A.K.A. “Mr. McDonald’s”
by Janet Newcomb
Growing up in Los Angeles, six-year-old Dick Shalhoub started hanging out with his dad on weekends as he checked his farms in Otay Mesa (San Diego), Oxnard, and the Coachella Valley. Dad was in the wholesale produce business and grew celery, tomatoes, romaine and cucumbers, and Dick learned first-hand about the importance of quality and value, and of supply and demand. He graduated from the University of Southern California with degrees in Finance and Management, earned another degree at the prestigious Thunderbird School of Global Management and continued to work with his dad.
The father-son team owned and operated produce departments in five Fedco stores in L.A. from 1967-1982 [Federal Employees’ Distributing Company – a now-defunct nonprofit SoCal membership department store chain] and sold them to Fedco in 1983. “My experience with Fedco taught me the concept of value retailing, a technique for moving products in and out rapidly by piling it high and selling it cheap,” he recalls. Some local McDonald’s executives who knew Dick persuaded him to go through their training program, after which he was dispatched to the Coachella Valley on December 29, 1983 to operate the three existing restaurants here – Palm Springs, Cathedral City, and Palm Desert. Today, 30 years later, he is the owner/operator of 19 McDonald’s restaurants across Riverside County and is directly responsible for all phases of their operations – including training, administration, marketing, finance and project development.
In addition to his father’s mentorship, Dick learned a lot from McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and CEO Fred Turner who both stressed the importance of goals and values in creating successful long-term businesses. His own success has allowed him to give back to the Coachella Valley generously. He recognizes that, in order to get out of poverty, people need secure housing, a food safety net, and access to education. To that end, Dick supports Olive Crest and Safe House of the Desert which provide secure housing, FIND Food Bank which feeds the hungry, and McTeachers’ Night fundraisers for local schools where teachers serve up the burgers and fries to students and their families and the money raised goes toward sports uniforms, band equipment – whatever they need.
He has served as President on the Palm Springs and Palm Desert Chambers of Commerce boards, Chairman of the Mt. San Jacinto Winter Park Authority, and Vice Chairman and Director of the Agua Caliente Development Authority, among other business entities, and currently serves on the boards of FIND Food Bank, The Living Desert, Palm Springs Air Museum, Pegasus Riding Academy for the Handicapped, Olive Crest, Desert Orthopedic Foundation, and Loma Linda Ronald McDonald House.
What keeps him engaged is the challenge of working in a complex population of all ages with differing regional tastes, economic disparity, and food preferences, complicated by a difficult legislative landscape. He visits all of his restaurants regularly, knows most of his employees by name, and chats with regular customers. He is very motivated to help the next generation to improve continually and think and act creatively, and he rewards the creators. Currently the focus is on fine-tuning techniques to deliver faster, more pleasant service and adding mobile apps for ordering. Ultimately, Dick’s job is to manage systems that manage restaurants. It’s complicated. He considers his best trait to be his ability to ask questions and never assume he has all the answers and, when asked questions by others, shares his knowledge and experience freely.
He’s easy-going, with a great sense of humor, but does have one pet peeve: critics with bold opinions on subjects that they know little or nothing about. You know the type – customers who whine about issues they perceive but offer no useful solutions. Most restaurant owners share that pet peeve.
Despite enduring long hours and a lot of traveling, Dick does have a passion for classic cars and enjoys hunting them as much as driving them. He’s an excellent cook, has an awesome wine collection, and loves to have his family around him. His son Rick and daughter Stacey have become McDonald’s owner/operators while managing their young families. Rick and Kristin have 2 sons, ages 9 and 6, and a 1-year-old daughter, while Stacey and Brent [Schmidman, founder of Schmidy’s Tavern in Palm Desert] welcomed their first child ten months ago.
While he enjoys most styles of music, Dick turns to Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Burt Bacharach, and Rod Stewart to lift his spirits, and watches classic westerns and noir films for entertainment. USC football and Lakers basketball are at the top of his sports obsessions. He has traveled much of the world and returns to Maui often for R&R when he can, but he’s intrigued by the Japanese culture and plans to visit soon. What he likes most about the Coachella Valley is the cultural mix of people who live here, a true melting pot. His priority now is to keep teaching the people around him because, in the words of Robert Half, “when one teaches, two learn.”
