The Failure Pledge

Restaurants

Next

Colonel Harland Sanders

Colonel Harland Sanders in his white suit and string tie.
In character, Santa Barbara, around 1974 — a decade after he sold the company.Dan Lindsay. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What failed

Almost everything, for forty years. Fired from the railways twice, out of the law after a courtroom brawl with his own client, fired from an insurance company; a lamp company, a service station, a motel and a restaurant all died on him.

What happened next

He went out with a pressure cooker and a bag of seasoning and cooked for restaurant owners in their own kitchens until they signed. He sold the company at seventy-three.

The point

The thing that ruined him repeatedly — refusing to defer to anyone about how a job should be done — is the same thing that made the recipe worth franchising. Forty years to find the one job that rewarded it.

The sequence

5 documented failures, shown with the successes in between. Every entry carries its own source — the wins are part of the record, and leaving them out is how these stories get distorted.

  1. 1915

    His legal career ends in a courtroom brawl with his own client.

    failureColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

  2. 1923

    He cashes in his ferry boat shares for $22,000 and puts the lot into a company making acetylene lamps. Delco brings out an electric lamp sold on credit and the venture fails.

    failureColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

  3. 1930

    The service station closes in the Depression.

    failureColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

  4. 1939

    His Corbin restaurant and motel burn down.

    failureColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

  5. 1952

    First franchise, at sixty-one — four years before the interstate killed his own trade.

    noteColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

  6. 1956

    A rerouted interstate takes the traffic. He sells Corbin at a loss in his mid-sixties.

    failureThe Life of Colonel Sanders (Snopes)

  7. 1964

    Sells Kentucky Fried Chicken for two million dollars, aged seventy-three.

    successColonel Sanders (Wikipedia)

Sources

Use the ← and → keys to move between entries.

Others in business & startups, and nearby.

← All of them