My conversation with Todd Graves

I've started a new show where I have conversations with some of the greatest living founders. That show is called David Sanra. It will be on a separate podcast feed from founders. So it's very important that you follow David Sanra on Spotify.

Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or really wherever you're listening to this right now so you don't miss future episodes. This conversation is with one of my favorite living founders, Todd Graves. Todd owns over 90% of Raising Cane's, a business that is worth over $20 billion.

And he's been working on this business for almost 30 years. Todd has an extreme level of focus and a love of radical simplicity that I love and I try to apply to my own craft. I am posting our entire conversation on this feed so you know what the new show is like.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and please don't forget to follow the new show, David Senra, now so you don't miss future episodes. And by the way, nothing is changing with founders. I'm still doing episodes every week and it will work on founders until I die.

I was not expecting to start here, Todd. We were just talking before recording. I didn't expect to start on sleep, but what you just said is exactly how most of history's greatest entrepreneurs are. They just can't stop thinking about their business. Because I was asking you, how much caffeine do you take?

How much sleep do you need? And then your answer was what? I just have a really erratic sleep. So I'll go, you know, some nights I'll go maybe three hours of sleep. The next night I'd be three to four hours. The next night I'd be five hours.

And usually about that point is the next night I have to crash. So I'll sleep 10 or 11 hours to catch up. And then I'll actually wake up feeling great and feel like I don't have to muscle through a day keeping myself awake. And then I'll be caught up. I'll go another three hours that night, four hours and five hours.

But what really dictates it is what I have going on in business and what I have to be thinking about. What might give me a little bit of anxiety about things I've got to decide on, the teams, what I have to work through. So my brain will be working as I'm...

sleeping. I think he's trying to figure out solutions. So then I'll just wake up and I'll actually wake up pretty refreshed thinking about, you know, that problem I had and then go jump on the computer in my, in my underwear and then wake up and go first that and then start sending out emails.

just actually solve that problem you know but if i get caught up at work and there's nothing like really pressing then i can sleep like a baby i don't have a problem sleeping let's have a problem sleeping when i got real business on my mind this keeps reoccurring in all these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs that i read

I just did this episode on Jiro, the best sushi chef in Japan. The documentary on hand is Gerald dreams of sushi. Why? Because in his sleep, he is thinking about his work, right? Then I did this episode on this guy named Michael Ferrero. It's another family-held business. It's the Ferrero Chocolate Company, right?

He would say that he dreamed up what he called comforts, which was new products, new chocolates to make in his sleep. The Michelin Brothers, same thing. They would dream up marketing ideas on how to market tires in their sleep. Leonardo DiVecchio. Luxottica, one of the biggest businesses in the world. He just passed away recently. He said he would literally wake up dreaming. He would dream about ideas for his business and he'd have to either keep a tape recorder next to his bed.

Or in your case, you're in your underwear and you're in a computer. Or you'd have like a notebook. Notepad just to write it down. It's very fascinating how you see the same personality type appear throughout over and over again throughout history. So we are in the very first.

Raising Canes. You were very kind enough to let us record in here. Your mother should. You're almost at your 30-year anniversary for running Raising Canes and starting this. I want to ask you a question. I've heard you say this before. What is the advice that these so-called, the bad advice, these so-called experts gave you when you were trying to start the very first Raising Cane? Thank you.

Having a dream to start a chicken finger only concept was just back then was in Louisiana was kind of unheard of. It was just a totally new idea. You know, we're known for our. cajun and creole food here like at lunch people could get a plate lunch some cajun dish and that's what people are used to also in the industry at that time you know mcdonald's and these other big quick service restaurant chains they were adding menu items because they didn't want the

veto vote is what they called it. One person in the car that might not have the choice at that restaurant that they could get, they said they would veto the whole car. and go somewhere else that had that menu item for their deal. They're also adding healthy items back then. So starting a restaurant and having an idea to focus just on one thing, one singular product. focused menu, which is really unheard of at that time. We didn't have In-N-Out Burger.

In Louisiana, right? But you knew about Harry Snyder. Not until I went to LA to work in the refineries. That's when I went out there and to work in the refineries. When I went to In-N-Out Burger, that's reaffirmed my belief that, hey, you can do one thing and do it better than anybody else.

And then I researched and I started studying the in and out model since 1948. So 1948, they have the exact same menu, right? And people know what to go in. It took me one time to go there and someone to recommend, get a double double and get it animal style.

get the fries, get whatever beverage you like, and then get a chocolate shake. And it's my same order every time. So when I first went, I kind of held up the order line for a second and, you know, went inside and done. Next time I went there, I went through the drive-thru, double-double animal style fries and a...

And then I also want to get that chocolate shake. And so seeing that really reaffirmed that belief for me, because since 1948, you think about how many different burger chains opened up and then went all around In-N-Out Burger. And they added all different menu items. They added unbelievable marketing. In-N-Out Burger's marketing is not much. Generally, they put big billboards on the interstate and say, here's where it is. Here's where we're at.

and they continue to do well raise their sales because they stuck to what they're good at and for that that really reaffirmed my belief and when i was able to come back from from a lot from going to la to work in refineries then going to alaska when i came back

I think that was a big selling point, being able to add In-N-Out Burger as a successful chain since 1948 with the banks at that time. That's when I got that SBA loan, after I raised that cap. So when I did the episode on you, this is where, because I read Harry Snyder's... Biography he's one of my favorite founders. I mean the guy was completely obsessed There's a great line in one of his biographies where he would live across the street from the first day to know and

He'd work all day, right? And then he'd sit in his living room, watch TV, but he'd look out the window. And as soon as the drive-thru would back up, he'd get out of his chair and run across the street. He was completely obsessed. And he, just like you, he blocked the trend in his industry. They went to like...

I think McDonald's was like, no, we're going to freeze our beef or whatever the case is. He's like, I'm going to... have my own butchers like he's like i'm gonna get the fresh tomatoes like no no i'm not going i'm all about quality there's a line they just gave me a tour of the kitchen it says never you guys have a mantra that says uh never sacrifice quality

for speed. That's right. And he was completely quality obsessed. And then if you just sit there and you think about your business over and over again, he's the one, a lot of people don't know this, he invented the drive-through speaker. Absolutely. Like, how can we do this better? That's right. Because remember, the prehistory to that was like, you had drive up.

restaurants you didn't have drive-through restaurants so i in that episode i was like induced into a state of rage because all these people are telling you all this this you can't have a simple menu it's like no Just go to the West Coast. They're thriving. They have a cult-like following. Went to visit my brother and sister in Orlando. You guys had just opened up. You weren't in Orlando before.

and i was like have you guys ever had raising canes this is after i did your episode and they're like no what's that go first of all you should listen to the goddamn episode second of all i'm going to take you to raising canes and so

I saw exactly what you said, where you're like, I don't hide. You know, we put Raising Cane's right next to, you know, McDonald's or Chipotle or whatever the case is. It's like, I'm just going to do one thing and do better than anyone else. So we pull up. Our brother and sister's like, what the hell?

is going on here. It looked exactly like when I was just in California two days ago. It looks exactly like when you pull into an in and out. They're like, why is there a line out to drive through? Why can't we find anywhere to sit? We have to wait for people to get up. I was like, just taste it. And you will understand. And then I thought of you that day because we're eating outside. And I look across the street and I see poor old little Wendy's.

and there's a single car in the drive-thru. I go, it's because Todd is obsessed. He wants to do one thing and do it better than anybody else. Yeah, you have to focus on doing one thing and do it better than anybody else.

since i have that singular product focus right and so people some people call like a simple menu i say well it's not simple it's it's focused and here's why it's not simple because our chicken has to be exactly right look it comes from the weight of the bird

that we want to get the size tender we want. It comes from the species of bird that gives the most tender and flavorful chicken. It comes up with a lot of technical stuff, rigor mortis on the bone after the chicken slaughter, then it stays on the bone a certain amount of time, then you get it fresh.

Then you brine it for 24 hours. Like all those things are that, like our fries, right? So we have crinkle cut fry, but like a thinner crinkle cut fry. You get fries from different times of the year, right? They do the crop harvest and it sits in the warehouses at certain times of the year.

you get more sugar tips in the fries those sugar tips have to come out so we have to remind our crew hey when you see those black sugar tip ends take those out it's not visually pleasing the our bread so we get bread made by bakeries all over the country but that recipe has to be exactly right and it's a little balls put together.

baked together so it's pulled apart bread. It's not sliced loaves. Sliced loaves end up being more stale. This is dense, moist, flavorful bread. Our coleslaw we secure all over the country. We have to make sure all those vendors have the right type of... slaw that we want for the right type of growers growing a certain amount of time. In that slaw, you have cabbage, but you also have purple cabbage, you have carrots, all those things. And so you go down to your tea, our tea gets...

brought from three different countries, the tea leaves, where we have to get at the right time of the year. We might pay more for that, but it's that focus on that. So my team can focus on those menu items and deliver it. Every time door tastes exactly the same around every canes across the country. So since we're focused, it's not a simple thing. We can focus on those things. We have a large culinary department. It's not R&D. It's culinary, right? So it's culinary.

Making sure that all those products, those raw products we get, are all perfect and make sense there. Same thing we opened in the Middle East. It took two years, two years to get the supply chain just right to make sure it tastes just the same. Two years to do that. It took two years to procure the chicken.

two years to get all the ingredients right. There's a lot of stuff you can't import in, plus it's very expensive to do that for them to import it in from the United States where we get it currently. You have to spend the time to do that. So two years, people would look at that and say,

Man, you know, you should be open in a year. That extra year is going to cost you X amount of dollars. And I'm like, no, those X amount of dollars are going to make us more money because our sales are going to be higher because our food is in quality ingredients. create and a proper cook system creates craveable product.

the food business, like, and I say this to all entrepreneurs that are in the food business, like whether they're wanting to open up or they have restaurants open, it's like your food has to be craveable. Like meaning like, oh my God, I love that chicken parm from Craig's. So I'll go, when I go there, I'm like, I want.

go back and get that chicken parm. Other stuff on the menu is pretty good or whatever. I'll sample this to try different things because I like food, but I want to go back to that chicken parm. If they didn't have that craveable chicken parm at Craig's, I wouldn't make it a point to go there. There's so many good restaurants. There's so many great places you can...

choose from in LA. There's so many great places that you could have good vibe and good atmosphere and good people, but that craveable product is what brings it back. And if you cut that quality, and I've had CFOs over time, not

not currency, but over time that have been like, hey, you know what? We just cut this just a little bit. You know how much money? Because it's a penny's business, right? We're doing well if we make 10 cents on a dollar. But like if you start cutting a little bit here to save a penny.

and you start cutting a little bit here and a little bit here, it's death by a thousand cuts. Then your food one day is not craveable. That's what's happened to so many quick service chains over the years. They've messed with their quality so much. Then they lost the craveability. So then it comes down to just a cheap.

calorie option versus a craveable meal that I'm dying to go get. Yeah, the way Steve Jobs would describe that is that you want to make products that people lust over. Lust over, yes. And so you nailed the craveable because I told you I brought my 13-year-old daughter with me today.

She's obsessed with raisin canes, and she door dashes it to her house constantly. She's definitely craving the quality chicken finger meals. Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business. He says the most successful people he knows.

stay in the details of their business. He mentioned learning from a friend who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company and how that friend would pay attention to even how much his company was spending on bottled water. When I heard that, I thought it'd be a lot easier to do this. If that shipping company was running on ramp, something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common, they know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny.

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These people are giving you this advice. Like, you don't know what you're doing. I know the answer to this, but I want to get it on record. It's just like, your kind of personality type, these, like, history is great. If you tell them...

that you can't do something. You get the opposite reaction that you think you're going to get, which is like, it's just going to make you want to do it more. Absolutely. You know, the best thing for a aspiring entrepreneur to be told is... I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think you can do that.

People haven't done that before. Why do you think you can do that? Because entrepreneurs have something to prove. They have a vision. They have an idea. They have a passion. If you're an entrepreneur, you're passionate about what you want to start. You're like, I know this is going to work. And you're so passionate about it when someone tells you.

You know, do that facial expression. I just, I don't think that's a good idea. Your first thought immediately is, you know what? I'm going to prove it to you. That is a great idea. And all those no's that you get, you just use that as fuel. It's like entrepreneurial. fuel it's putting gasoline on a fire because you have something to prove you know later in life now is you know I can take you know now that we're established and good I can take

I can take those things and not let it fire me up. We still get it at times, you know, like going into different countries. They're like, you know, like this mayonnaise type sauce, it's much more popular as a dipping sauce. You're not going to be used for sauce.

You need to add that. If I would have heard that in the early days, I would say, can you wait until cane sauce all that day out? You know, now I can say, hey, you know, actually we've had the same thing over the United States. Ranch was popular out west and different things like that. You know, and we went into Texas. They said you had to have cream. gravy. You got to have barbecue sauce, you know, things like that. And like, but through tried and true.

Over time, customers love the cane sauce. And so we want people to have cane sauce with our meal, not with ranch, because it's not nearly as good with ranch. And so they can understand that. So you're kind of calm later after you've proven yourself. But when you're getting started out, man, it is just fuel. You don't seem calm to me. It's not time to prove people wrong anymore. But I can feel your intensity over the table. So I'm very curious about this.

The hours that you're working now, 30 years in, compared to the beginning. So I just flew to Austin. I got to spend five hours with Michael Dell. Michael Dell is hilarious. He's been running his business for 41 years. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever met. Very calm and measured, but underneath just a super relentless person as you can imagine.

