down
one-thousand and nine times before his chicken was accepted once!
It's amazing how the man started at the age of 65, when most retire, and built a global empire out of fried chicken.
So now - I guess my complaints are looking pretty damn puny. No excuses anymore, for me!
Sources:
Colonel Sanders - Wikipedia
The Story of Colonel Sanders, a Man who Started at 65 and Failed 1009 Times Before Succeeding
8 Things You May Not Know About the Real Colonel Sanders
