In our last edition, I examined the life of Aliko Dangote, the president of Dangote Group who for nine consecutive times is Africa`s richest man. Like many other entrepreneurs, Dangote began early in life to manifest his entrepreneurship skill by selling sweets on the street of Kano, at the age of six to be precise.

Let us now look at the lives of Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and Ray Kroc who transformed McDonalds.

Ray Kroc was for more than three decades the largest food supplier in the whole of United States and before his death sold over 50 billion burgers. At present, there are more than 25,000 McDonalds in operation worldwide. Recent survey showed that McDonalds golden arches are now more recognisable around the world than, maybe, the Christian Cross.

CARLOS SLIM

Slim was born on January 28, 1940, in Mexico City to Julián Slim Haddad (born Khalil Salim Haddad Aglamaz) and Linda Helú Atta, both Maronite Christians from Lebanon.

Slim always knew he wanted to be a businessman and began to develop his business and investment acumen at a young age. He received business lessons from his father Julián, who taught him finance, management and accounting, teaching him how to read financial statements as well as the importance of keeping accurate financial records, a practice that Slim carries on to this day.

At the age of 11, Slim invested in a government savings bond that taught him about the concept of compound interest. He eventually saved every financial and business transaction he made into a personal ledger book which he keeps to this day. At the age of 12, he made his first stock purchase, by purchasing shares in a Mexican bank. By the age of 15, Slim had become a shareholder in Mexico’s largest bank. At the age of 17, he earned 200 pesos a week working for his father’s company. He went on to study civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he also concurrently taught algebra and linear programming.

Though Slim was a civil engineering major, he also displayed an interest in economics. He took economics courses in Chile once he finished his engineering degree. Graduating as a civil engineering major, Slim has stated that his mathematical ability and his background of linear programming was a key factor in helping him gain an edge in the business world, especially when reading financial statements.

Business career

After graduating from college in 1961, Slim began his career as a stock trader in Mexico, often working 14-hour days. In 1965, profits from Slim's private investments reached US$400,000, allowing him to start the stock brokerage Inversora Bursátil. In addition, he also began laying the financial groundwork for Grupo Carso. In 1965, he also bought Jarritos del Sur. In 1966, he founded Inmobiliaria Carso.His investments are in the media,oil and gas and technology

RAY KROC, FOUNDER OF MCDONALD’S CORP.

“The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.” — Ray Kroc

When Ray Kroc was a child, his father took him to a phrenologist-a practitioner who claimed he could predict the future by reading the bumps on a person’s head. Kroc’s chart revealed that his future would be in the food-service industry. Whether through psychic power or sheer luck, the phrenologist proved to be correct. Uniquely adroit at identifying popular trends, Kroc would go on to lay the foundation for the modern fast-food industry and champion the world’s No. 1 fast-food chain.

Like many entrepreneurs, Kroc began working early in life. While still in grammar school, the would-be fast-food king started a lemonade stand in front of his home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, he worked in a grocery store, and he spent a summer behind the soda fountain in his uncle’s grocery store. Through these early experiences, Kroc began to view the world as one big place to sell to.

By the time he was a teenager, Kroc had no patience for school, so he quit to take a job as a salesperson for Lily-Tulip Cup Co. He was a natural. Young, ambitious and willing to work hard for long hours, Kroc quickly became the company's top salesperson. In the course of selling cups, Kroc met Earl Prince; a client who had invented a five-spindle milk shake-mixing machine called a Multimixer.

Fascinated by the speed and efficiency of the machine, and recognizing a cash cow when he saw one, Kroc, then 37, left Lily and obtained exclusive marketing rights to the machine. He spent the next decade and a half crisscrossing the country peddling the Multimixer to drugstore soda fountain and restaurant owners.

As Kroc approached his 50th birthday, however, sales began to drop. During the early 1950s people were leaving the cities for the suburbs, forcing many neighborhood soda fountains to close. Ray was losing customers by the dozens. But one small restaurant in San Bernardino, California, ordered eight machines. Intrigued by the order, Kroc left for California to see for himself what kind of restaurant needed to churn out 40 milk shakes at a time. There he found a small hamburger stand run by two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald.

The McDonald brothers' restaurant was unlike any Ray had ever seen. In contrast to the popular drive-in restaurants of the time, it was self-service, had no indoor seating, and the menu was limited to cheeseburgers, hamburgers, fries, drinks and milk shakes, all of which were produced in an assembly-line fashion that enabled customers to place their orders and receive their meals in less than a minute.

Kroc quickly calculated the financial rewards possible with hundreds of these restaurants across the country. But when he approached the McDonalds with the idea, they told him they weren’t interested in doing it themselves. So Kroc offered to do it for them. The brothers agreed, and gave Kroc the exclusive rights to sell the McDonald’s method.