I was talking to him. I was like, hey, I heard you on a podcast one time. You said one of the funniest things because somebody asked him, like, you know, when you were starting Dell in the University of Texas dorm room with $1,000 and you're going to take on the biggest company in the world at the time, which was IBM. Like, that's so crazy. And they're like, how many hours?

did you work when you started your company? And Dale's face was like, all of them. Literally all of them. I slept at the office. And so we had a long conversation because he's also, he's married, he's got kids. And so he was just like, you know. At the beginning, it's intensity. But the value is the consistency and the compounding over decade after decade after decade. He's like, listen, I love my business. Because I asked him, I was like, Austin in July is not.

A little bit hot. If I had your place in Hawaii, I know where I'm going to be in Hawaii. He's like, why are you here? He's like, I just love my business. So one of the things he gave me advice, he's like, listen, the advice for younger entrepreneurs, he's like, I've seen so much over 41 years. He's like, you think you're going to be knocked out by a competitor?

You're going to sabotage yourself. That is much more likely that you sabotage yourself than somebody else sabotages you. Absolutely. So what you want to do is just like... You want to make sure that you're surviving to the next day? He's like, I work all the time. Do I work? I'm not sleeping under my desk. And then he's like, I have a team around me. When they say, hey, we have an important customer in Japan, he's like, do I?

Do I actually have to be the one? Are you sure that I have to be the one to be there? So this whole point is just like over time, you're still working a lot, but you're not, it's not even fanatic because you're definitely fanatical. And I want to ask you about your great quote about that. But you're just...

You're more measured. You're going to live to survive the next day. So how do you compare the hours you're working now compared to when you started this thing? So when I started up, and I give young entrepreneurs this advice. I'm like, imagine how hard it is to start your business. then multiply that by infinity. And if you're still committed to do it and you have the stamina to stick with that, then you'll be successful. Obviously you have to have a good

product and concept, and you have to have something that's going to work to make something go, which is often hard for people to see. The vision of chicken fingers down here in Baton Rouge was like, just chicken fingers, you know, just chicken fingers. We like our plate lunches. We want variety.

things like that. I'm like, wait till you have this product. And then when I was able to start cooking for them, oh man, that is good. Then when they start talking about the next day, hey man, you can cook some more of that. Yeah, come on by and have it. When you have to start up, there's so many amazing ideas by just promising. entrepreneurs, but they stop and the world never sees that product or service because it's so...

hard to open a business, then it's so hard to make that business successful. Then it's so hard to scale that business and grow. And if they just didn't stop and they knew how hard it's going to be, because they're like, how do you have quality of life and work-life balance? when you're starting a business i'm like you don't

Flat out, you don't. You're going to live the business every day. You're going to think about the business every day. You're going to be tired. You're going to be fighting through a bad mood because you're not getting enough sleep and things like that. It's like you don't have it. So you have to be committed that you're not going to have it. Now, once you get your business. open and you get it established and it's working, then if you want to grow, then you're not going to have...

quality of life then because going from one to two is your hardest step you'll ever have. Then two to six and six to 12 and all those growth phases are there. And so, but I just wish people wouldn't stop. when they go because like my hours in the beginning you know when we started this restaurant we were open every day of the week we were open until 3 30 a.m

And except for Sundays, we closed at 3 a.m. And look, when we were closing up, it took us two hours to close down. When we opened up in the morning at 10.30, we had to be here at 8 in the morning. And so you get about three hours of sleep a night. I had my... apartment right back here that would go up. And then during the day, we'd be like, hey, go take a nap. I'll go get a nap for like two hours and then wake up and come back to work. The hours were just all the time.

It was just nonstop. And I was young enough to have that stamina just to roll. And plus this environment. I love this environment. Cooking in this restaurant. It was very important for me to be in this restaurant so you could feel the vibe here. You could feel the soul of this place. It's right there. It's just here, man. You're not separate.

You're not separated from your customers. You're not separated from your customers. You're right here in the middle of this place that I constructed with my own hands. And it's like you just work constantly. You constructed what with your own hands? This restaurant.

I literally reconstructed all this with my own hands. Everything except the electrical, because I literally don't know electric, but plumbing, I did plumbing. I learned how to do plumbing. I learned how to do minor construction. All this place has resurfaced. So when you came in this place...

It was a lot of different concepts, college concepts that just didn't work. But they layered on paneling. Even the arcade was here, paneling after paneling. So rip off one layer of paneling. And there's like there's a rainbow stripe paneling going down this way because it was an arcade at one time and they had ripped up. this old paneling here on the wall, which is actually an Italian restaurant where it started. This was the outside of the building.

and they built this onto here. So when I pulled all these things off, I noticed this stucco all down the wall, but there was one little place I saw brick. I was like, oh man, we can have a brick wall. So I started ripping it out with a crowbar, left stucco down the side, and I got here and uncovered this old mural.

And look, I took it as a sign, man. This was an outside advertising for this bread mural, for this bread bakery, downtown Baton Rouge, where we actually started with our first bread at Canes. I came up with the recipe with the bread preparers there. And this was an outside advertising.

Advertising, Highland Road going from downtown Baton Rouge through LSU was the main core thoroughfare here. And we took this as a sign. This is what we came up with our logo for Canes. We took this design. I literally took it as a sign to say this is. going to be the Raising Cane's logo. And that's what we ended up with. But I learned this stuff because I didn't have enough money. I got a small SBA loan for $90,000. I'd raised equity in a sense of like $60,000 with original.

shareholders and I carried them over a little bit of the business today. It's been fun being with them. I pray. One of the things, I don't even want you to tell me if it's true or not.

I want to talk about how you finance the business because it's one of the craziest stories I've ever heard. But I just pray that today there is a boilermaker named Wild Bill that owns a couple hundred million dollars of equity and raise a case because he bet on your chicken finger dream when you were.

Like in your 20s. He did. He did. Let me take you back a little bit on the start of it. So, you know, I worked in restaurants in high school and college. I love the restaurant business. Food symbolized love to me. So what that means is like when I can spend time with.

my mother cooking in the kitchen. She's the one that taught me how to cook. We cook Cajun meals, so we would make a gumbo, right? You make a gumbo, you start with a roux, and you add your onions, and you really take all day making a gumbo. Now, does it take that long to do it? I don't know if it does. It's more about spending time.

with somebody that you love. And we're cooking for the family and our friends that we love. So that time together and then you make a good gumbo, then you sit out and all your friends and family are like, oh man, that's a good gumbo. That's good. And they start talking about, well, I do mine a little different. I do this. And those conversations went.

My grandmother would make me a pie, you know, chocolate pie. She'd come visit. She'd go, I made your pie you love. And I'm like, that means, you know, I love you. And so for me... restaurant and food and delivering food, it's an expression of love. And then the camaraderie, when you're working in the kitchen and it's rolling and drive-throughs going, and I can work any position, but it's that teamwork and it's immediate gratification when you're like, someone spent their hard-earned money.

And they give you their money and they look at that chicken finger box and they're like, oh yeah, like that's a good feeling. It's immediate gratification. So much stuff with corporate work and administration work and things like that. It's not immediate gratification. It comes over time.

My favorite job is if I can literally come in the restaurant and just crank out a shift. That to me is fun, man. That vibe, that energy. And you still do that? Yeah, when I go to restaurants, I go visit a market, and I'll go to one restaurant, and I'll get all the crew to come there. and we have like a town meeting. Hey, my main job when I do that is...

Saying thank you. Y'all are doing great. Thank you so much. And then what can we do better? And I can get that out of crew and management. You know, it'd be like, you know, first they're a little bit like, oh, no, the support's great. I'm like, yeah, it's great, but we're never going to be perfect. So what can we do better? Well, you know, the uniform program. It'd be better if we could do this, that. Great. Let's get some input. Because you can get system-wide, really good, like...

things from focus groups, you know, with crew or management, and you get good stuff from surveys. But, like, when you actually talk, you can pull it out of them a little bit more and do it with me. They feel comfortable, and then they'll tell me. But then I'll work with them, and they shift, and it's fun.

You can just, everything goes away. You're like focused on delivering good product and good service to customers right there. It's great. So I was in the restaurant business. And so like when I went to college, you know, I actually studied writing for script writing for television.

and film. I thought I might want to be in movies. But I always went back to business when I was working because I was that original kid in the neighborhood that had the lemonade stand. That was a kid that was going to cut your grass for 10 bucks. It was just always, I had to do like, I'd set up like Halloween.

haunted houses in my house and like, you know, go around, put flyers out and five bucks for kids to go through. So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and that's when I got serious about it my senior year.

and i actually graduated went to university of georgia but i was from batner's originally i knew i wanted to come home and i had a partner when i started the business since we wrote the business plan for raising canes um it started off we're calling it folly's chicken fingers that's original business plan terrible name but um we had we had

friend that was nickname was folly called each other folly but anyway we wrote that business plan and uh literally i wrote the i wrote the bible of chicken fingers man it was like i knew what our aprons would cost i knew what what would the cost i knew what would call i was called just college student i knew

college students need to make, I knew the environment they need to work in, I knew what college students wanted to eat, I knew what price points they would pay for that, all these things. But that professor gave you the worst grade in the class.

which is classic, but it was only a B-minus. The rumor went out that it was a failing grade and all this stuff is, but he was actually still a grader. But he said, no, the plan was great, like literally. You get the most detailed plan in the whole class, but the concept won't work.

And I said, well, why would the concept work? Well, because you didn't study the industry. We'll tell you to study your industry. You know, McDonald's is adding, you know, they've been out in a long time and they're the best in the business. They're adding these menu items. They're this thing called veto vote and people won't come to your restaurant.

didn't want this. They're also adding healthy items. Someone's going to want a salad and that and do it. And it's like, you tell that entrepreneur, no, you're like, oh yeah, wait, I will prove it to you. Literally, I took that. And people would have thought that'd be discouraging, actually. was that fuel. I will show you that this will work, right? So took that business plan, bought a cheap suit.

Went to Office Depot bought. I thought the businessmen need to wear a suit and I thought business. You got to buy a briefcase. Bought the briefcase. I had the same one. Did you? But didn't you feel like a businessman? You were like, yeah. I went to school for business. You don't know anything. You're like, you don't know, man. You're going into a bank, which is pretty intimidating, right? You're like these bankers and you think they know everything and literally brought it in and be like...

unlock the little safe combo. Was the combo all zero? I don't even remember what it was. Yeah, something like you would open it up and it'd be like, here's business plan for you, here's mine, put the business plan down and proceed to talk about this chicken finger.

concept I wanted to start at LSU. Everybody was nice enough, right? They're nice enough, but it was the banker's response was, you know, just chicken fingers, South Louisiana, you know, that's not how we eat lunch and never heard of that. I'm like, hold on a second.

Like, you know, you order pizza. Pizza's real popular, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably order the same pizza every time, don't you? What do you get? I like pepperoni or like whatever. I'm like, you get that every time. I'm like, this meal's that flavorful and craveable. You're going to want to get this.

meal over and over. Yeah, but you don't have years of management experience. You know, you probably should go work for, you know, great companies. I mean, go work for a brink for like 10 years. Then you'll really know the business, and then you'll have some money, and then da-da-da, and then you'll be bankable with that.

point, you know, they're like, because you have no money, right? I'm like, no, don't have any money. And they're like, you know, you can't get a loan. You can't just get 100% loan, which I thought you could do. But with every no I got, they were nice enough. I will give them credit for that. And they were nice enough to take the meeting. Maybe there's some kind of law that you have to actually see.

Somebody in their business plan. But then that, like I was like, man, I need to go make money myself. And so through a friend of a friend, I got a job as a bowler maker working in refineries. Louisiana has a lot of refinery work. And so what is this turnaround shift work? But this is super intense work. This is like 95-hour. It is 95-hour work week. So what happens is they'll shut down a certain sector of the oil refinery. And they're missing out on production, man, which is just...

big big money they're losing so they'll pay for you to work non-stop they'll pay whatever it needs to get that thing back up and running so you go in and you fix things you at you put new equipment in and things like that so you work to 95 hour weeks and uh and you just work straight through there's no there's no days off

or nothing just work straight through so there's overtime there's double time there's some kind of crazy thing you know that goes into another level so you make a lot of money in a short period of time and that was the first group that was encouraging to me

on my chicken finger dream because they could see me working hard on something. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm willing to do whatever, earn my money when I'm out there, willing to take on any job out there. And they're like, Todd, you're going to, you're going to, well, they call me Hollywood. We all had nicknames. Interesting story.

on the Hollywood deal. We'll leave that out. But so they were encouraging. And Wild Bill, Tolar, we all have nicknames. So Wild Bill was like, hey, Graves, man, you know. Hollywood, I see you got what it takes. If you really want to make some money, and you're not afraid of hard work, but...

This is a really dangerous trade. I fish in the summers, commercial fishing, sockeye salmon in Naknek, Alaska. And he goes... you can go up there get a job you can make a lot more money doing that then you can't bore making so i was like well what do i do he's like basically get up to knack neck alaska i'm like where is that he's above the lucian chain looking up on a map back then you couldn't look on the computer you had to pull out a map buy an alaska map

And so, look, I called a plane to Anchorage. I called a float plane to King Salmon, Alaska. I hitchhiked to Knackneck, Alaska. There was no Uber back then. Literally hitchhiked in. Set up in tent city where people go before they have a job. You get set up in tent city, put your tent out. on the tundra, by the way, and you go around to the boats and you ask them for a job. You're basically a greenhorn. It means you're a rookie out there. You have to convince them to.

