Excerpt From the Article

“There are not many lawyers with a new family, on track for a comfortable livelihood in a comfortable place, who would cobble together a $70,000 loan and up and move to another country to try their hand at a new business in an untested market. But as time would tell once again, there is no one quite like George Cohon when it comes to business chutzpah.

With McDonald’s a common fixture in any Canadian city and beyond, it’s hard now to imagine the daunting task of creating that reality from nothing. It’s hard to fathom a brand with such ubiquitous name recognition ever being turned down by Canadian suppliers because they’d never heard of it and didn’t want to adjust some production processes to meet McDonald’s requirements. But when George began to create his business working out of a small office and a suitcase in a downtown Toronto office building, those were the kind of obstacles he faced. Feeling the weight of what he needed to accomplish, but undaunted, George tackled issue after issue while he and Susan began to establish themselves in Toronto society where they’d made their home. When George’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened in London, Ontario in 1968 after a year of effort, it was a true cause for celebration.

To mark the milestone, George invited Ray Kroc and a contingent from the US parent company to join the festivities, and during their visit George drove Ray around southern and southeastern Ontario, introducing him to the lay of the land and mapping out his plans for growing the franchise. George had the visit close with an elegant soiree for McDonald’s staff, executives and friends, where Ray Kroc shocked George with another proposition. Clearly having recognized that he had undervalued the prospects of the Canadian market, Ray announced in front of the stunned attendees that he would write George a cheque for $1 million on the spot in exchange for George returning the Eastern Canada rights back to the parent company.

Needless to say, the new entrepreneur declined the offer. It didn’t seem right to George to throw in the towel on opening day when he and his family had made a good start. As George likes to say, he and his McDonald’s Canada partners went on to build their success one customer at a time, one restaurant at a time. George would have decades of success as Chairman, President and CEO of McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada Limited.

[…]

For most entrepreneurs, these successes would have been accomplishment enough. But George had another chance encounter that sparked his imagination and changed his life again. In 1976, with business booming for McDonald’s Canada, the federal government turned to it for the loan of a VIP bus to transport a Soviet Union delegation visiting the Montreal Olympics. George readily agreed and was leaving an Olympic venue as a spectator with his family when he happened to spot the bus and the delegation. In his irrepressible fashion, just for the fun of it he pulled his weight as the owner of the bus to convince the security detail and official handlers into allowing a spontaneous visit to the nearby McDonald’s for some Big Macs and conversation.

The delegates had such a good time and enjoyed the food so much that afterwards George couldn’t shake the idea that McDonald’s must be introduced to the Soviet Union. This began a 14-year odyssey of astounding intrepidness, with George and a small team from McDonald’s Canada riding ups and downs of interminable negotiations, as well as historic changes of global consequence until in 1990 opening the first McDonald’s in the communist world.”