Roads To Success 4.2

15 Cent Burgers

In the mid-1960s McDonald’s restaurants were not the McDonald’s we know today.  Merlyn Knight is President of Jerry Caven’s Royal Fork Restaurant Corporation.  He explained what it was like in the beginning.  “It was the old McDonalds with no indoor seating.  Just the open front and fifteen-cent burgers in those days.”

Merlyn Knight may be President of the Royal Fork Restaurant Corporation today, but he started out at Jerry’s first McDonald’s restaurant.  “Jerry hired me himself and trained me the first night,” Merlyn recalled.  “I worked alongside him for the whole time I was there.”

“We just got in and just worked, and just went with it,” Jerry added.  “We were actually running scared, I guess, of the consequences of not being successful.”

“We worked very hard but we had a good time in doing it,” Merlyn Knight continued.  “That’s what allowed us to become very, very productive and a very, very successful McDonald’s unit.”

The success at first was small, but success nonetheless.  “At the end of the first month we did a P & L for the first time in my life; I had no business training,” Jerry related.  “And we had made $700.”

That small profit would prove to be only the beginning.  McDonald’s headquarters took note as Jerry’s monthly profits steadily grew.  He had been in business six months when they approached him again.  McDonald’s had another restaurant in Portland, Oregon that was not doing well.  They asked Jerry to purchase it and turn it around, just as he had turned around the failing Boise franchise.

“I told McDonald’s we still don’t have any money.  They said, okay we will give you that one,” Jerry told our camera.

Jerry accepted, and eventually, McDonald’s gave him two more restaurant franchises that were not performing well, both in Washington State.  “Within about fourteen to eighteen months after taking over the Boise McDonald’s we had a total of four McDonald’s in three different states,” Jerry offered.  “Finally, about a year after that we got an honest to goodness franchise that we did pay for in Reno, Nevada.”

Jerry wanted to further expand his McDonald’s business, but McDonald’s would not sell him any more franchises.  The corporate headquarters advised him to operate the units he had with a promise of more franchises later.  Rather than wait for McDonalds, Jerry and his staff began searching for a new restaurant concept that they could start themselves.

“People are looking for value,” Jerry pointed out.  “They want good food, good service, in a pleasant atmosphere, and all that for a good price.  We decided on a buffet concept, so in 1967 we opened up the first Royal Fork Buffet in Pocatello, Idaho.”

It sounds rather cut-and-dried the way Jerry described it, but Merlyn Knight explained why the new venture wasn’t just another day at the office.  “It’s very, very risky because you don’t know how people are going to respond.  And buffets at that time mostly had been called smorgasbords.  They were an all-you-can-eat, kind of throw the food out there, and it was not high quality.  So the idea of having a buffet was to have higher quality, a higher image and really appeal to the family.”

So, Jerry Caven’s new restaurant concept was off and running in Pocatello.  Now the only question remaining was would it be as successful as his McDonald’s franchises?

© 2012 Philip Kassel