"I ended up, probably, the top 25 people in McDonald's in the world...[but] I started as a crew person." - Phil Gray
Phil Gray is a husband and father of two. He will own 36 McDonald's by the end of 2020, in addition to his personal investments in real estate and the stock market.
Q: What's it like working with McDonald's?
A: It's a very hard business. If you're gonna be good at it, you gotta have your head in the ball game and stay in tune with it. When you come onto McDonald's, you're called an owner/operator. So it's full-time, best-efforts for McDonald's. So that means, whatever else I do is either a hobby or it's passive. So my full-time focus is McDonald's. So, I get all these restaurant chains, they call me, and they say "Can you open this or that?" And I say, no. I'm full-time with my business. A lot of other businesses let investors invest in their business and turn it and hire different people to run it. And that can be very dangerous in the food business. McDonald's awards you the franchise. They want you to take care of it.
Q: So you run it non-stop?
A: Yeah, I pay them rent and royalties, and they send people out to help you and check on you. There's a lot of scorecards as an owner/operator. We have complaints, and secret, mystery shoppers. It's not like you don't have to worry. You have to keep up the standards.
Q: How much time do you put into your business every week?
A: I usually work five and half days a week.
Q: So, Monday through Friday, and half of Saturday?
A: Yeah. And then there's probably some calls at home. And sometimes you have to go out at night. Sometimes you have to go out on weekends. Sometimes there's emergencies. But I've got a staff. They work hard too, so it's not like I have to be out in every store, every second. People ask me what my routines are. They think I just travel from store to store to store. Most people looking, they don't know how complex McDonald's really is. From a consumer standpoint, they walk into a McDonald's and think "how hard is it to run this place?" Once you goet into it, you see how complex it really is.
Q: Did you realize how complex it was before going into this business?
A: No! I didn't.
When I graduated from college, I still remember it. I was out under the tree, loading my car or something. And my dad comes to me -- my dad didn't go around giving out advice all the time-- but he said," find a good company, and then stay with it." And that's really kind of old school advice. My big thing was to get with an ethical company. I didn't want to work for a company that had schemes going on or whatever. Work for an ethical company.
I think the new generation of people, they change 4, 5, 6, or 10 jobs in their lifetime. And I could have left McDonald's several times, for more money. And you can be an opportunist. a lot of the people today, maybe I would classify them as an opportunist. They might look at social media, or how much other jobs pay, or how great someone is saying their job is, and I think you can be an opportunist within your own company. And when I hired in, I always treated the company money like it was my own. I treated my job like it was my business. And I didn't waste money, even though I could have. I had an expense account. I had a lot of things at the corporate level. I always treated it like you would with things at your house. So don't let it go to your head.
So, he said, stay with a good company, an ethical company, work hard and make opportunities happen for you in that company. Bloom in that company. A lot of people don't have time to bloom in the company because they're always changing. From a young age, I can't ever remember not having money in my pocket. From 8 years old, to what my age is today. I can't think of a day, or week, or month, that I didn't have money. Maybe I was raised to be self-sufficient. Had a paper route at 8, and threw papers for 4 or 5 years. That was my spending money as a kid. I had part-time jobs and mowed yards. I never had a summer or year or anything that I didn't have a job. I don't know, we didn't calculate it, but I paid a lot of my college myself. I paid my gas, my cars, all that stuff myself. My parents would chip in when I needed them to, or when they wanted to, but I can't remember them chipping in that much to be honest with you.
As far as a career, it depends on what your goal is. There's always different routes to get to an end destination. There's not one route that's perfect. One person's route is gonna be different from my route. And that's okay. So you can go a traditional route, or you can go on a more aggressive route. Some people move and re-locate to advance with their company. Some people go international to advance with their company. Some people stay at a home office and politic to get up in the business. So, there's different routes for different people.
I always classified my career in 5 year segments. I always trying to make myself happy for five years. So, I'm gonna take this job, I'm gonna be the best at it, and I'm gonna do it for 5 years. There's been a few times where I turned down a promotion because it hadn't been my five years. Now, that's kind of an odd thing. I was enjoying the job I had, and they came to me, wanting to promote me to something. And I said, hey, listen, I really like that job you're promoting me to, but I need to finish up this. You know I tried to buy 6 months to a year more, but I ended up getting promoted anyway. I always took the opinion that I didn't want to chase the job, I wanted them to come to me and say "hey, I think you'd be good at this."