That you can get on the crew, right? They're looking for some help. Just a few of the boats. Most people were all staffed out, but a few of them needed just a greenhorn that they could pay a lot less, right? You get less cut of the take for the boat. But I ended up getting a job on a boat that summer and had the wildest experience. commercial fishing for sockeye salmon in Alaska, man.

32-foot boats is regulated. You couldn't keep going out to get the salmon. So the salmon are born in a stream. They swim out the ocean. Sockeye salmon live out in the ocean. Beautiful silver fish for like five years. And somehow in five years, they know it's time to swim back the original river, go up and spawn.

die it's a crazy cycle so they come during the peak of the season they're just rushing into these uh to these same rivers you catch them you can't continue to go out there's a loran line back then and you couldn't cross that line so if you set your net skill net

If you set it up in front of another boat's net, you're going to catch three times as much because you're catching the first fish coming in. So these captains make their entire income just during the summer. So they're heavily motivated to catch that perfect set in front of that other boat. So you play chicken. And literally somebody veers off in the end, someone chickens out, and sometimes you don't. And we rammed boats. We got rammed.

crazy we catch so much fish around like six foot seas in a 32 foot boat and the back of the boat gets weighed so much down with salmon before you get unloaded to a tender boat out there in the ocean that literally you'd be like getting waves over the side some boats sunk when it was gone

It was just unbelievable work. We worked 20 hour days during the peak of the season. It was about two to three weeks. And when you work 20 hour days, you only get like a nap here and there. Like you get, hey, go take a nap real quick. You can get an hour, get this. Or we get a break to eat real quick. You're so exhausted.

that then you stop being careful so people were thrown out with nets they would not hold on the boat when you're getting a bad wave and they crack their head open their skull open so imagine this you're out there fishing you're getting rammed by boats you're picking fish

You hear on the radio, somebody just got scalped. I heard that, distinctly, scalped. I don't know how they got scalped from the boat. Some medical helicopters are going in. National Geographic's coming over, filming the boat action. And I'm out there for this chicken finger dream. Nothing was going to stop me from doing it.

And sure enough, made good money doing both bowler making and doing the Alaskan fish and trade. Came back. I lived off credit cards because I had no other income. Before we get there, so there's this reoccurring theme in all these biographies. There's a story just like this now your story is pretty extreme and you tell in a wonderful way and the way I summarize this like how bad do you actually want it?

And, like, you have to actually ask yourself, like, if you're going to compete against Todd Graves, are you willing to work 95 hours a week for a Boilermaker after you buy your suit and your briefcase? And they're like, get out of here, kid. We're not getting any more. It's like, that's fine. I'll find another way. 95 hours.

hours doing shift work in a boilermaker. You're going to take a flight to Alaska. You're going to hitchhike. You're going to live in a fucking tent. Right. Before I got the job. Trying to convince. captains of boats that you could die on to hire you.

And then to do that and then to work 20 hours and the entire time, what I love about your story is it's like, I'm not thinking about sockeye salmon. I'm thinking about my chicken finger dream. Exactly. I would have worked construction in Nebraska. That's what paid.

I love the fact that I went to Alaska and did that and did something as cool as sounding like a bowler maker, right? But I would have gone and knitted blankets if that's where the money was at. Anything I could do to make the money because I was determined, man. It was like...

I was like a nerd in the entrepreneurial club in college. Then people would start up, hey, I got this, I steam clean floors, I do these different things. But I saw some of these entrepreneurs have these really cool ideas, and that's when technology is really rolling.

But they would just stop, you know, over a couple of years in college and be like, I don't think I can do that and do it. And I'm like, that's the key, man, is when you set a goal, you do it to success or failure, but you don't stop. You don't stop actually with my original partner. We went out to a camping trip in North Carolina.

I'm like, we need to make this like, we're going to go in and we're going to camp and we're going to literally commit to this because like you set an oath that you're not going to ever, ever stop.

then you don't stop. Because during the time, man, there's two years it took me to raise money for this. Two years. Tell me, wait, I love this idea. Run that back to me. I just did this episode on Elon Musk and he has a great mantra. He's like, retreat is not an option. Retreat is not an option. Burn the ships, man.

We are going to succeed or I'm going to, he's like, you will know when I give up because I will be dead. That's the spirit. That's what you have to do. He went on this camping trip to do an oath? Yeah, he was literally. But he gave up. Literally, it was literally to say. like around a campfire i mean we we did everything but just like become blood brothers you know to do the deal it was like we're gonna do this right we're committing this we're gonna make this happen

We're going to see it through and somehow doesn't work. We're going to die trying. And literally put that on the line, going out and fishing Alaska. People died in that fishery. God bless them, you know. But yeah, it's just that. And I think another thing too is I think when you have that relentless focus, so for me is during that time.

i was like i came up with a quote man i was like nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically like you have to be so fanatical when you have a dream and others don't believe in and you see it you have to be fanatical so fanaticism what carries you through

you know? And so I see this fanaticism and I study people, right? And so like your podcast, I'll hear things and I'll get reaffirmed with things, then I'll learn new things, new ways I can look at things and do it. But it's great, you know, and I like it. because it's like you can learn from it.

And you can get inspired by it being established because you need that fuel to keep rolling. And it's good to hear other people are doing what you do. And then you learn from other people. I'm constantly a student of the business. So it's like you learn other things from businessmen and businesswomen. But for me too, I love to be around celebrities.

The people that are successful at, whether they're an entertainer, whether they're actor or actors, whether they're athletes, they all have this common core. And you know what I see the most common core of all the people that are successful for me is...

They're never satisfied. Never satisfied. And so we carry that into our business about never being satisfied, but it's a bad way to say it. So you say never satisfied, it's like, well, y'all aren't happy what we did, you know, with this opening? No, no, no. So we changed the work of never satisfied. It's just like, we're always going to raise the bar.

So we'll raise the bar. So we did great at that opening. That was awesome. These were all the good things we did. But you know what, too, is these are some of the things we can get better at. We can actually get two seconds faster.

You know, and this is how we're going to do this. Look, we needed the staff more. We messed up here. We didn't give enough support because we wore out a crew. We should have had more crew members on staff. You can always learn. So I see that with people. I see it with the best athletes. I see it with the best actress. It's like, that film was good.

But man, I could have done this better. I could have done that better. And then like if you don't, the rest of the rules, then you're always going to keep striving to get better and better and better. It's like competition. I love competitors because they make you get up even earlier in the morning. It's just like we got other people that are gunning after us. You said the funny.

thing so one i think one of your most important messages is like we need more founders that refuse to sell their businesses like this there's this huge entrepreneurial industry that didn't exist especially when you were starting your companies is like and the entrepreneur industry is influenced by investors, not entrepreneurs. It's like start, scale, sell. Then what?

Then what are we going to do? You have a great line where you're like, if you create and do, you never want to stop creating and doing. And now you just sold the vehicle that you created and do and create into. Right. And so then what? Then you're working on your second best idea or your third best idea. And I think like one of the most important ideas that you have is just like everybody in your business. The reason I said this on the episode I did about you.

Todd's smoking them because he's competing against corporations. Who are the founders in your business anymore? They're either dead or they sold out. And then I love, somebody asked you the question out of like, the competitors like who get you fired up or maybe will keep you up at night and you're like and they may not even exist but they will exist in the future because you know that same personality types of you they're coming it's like the young todd graves that has that fire in his soul

And he wants to do exactly what I'm doing. And you're like, that's fine. But you don't understand. This is what I do. This is in my DNA. This is how I feed my family. So if you want to come, just understand I'm on this 24-7 all the time. You better be ready. You better be ready because I'm coming after you. I just saw you at the UFC.

Are you a UFC fan? Yeah, I like all sports, you know. And so Dana invited me to come and get to see Poirier do his last fight, Louisiana legend, man. But seeing those guys, like, it's the same personality type. So the reason I bring that up is because you were earlier in the conversation.

breaking down the species of bird and the amount of detail you just explained to us. The thought I had in my mind was not about chicken things. This is an important point you're making. It's like the same personality type.

pointing at a different endeavor. Jon Jones, you know, probably the greatest UFC fighter. UFC is the only sport I'm obsessed with and I watch all the time because I don't have time to watch anything else, but I can watch one pay-per-view a month and have an understanding of what's going on. And I heard him...

He said the same thing that you said in that interview. He was like, oh, you want to come compete with me? This is how I feed my family. And he was fighting surreal game. And he was studying him and understanding the detail. And he's like, I know what he does when he wants to go left. And when he goes right and everything else, he goes...

I assume that this guy is trying to destroy my legacy and trying to take the food off my family's table. And I will not allow that to happen. The same level of intensity that you're applying to your business. Absolutely, man. If I got somebody coming and compete, like you're competing.

With me, my livelihood and my managers and my crew members depend on this restaurant. You're going to open up across the street here. These people feed their families off this. We're going to go at it. You better be strong because we're not going to give up. And look, I've done this. I've done this for 30 years.

And I'm just as fired up as I was the first day. It never leaves you. It's a blessing that entrepreneurs have because when it's so hard to start your business, you gain this great sense of appreciation. appreciation for your crew that are working so hard beside you.

great appreciation customers coming in paying their hard-earned money to do this appreciation for community communities that embrace you so that sense of appreciation which is what our culture is all built off of 100 off appreciation is it never leaves you you always feel appreciative

So you always want to take care of people. So it comes in, people are like, oh, man, you just sell the business worth all these billions. You can just not worry, da-da-da. I'm like, yeah, well, then what happens? What happens to my management? who support their families? What happens with the crew members that come up? Because if I sold the business, you think they might have the same values? I mean, really hard to find.

Find a buyer that would have the same values that I do and that I believe and have that deep sense of appreciation. They bought it for this. They want it to be worth this because they're probably going to sell it themselves. They're looking at it as an investment, not a vehicle to help people.

entrepreneurs go and then you get successful and then you grow the business and then you're successful at growth and you create something, it goes to a level, it goes from fanaticism and passion and a dream. then you get purpose. And so my purpose of raising canes is, well, God made me good at chicken fingers to help people. And what I mean by that is I have 75,000 crew members. We have so many part-time. people that work. I love part time quick service crew members that come in.

We have an opportunity. It's most people's first jobs at restaurant retail. They need to come in, learn values, man. What are those values? Hey, look, we're going to work hard. We're going to have fun. We're going to deliver great customer service. We're going to deliver that craveable chicken finger box. Why?

Because people are spending their hard-earned money here. That's why we're going to do that. And what we're going to do with the money that we make, we're going to help out our communities. We're going to give that to people. And as we scale this business and it grows, this thing's getting into its values of billions of dollars. And someday when I clear debt, I'm like $3 billion in debt now.

Now, eventually with our growth, you know, as we go, God willing, we'll go and then we'll be able to pay down debt and we'll have, when I have this free cash flow coming out and doing, we're going to be able to help people in a big way. I can't wait for that phase of our business, but that's purpose, man. So you start realizing.

It's not what you make. It's what you give. That's a better way to keep score. So we have that purpose. And what I want people to do is to keep that purpose because too many great restaurant entrepreneurs and...

founders of the business, especially in the restaurant business, they sell, they sell. And look, they're so passionate about it. And they talk about it like, man, I have the passion and I love what I do, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then all of a sudden they sell a majority stake of their business because private equity is so good.

putting that package together. Generally, the numbers are five or 10 million because entrepreneurs put everything back to the business growing it. They prove in a successful model, either regional or they prove it out in different regions of the country, which may make it a national. Multiples go up and they're like, hey, we'll come in, we'll give you.

we'll give you 5 million or we'll give you 10 million, but they take control in the business. And these entrepreneurs are like, oh my God, we've struggled so long. We're still living by means. I got debt. I got all this stuff. They will sell, and then they lose control of the business. And if you're private equity, and private equity serves a lot of good purposes. They also serve some bad purposes. They take founders.

out of the deal and so decisions get made differently so a founder is powerful because a founder is their baby It's personal to them. It's personal. So for me to today, I read customer comments and look, we don't deliver every time. We will screw up. We'll have somebody that was rude. We'll have something that messed up their order or something like that. I take it personal.

I mean, I take it personal. I'm like, you spent your money here and we didn't deliver on that promise. I don't know if private equity really cares because it doesn't affect our overhaul sales. It's a small percentage of what we're doing is, but you're personal on that. Your crew is personal because they're working their ass.

off to fulfill your dream and you're sitting there and you're in a good financial position but they're busting their butt management's busting their butt crew members are busting their butt I know when I'm working at 3 a.m. and I'm like, oh man, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. I know there's crew members still closing up somewhere around the country, right? Somewhere around the world. Somebody's closing up that way and it's that appreciation. So when you lose that founder personal...

that this is their baby you start making the wrong decisions right now you really do and so so private equity they have their shareholders and they have to make a certain amount of money they're not getting the returns on their dollar they'll make other decisions that will go maybe they price maybe they raise their price

And maybe it's not the right time to raise their prices. Maybe they cut their quality. Maybe they cut wages for crew. Maybe they don't do the bonus plug. Their programs aren't as good as the year before. All those things start to make the business not special. And so I just encourage. People don't, don't let money be

one of your major goals. Because if it is, you end up living a shallow life. You end up saying, I need that $10 million, but you lost control of your baby and then it's not special anymore. It's not worth the dollars.

with it grow learn bring in other people to help you business the things you need help with learn it and do it probably can come in and say hey look at the staffs we have in finance accounting it and all these things that you think are too hard for you to figure out it's not too hard for you to

figure out. They had to figure it out, too, at one point. You can figure that out. Bring in some great people. Stretch yourself. Hire those people. Bring them in. Learn the details yourself. I'm not good at IT, but I know enough to work with the great people to still add value. If that makes sense. I just wish founders would hold on. Hold on. Don't get rid of it, man. And why would you? If it's something you're so passionate about, find that purpose. Find that purpose.

