The CEO Who Grew Up Without Running Water

On this episode of Our American Stories, he grew up in poverty. His first job was at McDonald’s—and he would go on to become the CEO of 7-Eleven. Here’s the inspiring story of Jim Keyes, in his own words.

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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

(00:34):
about Jim Keyes, the former CEO of seven to eleven
and Blockbuster. Here's Jim with his story.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
So wow, it's an interesting, I think, an interesting American
tale in many ways. I guess you could say I
am 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

(01:05):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:53):
church came with a basket of food and I remember
asking my mother at the time, why are they giving
against this food? She said, well, we need it. We're
you know, 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.

(02:16):
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

(02:37):
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
vapor sack and came out and said, I'm not going

(02:58):
to stay with either of you. 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 in and stay with
my dad until one day, literally walking home from school,
so I read sign on the house and the red

(03:19):
sign said condemned, and I didn't know what that word
was and went to my grandmother and said, well, what
is condemned mean? I think I was probably ten years
old or eleven years old at the time. What is
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 would

(03:40):
come and take care of my dad from the town
went back and reported on the conditions, basically being no
running water and 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

(04:02):
of my brothers. I ended up with with my eldest
brother living with him for a while until my father
finally passed when I was twelve, 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 she moved in with someone,
you know, who could better, you know, provide for us

(04:23):
with a 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 a natural teenager
conflict that you have over music or you know, the
length of your hair or whatever it is. But his

(04:43):
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. Went to the garage. We thought he
was only leave the house, heard the car start in

(05:04):
the garage and I went down outside. This 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

(05:26):
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 about enough that triggered my mom to then
find another place on her own, and she got me

(05:46):
out of that environment. But you know, you think at
the time, why am I going through this? I'm fourteen
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 know, you

(06:08):
say a little prayer of gratitude that you're not you know,
as validle 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,

(06:30):
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 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

(06:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
And you've been listening to Jim Keyes 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 dreamers story. Here on our American story, folks, If

(07:31):
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 seventeen dollars and seventy
six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters.
Go to Our American Stories dot com now and go

(07:51):
to the donate button and help us keep the great
American stories coming. That's our Americanstories dot Com. And we're
back with our American Stories and with Jim Key's story. Jim,

(08:13):
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 seven to eleven and Blockbuster.
Let's get back to Jim with the rest of his story.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
My first job, I think I made a dollar seventy
five an hour or something. It was mcdonald'. McDonald's had
just come to town. They were relatively new. They built
one store on Grafton Street in Worcester, and it was
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

(08:48):
was a worker. I learned self sufficiency at an early
age that if I was going to get by, whether
it was school work 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

(09:11):
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

(09:33):
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 a shift manager, the guy that had to
stay in work late into the evening. But I was
barely sixteen 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

(09:54):
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 here because then shortly after they literally came and
tried to talk me out of going to college and

(10:16):
going instead of 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 trained store operators and future franchisees in the system.

(10:38):
You know, I don't know, maybe I could have been
CEO and McDonald's through that, 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

(11:04):
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 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

(11:25):
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 disappoint yourself. Well, meanwhile, I probably had I applied
to Harvard, I probably could have gotten a full vote
scholarship given my grades and my activities, et cetera, et cetera.
But I didn't have that confidence. I just didn't have

(11:46):
that exposure to how it works, how the system works.
I had no choice but to pay for my own education,
so worked not only at McDonald's, I would also part
time driving a truck. And so I worked two jobs
at McDonald's at and then I'd be up at four am.
I'd literally work till the midnight shift and then close
out and then four am be there loading my truck

(12:08):
for the next day. But the good thing about those
two jobs is I was able to save enough. At
least the first year of college, 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

(12:31):
run into these periods of crisis or conflict or issues
that occur. Very first job golf Oil, I thought I
had made it big, one of the Seven Sisters, 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

(12:52):
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 it was crippled. Found
itself in trouble because they tried to make an acquisition
of City Service and it failed. The stock was pummeled

(13:15):
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 Gecko greet his 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,

(13:37):
you know he's right. This place is fat. I walk
around these halls and people have fallen asleep every day
after their three martini lunches and hiding buying 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 and now I was out, and I found myself

(13:59):
in San Francisco with Chevron, part of the merger team
and the guys, as Chevron was saying, Jim, 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

(14:20):
to seven eleven. One of the gentlemen that I was
working for at the time during part of my short
career at Golf, 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

(14:40):
the acquisition potential acquisition of the company. So when he
took over as CEO of this entity that was just
acquired by the south In Corporation, the parent company for
seven eleven, he reached out to me and said could
you come and join? So I left Golf and I
went to the south In Corporation Slash seven eleven, and
crisis occurs again. At seven eleven, they took on They

(15:04):
did an LBO leverage buyout of the company. It took
on four and a half billion dollars a debt at
seventeen percent interest rates. Hard to imagine at the time
anyone would do this is during the days of leverage
buyout frenzy that occurred in the nineteen eighty seven time frame. Well,
by nineteen ninety one, seven eleven, the Southern Corporation was
filing for Chapter eleven protection, and I thought, I'm out
of a job. Now what am I going to do?

(15:26):
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 going to
figure this out in chaos's opportunity. I kept my head up.
I looked at the opportunity. I worked harder than I

(15:47):
worked prior to the filing of Chapter eleven, and when
we came out of it, I had the opportunity to
be the head of strategic planning for seven eleven because
of the division that I ran during that LBO period.
In the bankruptcy period ended up out performing much of
the rest of the company, and so I came out
of it with an opportunity to lead to develop a

(16:09):
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

(16:31):
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 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.
In a ten year period, we increased same store sales

(16:52):
every quarter for nearly ten years and had a tenfold
increase in the equity value of the company from the
time I was named CEO in two thousand until we
sold the company in two thousand and five. And so
it ended up being just a wonderful experience born of adversity,
born of problems and crisis and challenge, and that adversity

(17:14):
that we faced, the chaos that we faced turned into
opportunity for me, both personally and professionally.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
And great job to Joey and to Alex on this story.
And you've been listening to Jim Keyes 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

(17:43):
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