Towers Associates

Whether it’s their free advertising, their ability to help your reach pretty much everyone in the world, or their ability to help your customers tell everyone in the world if you screw up or do great, whether you like it or not, Facebook has changed how we all approach business. We will have all heard about Facebook’s imminent IPO planning to raise $5 billion however what you might not have realised is Facebook is actually worth $100 billion.





This is a little section I’d like to call ‘Facebook is worth more than…’

Facebook is worth more than… 50 Naval Submarines (they cost about $2 billion each to build)

Facebook is worth more than… Brazil’s 2011 Travel and Tourism Budget ($74 billion)

Facebook is worth more than… The Gulf war (that cost $96 billion)

Facebook is worth more than… 6 years of US Breast Cancer Treatment  ($16.5 billion per year)

Facebook is worth more than… The Hurricane Katrina clean up (that was $81 billion)

Facebook is worth more than… 2 and a half Olympic games (Beijing Olympics were $40 billion)

Facebook is worth more than… Coffee (the worlds coffee industry is worth just under $100 billion)

Facebook is worth more than… 120 Eiffel Towers (about $820 million to build one in today’s market)

…and last but not least, Facebook is worth more than… Qatar (their GDP is about $98 billion)

Thanks to Mashable for the cool facts, and thanks to Bono (he owns 1.5% of Facebook)

Outside-In company McDonalds ran a Twitter campaign recently to help people get to know their local farmers better, 2% of the thousands of Tweets they received were people moaning that they became obese because they eat McDonalds every day or that they didn’t like a burger once 18 years ago and this campaign was considered a disaster. I just wanted to remind everyone of the massive success of McDonalds, not just after they turned Outside-In and coined their successful customer outcome, ‘I’m loving it’ and aligned their process towards achieving this but the lasting legacy that they have created.

Here are the facts.

McDonalds serve 1% of the world’s population every day, that’s around 68 million people…that’s more than the entire population of the UK.

McDonalds serve over 75 burgers a second, that’s about 6.5 million a day (that doesn’t count nuggets and salads)

McDonald’s $32 billion revenue makes them the 68th biggest economy in the world…just above Ecuador.

If you gathered up all of the McDonalds employees from the USA only, there would be more people than the combined population of Iceland and Luxembourg .

The Queen of England owns a McDonalds franchise.

Over the next 3 years McDonalds will be opening a new restaurant in China…EVERY DAY!

Americans alone eat 1 billion pounds (weight) of beef at McDonalds every year.

One of the questions that Outside-In companies ask themselves is ‘What business are we REALLY in?’. If you think that McDonalds is just a fast-food joint think again, McDonalds is actually the world’s largest distributor of toys…bigger than Toys ‘R’ Us, bigger than Hamleys, bigger than Schwarz, even bigger than Santa! Now who would have expected that from a fast-food joint?

So remember,  creating our successful customer outcome (SCO) and aligning everything we do towards achieving it and asking ourselves ‘What business are we REALLY in’ extends our scope, transcends the enterprise boundaries and stops us from thinking the same old way.