There's heavy politics in companies no matter who you work for. I didn't enjoy it, but you have to do some of that in life.
Q: Have you mostly worked for McDonald's since graduating college?
A: Yeah. I had started a small business when I was in college, and I had a rental house, and I owned some cattle and different things. So I was kind of looking around to what I needed to do or what I wanted to do. (This is an important point.)
My mother had met a lady, she was in our church, and she was over at our house. She had been working part-time at McDonald's. I had never eaten at McDonald's before I started working at McDonald's because they didn't have one in my town. It was in Oklahoma and it was a college town, but they didn't have a McDonald's. Closest one was 75 miles away and they had one McDonald's in Oklahoma City. I got in at the ground floor. So, she said, "you should go try this company. I think it's gonna go somewhere someday." My friends who had graduated form college, they all went to go work for "typical" business companies. I was in business school so they all went to work for IBM, or the Big 8 accounting firm. And my strategy was: I have a lot of common sense, I'm very persistent, and I work hard. I am not a super-high IQ person. People always say, "you're much smarter than you think you are." Persistence is my key thing. A lot of my friends were smarter than me. Where I would struggle in college, my friends would score higher than me. I was a C+ student. I had roommates that were geniuses. So I said, hey, I'm gonna go for this career. They all went kinda the "Ivy League way." I'm gonna go where no one wants to go, because I can excel fast in that environment. So my strategy was go where I thought I could get promoted quickly. I thought I could be a heavy competitor.
In that environment it's work. Hospitality is work. It's not easy. I got promoted every 2 or 3 years for probably 30 years. My friends would call me and they would go "wow, you're doing that?! You're flying on a corporate airplane across the world?!" McDonald's offered a lot of opportunities. So that's why I say destination and how to strategize for yourself. I found I was competing. In the restaurant world, there's a lot of smart people, a lot of great people. But your efforts can pay off fast if you work hard. So that's kind of what happened there. I ended up probably the top 25 people in McDonald's in the world.
Q: Was that your destination when you started?
A: No. I wanted to be an OP's manager. Kind of like a department head of a company. I always said that'd be great. First you wanna be an area supervisor, cause when you're a store manager you look at the executives and think, oh wow, I really want that job. you always look at the person above you and want their job, is what I'm trying to say.
One day, a regional manager, which is a huge job in McDonald's, cause that's an officer level position. You're over an entire region or multi-states. At a Christmas party one time, one of my worker's husband, he worked for IBm, and he came up to me and he says, I think you can be Regional Manager one day. I mean this guy wasn't even with McDonald's. I go " maybe I can be." Sometimes you need somebody to plant an idea in your head, and get a dream, and somebody to believe in you. From that moment on, I was like, hey, I wanna be a regional manager.
I think suggestions can be powerful.* Especially outsiders. When I was in high school, the football coach came up to me. I think it was my sophomore year. My brother was a very good athlete. And he got a scholarship. he could do everything. I was mediocre. I didn't have the passion for it. I might have had the size, but I didn't have the passion. The football coach came up to me and said, I think you can be something. Why don't you work hard this summer, and come back and play football. So I ran a mile everyday for the whole summer. I still wasn't very good. But he planted a seed in me that gave a vision for me to go forward. Some of those seeds work, some of them don't. But I enjoyed it, had fun, and made friends. It was still good for me. Builds character.
Q: How many kids do you have?
A: Four.
Q: Do you instill in them the same work ethic you have?
A: I mean, pretty much. You'd have to go interview them. They all work for me. That was another thing. Around the kitchen table, when I was young, I would joke with the kids, saying "Chad, someday I'm gonna own some McDonald's and you're gonna work French fries. Clark, you're gonna work the grill. Mom, you're gonna clean the toilets." I'd kinda joke around with them on that. Even when I was working for the company, I would say some day I'm gonna own some stores. Cause I was working for the other owner/operators, supporting them. I didn't own anything. The day I left McDonald's was the day I became an owners/operator. I could have retired at that point in my life and not had to work again. But our dream was, maybe we could have a family business. The only way we could keep family together and enjoy it would be to bring some of the kids into the business. So I became an owner operator and my oldest son Chad, he quit immediately. And I was telling everybody, hey don't quit your jobs, but I couldn't keep them from quitting. One by one they kept coming over. So I have all my kids. So we run a family business which has its pluses and minuses. But I think my kids would say I work too hard, and I probably have. They probably don't think I enjoyed life as much as I should have. When you look back at your life and think maybe I should have taken a few more vacations, made more memories, and done that. I make my own schedule, so it's not like I"m dictated. I can work as many or as few as I want. But to get a business running, I had to get it running, and set up, and I had to get it organized to give to the kids. Succession planning. McDonald's you have to go through an accreditation process of being approved as an owner/operator. you have to go through a bunch of interviews, a bunch of financial checks, so my two sons and daughter in law are approved owner/operators. So now if I bow out at any time I can give more and more to them to run because they're approved.
