Book Reviews: Grinding It Out & Behind The Arches

Have you ever looked at your business like a franchise?

In other words, have you considered what it would take to replicate everything you do in such a way that complete strangers could operate an exact copy of your firm in a distant city with only a few weeks training and an operations manual?

If you haven’t, maybe you should. It’s an instructive exercise, one recommended by Michael Gerber in The E Myth which will be reviewed in a separate posting.

One man who took this exercise to its logical extreme was Ray Kroc, who saw the success the McDonald brothers were having with their small hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California and dreamed of duplicating it across the country and around the world.

The story of how Kroc happened upon the McDonalds and how McDonald’s grew into a global business over the ensuing decades is chronicled from two different perspectives in two great books, both of which I highly recommend you read.

Grinding It Out is Ray Kroc’s autobiography. In it he talks about his childhood and his background selling paper cups for 17 years (yikes!) before acquiring the rights to market a machine called the Multi-Mixer which could produce 5 milkshakes simultaneously. When he received an order for four Multi-Mixers to be delivered to a single small restaurant (who needs to make 20 milshakes at once?), he decided he’d better take a closer look for himself - maybe he could help his other customers sell more milkshakes and himself sell more Multi-Mixers.

The throngs of people lining up to buy hamburgers, french fries and sodas from a single window through the front wall of the store at noon that day changed his plans completely. He no longer wanted to sell Multi-Mixers, he wanted to sell McDonald’s restaurants. The rest, as they say, is history.

While Grinding It Out is a lightly romanticized telling of the famous McDonald’s story from Kroc’s perspective, McDonalds Behind The Arches takes a more dispassionate approach to the tale and offers a more even-handed description of Kroc, warts and all. The stories of disputes with franchisees and the problems Kroc had with the McDonald brothers are told from an outsider’s perspective. Interestingly though, both books tell most of the stories the same way - just in different voices and, in the case of Behind The Arches, in much greater detail.

I loved both of these books and recommend you read the shorter Grinding It Out first. Pardon the pun but when you finish that one you’ll be hungry for much more information on how a single restaurant was transformed into the biggest food service business in the world. At that point, McDonald’s Behind The Arches will really hit the spot.