Age: 81yrs (January 14th 1984)

Birth Place: Oak Park, Illinois, USA

Industry: Fast Food

Biggest Hold Back: Confidence

Net worth: $500 million

Company Website: www.mcdonalds.com

You didn’t think I was going to leave Ray out did you ? What’s that, you don’t know who Ray is? Sure you do, you visit his restaurants at least once a month (Unless you’re a vegetarian, in which case I apologize). Ray Kroc is best known as the man behind McDonald’s. Ray, was an unsuccessful entrepreneur, and was also good friends with Walt Disney I might add. After the war ended Ray went on to try unsuccessfully a number of different career paths, a jazz musician, a pianist, he even tried to sell paper cups, but his confidence just wasn’t there anymore, he’d lost a little faith. After leaving the cups behind, he went on to sell milkshake machines, and found that he was pretty good at it. His confidence rose and he was selling them by the dozen.

Convinced with his new found confidence he sell a machine to every restaurant he partnered up with a couple of brothers by the name of McDonald. They were starting to franchise their own business, a fast food restaurant. The McDonalds brothers went on to build a fair amount of stores and were raking in the money, but Ray wasn’t happy, he was hungry, hungrier than ever now he’d tasted success. So he used all the money he had made ($2.7 million) to buy out the two brothers in a bid to franchise the business everywhere he could. Ray discovered that the way his business should work, should be almost like a production line, that way he could work quicker and serve more customers. He was right. His technique meant no customer would go from being served to having their order in their mouth in more than five minutes, hence the coined phrase of “Fast Food”. By the time of his death Ray Kroc had built an empire of over 10,000 restaurants globally and that has grown to a massive 31,000 today! McDonald’s currently makes $23 billion each year. What an achievement.