Q: What was so appealing to have a family business?
A: I talk to a lot of people and they say all the time "You are so lucky! Your kids live all around you. You work with them." They don't realize it took 40 years of blood, sweat and tears to make that dream come true it didn't just happen. I had the opportunity to bring them in because I had the wherewithall to joing and they wanted to join. one fo the thing I said to each of them was I wanted you to work at least one or two years for another company before they joined my company because I dint want them to be homogenized in my thinking. and I need that outside thinking too, new thinking, new thoughts. so all of them have worked for different companies and have different skill sets that they Brought in. my son in law did pest control, and did all the stuff, and he was great at that. my oldest son worked for a computer company and did logo designs in provo, my other son worked for a vendor that is a vendor in McDonald's and he moved to Singapore to help them with that and the came back. my daughter does all the customer service. she stays home and handles all the complaints. my wife does all the orientation. she works about 20-30 hours a week. we have about 1600-1700 employees a week. so there's always issues.
We started with 6 restaurants in Florida. A gentleman in Nashville had 22 stores, and he decided to retire. So we took the opportunity, and moved to Nashville. Now we'll end the year with 36 stores. We just bought a new store last month, and we opened a new store in Franklin. Which you oughta go see, it's pretty cool. And we're buying a couple more stores by the end of the year.
Q: What's your next 5 year goal?
A: Probably my next five year goal is probably learn how to bow out more. Let them control it. Try and catch up on some trips, travel with my wife, and enjoy some things we've never done before. Do that and watch the kids flourish. See if they can grow the business to the next level.
This business is a little different. It's almost a generational business. If you do things right and run things right, you set it up for the next generation and the next generation after that. A lotta people don’t realize, you walk into a McDonalds’s, a lot of them are second, third generation family members that have been in it the whole time. It’s not a buy and sell business. In the business world, there’s a lot people who go, "Hey, In 3, 5, 7 years, I’m gonna build a business then I’m gonna cash out." That’s the mentality. It’s doesn’t matter if it’s a laundry, restaurant, or a bar. You got an investor, they got x number of years, and they wanna bulld a business, cash out, and make a lot of money. That’s the business world. "I wanna build an apartment, I wanna get it full, then I wanna sell it." In some businesses it works. McDonald’s is not a buy and sell type thing. There are transactions that happen all the time. It's usually life events. Somebody retires, somebody passes away. Maybe the second generation doesn’t enjoy the business like their parents did. There’s always things going on. But it’s not like you’ll see a McDonald’s for sale in a magazine. Most companies say they’re a franchise business. They wanna make money on the franchise and on royalties and products that they sell. They don’t care if you’re successful or not. They kinda do, but they don’t. It’s not like it’s a big threat to them because if you go broke they can sell it to someone else.
If you read a book on McDonald’s. The way McDonald’s started was ingenious. Cause they had a strategy that no one else understood. On the New York Stock Exchange today, McDonald’s is listed as a reality company, not a hamburger company. So McDonald’s had the vision of "we’re gonna own all these sites as a company." I’ll give you an example. Great Clips. How many sites do they own? Probably zero. They probably lease every site there is. How many sites does Subway own? They lease all those sites, they don’t own any. A lot of franchises, their franchisee develops and buys the land, and builds the building, and do the whole thing. McDonald’s had a strategy of, "we’re gonna buy all these sites, develop em, and we’re gonna give people 20 year leases for these buildings. And we’re gonna collect rent and make money off the store." So, it’s a very long-term vision. So McDonald’s has control over all their real estate in the world. Most sites. So they either own it or have long term leases. So that’s why a lot of times you see McDonald’s that’ll stay there forever cause the McDonald’s corporation owns the real estate. So Dave Watson, which is an outstanding businessman, I think he probably owns all the land, and the buildings, and everything on his. So that’s a positive for him. Cause when he sells, he can lease the building to whoever buys his. So he has an income coming in. I get a 20 year lease on the buildings. And the cost for the future are more fixed. So take the green hills building, the McDonald's. If a competitor came to Nashville today, there’s probably no competitor that could afford that piece of property. McDonald’s probably bought that 40 years ago.
