Colonel Sanders: the road that took his customers away

Harland Sanders, the face of KFC, spent much of his life in jobs that didn't last: farmhand, locomotive fireman, insurance salesman, service station attendant. In the 1930s, he opened a gas station with a restaurant in Corbin, in the US state of Kentucky, and his fried chicken became known in the region. The title of "colonel" is honorary, given by the government of Kentucky.

The no

The no, this time, didn't come from a person. It came from a road.

In the 1950s, the new I-75 interstate highway bypassed Corbin. The traffic that had sustained Sanders's restaurant for two decades vanished almost overnight. In 1956, he sold the place at auction, and the money barely covered taxes and bills. He was 65. The fixed income he had left was his US Social Security check, about US$ 105 a month.

What they did

Sanders took the recipe, a pressure cooker and his car and began driving around the country offering the chicken to restaurant owners, charging a small amount per chicken sold. He'd had a first franchisee since 1952, the businessman Pete Harman, in South Salt Lake, Utah. After losing the restaurant, he made franchising his main business. In 1964, he sold the company to investors and stayed on as the brand's ambassador.

One number circulates widely: Sanders supposedly heard 1,009 rejections before the first yes. KFC itself has repeated the number on social media, but we found no document from the period confirming it, and the chronology doesn't help, because the first franchisee came before the loss of the restaurant. So the number stays here as legend, not fact.

The fact is enough: at 65, without the business of a lifetime, he started over.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the feeling of watching a business collapse for reasons that weren't in his hands. He says he came in as a partner in a business that didn't hold up and lost everything, with fifty people depending on him. He didn't complain about the partner, the system or luck. He decided to do what he didn't yet know how to do.

The parallel with Sanders isn't one of age or size. It's the refusal to treat a loss as the end of the story. The road that took Sanders's customers away is, in Bairo's life, every door that closed and became the foundation for the next.

Read: Fifty lives · No is the foundation of yes · The seventh attempt

Sources

• History of KFC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KFC
• Harland Sanders Café and Museum (Corbin, 1940–1956): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_Sanders_Caf%C3%A9_and_Museum
• Yahoo Finance, "KFC founder Colonel Sanders didn't achieve his remarkable rise to success until his 60s": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kfc-founder-colonel-sanders-didnt-161545534.html
• KFC repeating the 1,009 rejections number (no contemporary source): https://x.com/kfc/status/1916283448429342903