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Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit HubSpot.com today. That is HubSpot.com. I think that's one of the most important messages that we could possibly get out there.

There's two things. I have this idea, this maxim of anti-business billionaire, which I'll get to in one second. But what I'm trying to do is exactly trying to bring attention to exactly what you're talking about. It's like we celebrate the sale, but we don't... What happened to the guy for the rest of his life? Is he still happy about this? And so, you know, Trader Joe's, right?

The founder of Trader Joe's, his name's like Joe Colombo or something like that. I can't even pronounce his last name. He did such a wonderful service to the future generations of entrepreneurs because he writes this autobiography that's excellent. And he tells the story of Trader Joe's.

90% of the book, okay, he wound up selling Trader Joe's in like the 70s, okay? And he lives for like another like 40 years. 90% of the book is this guy's so fired up. He loves Trader Joe's. He came up with a new concept. 90 percent of the book is just talking about how amazing Trader Joe's was, all the different ideas. He's the same personality type that you had, but he made the mistake that you didn't. He got scared. There's a bad economic climate.

He wind up selling, I think it was to Aldi, which still owns the business today, if I'm not mistaken. What's fascinating is just look at the time and effort he dedicated to Trader Joe's in the book. And then the last 10% is... Yeah, I invested in some real estate. I did some consulting. And it's like, it goes from like, this guy's fired up every day. I'm in love to I sold my baby. And then it ends the last page. He's like, I have to tell you something.

I was not true to my own self. I regret selling. Thank you for listening, Joe Colombo. Okay, that's the last page. The book is published. He dies the same week. Gives me chills. Think about that. He's like, don't do this. I wish I had the courage. I wish I wasn't so scared. What a good man to just be honest to everybody. I wish I didn't do it because he wants to inspire people not to make the same mistake. Paul Orfalia, the founder of Kinko's. I did an episode on him too. He thought, oh.

I sell for billions of dollars. I'm a success. He's like, I can't even go in the store. I can't look at it. Like I got the money, but like I don't have exact the purpose. I love the word that used purpose. So this is something I'm trying to draw attention to on Founders Podcast.

It's like these anti-business billionaires, right? They're not in it for the money. Somebody like James Dyson, like the Steve Jobs, like an Yvonne Chouinard from Patagonia. It's like these people are just like you, so obsessed with the quality of the product that they are making. That is the main goal. I'm going to make the best in the world.

right? Then they retain control. And the point I make on this is one of my favorite maxims in the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, who also owned 100% of his business. 1919, he owned 100, he bought out all his old investors, owned 100% of Ford Motor Company.

It's very equivalent. It'd be like owning a $20 billion company today. He says, money comes naturally as a result of service. Is that what you said? Stop fucking worrying about the money. Can you make somebody else's life better? They're an act of service. Then you keep doing that and then figure out a way to scale up to serve more people. And guess what? The money will come automatically to you. So the anti-business billionaires, they put the quality, they're obsessed with the quality.

product they're making, they retain control. And guess what? If you're obsessed with the quality of the product you're making and you retain control, you wind up with the money anyways. Absolutely. If you think for the right reasons in business, money will come. Yes. 100% money will come. You know, it's just like... Sales-driven. Do you want to be profit-driven or do you want to be sales-driven? Sales cures all woes. You can raise your sales. We're number two on average unit volumes.

in quick service restaurants, Chick-fil-A than us. And I think McDonald's might be a million behind us per unit, per restaurant, all the way down to a lot of our competitors are like a third of what we do sales-wise. But if you're sales-driven, you're going to do exceptional customers. service. You're going to have more people on shift, right? And then cutting it shorter to try to save labor. You're going to need highest quality products to do craveable, all those things that you do.

that do that, then you end up making more profit because you have more sales, you have more happy customers, you have more repeat business volumes, and you get the volumes and you get flow through dollars and you make more money. This is where the finance industry gets it wrong. And I think Bezos said this perfectly. He's just like, no, over the long term. If you put the interest of customers first, it is the interest of the shareholders.

It just takes longer, but that's where you actually create the value. It's like serve the customers and then your challenge will make plenty of money. The dollars will come. It's proven time and time again, and I'm an example of that. We talk about entrepreneurs going to a certain point and they get scared of certain.

times. Great example is Tony Tenchikong, who had Jollibee, right? So Jollibee is a Filipino concept, and he was an engineering student. He explained to me, he said, look, if you were a smart Filipino kid, your parents were like, you're going to be an engineer.

He's like, I hate an engineer. He goes like, but we went and looked at a dairy to see the engineering behind doing a dairy or whatnot. But they had a little ice cream shop up front. He goes, that's what I was interested in. I was watching them do the ice cream and run the register. So he started an ice cream shop.

a burger then he added spaghetti crazy crazy menu and became this this like success he opened that one little ice cream shop turns into a restaurant then he starts growing it so he's like my goal i want to be

The largest restaurateur in the Philippines. He's setting on his goal. He has his fanaticism. All of a sudden, McDonald's announces, we're going to the Philippines. They saw success that he was selling all these burgers. And his accountant and his financial people were like, you got to sell. You got to sell. This concept's amazing. started in the US, they're just going to blow us away. Sell now.

You're going to make all kinds of money. You can live the rest of your life and be happy. He's like, no, I won't be happy. I like what I do. And he's like, what do I do? He said, made me nervous as hell, right? And bean counters will do that. And they were showing him what could happen. McDonald's put him out of business. Could be a millionaire or...

or he could be worth nothing. They put him out of business completely. He said, you know what? I'm going to put the goal, I'm going to beat McDonald's, and I will still be the largest restaurant in all the Philippines. Well, he did that. McDonald's came in, he blew them away, he grew all out through the Philippines, he was the largest restaurant in all the Philippines.

Set his next goal, right? Fanaticism, right? Am I stopping there? I want to be the largest restaurateur in all of Asia. Think of all of Asia. He did that. He did acquisitions of other restaurants and did his largest restaurateur in Asia. Tell me what's the next goal. I want to be top five largest restaurateur in the world.

This is what I want to do. And this is the big boys. This is McDonald's. This is all the big ones. That's his next goal. But that fanaticism keeps him going versus getting scared. It's okay to be scared. It's actually a good thing. But then say, well, I'm fanatical. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to see it. And so I wish just more entrepreneurs would do that because so many.

things can be out there that can scare you so many people going to tell you believe in yourself like you always did and don't give up Don't give up. If you didn't give up when you started, that's the hardest part. You didn't give up when you're growing in that deal, that's the hardest part. Don't give up now. Go, go. And you don't need those other things because if you lose your baby, you lose purpose, then you lose purpose in life. There's other things to do, but it's not your passion.

Let's go back to how you're financing this one. And then I want to go to how you finance the...

The next 28. And that insane story. So you got the wild bill. You got the refinery money. You got the sockeye salmon money. Now you're playing credit card roulette? Yeah, yeah. I had to do it the whole time when I graduated, right? I bartended at night when I was... We're working on a build business plan and then trying to start the business. Literally, I don't have any income, so I'm living off bartender money.

from tips at night. And then literally back then, too, you could get credit cards. There were 18% to 22% interest rates. And you can get as many as you wanted with $5,000 limits. So that's just what I did. I just sent in. Yeah, I have a job bartending. And OK, well, sure, here's $5,000 credit line on this deal.

I paid 20 to 22 percent on that. And so I just lived off of that. And so what I did was I had enough money of my own to come back and to live off of and put into the project. At that point, I was able to raise some preferred shareholders. And I raised maybe $60,000. These are people.

These we would call like angel investors today. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, these are like my bookie. Well, guys I worked at Buller making. Hey, bookie's got cash. Yeah, yeah. Can you take this $10,000 investment in cash? I'm like, sure.

bank, I'm like, came from my investor. But I was able to raise that and I was able to get a... a 90 000 sba loan and it was enough money to to for me to come in at this place north gates of lsu i had a wonderful uh real estate broker one of my mentors mr red reynolds this place had flipped over so many different times and he was like i wanted

I went for the landlord landing to Lula Arbor. She was 94 at that time to have something solid. I believe in you. I believe in your fanaticism. You will make this work. So I'm telling her to hold it. Basically held the location for a year for me. How impactful are those words of encouragement? Because you're young. Like somebody you respect that was just a good man and a really good real estate broker. I really respected that because he saw that. It was affirmation that.

why I was being so fanatical and trying to talk everybody into it. You know what I mean? Except for the bullet makers, he believed in me. I'm like, okay, okay. That's his little wind in my sails to do this. And basically told her, hey, it's going to take him a year to... put all this together, but I believe he'll do it. And then I believe you have a long term tenant. Look.

Sure enough, we've been here for almost 30 years, and we got like a 100-year lease going forward. And the family, she passed away, but the family's like, no, you know, I'm trying to buy it. They're like, we just have pride in this, you know, so we'll just keep doing a lease, I said, but we'll give you 100.

you know, and options to stay in this original location. Do you buy the real estate now for the new store? Wherever I can. Absolutely wherever I can, I do. Just good real estate, a quality real estate. It's just there's so many people that own it. It's part of larger shopping centers.

larger developments. A lot of it is in trust, you know, family trust and things like that. But everyone I can buy, I buy. Absolutely. They won't tell you this one, though. No, no, no. They like being a part of it, right? You know, but they give me a good, I got a good lease term on here. And plus, you know, what I put into this place.

learn things. You know, like I said, I had to learn plumbing. I had to learn construction. I had to learn the steps. I didn't have, I really didn't have a lot of money too, to come in and, and, and, and spend much money on this. But this place is sacred, man. I can tell you every square inch. And later on after, after we get in on our discussion.

I'll show you all these little points in this. This is original furniture that I went. I got a U-Haul, went around to all these equipment supply stores in Texas. I hope you have bed sheets that look like this somewhere. That's a damn good idea. They're just in pajamas too, right?

But it means something, right? And keeping this like this, I can bring in management to here and show them this place. We have big, pretty buildings, all functional, everything. They come here and go, this is our soul. Just remember, this is where we started.

And we got to keep that spirit going here. Dude, the one in Miami Beach by my house looks like a nightclub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like literally the deal. I love that location. It's huge. So credit cards, SBA loan. You said it took a year for the development of...

So you had the lease before you opened it? Yeah, no. So it didn't sign the lease. That doesn't hold it for you, right? But this location was available, and I knew it was going to be awesome. It took two years. Two years from the business plan to where I actually opened up the restaurant. It took me two years. And so literally from writing the business plan,

playing from class, going to the banks, getting turned down, working in refineries, then working in Alaska for the summer, then coming back that fall. And we opened in 96, so it'll be the fall of 95 when I got back. Then...

So I had some money on the deal. I went and got that SBA loan and got the investors. And from there, then we started the construction process. We started getting the used equipment. And luckily, the equipment I went, I went into Houston and Dallas, restaurant supply houses because, you know, restaurant business.

go out nine out of ten go out of business i could go buy stuff and i'm like i need a fryer that'll work 60 days like give me your cheapest fryers they had to be 85 pound fryers and they're like well this one's good i'm like yeah it's 10 times as much i need something to last because i know as soon as i Prove this will work. I know I can get another loan. Thank goodness we made money. And so we opened up. I was so excited. We reconstructed. We're ready to open up. We got...

registers back to office depot there's little registers and once they figured out how to program them i went and started waving people in the restaurant and people came and people liked it and then we made thirty dollars the first month that's what we made people like that's all you made i'm like no dude that means i could pay my crew i could pay

Rent. I could pay, you know, literally payroll's taken care of. I can pay the vendors. We're working. And steadily off of that, we started making more and more money. I could replace equipment as we went. Just basically dumped everything back into the restaurant. And sure enough, I was like, like.

This is working great. We can go to the other side of campus and we can go in and do that. I brought the business plan to the SBA lenders that did us. And I got to that one literally 18 months later, I was able to buy the piece of property, construct a new building.

and opened up 18 months after the first one. It took two years to start this first one on a shoestring budget. The second one, I have a piece of property and I got a brand new building that we opened up and it showed efficiencies there. And what was really amazing with that location. is that it was on the other side of campus. It also had traffic flow from neighborhoods, office buildings, things like that.

We had not just students coming in. All of a sudden, we had businessmen and women coming in for lunch. We had moms and dads picking up food on the way home. We had T-ball teams on Saturday. We had church groups on Sunday. And that's when I got the vision.

I was like, this isn't just a college concept. It's what I thought it was. If I just work for college kids, I'm like, this works for everybody. And that's when I got that fire, man, to grow at that point. That's when I got the vision, man. And the vision at that point was, and it wasn't, it wasn't. articulate this way but what i wanted was locations all over the world and i'm like i want to be known as the brand for

craveable chicken finger meals, great crew, cool culture, and active community involvement. Like, those are the things that turned me on with that deal, right? What do you mean it wasn't articulated that way? Well, I thought the vision was there. I just didn't put it down. And so I'm like, I asked myself, you know, it's like... I was like, you know.

Why do you want locations all the world? I'm like, because I want to go in every community because I love hiring people to come in and build teams, creating opportunities, job growth, teaching them values. And I'm like, man, he's like, I get turned on by customers coming in and loving the food.

And I'm like, and I'm going to keep giving them quality chicken finger meals, that craveable product. And I was like, now I'm able to give money back to the community. I'm like, and I want to be able to give money back to the community, that actively involvement. I'm like, but we have this cool culture, man. I want to emulate that other places. I want to be the place that.