Q: So what does that mean?
A: Say you bought a piece of property 40 years ago in New York City, what’s it gonna be worth today?
E: A lot more.
A: So the company balance sheet of McDonald’s has all this land. That’s why it’s considered a great company for the investors. So, if I have a thousand franchisees, and I own no property, but I collect revenues from them, which is a good business model, what happens if I lose the lease?
E: You just lost your income.
And what happens in leases in the business world, usually a business gets a 5 year lease, a 7 year lease, a 10 year lease. Very seldom over 10 years. But your fixed cost go up. So Nashville, 10 years ago, I’d be paying 3x the rent at Green Hills if someone else owned that building. If Mcdonald’s owns it, I get the same rate forever.
Q: So if you were to buy a store today in 2020, you’d be paying the same rent in 40 years?
Mhmm. It might go up a little bit for different things, but basically yes.
E: That’s really good for the franchisee. It seems like that would make it more attractive for people to join the company.
A: Yeah. You’re joining a stable company that has a solid balance sheet that will take care of ya for the long term.
Q: Were you aware of that going into the company?
A: No, I learned all that over the years. I didn’t no beans about it. So, I can remember this new McDonald’s in town, I had just graduated from college. I had to stay in town for a couple months. So I just took it as a lark. I said, "I’m gonna work for this new McDonald’s restaurant, then I’m gonna quit in two months. I’m gonna see what’s going on." So then I got in and I go, "oh my goodness, they are organized." They taught me more about business than I could ever learn in college or anything. That’s why you see all these people that are successful. I used to tell people, go work for a business that’s successful and learn what they’re doing. That’s real life action. If you wanna be a chef, go work for a really good chef. If you wanna be a real estate person, go work for the best real estate person. If you think you’re smart enough to start all this stuff yourself, it probably isn’t going to happen.
So funny story, I interviewed for McDonald’s and they said (I wanted to be like an assistant manager) and he goes, "well we don’t really have an opening, so you can come work on the crew." And he said, "we’ll probably have an opening in a couple months." So I said, fine. I started out as a crew person. The opening came and I got the job, and at that point I said, "wow, this company’s organized, I can learn a lot." And after a few months I said, "I think I’m gonna stick with this company cause it’s gonna go somewhere." Kinda like today, you’re with a start-up company and you can see it going somewhere. Like you’re with a tech company and you can see it growing like Facebook or another app. I was very impressed with their organaziation, their standards, their ethics. So took it as a lark, stayed, and worked 35 years for them.
Q: It sounds like you were more focused on learning about business than making money.
A: Yeah, well, in the early years, oh yeah. I never made a lot of money. I provided for my family. You get into restaurant manager, then supervisor, then management type salaries, of course you made more each time, but I don’t think money was ever the [motivator]. I always wanted to get promoted and I knew I was gonna make more money. I could have. I’ll give you an example. I was working in Dallas for McDonalds, and this other company, at that time, the owner owned the Dallas cowboys. Which had a lot of glitz in that time in Dallas. And they were opening up some deli’s and office complexes and catering stuff for the business district. The whole time I was working for McDonald’s I interviewed maybe once. Maybe 2 or 3 times, I didn’t know I was interviewing. I can remember taking a resume and going to meet somebody one time. I interviewed a lot within the company, but not outside the company. And this guy offered me like double my salary. And I was a young guy, young and married, so I go, "wow, I can go double my salary." And I thought long and hard about it, and I thoguht, no, I’m gonna stick with McDonald’s. 3, 4, 5, years later, they wern’t successful. He closed down and went somewhere else.
