David Senra - Todd Graves, Raising Cane's

Episode Date: November 9, 2025

Todd Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's, one of America's most successful and fastest-growing restaurant chains built on a radically simple concept that nearly everyone told him would fail. He is an entrepreneur and restaurateur widely regarded as one of the most determined founder-operators in the fast-food industry. Rising from rejection in the mid-1990s to building over 800 locations by the 2020s, he became known for his unwavering commitment to doing one thing better than anyone else—serving quality chicken finger meals with the exact same menu he launched in 1996. He became a household name in restaurant circles through his relentless focus on simplicity, his refusal to franchise or take on outside investors, and his missionary-like devotion to a business he calls his "chicken finger dream." His career highlights include getting the worst grade in his college business class for the Raising Cane's concept, working as a boilermaker in oil refineries and commercial fisherman in Alaska to fund his first restaurant after being rejected by every bank, opening the first Raising Cane's near LSU in 1996, maintaining over 90% ownership while growing to 900+ locations and billions in revenue by staying fanatically true to a menu that has remained virtually unchanged for three decades. Episode show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/todd-graves Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com⁠ Function: https://functionhealth.com/senra Chapters (0:00) The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Sleep and Business Obsession (2:13) The Birth of Raising Cane's: Overcoming Skepticism (3:29) Inspiration from In-N-Out Burger (7:17) The Importance of Quality and Focus (14:49) The Journey to Success: Hard Work and Sacrifice (19:21) The Early Days: Building Raising Cane's from Scratch (21:23) Financing the Dream: Unconventional Paths (32:28) The Relentless Pursuit of Success (33:02) Commitment and Oaths: The Camping Trip (34:02) Fanaticism and Relentless Focus (34:53) Learning from Others and Continuous Improvement (35:06) The Never-Satisfied Mindset (36:04) The Importance of Founders in Business (39:55) The Purpose Beyond Profit (51:52) Financing the Dream: Credit Cards and SBA Loans (55:47) Building the First Restaurant (57:56) Expanding the Vision (58:59) Positive Motivational Management (1:00:51) Creating a Coaching Culture (1:01:42) Intrinsic Motivation vs. Titles (1:02:41) The Importance of Being Present (1:06:35) Respect, Recognition, and Rewards (1:09:12) The Power of Encouragement (1:18:10) The Myth of Delegation (1:22:57) Focus on What You Do Best (1:30:07) Dining at Jiro in Tokyo (1:30:59) The Franchise Model Debate (1:32:50) Challenges of Franchising (1:35:21) Building a Business Authentic to You (1:37:07) Financing and Expansion Strategies (1:49:13) Surviving Hurricane Katrina (1:55:48) Lessons from Estée Lauder (1:58:06) Final Thoughts and Reflections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-scraised entrepreneurs are. They just can't stop thinking about their business. Because I was asking you, like, 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 to 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 you up. And then I'll actually wake up feeling great, feeling 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 really dictates it as 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,

and I think it'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 underwear. In the middle of the way to wake up and go first that and then start sending out emails just actually solve that problem. But if I get caught up at work and there's nothing like really pressing that 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 great entrepreneurs that I read. And so I just did this episode on Giro, the best sushi chef in Japan, right? The documentary on him is, Jerry 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 Ferreiro.

It's another family-held business. It's the Ferroo 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 de Vecchio, Luxottico, one of the biggest businesses in the world.

He just passed very 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, art, in your case, you're in your underwear and your 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 Cains. You're very kind enough to let us record in here. Your mother should. You're almost at your 30-year anniversary for running Raising Cain's 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 expert, gave you when you were trying to start the very first racing canes.

I think, you know, so 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 votes, It's 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 do one, 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 L.A. 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. I started studying the In-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. And it's my same order every time.