Look, I worked in the restaurant business, high school, college, man. It was like, it was not positive motivational management, man. It was like, do this, do that. You know, like you screwed up. Yeah. No music in the kitchen. Can you imagine working back there? It was just negative environment because the manager. was negative because the owner didn't appreciate.

everybody you know what i mean so it's just this negative feeling i can get people from other other other restaurants without treating right and they're not like giving good customer service they come here they're treated right they have a good environment we've got music cranking the kitchen we're having fun we're a team and it's positive motivational management it is like Good job. Hey, thanks for taking the trash out to the dumpster. Wow, that's good toast. Hey, good job on the shift, man.

That's how you motivate people. Praise costs nothing and means everything. It means everything. Absolutely, man. And this teamwork, and it's good. And also, too, is why I love operators is it's like when I was on the football team. It's constant coaching.

Oh, yeah, it's a good pass. Oh, man, you screwed that up, man. Like, make sure your arm goes back. And, you know, hey, block harder. Do this. You know, like, you're getting constantly coached. And nobody takes it bad. No one takes criticism bad because it's all about.

Doing better, winning the game. It's the same thing in the kitchen. You're like, hey, man, toast needs to hurry up. Hey, great. That's great toast. Like you can mix those things in the corporate environment. And this is how you get weeded out of Cain's corporate is the people that. can't take constant coaching.

And it's coaching, right? You know, it's like, well, no, we should meet every six months on an eval and how we're doing and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. It's like, no, every day is an eval. Like every day when we get better and a lot of corporate people, one, if you make mistakes, like I encourage, make mistakes.

We're not making mistakes. We're not pushing ourselves. We're not trying new things. We're not doing things. But let's learn from them. But let's admit our mistakes. I see corporate people come in, and it's like you don't address an issue. You just say, oh, we're doing da-da-da-da-da. It's just like, hey, man, we screwed up on this. We learned this. We're going to do this different.

Let's move on. It takes all of 30 seconds. When you create that kind of environment, like in a coaching situation or in operations, that's a challenge for me. on growing the business because we're bringing in some really experienced people from other organizations. Right now. Yeah, right now. As we do that, a lot of the culture is you don't admit mistakes. One, you don't want to admit mistakes. And two, you don't want to be coached.

It's this academia type of things like that. I was like, look, man, I'm learning every day. And I'm the first one to always say, man, I screwed up on that. That was a bad decision. Then the team knows. Hey, well, once it's validation too, he doesn't think he knows everything. And two, it's okay for me to make mistakes. But we do need to learn from them. Todd's not going to make that same mistake over and over.

Like we know that, and I won't either, right? And so that's some of the challenging growth.

Restaurant growth, we get the operators. And if you're an operator, man, you just have that culture. And we have to get as people that are intrinsically motivated, right? And so we can pay people really well because we do good. But pay doesn't matter, man. It's like... They want to make a good living, of course. Title doesn't matter.

Right. You know, it's like this VP executive, all these like titles and stuff like that. People are like title crunching up. I can literally interview somebody and I can see the things that's like, it's like they're going after title.

They're going after pay. They're going after these things versus intrinsic motivation. Like, I like to lead people. I like to be part of good teams. I like to be part of high-performing teams because it gets the most out of me. I like to be excited by what I'm doing at work. Those are the things that when you hear that, you're like...

you're intrinsically motivated. I like what y'all do back in the community. Hey, have you ever thought about supporting this? I think this is a great organization. When you hear that kind of stuff, because there's plenty of brilliant people. There's so many brilliant people who do the same job or that haven't had the experience, but it will learn that, right? They have intelligence.

to do it, but it's hard. It's 100% hard. If you're intrinsically motivated, you do really well, okay? I love the idea that you said that they have this almost theoretical academic understanding of business and that usually only survives in an environment where you're separated from the customer. It's like if you're working here, there is no theory. It's like we made it.

We can see the customer eating it. Look at their face. What is actually happening? Separate from the customer and separate from the crew. Corporate environments, like when I started off, I was the first guy to wear a Canes t-shirt to conferences. Everybody else is in a suit and tie.

But their crew members in the restaurant are wearing jeans and T-shirts. It was this business mentality from here. You're separated from the customer because you're not in your restaurant seeing who's being served. And you're also not with your crew to see what gets it. You're in the suit.

So immediately when you go in with your suit into a restaurant, they're immediately like there's a separation. There's a divide. When I walk in a restaurant, I'm dressed exactly like them. And I speak their language. And I talk to customers. They're like.

There's no separation like, oh, that's the boss. They're like, oh, that's the founder, right? That's a different title. You know Les Schwab Tire Company on the West Coast? Okay, I'm going to send you his book. It's very hard to find. I found this because Charlie Munger is like one of my heroes.

He, you know, he had like the complete history of American business in his head. And if this he's like, you need to read about this guy. I just read the book. You would love Lesh because he sounds exactly what you're saying, where he competed in a very difficult business. You come into.

Fast food, QSRs, that was an established thing. You're coming in and there's competition everywhere. And he goes into selling tires and he just smokes every single other person. And the book starts because he's like...

In his 60s, the business is named after him. He goes, I need to put this in a book. Just so you know, I didn't have a ghostwriter. I wrote this all myself on a 50-year-old typewriter. He goes, this is how I want the business to run. If the business is not going to be run this way, take. Take my name off the business. Take my name off the business. And he's like, you know, old school guy. He's cursing all the other boys. He's like, God damn it. And he's just like.

I'd always tell the goddamn people in the office, like the only reason they have a job is because the people in the store selling tires. And then he would talk about this. He's like, if you're out, you're going to love this guy. I already know this for a fact. I'll send it to you. He's like, if you spend 30 days outside of a store, you forgot half of what you know. He's like, you have to be. He's like, every single thing. He's like, we exist.

to serve the people that are serving our customers. 100 percent. It's why we call it a restaurant support office. We're not corporate office, we are a restaurant support office. We're here to support the people that are serving our customers. 100 percent. We have these monitors set up in our offices.

And it has restaurants, and you can pull up any restaurant, our whole system. I want people, when they're leaving our office, our restaurant support office, to see there's people still working, right? When they get there in the morning, there's people opening up.

Doing the restaurant, doing it. There's constantly working. So you see it every day. You're walking by that every day. You're like, ladies and gentlemen, that's where we do our business. And our job is to support them. Because when you go to bed at night, they're going to be working.

When you get up in the morning, they're going to be opening the restaurants. We've got 75,000 crew members across the system. We're here to support them. We're here to make their job better, easier, more efficient, more fulfilling, the whole bit. And keeping that going. You have to like...

You also, if they do this, entrepreneurs are very erratic, unscheduled, bad, you know what I mean? Like, so, you know, most of us, you know, it's a general deal. It's like people are like, what's your schedule like? I'm like, my schedule's all the time. Everywhere, however, whatever. It could be 3 o'clock in the morning. Are my eyes open? Yeah, it is. If it means no sleep that week, it is what it is. It means I can take off a day and go climb a mountain. I'm going to do that. Whatever.

Whatever called for the business, then you answer that. So there is no schedule. There is no that. And so the discipline comes from the focus and the fanaticism. You're always going to be there. You're going to do it. But there are the things you have to structure and do it. And so like for me is to scale, I created.

the Keynes Love department in our business. Respect, recognition, and rewards, man. When you have crew members that are working hard, one, things of respect. are things that you should just do. You shouldn't get credit for them. So, like, we're closed on every major holiday. That's not a reward. That's not recognition. It's just respect, man. It's like, do I want to work on July 4th? No.

I don't. I want to be with my family and friends. I want to enjoy the holiday. I want to take off Christmas Eve. I want to not work on Christmas Day. I want to be, you know, holidays and things like that. I want to be there. So if I respect for my crew members, if I'm not going to work, you're not going to work. I work nights. I work weekends. I work all that. But we don't.

work on those days i mean the first july 4th i was open at this restaurant i saw the crew was dragging i was here working with them right but they're like oh because all their friends were doing something fun their family doing something fun i was like you know what that's not worth it so that's respect recognition

It's something you should recognize achievement. You should recognize tenure. You should recognize all these things. There seems to recognize all the things. It starts from the simple things like, hey, that's great toast. Thanks for being so friendly in the drive-thru. Man, they loved you today. It's things like that.

You work a year at Raising Cane's, you get a hard hat. It symbolizes the first year I was there. All crew members signs it. It's fun, right? Five years, you're getting the salmon. Those are the recognizing things, recognizing that deal, then rewarding. So it's like, whether it's a $5 gift.

to go get a coffee at the local coffee shop onto other bigger and better things that you get. There's rewards that you get. And I don't want to build that better and better. But if I just think of these ideas and they come and go, it's like, no, create a department around that.

literally department that thinks of nothing but will respect, recognizing, rewarding crew members every day and put a bunch of brilliant people. Most of them came from operations in the restaurant and they know this stuff about build systems. So our next thing with that is versus saying, here's the gift card. or here's a new Canes hat or things like that. It's like build a point system, right? It's kind of fun, right? You'd be like, you know, you come in, you get it for

Every year you work, every month you work. You build shifts, right? Like, hey, so-and-so was sick. Do you mind coming in and working? They come in. You get points. I want to build it up a really exclusive type merch and stuff you could build up to and do, but like constantly getting better at that, raising the bar. That's smart. But have people around that.

just the field. You have to put programs and things around these great thoughts. You have to get structure to do that. Sometimes that's tough for an entrepreneur. One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever read in a book came from Mary Kay, who built that massive, remember the Mary Kay Cosmetics? They would wear people with the pink catalogs and everything.

I feel Mary Kay was a master at understanding sales and human psychology. She had one of the biggest and most successful sales departments. The piece of advice that she gave the organizing principle for her salespeople. Sounds a lot like what you're doing with Crew Love. And she goes, remember that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And I am a hard driving person like you.

I can be a bit of a dick. Just being clear. It's like I'm kind of obsessed. And that just knowing that is like actually helped me interact with other people better. And to kind of like modulate my behavior is just like.

They just want, that person wants to feel special just like you do, just like the person that helped you secure this. Like, man, Grace, I believe in you. Like, and it makes a difference even to hard driving, you know. psychotically obsessed fanatical people like you. It does work. Words of encouragement matter. And so I remember reading a biography of Henry Ford, who I already mentioned. And at the time, he was like a...

He was not successful. He had this idea. He was like, hey, all the cars that were on the road... at that time were either electric or steam that's what people don't understand it's like electric cars are not new they were the default at the very beginning he had this idea to make one with an internal combustion engine because he's like then the fuel source you carry the fuel source with you right And so he winds up meeting Thomas Edison. At the time, Henry Ford meets him. Henry Ford!

No one knows who he is. He's not successful. I think he's already failed. He had two or three failed car companies before he finally succeeded with his third two. Again, just I'm coming no matter what. Thomas Edison is the most famous person, one of the most famous people in the country. He has a hard time hearing. They're at dinner, like a huge dinner, and Henry, but Henry Ford's an engineer, and so he gets a minute.

with his hero, Thomas Edison. And he's having to like yell in his good ear about this. And I think it's like seven words or something like that. But Edison, obviously brilliant, he just gets it right away. And he hits the table and he goes, that's it, young man, you have it, keep at it.

And then Henry Ford says his autobiography, which he's writing 40 years later. He's like, those seven or eight words of encouragement. There was a hell of a lot of pain between him telling me that and me succeeding at this idea. But I heard that in my mind. And it kept me, I was going to keep going, but a little boost was very freaking helpful. And I heard Edison, my hero saying, you're good at this. You have a good idea. Don't give up.

I think it's really important. Yeah, it's really important. Absolutely. But it's earned encouragement. Edison knew he had it, right? And so sometimes tough love, I had to learn that on Shark Tank. Tough love is also...

when you get different entrepreneurs and things like that and sometimes the ideas aren't good now i wasn't good at it like it was always encouraging and you'll find a way and do but like on shark tank they're like hey man you're gonna have to learn tough love like like cuban knew me right and then in the beginning mr wonderful then they're like

I know it's heartbreaking, but sometimes the ideas aren't good, or they're doing it the wrong way, and you're not doing them a service doing it that way. So the tough love is to say, but then help them.

to focus on what's really important. No disrespect to Shark Tank, but fuck that. I cannot stand. I said this in the episode I did about you. It's just like, the future is unpredictable.

Like, if you read history as much as any, like, I think I read history more than almost anybody else. It's like, all it is is humans failing to predict the future accurately. Why would you sit there and think that you sit on a stage in a suit and a bunch of makeup on and say, this kid's not going to succeed? Fuck you.

How about that? Like, let's see how it actually is going to go. I hate people that do that. And so my idea is like, obviously, there's millions of founders listening to founders. And I get emails and all this kind of stuff. And we have conversations. It's like, what do you think? What I think doesn't matter. I was like, I don't know. I have no way to predict the future. All I know is like when I started my podcast, people were like, there's too many podcasts out there.

It's like 2000, it was 10 years ago. There's no podcasts out there. They're like, no one's going to listen to a solo podcast. No one's going to listen to a podcast where you can't make a living reading books for like, that's ridiculous. It's like. It doesn't matter. I actually hate that show. No offense to them. But it's just like the idea of I'm all-knowing. I'm an expert. There is no such thing as an expert in entrepreneurship. You know what you're going to be an expert in?

