On September 9, 1890, Harlan Sanders was born on a farm near Henryville, Indiana. The family was not well off, but they got by. When he was six years old, however, his father died, leaving his mother and three children to struggle to get by.
To make ends meet, his mother had to take on many jobs outside the home, peeling potatoes at the food factory during the day and sewing clothes at night, so she didn't have time to take care of her youngest child, and as the oldest child, he shouldered the burden of taking care of his siblings and worrying about his mother. During the day, when his mother was not at home, young Sanders had to cook for himself, and after a year, he had learned to cook 20 dishes, and became known as a good cook.
At the age of 12, his mother remarried, and his relationship with his stepfather was not very good, and he never wanted to study again until he reached the sixth grade, when the air in his home was stifling. He went to work on a farm in Greenwood, where he worked hard but managed to put food on the table.
Since then he has changed jobs in countless ways and has tried his hand at just about everything, working as a stucco man, a fireman, selling insurance, and serving as a soldier for a while, and then he got a correspondence law degree that allowed him to work as a sheriff in Little Rock, Kansas, for a while.
At the age of 40, Sanders came to Kentucky and opened a Kolbein gas station, because there were a lot of customers coming and going to fill up their tanks, and seeing these long-distance travelers hungry, Sanders had a thought, why don't I make some convenience food along the way to satisfy these people? Besides, his own craftsmanship is already good, his wife and children also often praise. As soon as he thought of it, he made some daily meals in the small kitchen of the gas station to solicit customers.
During this period, Sanders introduced its own specialty food, which was the prototype of the world-famous Kentucky Fried Chicken, which soon became so popular because of its delicious and unique flavor that customers praised it, even to the extent that some people came not to get gas but to eat the fried chicken from the Kolbein gas station.
When he first started doing this, Sanders was trying to expand the business of his gas station, but now instead the reputation of fried chicken has spread beyond the gas station, and because there are more and more customers, the gas station can't accommodate them anymore, so Sanders opened a Sanders restaurant across the street to specialize in his specialty -- fried chicken.
To ensure quality, Sanders put on his apron and fried, and invested in an expansion of the restaurant to seat 142 people. In doing so, he created a rudimentary market for fried chicken. In later years, he operated while researching the special ingredients for fried chicken (containing 11 herbs and spices , so that the skin of the fried chicken formed a thin, almost unbaked shell, the chicken was moist and tasty. The recipe for this ingredient is still used today, but the number of seasonings has grown to 40. And it's Kentucky's most important secret weapon, as is the Coca-Cola recipe.
By 1935, Sanders' fried chicken had become famous. Kentucky Gov. Ruby Lafont officially presented him with the rank of Kentucky colonel in recognition of his special contributions to the state's food and drink, and so he is known as "Dear Colonel Sanders" to this day.
Penniless after World War II
Though business was good, Sanders wasn't satisfied with that success, and he took it a step further by building a motel next to the diner. This made Sanders the first corporate conglomerate to combine food, lodging and gasoline before the famous Howard, Johnson Motel was built.
But with the increase in customers, Sanders felt the lack of their own management experience, for which he specialized in New York Cornell University to study the hotel and inn industry management courses, which enabled him to solve the restaurant management problems faced in the future, but there are still problems. With the growing reputation of Sanders Restaurant and the increasing number of customers, it was not an easy task to fry the chicken for so many customers and serve it to the table quickly. He was always scrambling to fry the chicken for his customers while listening to the incessant grumbling of those in a hurry.
Sanders was troubled by this, what to do? That's when a chance demonstration of a pressure cooker inspired him; a pressure cooker could dramatically reduce cooking time without burning the food, which couldn't have been better for his fried chicken.
In 1939, Sanders bought a pressure cooker, and after doing various experiments with cooking time, pressure and oiling, he finally discovered a unique way to fry chicken. The chicken fried under pressure was the best he had ever tasted, and Kentucky Fried Chicken still uses the pressure-cooker method today. And as he imagined, it took only 15 minutes to fry a chicken, and the short, flavorful fried chicken became the talk of the town, with so many diners flocking to it that even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Sanders' business was still booming.
But the outbreak of World War II dealt him a small blow when gasoline rationing was instituted during the war and his gas station closed, leaving Sanders to concentrate on his own restaurant. Yet changes in the outside world once again threatened his peaceful life. Plans for a new trans-state highway across Kentucky were finalized and announced to the public, and the road next to Sanders' restaurant site was passed by the new highway, which was a huge blow to Sanders, disrupting all his plans, and his ambitions and passions dropped to freezing point. He had to sell his assets to pay off his debts, and the proceeds amounted to only half of his total assets before the highway opened. Even his bank deposits were exhausted in order to pay off the debt. In one fell swoop, Harlan Sanders, the formerly respected colonel, went from being a rich man respected by all to a penniless pauper.
Sanders was 66 years old at the time, and all he had to go on was his own $105-a-month dole. But Sanders didn't want to end his life on that note, and the dole wasn't enough to make ends meet, so he had to rely on himself.