There’s a lot of false promises out there with salaries and opportunities and people try to bait and switch you and offer you the world. It might seem like it’s great for one or two years. That’s where my dad’s advice, stick with a company and make it pay off for you, I don’t know if that’s the right advice for today. Cause the younger generation change jobs more. But I have seen a lot of people that I work with, that were working for me, and they would leave and get a job somewere else, I’d always go, "are they better off?" A lot of times they would have been better off if they’d stayed. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Maybe one out of ten or two out of ten or three out of ten scored bigger for themselves, but the vast majority didn’t. It wasn’t a gigantic leap. Somebody offers you more salary, and they want you to move to San Fransisco. The cost of living is 26% more in San Fransisco. You might be thinking you're making more money, but you’re making less money.
Q: So, you’ve been an owner/operator for a while. What do you think contributes to the success of your business?
A: Well, It’s always people in any business. Our business, we have a good brand. It’s a highly recognizable brand, which is good and bad. We’re the lighting rod for anything good or bad that happens in the world. Whether it’s health, or wages, or anything else going on. So I think we have a good brand. If I work the system and care about it, and care about the people and motivate them, and nourish them. Just work hard everyday on that.
During Covid, we didn’t lay off anybody. We actually hired all during this mess. We gave promotions. We had a bonus we were gonna pay out at the end of the year for performance, and we went ahead and paid that bonus out early. We try to do a lot of things. We have a company loan program. Most of the people that work for us, they don’t have a network. Their car breaks down, they need a thousand dollars. So we have an automatic loan for our emoployees. You can get 500 just automatically. We just do a payroll deduction and loan them the money. So we have a lot of things, we try and take care of the people. We watch over them and care about them. I’m not really getting to your question. What makes it successful? First off, you gotta understand the financials. You gotta understand how to make money. Save the pennies. That’s where people don’t understand. I know everything and what it costs.
Q: Everything?
A: Everything. Everything. Well, pretty close. This is a good example. The trash bag, the plastic trash bag we use on our trash, costs 10 cents a bag. A roll of paper towels, I know how much it costs. I know all the cleaning chemicals, I know what they cost. I know how much I pay for pest control every month. I know how much we pay for waste management on the dumpsters. I know what a pound of freon costs. In the business world, that’s where it gets eaten up. People don’t know all the miscellaneous costs. They just look at driving a BMW or this and that. So that’s where it’s kind of a ground-up approach. And still to this day that’s how we run the business.
My oldest son looks at every bill that comes in. Everything that we pay. Of course we have a lot of technology that helps us with all this. We have dashboards, we can see what’s going on. McDonald’s is a penny business. Pennies make dollars, but you gotta start out counting the pennies. If you’re leaving your air conditioning running overnight, and you don’t have it on setback, money’s just being thrown away. I work on that everyday. Is there a better way to do this? Are the calibrations right on the machines? Are we giving too much? Are we giving not enough? You don’t want to cheat. McDonald’s has very strict standards, but if you’re not watching it…
A coffee example would be, you have a coffee pot that has ten cups of coffee. That’s a dollar a cup. Let’s say, over a year, maybe the sediment has built up or something. It’s giving nine cups, instead of ten. You gotta be able to recognize that. If you’re selling 50 pots a day, that’s 50 dollars a day. For a year, that’s $15,000. I could keep going on. I could give you example after example after example.
I think that a lot of people don’t realize that you teach correct principles, and you’ll be successful in any business. If you’re a highly profitable person, every business wants you. If you can make money. So it doesn’t matter if you’re running a grocery store or McDonald’s or whatever. And tha’ts a whole skill set in itself, how to make money. And how do you make money? It’s, how do you take care of your people? And how do you take care of your profit? And once you make money, what do you do after that?
A big tip. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a guy I respected a lot in the business world, and he said something to the effect that, money always wins. So that means that you save, and you scrimp, and you have a reserve, and if an opportunity comes, and you have the money, and somebody else doesn’t have the money, then you win. Let’s say we were extravagent, and our financials were borderline, which, a lot of people in the business world, they’re living on a razor, they don’t have a reserve. You might think... but they don’t have a reserve.
Pizza Hut and Wendy’s. They own 1200 Pizza Huts and 400 Wendy’s, that’s the largest franchisee in the US, they just filed for bankrupcy. And if you go through the store closings for restaurants, you’ll see a massive amount of restaurants. It’s all of them. When business is slow, they’re consoledating. They’re keeping their best running. And their losers? Close em. So company’s have to balance their profit. And individuals have to balance their profit.
