The Founder (2016)

Trailer: Official UK trailer, Studiocanal.

What it is

John Lee Hancock’s 2016 film, with Michael Keaton as Kroc, telling the story of how a milkshake-mixer salesman encountered the McDonald brothers’ restaurant, franchised it, and ended up owning the company and the name while the brothers were pushed out.

What it gets right about the trade

It separates the product from the brand, and shows which one captures the value. The brothers invented the operating system: the kitchen layout, the speed, the limited menu. It was genuinely brilliant and it is why the food was good. Kroc contributed none of it. He understood what it could be called, where it could be put, and how it could be owned.

That is uncomfortable and it is accurate. Operational excellence does not automatically become market position. Somebody has to do the second job and it is a different job.

It understands consistency as the product. The thing Kroc was selling to franchisees and customers was sameness. Not the best hamburger, the same hamburger. That is distinctiveness and physical availability several decades before anyone wrote it down.

The real estate insight is the actual business model, and the film gives it the weight it deserves. The money was in owning the land under the restaurants. Most people who cite this film as a branding story miss that the branding was in service of a property play.

What it gets wrong

It is a film, and it compresses and dramatises. The brothers are played as pure and Kroc as the predator, which makes for a better story than the record probably supports.

It also invites a reading that the brand work was theft. The more honest reading is that the brothers built something excellent and had no interest in scaling it, and Kroc did the work they would not do. The ruthlessness is real. So is the fact that without him it stays one restaurant.

The one scene worth showing a team

Kroc explaining why the name matters. He says McDonald’s sounds like America, and that his own name would never have worked.

It is thirty seconds and it is the cleanest statement of brand asset value in any film. A name that is memorable, pronounceable and carries the right associations is worth more than the recipe, and the person who recognised that is the person who ended up owning the company.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

This is the film to watch if you have built something good and cannot understand why a less competent competitor is better known.

The McDonald brothers were better operators than Kroc, by a distance. They lost anyway, because they treated the thing they had built as the whole job. Being excellent at delivery and assuming recognition follows is the most common failure mode among technically strong founders, and it is the central subject of this film.

Two questions it raises that are worth sitting with. Who in your business owns the job of making you known, as distinct from making you good? And if the answer is nobody, or a junior person reporting to someone with a different priority, that is the structural version of the brothers’ mistake.

The second: what do you actually own? Kroc’s answer turned out to be the land. For most service businesses the honest answer is the client relationships, and those sit with individual people who can leave.