Resumo de "colonel Sanders Made It Happen"

Colonel Sanders Made It Happen
by John Bray
More than 70 years ago, a restaurant opened in Corbin , Kentucky. There was only one table and six chairs in the front room of a gas station, but it was destined to become a legend. The owner was Harland Sanders, who was already 40 at the time.
The town of Corbin sat on the edge of the mountains, and the depression was in full force. The stock market had bombed out and collapsed late in the previous year.
Sanders had tried to make it with an earlier service station in another town, but it had failed. The crash of 1929 had wiped him out along with thousands of others. Sander had the soul of a champion, however, and would not admit defeat for long.
He took a job selling tires but was laid off when the plant closed. He had been kicked out of his home at only 12, and that marked the end of his formal education. Yet he made an important discovery about himself. He loved work and found he could get a lot done for such a youth.
Like others, Sanders had to work a number of places before realizing that he had a burning desire to be his own boss and have his own business. The important clue about Sanders and his great eventual achievement was his incredible capacity for hard work. Opening a restaurant during the Depression would have wiped out a lesser man, but he began to succeed mainly because he did everything in his power to please his customers.
Sanders serviced the cars of his customers like nobody ever had before. He cleaned windshields. He filled the radiators of every car and went far beyond the usual restaurant type. Travelers discovered how tasty his food was. Sanders had learned what the best seasonings were from his mother, and he also soon found out that he liked to cook.
He soon learned how to use a pressure cooker for frying chicken and began to do well. He added a motel and more seats to his restaurant. A federal highway opened near his restaurant, and that gave him no choice but to sell his operations.
At that point he might well have given up. Sanders was 66, but he felt he was still too young to retire, to call it a day. He got the idea of offering his famous chicken recipe on a franchise basis. This meant traveling through Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. He called on restaurant owners and even cooked his chicken for them and their employees.
The deal Sanders made with restaurant owners was for a few cents for each Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner they sold. He was hopeful of making perhaps $12,000 a year. Only five years later, Sanders had 400 franchises in America and Canada. This number grew to 600 four years later, counting outlets in Britain.
Then a young Kentucky attorney and a Tennessee financier offered to buy the Colonel?s business for $2 million plus the guarantee of a lifetime job. It was too good an offer to refuse. Sanders said yes.
Sanders at that point hit the open road to promote Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he turned up on a number of leading television shows as a guest. He became a superb spokesman and promoter both in person and in commercials.
In 1971, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation was sold to the Heublein Company for a whopping $275 million. Since then the number of outlets has risen even higher and sales passed an amazing $2 billion long ago.
Colonel Sanders is an admirable example of someone who believed in making your dream come true. He got that business of his own and touched the lives of millions...for the better. Well done, Colonel.

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