1009 failures
Sanders pondered what he should do to get out of his predicament, and the most valuable thing he had was fried chicken, which was a huge intangible asset. Suddenly, he remembered that he once sold his fried chicken practice to a restaurant owner in Utah. This owner did such a good job that a few more restaurant owners also bought Sanders' fried chicken compositions. They paid Sanders five cents for every chicken they sold. In the midst of his predicament, Sanders thought, maybe there are others who do this, and maybe this is a new beginning for the business.
So Colonel Sanders started his second business, taking a pressure cooker, a 50-pound bucket of ingredients and hitting the road in his old Ford.
Dressed in a white suit and black bow tie, the white-haired colonel, a Southern gentleman, stopped in front of every restaurant, from Kentucky to Ohio, hawking fried chicken recipes and asking to show the owners and clerks how to fry chicken. If they liked fried chicken, they sold them concessions, provided the ingredients and taught them how to fry it.
At first, no one believed him, and the restaurant owners even thought it was a waste of time to listen to this weird old man's nonsense. Sanders had a tough time getting the word out, and after two years and 1,009 rejections, he finally got a "yes" the 1010th time he walked into a restaurant. With one person, there was a second, and with Sanders' persistence, his idea was finally accepted by more and more people.
In 1952, the first authorized KFC restaurant was established in Salt Lake City, and that was the beginning of restaurant franchise franchising in the world. Immediately afterward, to the surprise of more than a few, Sanders' business snowballed. In just five years, he had developed a chain of 400 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada.
In 1955 Col. Sanders' KFC Co. was officially launched. At the same time, he accepted an offer to appear on a Colorado television talk show. Because of his busy schedule throughout the day, he had to find the only clean suit he could find - a white palazzo - and put on the black-rimmed eyes he had worn for years to appear in front of the public. The image of the veteran Southern colonel cooking fried chicken soon attracted so many reporters and TV hosts that Sanders, 70, was surrounded by people clamoring to work with him, and restaurant reps were still flocking to him to buy franchises. In response, he built a school for these restaurateurs to come to KFC to learn how to run a franchised fried chicken restaurant.
In 1964, a 29-year-old young lawyer John Brown and 60-year-old capitalist Jack Massie and other investment group was y impressed by the cause of Sanders, they wanted to use 2 million dollars to buy the business, which at the time this is not a small amount, although the heart is extremely reluctant to give up, but taking into account their own already 74 years old, Sanders agreed to put the next The next generation will be the next generation to do the job.
Forever the image of KFC
In everyone's eyes, the retired Sanders should have taken a break, but the tireless old man started another job. Since his appearance on TV, his outfit has become a unique KFC registered trademark, and when people see him, they will naturally recall the legendary experience of Colonel Sanders and his ever-smiling appearance. For this reason Sanders often joked, "My smile is the best trademark." Although he sold all of his proprietary rights, in consideration of his tremendous reputation, these new owners paid Sanders a special lifetime salary to continue to serve as a spokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which he advertised widely.
Accompanied by enterprising new business executives, Kentucky Fried Chicken grew at a phenomenal rate in the rapidly growing fast-food industry in the United States. Over the next five years, sales grew by an average of 96 percent per year, reaching $200 million in 1976. Nearly 1,000 new outlets opened that same year, the vast majority of which were franchises.
In 1971, with the Colonel's approval, Brown and Massey sold the promising business to Huberline. By this time, KFC's annual turnover had exceeded $200 million. Although the KFC business has changed hands since then, the franchise has remained the same, with more and more fried chicken ingredients, but always based on that classic 11-ingredient base, and, of course, always in the image of the always-smiling Colonel Sanders in a white suit, with a full head of white hair and black-rimmed glasses.
Sanders' life is a typical American legend, he has done a variety of jobs, but only at the age of 40 in the catering industry to find the starting point of his career, and then through setbacks, at the age of 66 and rise again to re-create another brilliant, with his "franchising", today's KFC! With his "franchising", KFC today is the world's largest fried chicken chain.
And Sanders can be said to be for KFC to pay a lifetime of effort and hard work, just before he died at the age of 90, but also to do up to 250,000 miles of travel each year, around the sale of Kentucky Fried Chicken. His age and wealth did not affect his passion for his work, and he continued to work tirelessly on his business. When people asked him why he still worked as hard as he did, Sanders replied, "More people rust from idleness than exhaustion, and if I ever rusted from idleness, I'd go to hell."
Colonel Sanders died tragically in 1980 at the age of 90 because of leukemia. His body was laid to rest to be honored at the State Capitol. Although he is gone, he founded the fried chicken business to bring eternal charm to Kentucky, people can not know the U.S. geography of Kentucky, but they can not not know the name of fried chicken Kentucky. With one chicken, he changed the world of food.
The secret of success
It's not too late to start a business at 66.
Face your 1009th failure with candor.