47 Ray Kroc Quotes To Be Successful

Ray Kroc was an American businessman who joined the McDonald’s chain in 1954 and built it into the most successful global fast food restaurant in the world.

It was Ray Kroc’s ambition, persistence, vision and ability to seize opportunities and take massive action that ultimately made him a successful entrepreneur and McDonald’s the Goliath it is today.

If you’re looking for a great entrepreneurial movie to watch then I would highly recommend The Founder movie which tells Ray Kroc’s story and how he built McDonald’s.

I’ve put together 47 motivational Ray Kroc Quotes that will inspire you to success and give you useful insights into how one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the last 100 years thought about business.

47 Ray Kroc Quotes

1. “Its easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.” – Ray Kroc

2. “Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.” – Ray Kroc

3. “I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.” – Ray Kroc

4. “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc

5. “If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way – of survival of the fittest.” – Ray Kroc

6. “The key to success is being in the right place at the right time, recognizing that you are there, and taking action!” – Ray Kroc

7. “You’ll learn more about a road by travelling it than by consulting all the maps in the world.” – Ray Kroc

8. “When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?” – Ray Kroc

9. “Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.” – Ray Kroc

10. “No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client.” – Ray Kroc

11. “There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.” – Ray Kroc

12. “The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.” – Ray Kroc

13. “Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.” – Ray Kroc

14. “I have always believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems. It is a simple philosophy.” – Ray Kroc

15. “While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.” – Ray Kroc

16. “The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.” – Ray Kroc

17. “Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.” – Ray Kroc

18. “You’re only as good as the people you hire.” – Ray Kroc

19. “All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment.” – Ray Kroc

20. “The more I help others to succeed, the more I succeed.” – Ray Kroc

21. “None of Us is as Good as All of Us.” – Ray Kroc

22. “The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.” – Ray Kroc

23. “If you do it first class and you don’t compromise values, and you don’t compromise quality, and you don’t compromise service, and you don’t compromise cleanliness, then everybody else who is the competitor has got to play catch-up.” – Ray Kroc

24. “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.” – Ray Kroc

25. “That’s the name of the game … pleasing the customer. If we ever lose sight of that fact, we’ve lost the ball game.” – Ray Kroc

26. “If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard, it is impossible to fail.” – Ray Kroc

27. “We have an obligation to give something back to the community that gives so much to us.” – Ray Kroc

28. “To be successful, you must be daring, be first and be different.” – Ray Kroc

29. “I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced the best was ahead of me.” – Ray Kroc

30. “As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.” – Ray Kroc

31. “I guess to be an entrepreneur you have to have a large ego, enormous pride and an ability to inspire others to follow your lead.” – Ray Kroc

32. “In business for yourself, but not by yourself.” – Ray Kroc

33. “I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand.” – Ray Kroc

34. “Competition can try to steal my plans and copy my style. But they can’t read my mind; so I’ll leave them a mile and a half behind.” – Ray Kroc

35. “People have marvelled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonalds until I was fifty-two years old and then I became a success overnight. But I was just like a lot of show business personalities who work away quietly at their craft for years, and then, suddenly, they get the right break and make it big. I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.” – Ray Kroc

36. “You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.” – Ray Kroc

37. “It is impossible to grant someone happiness. The best you can do… is to give him the freedom to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a by product – a by product of achievement.” – Ray Kroc

38. “A man must take advantage of any opportunity that comes along…” – Ray Kroc

39. “There’s almost nothing you can’t accomplish if you set your mind to it.” – Ray Kroc

40. [On the art of entrepreneurship] “You’re not going to get it free, and you have to take risks. I don’t mean to be a daredevil, that’s crazy. But you have to take risks, and in some cases you must go for broke.” – Ray Kroc

41. “If you believe in something, you’ve got to be in it to the ends of your toes.” – Ray Kroc

42. “Taking reasonable risks is part of the challenge. It’s the fun.” – Ray Kroc

43. “I believe that if you hire a man to do a job, you ought to get out of the way and let him do it. If you doubt his ability, you shouldn’t have hired him in the first place.” – Ray Kroc

44. “Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.” – Ray Kroc

45. “My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach. Stress your own strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness and value, and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up.” – Ray Kroc

46. “I became a real entrepreneur, crazy enough to take the risk of losing everything.” – Ray Kroc

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

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