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While the movie made it almost impossible to love Ray Kroc, there is a lot to be learned from his extraordinary amount of persistence. Throughout the movie, there were several lessons that stuck out to me like the innovation within the franchise or even the branding power of the name and golden arches. However, the biggest entrepreneurial aspect I took away was Ray's persistence.
For starters, when he heard of Mcdonald's, Ray was 52 years old driving the country to sale a more efficient milkshake mixer to fast food restaurants. He saw Mcdonald's as an amazing opportunity to get a part of and relentlessly tried to persuade the Mcdonald brothers to Franchise their business. After his second visit from across the United States, the brothers agreed to Franchise with him. So, Ray started looking to get funding. This part of the movie gave me lots of information of Ray's persistence in his early career as well. Both investors that Ray spoke with recognized Ray and the product that he tried to sell to them years ago. Also, when Ray pitched his idea to some wealthy friends they teased him asking "what is it now Ray". After he had a few franchise locations he realized he needed a more profitable agreement. He made several attempts to renegotiate with the brothers about operations but they never agreed. Still, Ray kept on and eventually found a way to takeover the business. In the end, he went and visited one of the brothers and he said "Business is war... if my competitor were drowning I'd walk over and put a hose right in their mouth". Those few examples of his persistence were a foundation in the legacy he has today.
Furthermore, this aspect of entrepreneurship is interesting because a lot of people consider famous entrepreneurs to be overnight successes. In Ray Kroc's case, his overnight success took him 30 years of persistence. That's three decades of relentless effort and faith in it eventually all paying off. Today, I think that persistence may be one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur. Everything is moving so fast and our attention spans are dwindling. As a result, most people want to be successful but they want results right after their input. If not, they're quick to lose hope and some will just give up and find something else with faster results. Sadly, some of those ideas could have turned out to be huge if given adequate time and effort. These misfortunes are what we refer to in the classroom as lost value.
The aspect of persistence in entrepreneurs affects society in a positive way (eventually). Like we saw in the movie, Ray's friends were tired of hearing about his business ideas. Even after they invested, it was another mistake. Except this time, Ray was the one revoking his investment from them. If Ray wouldn't have been persistent, then we wouldn't have a fast food business that serves 1% of our world population every day. When entrepreneurs are persistent, creating value is inevitable. Contrary, society doesn't support this aspect as well as they should. Like I said earlier, we as a society look for quick results. There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it's uncommon to see someone focused on one thing. This creates a dilemma where society prioritizes value in things that are trendy and short lived. So, it almost doesn't make sense for an entrepreneur to be so persistent in a slow venture when the market could become obsolete at any moment. This is not a good interaction because a lot of the things we value most as society took persistence to implement. For instance, look at the market share of Mcdonald's. Then look at the dependency we have on fast food chains across the globe. Short lived value is essential, but the greatest value we have today came from the persistence of entrepreneurs.
