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How to Ride the Right Tide for Business Success

April 4, 2022 by Mel Bost Leave a Comment

As small businesses begin to open up again, the business owner must look forward to creating future business or new ventures. Here is some advice from other entrepreneurs and business leaders.

In his book Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonalds, founder Ray Kroc stated in the first chapter that he had always thought a person should be responsible for their own actions and initiatives.

He went one step further by including these seven lines from a Shakespearean play Julius Caesar:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, 
Taken at the flood leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyages of their lives 
Is mired in the miseries and the sorrows.
On such a rising sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the tide where it leads
Or lose our fortunes.”

If you know the story of the modern McDonalds, you know that, after meeting the McDonald brothers at their fast food restaurant in California, he developed a vision of what a McDonalds chain of restaurants could become: a gathering place for families to enjoy comfort food in surroundings easy to get to by car and a an approach to customer service that was fast, clean and dependable.

Success depended on having a “process” which focused on customer service and a product that was in demand.

This is great advice for entrepreneurs or new fledgling business owners. When faced with a decision to expand operations or enter a new business venture, the time to act is very short. The success or failure may be weighed by many factors, but the instant of decision is the business person’s to face.

Knowing when the sea is rising and the tide is in the right direction is a quality or characteristic of leaders that new business owners must ascribe to.

In a recent television interview with financier David Rubenstein, famed Japanese investor Masayoshi Son said that, when he read Ray Kroc’s book, he immediately wanted to talk to Kroc about his ideas in fields in which to invest.  After many attempts to connect with Kroc by phone, Son traveled to a city where he knew Kroc would be visiting and the two talked face-to-face. Kroc told him that “computers” was the field to investigate. Masayoshi  first tried his hand in “electronic translating machines.” He relied on other emerging figures in the field to advise him.  His success has been astounding. 

More and more business owners are heeding the call from Ray Kroc to find the tide and ride it to new successes. Hesitating often means the opportunity is lost.  In this time of extreme crisis for small businesses, perhaps it’s time to make a bold move and thrust your business forward into the new and emerging economy.

Shouldn’t you be doing the same thing in your ventures?

This blog article originally appeared on the SCORE Greater Phoenix blog available here.

Filed Under: Best Practices

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About Mel Bost

Mel Bost is a project management consultant specializing in project closeout and lessons learned, as well as process improvement, best practices, and benchmarking. For the past several years, he has been teaching “Project Management for Research” to postgraduate students at Arizona State University, as well as developing new approaches to the research process. Read More

Project Management Lessons Learned: A Continuous Process Improvement Framework

The NERS department congratulates C. Melvin Bost, Jr., on the publication of his new book.

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