Raising canes. You're an expert in raising canes. And I'm sure you have a ton of ideas, which are obviously transferable to other businesses. But we don't have predictive ability. I just did this episode on Elon Musk. Let me give you a simple. There's getting Michael Moritz. might be the most successful venture capitalist of all time. He's at Sequoia. He invested in PayPal, which is a successful exit. They sold it to eBay for $1.8 billion, something like that, if you want exits.

So they sell that. Then he already knew who Elon was. He invested in PayPal, which was Elon's company. Then Elon goes to start Tesla and he pitches Michael. And Michael's like, he's like, invest in my new company. You just made money with me. Michael's like.

You're trying to compete with Toyota. That's impossible. I'm passing. That's a multi-billion dollar mistake on Michael's part. The funny part is, and I'm not doing this to Shane Michael, because in the book, later on, he goes, that was, he's saying years later, he goes,

That was a mistake because I severely underestimated the level of Elon's determination. That's why I don't like shows like that. You don't know what's inside that person's heart, inside that soul. It might take them five years. It might take them 10 years. There's a book next to me. I just showed you.

Before we start, okay? The reason that I've read 400 biographies of History's Greatest Entrepreneurship. Yeah, so I've read that book four times. I'm about to do another episode on it. But the reason I bring that up and the reason that out of the 400 books that I've read... that this is my number one recommendation is because this is not a celebration of success. 90% of this book is James Dyson failing. He goes through 5,127 prototypes. He gets screwed over by...

He gets screwed over by partners, joint ventures. He was just like you. Please. I want to sell you a piece of my company. I need to raise investment. Please take it. Everybody's like, no, your company's not worth anything. So that's why he owns 100% of his company to this day. But the reason that's so fascinating about this, right, is because he has the idea. I think he's 44.

By the time he finally has a product up to his standards that he owns completely that he is now selling. And the book ends where he's just like, listen, it's easy for me to say to not give up, right? But there was times where...

My kids grew up seeing their dad as a failure. He would go in the back, do prototypes, be covered in dust because he's doing vacuum cleaners, carry himself inside and cry himself to sleep covered in dust. That's what his kids see. But he's like, so it's easy for me to say...

Not to give up, but because I'm on the other side of that. And where the book ends, he goes, they have one product, which is the vacuum cleaner. They're in one market, and they're doing $300 million a year in sales. And then what happens? Now his company is doing billions of dollars.

And he's got a bunch of different products. He's in markets all across the world. The compounding between 44 and 75 was so important. And it wouldn't have happened if he couldn't endure the pain. I have one of my favorite quotes. Endure the pain. the capacity to take paint. It is. And you see that over and over again. It is, 100% is. It really is. And founders lead and they work with their heart and soul. Yeah, absolutely.

In my conversation with Daniel Ek on this podcast, he said one of the most important ideas I've ever heard. He said, I'm not obsessed about time. I'm obsessed about energy management. If you have time, but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyways. I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast. And when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all caps was maximum energy.

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Right now, Function is offering $100 credit to the first 1,000 people who sign up for a Function membership. To get this $100 credit, just visit functionhealth.com forward slash Senra and then get the data you need to maximize your energy. Again, that's functionhealth.com forward slash Senra. For me, you know, when I was growing and seeking advice, and I got a lot of really good advice, I also got a lot of bad advice that I was able to, like, see through it.

You know what I mean? And learn from, you learn from good and bad, good examples, bad examples. Like people started saying stuff like, Hey, look, you know, Todd, you're just, you're, you're so much in the details that you just need to delegate the delegate. I hated hearing that word delegate. I mean,

Explain to me. Explain delegating to me. What do you mean by that? Well, delegate means you give other people. I'm like, no, I know what the word means, but how do I delegate this? Well, you just hire good people and you delegate. get them to do the work. I'm like, I hire good people. And let's say out of a hundred point scale, if I can, if I can do it at 95.

Pretty good. No, that's perfect. But let's say operations, I'm at a 95. But if I hire somebody good, but they end up being an 85. But we need to be at that 95 to have success. I can't just delegate that. I have to supplement.

to get us back up to 95 working with that person to do it and over time they might get to the 95 so at that point that they're at the 95 then i'm like hey you can run this good then they get to 96 how you can run this better than me so now i'm gonna now i'm gonna ease off on some of those things that i was

supplementing all the deal is but i'll still still check and make them but i still know enough to to where i can still add value on improving and doing things like that and so like did you say it can't be in the details what do you mean on the details oh man look you always you're down to the minutia and all this stuff you're wasting your

time doing this stuff. You should be big picture. You should be there. I'm like, well, yeah, it got to be big picture too. But the devil's in the details on this thing is. And so I got reaffirmed by this. And this is Edison's West, a large shipping company here in Louisiana. And actually, it was one of his partners in another shipyard business had told me when I was explaining this to my YPO forum business group and saying, people are saying I'm just too much in the details. They're like, hey.

Gary Suess knows exactly what the bottled water cost at his place. He's like, look, and there's formulas to give it to him. He doesn't go and count water bottles. He looks at the program because he's like,

If we're paying 25% too much on bottled water and people aren't going up to the thing and getting out of the big thing and they're using, which is wasteful too, little bottled waters, it means they're doing that in every phase of the business. So knowing those details, but that reaffirmation of me going, yes, me into the details.

matter. So I say you don't delegate. You hire great people. You help them and do it. And if they do it better than you, then you can back off and you make sure all those components of the business, look, I'm not great at IT. I have an exceptional IT team.

They do it better than me, but I'm still into the details to make sure we're doing what we need to do. We're supporting our operators. We're doing it. We're being innovative and we're getting faster and drive-throughs and doing it. Our co-CEO in the business is a much better operator than me.

I'm still in the details with him in the business, and I know enough about it. I'm good at it to add value in the deal list. So the word delegation is used way too much, like trust your instincts, learn and grow, and let people grow themselves, but be...

into what they do and absolutely stay into the details of your business. If that's what made you successful, don't lose those things. Get better at it, get more efficient, get the reports and things like that. Y'all have products and you also refer people to products that can help consolidate the information that right.

quicker, efficient, more decisions like that. You get better at that, but stay in the things that stick to what you know. Second on the concept, man, I'm fully believe. Be good at one thing and do it better than anybody else. Be relentless. I do it better than anybody else. Can you expand on, but that, I said on this episode, it's like sometimes you can just hear a person say a sentence, like what you just said about delegation. It's just like.

If that's the first thing I ever heard, I was like, I know him. I feel that way too. Walt Disney has a great line about this, right? If we lose the details, we lose everything. These are not after. This is not something you think about after. It's like this is what makes the magic, you called it craveable, like the magical experience, like why people have an emotional reaction to your company.

Right. Like your product evokes emotion just like his evoked emotion. Right. But the reason, the very first, I didn't, I was unaware of the reason it came. There wasn't any in Florida where I live. And I actually saw a clip when you were on Theo Vaughn's podcast. It was a TikTok.

And you said something and I was like, I know him. Like, I have to find out who this is. Yeah. And then my brother-in-law lives in Austin. And that's when I had my first race in Canes. So I'll tell you what I heard about you. And then the first time I had it.

I was like, of course his food is like this, and then I had it for lunch and dinner, lunch and dinner, lunch and dinner, lunch and dinner, the whole week I was there. His kindred spirits. Yeah, but this is what I'm obsessed with. This is exactly what Harry Snyder thought the way he thought as well.

it's not just the principle of doing one thing doing better than everything else this is like how it applies to every single thing and you would talk about in that podcast where it's just like well simple menu has all these other positive effects that you know you can really focus again all the details good you can make it better but also you even had the concept that

it's going to allow you in the future to serve more people because it's a shorter order time. Right. When did you figure that out? Did you know that at the beginning? Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't. What I wanted was... craveable product you know and new from restaurants you had that the one credible product on their menu and then they have all these other menu items all these other distractions you're like but everybody goes to gino's to get that delicious carbonaro right like it's like

Focus on that and do it extremely well. Don't try to be all things to all people or you're going to be nothing to anybody, right? You have to be what people will be fanatical about. The restaurant is craveable. What I want to do is create that craveable product that everybody did. Then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive-through, right? And so it starts from when customer pulls up.

to the order deal. The first time at a Rays and Gains, they look, they have to decide what they want, they do it. After that, they know what they want. Box combo, sweet tea, extra sauce. You know, whatever their order is. So the order's quick.

Coming to the drive-thru, we have a singular product focus, right, for that one menu item. We have one line. I'll take you back to the kitchen later. You can see down the line, toast is grilled on the end. You got chicken fryers, you got fry fryers, and you got the board. You can watch that cook-to-order process happen, like you're cooking. And so you can cook and you have that product and you're making one, basically one meal just with...

three, four, six chicken fingers. So you can make an assembly quicker. You have your, your, your drinks that are popular comes up in and out. It gets out there. Thank you very much for your, for your order. And you go through. And so then I saw the speed on that deal. So it's like our concepts.

craveable food served with fast food speed and convenience. That's what it is, right? Fast food, speed, and convenience, craveable products. So both of those together. So if I added menu items, right, then it would slow me down. right on that say a little good speed up is then I'll put

heat lamps and keep all this other food assembled done. So then quality goes down. So your speed goes down, then your quality goes down. Then your quality is now worse if you've been adding heat lamps. And we don't have heat lamps, we don't hold time, we don't have any of that stuff. We're having that cook to order process.

In-N-Out Burger, you know what you want, and you're cooking ahead. So it's literally like you're cooking ahead. Now, if you show up, you're the first customer at Raisin Cane's, it could take you four minutes to get your order. Four to five minutes, because...

we're dropping the chicken we're doing that but when the when the line picks up then you're cooking a little bit ahead then you know during your rushes you're cooking way ahead you're just meaning it's coming out it's getting served immediately right we're two minutes 35 seconds drive-through and counter service right If we added different products and we lost two seconds, every two seconds that I can get faster is a point on sales. So let's just say just roughly 1%. If we do...

$6 billion in sales this year. What's $60 million in sales you can do if you can tweak that. order time two seconds now it flips on the other side right if you had two seconds you add two seconds you add two seconds is then those sales go down and then you flow through dollars once you get to the flow through point then you then you lose that's money so not having all those different things it keeps the

concept so that knowing what your concept is and sticking to that concept then you know what what here's the engine here's what drives here's what drives sales which eventually drives profitability it does there's other benefits too

In the restaurant business, you look at a lot of the quick service competitors. They're adding all these LTOs, limited time offerings. Management and crew have to learn a new product that's going in and how that works in the service model and do it. And as they learn that, they do that. It's a distraction of what you do.

The next 60 days, there's another one. Then there's another one. Then there's another one. There's all these things going on. Management has to spend so much time on learning those new products, delivering those new products, hitting the sales of hectares, all that. Where's the time to encourage the crew and do positive motivational management? Point out, that's good toast. You're great in the drive. Where's the time to walk out and talk to the customers and actually see?

Their food. How clean is our restaurant right now? What's the general vibe here? Oh, wait, the music's a little lower. Someone knocked it down. Where's those things? So our management can focus on that crew member and customer experience and make sure that goes because they're not these LTOs they have to learn, go through training modules and do that.

Focus on what you do good. And so, like, you go back to that business plan. They talked about not having all these different menu items. No veto, but it doesn't happen. They're like, you're not going to get the frequency because you need frequency gets driven by different menu items because you get all that stuff. Our frequency is just as high as any.

other quick service restaurant, meaning how many times somebody comes back in a month period of time. I see the DoorDash bills. I know how. But then you come back, right? You come back. So it's anti what they say is what drives this stuff. It's like there's no veto vote.

There's no variety drives more sales. It's actually frequency. Our frequency is as high as anybody else. It's serving the exact same thing people have day in, day out because it's good, because it's good. Our competitors can run chicken, finger, chicken strip, whatever type sales. It doesn't affect our sales. It doesn't affect it because people say.

They might try it, but two days later, they're coming back and getting their chicken finger meal from us because it's the best. Actually, I love it when they run all these specials, they do all this stuff, because it adds more advertising out there for chicken fingers, and we're known for the chicken fingers, man. It's like, when I...

want people to talk about chicken burgers, chicken strips, whatever they're talking about, boneless chicken being dipped, I want them to say Raising Cane's in their mind, like Xerox, you know, it's not a copy anymore. Go give me a Xerox of that. That's what you want to be known for. Do what you're good at. Do what you're good at when you...

execute on a consistent basis consistently and you can teach other people how to do it and they can execute and operate the same way and you stay focused on that and delivering that high quality craveable product with fast food speed and convenience and being friendly and doing that, when you focus on that day in, day out, the whole organization is around that, then you can look at stuff like Cane's Love. You have time to do those other things that...

enhance that crew member experience. And when crew's happy, they're going to be friendly to your customers. That's why people come back. They don't just come back to things because the food's so craveable. They come back because they know it's going to be food safe. They know people are going to be friendly. They know people are appreciating.

Customers want to be appreciated. They want to say, thank you for your food. And our people mean that. It's like, we appreciate you spending your hard-earned dollars here. In fact, they want to go to the restroom. It's going to be clean. Those things get you that repeat business. Yeah, we landed and went directly to one last night.

Just greeting every single person that went to the door. Absolutely. I love this idea because, again, focusing on one thing and being the best in the world at it, to me, that should be completely obvious. I think humans crave simplicity, but our default state is we tend to overcomplicate things. So your competitors, like, okay, Todd's just going to have...

Chicken fingers. I'm going to have chicken fingers and nine other things. The problem with that is the distracted do not beat the focus. That's exactly right. The distracted don't beat the focus. They're going to say, we're going to do chicken fingers, but we're going to have a hundred different sauces. People go back and get their same sauce. They might come try it one time, and then it's also slowing down their order process. It's slowing down turnover time and all that stuff.

