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Gillbridge and other VA benefits are available to those who qualify. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and we tell all kinds of stories here on this show and one of our favorites is what we like to call our American Dreamers series and always that series is brought to us by the great folks at Job Creators Network advocating for small businesses and working hard to help them turn their small businesses into bigger ones. Today's story is about Jim Keyes, the former CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster. Here's Jim with his story. So wow, it's an interesting, I think an interesting American tale. In many ways I guess you could say I'm the classic definition of the American Dream because I grew up in a challenging environment, too many children, not enough money, three room house, six children, two parents all squeezed into this one building literally with no running water and no modern conveniences like a thermostat. We had a wood burning stove that would stop burning in the middle of the night if someone didn't get up to replenish the wood and it would get so cold in the house that literally the galvanized buckets that we used for water, we had an outdoor pump would freeze over and we'd have to break the ice to get to the water in the morning if it wasn't cold enough to freeze the whole bucket during the night.
Cleanest freshest water in the world. Literally that was the environment that I grew up in which interestingly never occurred to me was a situation of poverty until one day I believe the church came with a basket of food and I remember asking my mother at the time, why are they giving us this food? And she said, well, we need it. We're kind of poor and I still remember trying to understand why they would think we were poor because I didn't feel like we were poor, never did. But that situation is tough on any family in any situation. So my mother at the time I was about five years old was probably pretty tired of that situation, no running water, no indoor plumbing and found a relationship with another person and my dad found out about it and created quite a scene and she ended up leaving. And so she left home when I was only about five years old.
Interestingly, they gave me the choice. Would you like to live with mom or dad? And apparently I don't remember this part, but apparently I went in and put all of the things I owned into a little paper sack and came out and said, I'm not going to stay with either of you until you figure out what you want to do. And I went to live with my older sister who had just become, just gotten married.
My mom had moved away to a trailer park and my dad was still living in this house without running water. So I decided to go back and stay with my dad until one day, literally walking home from school, saw a red sign on the house and the red sign said condemned. And I didn't know what that word was. And I went to my grandmother and said, well, what does condemned mean?
I think I was, I was probably 10 years old or 11 years old at the time. What does condemned mean? And she tried to explain it to me and it just didn't register. Why would they condemn our house? And it turned out that the visiting nurses who had come and take care of my dad from the, from the town went back and reported on the conditions basically being no running water, no heat. And it certainly wasn't an adequate environment for someone dying of cancer.
And I didn't realize he was that bad off at the time, but they ended up putting him in a VA hospital for the rest of his, for the remaining year or two of his life. And I got shuffled off to one of my brothers. I ended up with the, with my eldest brother living with him for a while until my father finally passed when I was 12 and I had an opportunity to go in and live with my mom at that point. So my mom, she knew that the trailer park wasn't a good environment. So we moved in with someone, you know, who could better, you know, provide for us with home and that sort of thing. And that environment was not a very healthy environment. So the gentleman was a bit volatile, you know, and as I became a little bit older, we would have natural teenager conflict that you have over music or, you know, the length of your hair or whatever it is.
But his volatility got to the point that caused him to take some extreme actions. And then one, in one circumstance, I was in a situation where he and my mom had gotten into a fight and we wondered what he was going to do. He was, went to the garage. We thought he was going to leave the house, heard the car start in the garage.
And I went down, went down outside. This is in the middle of winter in Massachusetts, went out to the outside of the garage and found that it was locked and the car was running inside. I had to kick open a panel of the garage and got the door unlocked.
Finally, by the time I was able to kick through a panel and unlock the door. And by the time I got the door open, I literally had to pull him from the car in the garage full of smoke. And he was passed out and I had to lay him down in the snow. And thankfully he was able to come back out of it. We moved shortly after that.
That was, that was about enough. That triggered my mom to then find another place on her own. And she got me out of that environment. But you know, you, you think at the time, why am I going through this?
I'm 14 years old. Why should I have to deal with, you know, this sort of situation? But again, you do, you deal with it, you, you get through it, you get to the other side. It's not fun, but you learn from that adversity that everyone has issues.
