Harland Sanders: Took his chicken recipe on the road in his sixties
He worked as a farmhand, railway fireman, insurance seller and petrol station owner before the chicken. The franchise idea came when he was past sixty and his roadside cafe was failing.
A long list of jobs
Harland Sanders was born in 1890 near Henryville, Indiana, and left school young. Over the next thirty years he worked as a farmhand, streetcar conductor, railway fireman, insurance salesman and tyre salesman, and was let go from more than one of those jobs.
A cafe by a petrol station
In 1930 he ran a service station in Corbin, Kentucky, and began cooking meals for travellers at his own table. The food did better than the fuel, so he opened a cafe and motel, and spent years working out how to cook chicken quickly under pressure without losing the taste.
The road moves away
In the 1950s a new interstate road bypassed Corbin and the passing trade disappeared. He sold the business at auction and was left with little more than a small government pension cheque. He had already licensed his recipe to a restaurant owner in Salt Lake City in 1952, so he took to the road, cooking for restaurant owners and asking for a few cents for every chicken they sold.
What came of it
By the early 1960s there were hundreds of restaurants using his recipe, in the United States and Canada. He sold the company in 1964 and stayed on as its public face until his death in 1980.
Thirty years of mixed jobs taught him to sell, to cook for strangers and to keep going after a setback. Nothing you learn on a shift is wasted, even in a job you leave.
The myth: The story that he was turned down 1,009 times before his first yes is repeated everywhere, but we have found no record that backs the number. He did hear no many times.
Where the facts come from: His autobiography, Life As I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin' Good (1974); Josh Ozersky, Colonel Sanders and the American Dream (2012).