Ray opened his first McDonald's in April 1955 in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines. He used the meticulously clean and efficient restaurant as a showcase for selling McDonald’s franchises to the rest of the country. For each franchise he sold, Ray would collect 1.9 percent of the gross sales. From that he would give the McDonalds one-half percent. Kroc sold 18 franchises his first year in business but was shocked to discover he was barely making enough money to cover his expenses. In his haste to acquire the rights to the McDonalds’ methods, he had made them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Unfortunately, it was a deal on which he couldn’t make any money.

Then Kroc met Harry Sonnenborne, a financial genius who showed Kroc how to make money-not by selling hamburgers, but by selling real estate. Under Sonnenborne's plan, Kroc set up a company that would purchase or lease the land on which all McDonald's restaurants would be located. Franchisees then paid Kroc a set monthly rental for the land or a percentage of their sales, whichever was greater. By owning the land the franchises were built on rather than just the franchises themselves, Kroc was guaranteed a profit. With his real-estate formula in place, Kroc set out to fulfill his goal-opening 1,000 McDonald's from coast to coast.

But there were problems. Kroc continually clashed with the McDonald brothers over changes he wanted to make in their original formula. Kroc became increasingly frustrated and decided he wanted control of McDonald's all to himself. So in 1961, he bought out the McDonalds for $2.7 million-cash. Kroc thought the deal included the original McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, but the brothers said it did not. Infuriated, Kroc confided to a long-time employee, “I’m not normally a vindictive man, but this time I’m going to get those sons-of-bitches.” And he knew just how to do it. Without the rights to their own name, the McDonalds were forced to rename their restaurant The Big M. So Kroc opened a brand-new McDonald’s one block away and put The Big M out of business.

With the McDonald brothers out of his way, Kroc was free to run the company as he saw fit. By 1965, he had opened more than 700 restaurants in 44 states. In April of that year, McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to go public. Stock was issued at $22 per share. Within weeks it climbed to $49 a share, making Kroc an instant multimillionaire. By the end of the decade, Kroc had met and surpassed his goal, with nearly 1,500 McDonald's operating worldwide.

By the 1970s, McDonald's was the largest food supplier in the country and would remain so through the next two decades. At the time of his death on January 14, 1984, a new McDonald’s was opening on average every 17 hours. Ten months later, McDonald’s sold its 50-billionth burger.

Like many of the 20th century's most influential entrepreneurs, Ray Kroc was not a creator. When Kroc came onto the scene, convenience food already existed in many forms, from local diners to hot dog stands. But it was Kroc who had the cunning ability to grasp all the complexities of the fast-food concept and deliver it in the best possible way.

HAMBURGER U

Ray Kroc believed that the success of his company lay in his franchisees following “the McDonald’s Method” to the letter. To ensure this, he developed a 75-page manual that outlined every aspect of running a McDonald's operation. Nothing was left to interpretation. Burgers had to be exactly 1.6 ounces, served with a quarter ounce of onion, a teaspoon of mustard and a tablespoon of ketchup. Fries had to be cut at nine-thirty seconds of an inch thick. The manual even specified how often the restaurant needed to be cleaned.

In 1961, Kroc came up with a way to gain even greater control over his franchisees. In the basement of a McDonald's in Elk Grove, Illinois, he opened a training center that would eventually become Hamburger University, where students earned their degrees in “Hamburgerology” with a minor in french fries.

FACTS WORTHY OF NOTE

There are more than 25,000 McDonald’s in operation worldwide today.

1 in 8 Americans has worked for McDonald’s

According to a recent survey, the McDonald’s golden arches are now more recognisable around the world than the Christian cross.

There is no doubt that the three men, Aliko Dangote, Carlos Slim and Ray Kroc, though from different environments, Nigeria, Mexico and United States, have so many things in common.

They started early, worked long hours and had eyes for needs to fill. So this goes a long way to prove that entrepreneurship, like music is a universal language. It has principles which if strictly adhered to, no matter the environment that one is operating in, the result would definitely be success.

ABOUT THE COLUMNIST

Peter Anosike is a well-known journalist and development economist.

His book, Dangote’s Ten Commandments on Money (Lessons on How to Make Money from One of the World’s Richest Men), was rated as one of the best development books in the world by Wall Street Journal and FORBES. The book has been adopted as a workbook for grooming entrepreneurs by the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN). Anosike’s other of his books include, How To Be The Best You Can Be and Look Forward and Lean Less On Your Past – all trending in Smashwords along with Dangote’s Ten Commandment on Money and How To Be The Best You Can Be. You can follow him on Facebook and Linkedin.

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