And you, you know, you say a little prayer of gratitude that you're not, you know, as volatile as that. And it makes you go forward and be thankful for what you do have rather than sad about what you don't. In many ways, you know, you look at it and you say, wow, those were tough times. But that adversity that I dealt with made me the person I am today. Gave me the confidence, gave me the strength, forced me to be self-sufficient, forced me to realize at a very early age that I was going to survive.
I had to do it on my own. And, and I, and I wouldn't trade that for anything today. Looking back, I was very fortunate to have had that adversity and to come out favorably from it, which some people don't, but I think there's a huge lesson there that I, that I love to share with young people today that adversity gave me strength that others don't have the opportunity to get. And you've been listening to Jim Keys tell the story of his youth and not an easy story, but as he put it, it shaped him as he put it, that adversity made me the person I am today. When we come back more with Jim Keys, his story, our American dreamer story here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American Stories coming.
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Visit ADDYI.com to learn more about ADDIE. And we're back with our American stories and with Jim Key's story. Jim, as you just heard, grew up in poverty, divorced parents who died at a young age, but Jim would end up becoming the CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster.
Let's get back to Jim with the rest of his story. My first job, I think I made $1.75 an hour or something. It was McDonald's. McDonald's had just come to town. They were relatively new.
They built one store on Grafton Street in Worcester. And it was a fabulous experience in so many ways. I can't say enough about it because one, it was money. I needed money for school. Two, I learned very, very quickly that I was a worker.
I learned self-sufficiency at an early age that if I was going to get by, whether it was schoolwork or a job, I had to work twice as hard as anybody else. So I put my head down and said, I'm going to be the best burger flipper that's ever been in this place and literally practice flipping burgers so that I'd be faster than anybody else. Anyone that's ever worked at McDonald's knows that that's a cherished skill.
And even something as mundane as cleaning the parking lot, I would run because I knew that if I did it better than somebody else, even though it was the lowliest of tasks or cleaning the bathrooms, if I cleaned them better than anybody else, I would get the attention of the manager who would perhaps give me a raise or give me more hours because hours were precious. He wanted to work as many hours as you could. And so I did get their attention and literally they rewarded me with the worst job in the store, which was the shift manager, the guy that had to stay and work late into the evening. But I was barely 16 years old and I was able to be a shift manager, which means they trusted me basically to manage the small late night staff and to cash out the drawers at night, counting the drawers and filling out the bank statement and the daily financial statement at night. There was a huge breakthrough in confidence because hard work is rewarded.
Trust is important. And there is virtually unlimited opportunity because then shortly after they literally came and tried to talk me out of going to college and going instead to Hamburger University and becoming a store manager. Hamburger University is McDonald's internal training program. They send their store managers through.
It's quite an advanced program. It's both academic and practical application of managerial skills and store operator skills, basically the train store operators and future franchisees in the system. You know, I don't know, maybe I could have been CEO of McDonald's through that path, but I'm glad I took the path I did. One other story about McDonald's that was so important is that I got exposure to others in a different environment.
My environment was one that you see so much in schools, particularly in rural areas, almost discouraging me from trying to pursue a career or a college education. We don't do that here. We go to work for the factory like our parents did.
And there's nothing wrong with that. But at McDonald's, I had the opportunity to work with a couple of college students and they told me how easy it was to, you know, to get into college. Look, you can do this.
We're doing it. That really gave me the confidence that college is an option for me. I would never have even considered it because my, literally my guidance counselors in school said, you can't afford college.
Why would you even think about it? Don't, don't disappoint yourself. Well, meanwhile, I probably had I applied to Harvard, I probably could have gotten a full boat scholarship given my grades and my activities, et cetera, et cetera. But I didn't have that confidence.
I just didn't have that exposure to how it works, how the system works. I had no choice but to pay for my own education. So I worked not only at McDonald's, I would also part-time driving a truck. And so I worked two jobs at McDonald's at night and then I'd be up at 4 a.m.
I'd literally work till midnight shift and then close out and then 4 a.m. be there loading my truck for the next day. But the good thing about those two jobs is I was able to save enough at least for the first year of college. I decided to apply early admission to Holy Cross because my mother had now been diagnosed with cancer.