And then they go back to the same sauce. So how much time did you spend on all those different sauces that when it comes down to, you might have narrowed down to three sauces. What are the most popular? Narrow down your menu items. You're seeing more and more by nighting restaurants.

narrowing their menu, it's happening. I'm not saying I was a part of that, but maybe they looked at Canes and said, wait a minute, I bring my kids here, we come here all the time, maybe I don't need 50 different menu items on this thing. People don't actually want to make choices. No, they want to know it. What do you do best? I went to Jiro in Tokyo.

And, you know, it's a three-star Michelin restaurant. It's ten seats. Maybe you can get me in. I can, actually. I have a friend that knows how to do it. So Jiro's really old, so he only comes in frequently, but his son was the one that served us. But, like, you don't even get to choose. You sit down and he...

He's like, I'm the best in the world I want to do, and I'm going to serve it. Brilliant. It's actually nice. I don't have to think of it. As long as you can get in, then I don't have to think of anything else. I don't flip through a menu. Like the restaurant that has a book this size. Something.

California, not California kitchen. Cheesecake factory. I don't go there. It's like, I don't want homework. Like I got other shit in my head. I don't want to think about this. It calls anxiety. This is what we love. It's like last night we were like, okay, what do you want?

You want three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, or six. That's all you have to, you already know. That's all you think. Another way that you buck, so you have this limited menu, and then most people in your industry, they're the franchise model.

Why did you not choose to go down that path? You know, when I started out, you know, when I had that vision, you know, grow canes, you know, so franchising was like one of the obvious ways to do it. And so everybody was franchising. Why do they do that? Well, I mean, there's a lot of advantage.

One is less capital cost. If you can grow off franchisees' money, so let's say you have a good concept, you have a few locations, and then from that, for you to grow company restaurants, then you have to...

keep putting in, injecting a lot of capital. And on top of that, you have to take in a lot of debt to do that. Restaurants are very expensive. You can't, you know, you literally, and that's not a manufacturing plant. If I could do all chicken fingers, one location, send it out, right. The cost wouldn't be there. The capital costs, but every, every one is a.

new restaurant, a lot of money. So people are like, you can grow in different areas and use other people's money to grow. There's also the thought of that other restaurateurs will bring other things to the table, other knowledge. They're good in their regions. They know the local.

knowledge better and it's better to grow that way and do it. But I think mainly it's the money play. It's literally, we don't keep growing with our capital. We'll take a royalty off the deal. So I had the model of like, I'm going to grow.

50%. I knew I wanted to go company, but I'm like, I'm not going to grow fast enough and I'm not going to have the capital to be able to grow in all the areas. So I got really great people from the industry, people that were CEOs and other great big billion dollar businesses. And they were good people. They're people that I trust.

trusted in good people. And so I'm like, that will fuel my company growth, right? Getting franchise royalties in and I'll be able to grow and we'll grow quicker. And so I did open up in different boxes of the country. I opened up in Ohio, opened up in Minnesota, opened up in Nevada. different areas. And they were good franchisees. And because I had the real friendship with them, we could talk through any problems or anything like that. The thing is, they operated

Say we're at 95 out of 100. They were about 85 out of 100, which I think other franchisees were like 65 out of 100, honestly, what they're doing. So other people have been thrilled with those franchisees, but that 85 to 95 gap drove me crazy. And I was just like...

I know we can operate these better. I know I can do it better. It's a single change of operational procedure. We had tested in our company restaurants. We knew it made us faster or it was better for management and crew. It was a better system.

To talk them into changing that system took so much time that was just totally inefficient because it's their business. You had the respect to show them, like, ah, that just doesn't work for us because it's different. It's like, well, what's different? The crew and customers.

Your customers are exact same in both these areas. No, we just like it better this way. We think that or even crazy things like, well, we don't want to get that much faster because we like the longer interactions. Like, well, the longer interaction, well, you can still be just as friendly, but quick as.

They want to get out the door anyway. But talking them into things took too long. And I was spending, and me and the team were spending too much time on something that should have been implemented overnight. And I'm like, our company restaurants, once we tested it out in like five restaurants and we felt good about it.

Our operator said, man, great system, boom, let's roll it. And so that time was less efficiency on us building the business and making our existing restaurants better and getting higher same restaurant sales. And so I ended up buying all them back.

And they did really well, and they were great, and they were all happy. And actually, too, is they looked at more of a merger because we kept their teams, and they had more opportunities for growth. And it worked out really well. But for me, it's like, you know, franchisee. is never going to run it.

like you do, because it's your baby, it's your thing, and they're not going to be quite as personally, and they're not quite as fanatical as you are, right? I'm a fry cooking cashier, man. That's what I live to do, right? And they were...

85. I was at 95. And so I could hire the people that had those same types of values as I did. And so franchising for me is just you're going to lose quality service. You're going to lose those things. And you're also going to lose a tremendous amount of efficiency.

because you're talking them into things versus just adopting something system-wide really quick. So we got way more efficient. We bought them out. We actually operated at 95. Sales went up in all the franchise markets. Sales went up. Wages went up. Everything went up.

it actually improved out better. So look, I think it works for some organizations. I, for me personally, especially in the restaurant business, I think the company model just rules. Well, I think the important part that, you know, a lot of people

Like, hey, should I work on this? Or what's the idea I should pursue? And I actually get this idea from Michael Dell, where I used to say, well, you just have to build a business authentic to you. It doesn't even matter if you could make more money from franchises. It's not suited for your personality. So it doesn't matter. It has to be. And I used to use the word authentic. all the time you should build a business authentic to you and then i was reading michael dell's autobiography and

He was in his early 20s, so he's like, shit, man, this is really hard competing with IBM. So he actually gets a guy to come in and be, I think, the vice president or president and help him. And the guy's like 20 years older than him. And I found an interview with that guy who's now in his 80s. talking about what it was like working with Michael Donald's 20s. He's like, I loved it, but I can only last four years because we're playing for high stakes. There's a thousand other computer companies.

Taking on some of the biggest companies in the world. He's like, so after four years, like I'm losing my hair. My back hurts. Like I got digest. He's like, I got digestive issues. I'm drinking too much. And he goes, and Michael is. Drilled he's like energized because then he said this great line he goes because Michael built a business of his natural town It was unnatural to me where my body is shutting down and Michael's like, yes, let's do this like natural is a better

description than authentic it has to be natural to the creator has to be natural to the founder absolutely it's just like i don't i'm the same way i'm obsessed with control i spent eight hours yesterday hand editing the transcript that no one gives a about because I care about it. Everybody tells me outsource, delegate. They use that word all the time. No.

I don't want to delegate. Like, I want to feel it. I have a feeling for it. But that's the key. That's the key to success. That's common in everybody that's successful, I believe. The time period you're describing, where in Kane's history was this happening? For the franchising? Yeah. Is that five years into it? Yeah. Yeah, probably three years I started talking about it. Okay. No, no, no. So, second restaurant was 18 months after the first restaurant. Okay.

Then from there, I had an opportunity when I really knew I wanted to grow. And that's when my partner got out, which was really interesting. You said it has to be natural to you. My partner, Craig, who was... Great. He loved the finance part of it. He loved the IT. He loved the business administration stuff. He wasn't a fry cook like me. And he's like, Todd, when I get a night off, when I get a night off, I go read the Wall Street Journal.

He goes, you know what you do? You get a night off. You're writing new schedules. He's like, this just doesn't make me happy. And so he ended up getting, we didn't have much money to buy out then, but he ended up getting a scholarship, wait for us, did business. He did all the things he did. He actually came back to Canes for several years doing the things he likes to do, has his own business now. He does really well. Still one of my dear friends, but it wasn't happening.

He had the courage to say, I don't like this. This is all we're doing is being fried cooks. It doesn't turn me on. It doesn't do it. And so I encourage people, do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. Right. It's just a part of your DNA. Like there's no work. There's no I'm working. I'm not working now. I mean, like, I'll be at the beach and it's like, you know.

checking in and we've got calls and I'll be able to roll heads on the beat, you know, you're talking, doing, and then you get back to, hey, let's have a margarita. You know, it's like, it's a part of what you do. So you have to do what you love, right? You have to, and if you do, you'll never, you'll never work. There will work. Words like career. It's not a career.

It's a passion. It's just what you do. It's the same thing as I get up and I go take a walk and I love my dogs, I love my business, I love my kids. Things like that are what makes the difference in being whole.

I believe. So one of the disadvantages of having other partners in your business is that they might have different goals in mind that you have in your business, right? So an entrepreneur and a founder brings on an equity partner, whether it's an individual or whether it's a professional group, private equity. I mean, very careful.

on what their motives are and if their motives is about a financial return you're generally gonna end up bad because you have a you have a fiduciary responsibility to the other owners of your business to meet their their goals right and if those goals are financial

on that deal is it can change your thinking. It can change your thinking on quality in my business. It could change vision on quality food. You could try to lower food to make more profitability, which is a short-term game. You could cut wages. Right. And so your crew members aren't as happy. They're not as appreciated on the deal. You could try to do different avenues of sales just to raise sales. That's going to lose your focus. There's all kind of bad things that go with that.

The only way I do a partner is they believe 100% in what you believe in. And then you also believe that they're not going to sell that stock to somebody else that doesn't in the future. And rarely does that work out. If it's special to you, hold on to your equity.

Take the risk, get more financing, but keep it yours because you'll always be able to protect your baby. You know what makes it work better than anybody else. I have one thing to add to that I think is super important that you said that.

There is this something that I've come across in a lot of the biographies, like many times the best financial decision are not financial at all. And so there's this investor named Nick Sleep who wrote these legendary letters to his partners.

And he made a great line. He's like, the best investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold. And what he was talking about is the fact that, like, if you took, obviously, Sam Walton, right? He gave away the equity in Walmart to his kids before it was valuable.

They wound up being very tax efficient. But if you look at his combined wealth that came from Walmart, right, that's still concentrating on the family today. The last time I looked it up was like a month ago. It's like $432 billion, okay? So one of the greatest fortunes that have ever been created.

Do you think Sam Walton woke up every day like, oh, I need to maximize shareholder value. What's my stock price? No, he woke up serving his customers. Customers. And then they're like, why didn't you ever sell? It's like, why would I?

He's like, I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing this because I wake up with a burning, he says something like, he wakes up with a burning desire every day to improve something. And he's the most wealthy man in the world. He drove the old pickup truck and went to work every day. Yes. It's not about the money. I've heard this.

for 200 years of entrepreneur history. It's like people think it's like some Willy Fufu stuff. Oh, yeah, you should do what you love. There's an underlying reason to that because work is going to be a grind. You are going to run in times where you are... crying when you're in pain every day you want to give up and if you don't love it

You will give up because you're sane. And so you have to love it. You have to be irrationally obsessed with it. And then what happens? It goes back to the anti-business billionaires. The people that are irrationally obsessed with it, they make better products. And then customers, you know how many people have told about raising canes? Even before I knew I was going to meet you. It's in human nature. When we find anything that we love, it could be a quality chicken finger meal.

It could be a movie. It could be a podcast. It could be a piece of art. It could be a city. Non-profit. No one keeps it to themselves. Humans don't do that. They're just like, you've got to have this chicken. It's incredible. And so that, all this stuff.

love, being hyper-focused, staying in something for a long time. Mildly obsessive and compulsive. Mildly obsessive and compulsive. Yeah, 100%. Oh, it's funny you say that because there's this line in this Elon biography. So Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle.

He only ever joined two boards. And he was best friends with Steve Jobs. He was on Apple's board. He's good friends with Elon. Elon consistent inventor. He's on Tesla's board. And he was asked one time, what do they both have in common? He goes, OCD. OCD, 100%. 100%. What do you mean what they have in common? It's obvious what they have in common to him. Yeah, being Molly obsessed with convulsives is actually a good thing.

I'm only interested in fanatics. My entire podcast is just about, think about like to get on the podcast, right? It's like you had to live a life, you had to be so good at your job.

that somebody wrote a book about your life. It's like that's the tiniest. And in cases of people I'm super fascinated with, like you, it's like, oh, no book? Fine, I'm going to make my own. I literally printed out the transcripts for every single one of your interviews, and I went through it just like I did for this book.

looks the exact same way. It's the same personality. It's like whether you're playing basketball or you're building Raisin Cane. So wait, so how many years of doing the franchise you're like, shit. This is not the right move. Yeah, I mean, so it was exciting getting in. It was exciting to open up new wrestling. It was exciting to teach what we do and do well. It was exciting to learn.

A couple years into it is when I started seeing the lack of efficiencies and a little bit less. You know, like I said, they still did a good job. And so I want to give them credit. They did a good job, but not as good as we could do it. So if we couldn't do it as well, you know, we might be like, oh, wow, look, they took us to another level. They just didn't.

operate as good as we did. They cared about the crew. They cared about the customers. They just didn't operate as well as we did. And so a couple of years into it, I started seeing it. We bought them out probably about the 10-year mark, which was good because they were able to grow there and make good money. company-owned restaurants is the business is valued way higher. Like for franchises, you'll get a valuation of the 6% you're getting off that restaurant. That's part of the idea, but it's...

based off evaluation of what franchises markets go. So let's say franchise multiples off of EBITDA minus debt. Franchise multiple would be like four to seven percent. is what they could sell in their market, right? We're trading on, not trading, we don't trade, but we're valued on over 20 times EBITDA, those company restaurants.

go into that. So the profitability that comes into all of it gets on that higher multiple. That's why we have the 20 billion plus valuation for the business. So it's a better valuation model too if you do company. Okay, so let's go from two.