This gets into another key.
When I was sitting in my living room, with another friend, and both of us didn’t have any money. He got his accounting degree, and we were both sitting there, and we said, "how in the world can we ever have money, if we don’t have any?: And he says, "well,"—and we both did— he says, "well, we’re gonna pay our tithing, and we’re gonna save 10-15% for every year that we’re ever gonna live. And it’s gonna go into an account." He sat there and says, "the people that make money already have money. So we gotta make money to have money." Now some people think they can get a pyramid scheme and make money. Really, if you have ten thousand, twenty, or fifteen thousand, then you could actually do a solid investment in something and make some money. So I did it my entire working career. So we saved at least 10% and my wife would say, "wow, we don’t have any money. We can’t buy this or that." And I go, "some day you’re gonna thank me." So we always put that money into a savings. And my method was every time I got promoted, I would take a percent of that pay increase, and put it into that account. So that way my lifestyle would never change.
Let’s say I got promoted and got a 5% pay increase. I put 2.5% of that pay increase into the savings, and we would live on the other 2.5%. So every year I did that, and then I built up to 10%. It mighta taken me 2 or 3 years to build up to 10%, then I might have built it up to 15% the next 5 or 10 years, then I built it up to 20% the last 10 years. Then you have a lump sum you can do something with.
Q: What’s a good lump sum to begin investing? How does one begin investing money?
A: Well there’s Robin-hood. There’s an app you can get for your age-group, there’s two or three apps. My kids all do it. You can buy one share of Joe-Blow’s company or whatever it is. And they buy it, and if they get a little more money, they buy another share or something. In the old days, you’d pay a stockbroker, and you’d pay this. So I would say just start out on something small like that, and over time try to build that investment up a little bit. The strategy I said was save 10% of what you make. Even if you say, I’m gonna put 50 bucks a month. But you gotta start somewhere and build it. It’s hard to come up with that sum of money. Plus a retirement for a ton of people. If you’re freelancing or something, it’s more important, cause you don’t have a big company behind you, forcing you to get payroll deductions and stuff. So if you’re freelancing, you gotta be kind of your own financing person for the short term and the long term. Freelance is great. But how long can you freelance? Can you get a house? What happens if you get married?
Q: What resources would you recommend for anyone just starting out?
A: I’d say learn by the succesful people. I don’t know if you can learn it all. You need to study it, but you need to see some practical application. The resources? There’s a lot of resources. You can take annual reports. You can devour what you’re interested in. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m interested in the restaurant business. Well, you take a look at the trade magazines. You take a look at every annual report that stock holders look at. You can see how they’re doing. Are they plus sales, are they minus sales? Are they building more stores, are they not building more stores? Become an expert on that industry. A lot of people that are in those industries, are not studying it hard enough to keep up with the trends. They’re just there floating.
Work for some great bosses that have tremendous leadership. I had one, he was a financial genious. He would read all these financial reports, and he knew who was trending, their advertising campaigns, and he would come back and try to apply that to the company he’s working for.
And you work for another boss that is an extreme people person, that’s charismatic, he can get a lot out of people. He can get 20% more out of people. Other bosses can get 70%, he can get 105% because he was fun to work with and he motivated you to work. You see other bosses that were solution bosses. They come up with solutions. Which I call skip thinking. Instead of dwelling on the problem, they’d say, "ok, here’s the problem, but here’s the solution to that." I can just go back through my career and say, "that boss was great at that. That boss was a great motivator. That boss was a great financial person. That boss was a great restauranteur. He knew the nuts and the bolts of the business." So you get different levels of skillsets. And that’s why, as time goes on, you circle yourself with those type of minds.
So even today, I have, I don’t utilize them a lot, but I’ve got like 4 or 5 people that I totally trust, and they can guide me as mentors in the areas that I need help in. So if I need legal advise and estate planning and very complex tax strategies, I can go to this person. And if I got accounting issues, I can go to this person. I think as time goes on, you have to have that.
If you think you can do it yourself, you can go so far, because other people are so beyond what you’re thinking and can see it in the future better. So you gotta be able to tap into those minds, and that’s networking and friendship. And I think some of my kids really don’t understand that aspect, cause they’d say, "why do you still talk to that guy?" They just don’t understand. "You can get that done faster and cheaper doing xyz." ,"But that guy saved me 20 years ago. He took me when I was at my rock bottom and helped me." And that whole relationship piece in the business world, to have those relationships, and skill sets that can guide you.