So she was ill and I didn't know what I was going to do in terms of being able to try to help take care of her. So I decided to go local. Throughout my career, I've run into these periods of crisis or conflict or issues that occur. The very first job, Gulf Oil, I thought I had made it. Being one of the seven sisters of the big oil companies, I had a fabulous job working for the chief financial officer doing merger and acquisition work and really thought that I was on my way.
This was a great career move coming out of graduate school. I had the opportunity to do this and four years into this we made an acquisition attempt that failed and it weakened the company. Even one of the largest oil companies in the world all of a sudden was crippled.
Found itself in trouble because they tried to make an acquisition of city service and it failed. The stock was pummeled and we had to figure out what to do next and right about that time Boone Pickens ironically made a run on Gulf Oil. Still remember the day he came to our shareholder meeting and stood up and gave the Gordon Gekko greed is good speech in front of the staid old Mellon family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a shareholder meeting. I was a kid at the time just wide-eyed thinking, you know he's right. This place is fat.
I walk around these halls and people falling asleep every day after their three martini lunches and hiding behind the Wall Street Journal. They could make a lot more money which is exactly what Boone was saying. Well it turns out Boone's pressure on the company caused them to merge with Chevron so all of a sudden here I had this great career now I was out in I found myself in San Francisco with Chevron part of the merger team and the guys at Chevron were saying Jim we don't we don't know how you got here or why to this position because I was in a relatively senior role on the merger team even and I was very young at the time and they said you're gonna have to pay your dues here at Chevron and that was my opportunity to go to 7-Eleven. One of the gentlemen that I was working for at the time during part of my short career at Gulf took over as CEO of Citgo which was ironically part of city service it was the downstream end of city service. I had spent a lot of my time working on city service on the analysis for the acquisition potential acquisition of the company so when he took over as CEO of this of this entity that was just acquired by the Southland Corporation the parent company for 7-Eleven he reached out to me and said could you come and join.
So I left Gulf and I went to the Southland Corporation slash 7-Eleven and crisis occurs again. 7-Eleven they took on they did an LBO leverage buyout of the company took on four and a half billion dollars of debt at 17 percent interest rates. Hard to imagine at the time anyone would do this during the days of leverage buyout frenzy that occurred in the 1987 timeframe well by 1991 7-Eleven the Southland Corporation was filing for chapter 11 protection and I thought I'm out of a job now what am I going to do. It turned out that that was the best thing that could have happened in my career.
The way that people approach adversity they either put their head down and take on the role of the victim woe is me or they put their head up and say I'm gonna figure this out in chaos as opportunity. I kept my head up I looked at the opportunity I worked harder than I worked prior to the filing of chapter 11 and when we came out of it I had the opportunity to be the head of strategic planning for 7-Eleven because of the division that I ran during that LBO period and the bankruptcy period ended up outperforming much of the rest of the company and so I came out of it with an opportunity to lead the cut to develop a new plan for the new entity emerging from bankruptcy. That then led to an opportunity to be chief financial officer that role of chief financial officer gave me an opportunity then to be chief operating officer so it was a wonderful sequence of events where I was able to work really hard and prove that at least one division of the company could excel. I was then able to develop a plan for the new entity going forward I was able to take on the role of chief financial officer to finance that plan and then I was a ultimately able to be the chief operating officer to execute the plan and chief executive officer to then sell it to the investment community. That led to an amazing period of time from in a 10-year period we increased same store sales every quarter for nearly 10 years and had a tenfold increase in the equity value of the company from the time I was named CEO in 2000 until we sold the company in 2005 and so it ended up being a just a wonderful experience born of adversity born of problems and crisis and challenge and that adversity that we faced the chaos that we faced turned into opportunity for me both personally and professionally. And great job to Joey and to Alex on this story and you've been listening to Jim Keys talk about his life and I think the line I took away from all this is when he discovered this when he said I was a worker and that is so important to be able to put in a day a long day a hard day and a productive day. The story of Jim Keys brought to us by the great folks at Job Creators Network they're working to promulgate policies that make it easier for entrepreneurs to do their thing. Our American Dreamer series here on Our American Stories. You know what's great about your investment account with the big guys it's actually a time machine log in and zoom welcome back to 1999.
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