How did you finance when you got up to 28? Oh, man. So this is interesting, man. I said, look, after the second restaurant, I had an opportunity to go into some of these failing double drive-through burger places. And so Greg got Dr. Hill, another great mentor of mine. He's like, look, we're just not operators, man. They had like 30-something.

something, you know, they're called fast track and then burger joints. We're down to like four of this, our best units and our best, we consolidate the best crew. We just, we want to be landlords. Like we're not operators and you can use equipment and you can have all this, look, whatever you need.

and look, just, we'll give you cheaper rent. And so I didn't want to go into them because I was like, it was these like double drive-throughs. I thought like, you know, this place had a lot of soul, big diners and all that. But I said, you know what? It's an opportunity to get in cheap. and prove what I want to prove that we can work on. We can not just on campus that we can do well. We can do well all over town.

And we went into those places, we just painted them, used the equipment they had in there, and we started just doing sales, man. I mean, like people loved it everywhere and they loved it. And so it eventually turned all those into...

big, you know, dine-in drive-through locations. So I was able to do that into a mall food court. So I was able to get all these places. So we went from, what is that? Two to eight restaurants. We opened five restaurants in five months, man. We started rolling, made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot, burned myself out. Like, like I couldn't be at all the look.

So then I really learned how to set up leaders at different restaurants and give them the support they need versus me bopping around the restaurants and then like Putting out fires, basically, is all I was doing. But I did that, and then from there, so I was able to get into those. There, I was like, okay, I'm going to come up with a prototype. Like, what is Raising Cane's ultimate location, the prototype I want to do? And I want to do it out of town, and so out of Baton Rouge.

Why? Because I want to prove the prototype starting off when no one really has the brand recognition that we have and show what this thing can really do. So literally, one year I'm like, no more growth. We're going to set up what the prototype is. And by prototype, I didn't mean just architectural design, kitchen design and where our look and feel was. Everything. Marketing systems, human resource systems, training systems.

everything globally. I used to go to restaurant conferences to learn from people that were experienced. I was able there to get, I know the marketing guy, I know the human resources training and operations person. I know the crew relations. So I was able to assemble a team together with architects and with interior designers.

and branding people. I was able to assemble a team coming in. We call them partners, not consultants. It was like they were partnered into the success of the business. And we came with that first prototype. Raising Cane's opened up in Lafayette, and we just went gangbusters, dude. We killed it. It was just like we had operational efficiency.

Our drive-throughs got faster. We could stack more people around the restaurant. I had all these really good people that came in and gave us great things. We came up with the original black and white logo. We changed it to this logo because we got it. That's where we came up with Raising Cane's One Love. All those things went into it, comboing meals.

I didn't combo. It was a box and a drink. We said let's combo it because people make it easier. You don't have to decide to. It's like just get those menu items and we created that. But I got that on another. conventional loan. Now I'm like, you know, with the money coming in and doing this thing is I'm bankable, but I'm not bankable to where I want to grow, which ended to be in the 28. And so back then, bank regulations were a lot more lenient, man. So what I said was,

Why don't we go in to go to these community banks? Let's say we want to open up in Houma, Houma, Louisiana. Go to the community bank in Houma. and let me go to Angel Investor. And this was Dr. Hill had those fast tracks. He wanted to be a landlord. He also liked to do deals. And he said, hey, let me buy equity in the company. I don't want to have equity partners, but I'll give you a sub debt deal. So, Dr. Hill, let's say I borrow $200,000 from you. I'll give you a 15% interest.

rate, subordinated debt. I mean, it's a one-page deal. Subordinated debt means subordinated to the banks. I know I can take that subordinated debt at $200,000. And the bank will look at that as equity, right? So it's $200,000 and a million dollar deal. So I could go into the location, get that finance, boom. And I was creating cash when I did that because.

Basically, I could open up. I didn't have to pay my rent for 30 days. I had to pay my vendors for 30 days. You know, all those things came. So I opened up, got this cash flow in and do it. Boom, do the next one. Subordinated debt, no equity. And it was a really stupid way to finance a business, man. But I was young. I was 10 feet tall in the bulletproof. We're going to work. I mean, I'd had zero fear of any kind of risk on debt, right? And so I was going in.

creating cash, doing this stuff. I get up to 28 restaurants and all of a sudden we have a storm coming in named Katrina. It's coming into Louisiana. We're used to hurricanes. We knew what to do. We put crew to safety, shut down the restaurants, buckled everything down. Hurricanes would come through. We open up the next day. We'd have some power outage, whatever. But Katrina was different because it came up.

went over New Orleans and it hovered and then the levees broke right and we're watching on tv from our second location across here where you all go we got this whatever cranks up this power to where we could actually watch television and when the levees broke we're like We've never seen this before. What is this?

flooding, terrible, awful, whole debt. And I thought, I said, man, you just screwed up bad. You screwed up bad. You just put this company in such bad financial condition because now there ain't no sales coming in. And we knew it was going to take a while to open up. And every single Kane's location is...

21 out of the 28 were down from either power to damage, to flooding, to whatever it was. And so no cash is coming in. I got the companies levered to the hilt, right? I owe everybody. And in times like that, you... You think that the banks still want their money. Landlords still want their money. And I gathered people together. We had teams that helped.

people that actually had damages houses and do all these things. We had to keep up through like SMS texting to make sure everybody, we actually set that up pretty good before. And I'm like, look, we need to rally. and when i tell you we need to rally they said we need to rally to save this business and i explained to them how we had financed everything and they understood and i said we need to open up because one we need to save the business two

We need a place for our crew to come back to work because they have bills too. You got managers and things like that displaced. They're coming back and they don't have a job and we don't have money now. like we have vendors and things like that to pay for their livelihood. And then three, people are going to start coming back to New Orleans and they need a place to eat. And we symbolize as a team and we have that same fanatical view of...

We're going to do it. We figured out, I figured out how to get into New Orleans right away, talking to the governor's office. They got us passes to go in. They weren't letting anybody in. We worked with the state on doing Bull Water Acts because we didn't have formalized Bull Water Acts.

the water because, I mean, like some of the rivers and all these things that hit everything, you had to boil the water. But we came up with working with them on like, how do you boil the water? How do you test it to where it's safe? Those sort of things. And we reopened, man. We reopened, like, we start off on the North Shore, you know, slide down those areas. On the West Bank, like, some areas we open up, like in Metairie.

which is just a mass population of people. We're the only restaurant open. We opened up 30 days after the storm. Other restaurants didn't open in like 90 days. We opened up in the West Bank. So you had the whole market to yourself? The whole market to yourself opened up in like the West Bank. We opened up in the Harvey and like it was in like

120 days or whatever for the next restaurant open. We fed first responders first. And when people came back, they just came in and we were the only place to eat. They come in and eat. They like more come in and eat, right? Because it was like, you can come in. We got power. He's all generated power. We got generation all over the country. and set it up and we galvanized that point like the team and the community.

and like us being open. And then sales were nuts. Like it was nuts. So now we had cash flow coming in. We could do these massive crew bonuses. We could give back to the community organizations. And I mean, I was just really, really proud of the team. And at the same time, proud of it. I was disappointed in myself. And I was disappointed in myself because I put all that in jeopardy. You know what I mean? I put all that in jeopardy for financing.

From that day when I watched the levies break, I said, I'll never, ever, ever put the position, the company in a position that we're financially strapped. Like, I'll never do that again. And from that day, we got our metrics and we worked towards, it took us a couple of years to get there, but we worked towards those right, you know. it's like three times dead equity, you know, sales, all that stuff is we'll never cross that. Like I have a capacity to get all kind of.

you know, lending, but we won't go past our metrics, right? We won't go past that. So we learned that one the hard way. And a lot of the same things with COVID, you know, when COVID happened, we're like... Oh my God, you can't serve, you can't do food. We were a necessary business. They said essential business to be open because we need to feed the public because they felt okay with going through drive-through COVID because there was limited contact.

But we had to learn everything. It was like literally, hey guys, we talked to the restaurant industries, all the authorities were like. we're going to tape off every six feet for people to be. We're going to put shields between people. It's like symbolizing the team like that. And then we took parking lots and we had three drive-through lanes. When I tell you, when like we were the...

Like the first that figure that out, can you imagine people now have a place to go get some food and not just eat at their house what they get from the grocery store, man? It's like our sales went crazy. We were able to do huge crew bonuses, customer bonuses, but it's that fanaticism.

to figure it out right now. And it's like me leading with the people. And I have so many people who are better at it than me, but like in the weeds with them in the restaurants, I flew to all of our markets and saw our buy. But at that point too, I couldn't even go in the restaurant. because it'd be cross-contamination like if i had it and went in so i just waved there by outside go to the next restaurant wait fly to the next market

wave, you know, and do that sort of thing. But like, that's how you get galvanized. But that same entrepreneurial fanaticism, like, I'm sorry, you're not going to get that from some private equity group with a bunch of corporate people. I mean, are they going to fly out of the country to do that and say, let's go take this?

the restaurants and do this stuff is when it's personal to founders you know these are my people these are my customers in my communities you figure out a way you know you figure out a way and that's why that's why I just wish more founders would hold on and stay with the business. I love what you said. It's like, I watched the levees break and there's no way I'm ever going to jeopardize. This is my life's work. This is a part of me.

I cannot let this die. One of my great favorite quotes about this is Steve Jobs says, victory in our industry is spelled survival. You see this over and over in biography. It's like, just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. You took two gigantic... you know, tragedies that were outside of your control, which of course you're gonna run into things that are outside of your control. And you turn them in.

You flipped it from a liability to an asset. And it goes back to what have we been talking about? The fact that you're a fanatic. The fact that you're trying to create the world's best product in the category that you're in. The fact that you limit the amount of details. You perfect every single detail. So now these people...

They've maybe never would have tried racing games that didn't happen because you know, but you're the only game in town and then you're like, oh, this is pretty good. Then think about how many customers that one person has given you.

The one thing that comes to mind about this, it sounds crazy, but one of my favorite entrepreneurs I've ever come across. I found this autobiography of Estee Lauder. published in the 1980s. At the time, SELO was not the public company. It was still very successful. It was a family-owned business. And she would get a lot of shit from people.

Because her main distribution channel was like, she wants your Bloomingdale's or Neiman Marcus to take care as a distribution center. So she goes, okay, if you're willing to sell my products that I love, that I gave my life to. I'm going to show up when you do that. And so she would go, oh, a big Neiman Marcus open in Houston. That makes a lot of sense. You're going to have 1,000 customers. Why Estee? Why are you going down to Corpus Christi? There's going to be 20 people there.

She's like, every single customer matters. What she would do is on these trips, she didn't have any money to fly, so she'd have to take trains and buses.

Let's say you're sitting across from Estee just like me and you're sitting across the room and she sees a woman. She says, hi, I'm Estee Lauder. Would you mind giving me 20 minutes of your time? I'll give you a free makeup. I make beauty products. Or makeover, rather. It's like, oh, I guess we're just sitting here. Let's do this. And then she does it.

one-on-one attention people like oh that doesn't scale you can't do that it's going to scale because you're going to do this for the rest of your life and so she says 30 years later she she would get letters from people that she gave a free makeup on a train talking about how much they love their products think about how many

People, that one woman that you spend 20 minutes with, has told if she's a customer of your story. Absolutely. Fanatical fans telling everybody they know. Listen to this story. Exactly. I've been a customer of yours for, I don't know, four years. And then they make a podcast that's been listened to by like half a million people. That's right.

There's probably going to be millions of people that watch what we're doing. The fact is, it all stems from the fact that you're a fanatic. In purpose, right? And so what excites me about talking to you today is, is that the people that listen, if they get a little nugget. from this little nugget that changed their life that helps people like that fires me up

The reason why you're doing this and you're so fanatical about having, and the questions you sent me before, right? I had those questions. I was able to wrap my mind around it because you want it to be good for the listeners. But that's purpose, man. If it's just slapping something out to say this is success and do it, it's what people want. and what people will benefit out of this conversation is what matters.

An insane amount of information and knowledge. How many people work on the same thing for 30 years? It's like so few people because everybody wants to, what we talked about earlier, they want to start, scale, sell. It's just like my favorite entrepreneurs, like sometimes I've got to speak to entrepreneurs. dinner with uh one of the wealthiest people in the world he's 76 years old he's been working the family business since he was six

Do you understand what's in that guy's head? Absolutely. It's so much more impressive than no disrespect to anybody else with the startup founder that ran the business for two years. Nothing. They're like a baby. They're still in diapers. And even you. I love that you keep hitting that you haven't met. I'm just implying here, but you're like, yeah, we can get to 95. Yeah, because you know there's no such thing as ever getting to 100. You're always looking for different ways to improve.

Todd, you're going to do this for the rest of your life. I'm going to have conversations with founders for the rest of your life. I really appreciate you taking a risk and being one of my first guests. Absolutely. I'm a big fan of what you do, man. It fired me up that I made one of the first, man. Because everybody's going to want to watch it and see it, man. It's like a...

So I'm going to keep having these conversations forever. I think we'll hopefully talk, you know, come back on the show every year, two years. You have so much to give and to like share. I really appreciate you taking the time and I really admire you.

Oh, I appreciate what you do. I appreciate you having me on. I love the conversation. And we could actually talk for another five hours. All right, let's go check out the apartment. Yeah, yeah. I want to show you the kitchen here, and then I want to go back, and then let's go check out the apartment. All right, let's do it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.