Everyday I’m thinking about, how can I do this? Maybe my kids can help me, maybe somebody from church, maybe one of my advisors, maybe one of my good friends. That’s where you can explode the opporutnies for you, if you have people that can do that. Could I be an architect for a building? No. I couldn’t. There’s no way. Could I draw up a legal document? No, I can’t. You gotta have people that are much smarter than you in certain subjects. I’m a good general practitioner, but I would call on the specialist when I need it. I’ve met some through the church, some of the most people I highly respect. I met others in the business world.
There’s a guy who lived next door to me in Flordia. He had a car wash right next to my McDonalds. And he’d be hosing down the carwash, he’d be changing out motors at 2 o’clock in the morning. He’d be flithy. He’d be working. He owned 26 car washes, but I could tell immediately, that he was active in his business, that he was a good business person. He runs a totally different business, but we both got the same business style. We talk the same langauge. So, you wanna hang around that guy and see what he’s doing. He’s cutting edge. I don’t know how many car washes he owns today, he probably owns 40 or 50. I talk to him every 6 months. Relationships are important. If I need help, I know who to call. This sounds, I probly shouldn’t even… You know people of other companies, maybe presidents or vice-presidents, and they’re very successful, and you could always call them if you needed something because you built the relationship. Relationships, and this is where it’s new to your guys' age, cause texting and this and that, and it’s very seldom you even get a phone call.
I was at a speech with Colin Powell. I was at a conference and he was one of the main speakers, and he said, "I could command the biggest military in the world. I could drop bombs, and I could send troops." He had all this massive power, and he said, "the next day I didn't have a job, and I’m vacuuming his floor." This is after he left, and that puts it in perspective. Ego only gets you so far. You’re always gonna come down to earth. You gotta keep everything in check. My kids are always checking me, making sure things are right.
What I learned:
He talks a lot about the importance of people. Most of his important lessons came from people in an informal setting, in living rooms, kitchens, parties. I'm making implications, but it seems like relationships are better built outside of the office.
Patience. With my other interview with Dave Watson, I learned the value of saving and investing. Here, we really see the patience required to let it pay off. 40 years to get to where he is, starting as a crew member. He had so much patience to get to where he was.
Hard work, and enjoying what you do. It's easy to fall into the trap of changing course because of the allure of money. But if you want to be successful, it's a long way to the top. You have to enjoy what you do, like it, and keep working at it.
A lot of the stereotypes about McDonald's were shed. They really do care about their employees, the health, the safety. Before our interview, he was talking about an emergency that came up. An A/C unit was falling through the roof. It was Phil's top priority to make sure that his employees were out of harm's way.
The financial principles of saving and investing, even if it's small, was put into perspective. If a crew member is working and putting away 10% of what he makes, and a higher up isn't. That crew member is better financially prepared than that regional manager making $100k a year who is living on the edge. It means that discipline should be practiced at every level.
Questions I wished I asked him:
He talked about politics, and how there's politics in McDonald's. I wish I would have dug deeper into what he meant by that.
I wish I would have asked him if he regretted working too much, and if hew would have done things differently.
How would a crew member working at McDonald's today get to where you are now?
What I could do better on:
Originally this interview was going to be done over zoom. However, I ended up going to his office. I had two lapel microphones, but I was only use to setting up one. I didn't think I would need to know how to set up both so soon. I even had to borrow batteries from him (which I need to give back). I forgive myself for not knowing how to set up the second microphone (which I had to learn how to do on the spot), but I could have at least remembered to check the batteries.
I took too long to transcribe this. I had a goal to get it done on Friday. It's now Monday, and I'm just now finishing it up.
What I think I did good/better:
I think I did a better job at listening. I was still nervous, so I missed some stuff, but I was more focused than I was last time.
I asked him "who else do you think would be interested in being interviewed?" After it was over. He told me that was a good question. I'll keep asking that question after it's over.
I've been trying to pray before every interview and before I transcribe. I feel like it helps me focus while transcribing, and I was able to get a lot out of the interview.
*Note: At the end of the interview, he said: "I might be hiring you to be the property manager." And, "I might have to hire you to do our video work."