So when I first went, I kind of held up the order line for 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 Coke. 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 going to L.A. to work in their fineries, then going to Alaska. When I came back, I think that was a big selling point, being able to add in and out burger as a successful change 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 in and out. And he'd work all day, right? And then he'd sit in his living room and watch TV, but he'd look out the window. And as soon as the drive-through 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, when everybody, I think McDonald's was like, no, we're going to, like, 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 going to get the fresh tomatoes. Like, no, no, I'm not going. I'm all about quality. There's a line that just gave me a tour of the kitchen. It says never, you guys have a mantra that says never sacrifice quality for speed. And he was like completely quality, completely like quality obsessed. And then if you just sit there and you think about your business over and over again, like 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 in that episode, I was, like, induced into a state of rage because all these people are telling you, oh, this, you can't have a simple menu. I was 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.

And you guys had just opened up. You weren't in Orlando before. And I was like, have you guys ever had Raising Keynes? This is after I did your episode. And they're like, no, what's that? I go, first of all, you should have listened to the goddamn episode. Second of all, I'm going to take you to Raisin Cains. And so I saw exactly what you said, where you're like, I don't hide.

You know, we put Raising Cains right next to, you know, McDonald's or a Chipotle or whatever the case is. It's like, I'm just going to do one thing and do better. And 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 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, we look at it and 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. Yeah. 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.

And so since I have that singular product focus, right? And so some people call, like, a simple menu. I say, well, it's not simple. 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. Rig and motorists 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. All those things are that, like our fries, right? So we have crinkle cut fry, but I 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 our bread.

So we get bread made by bakeries all over the country, but that recipe has to be exactly right. And its little dough balls put together, baked together, so it's pull apart bread. It's not sliced loaves. Slice loaves end up being more stale. This is dints, moist, flavorful bread. Our coal slough, we secure all over the country. We have to make sure all those vendors have the right type of slal that we want for the right type of growers, growing a certain amount of time.

In that slough, 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 to taste 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 as raw products we get are all perfect and make sense there.

Same thing we open in the Middle East. It took two years, two years to get the supply change 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, because 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. So, like, in 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 cravable, like, meaning like, oh, my God, I love that chicken parm from Craigs. So when I go there, I'm like, I want to go back and get that chicken parr. 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 for that chicken parm. If they didn't have that cravable chicken parm with Craigs, I wouldn't make it a point to go there. There's so many good restaurants. There's so many great place you can,

choose from in LA. There's so many great places that you can 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 current CFO, but over time, that have been like, hey, you know what we just cut this just a little bit? You know 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 cravable. That's what's happened to so many quick service chains over the years.

They mess 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 like you want to make products that people lust over it. Lust over. And so you nailed the craveable because I told you I brought my 13-year-old daughter with me today.

And she's obsessed with Raising Cains. And she door-dashes it to our house constantly. She's definitely craving the question. quality chicken finger mills. 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 would 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 cost. down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find

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on ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. So go back to 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, such a bunch of terms of all the same. 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 an 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 knows that you get, you just use. 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, they'll let it fire me up. We still get at times, you know, like going into, you know, going into different countries. You're like, you know, this mayonnaise type sauce, it's much more popular as a dipping sauce. You're not going to be a use of sauce. You need to add that. If I would have heard that in the early

days. I said, and you wait till cane sauce all that day out. Now I can say, hey, you know, actually we've had the same thing of the United States. You know, 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. 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 then they can understand that. So you kind of call them later after you've proven yourself, but when you're getting started out, man, it is fuel.

You don't seem calm to me. Yeah, there's not have to prove people wrong anymore. But I can feel your intensity over the table. So I'm very curious about this. Like 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 of Michael Dell. And Michael Dell is hilarious.

He's been running his business for 41 years. He's one of the most impressive people ever met, very calm and measured. But underneath, just a super, you know, relentless person, as you can imagine. And 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, you know, he's married, he's got kids. And so he was just like, you know, at the beginning, it's, I'm intensity. But, you know, the value is the consistency and the compounding over decade after decade, every decade. He's like, listen, I love my business because I asked him, I was like, all of a sudden in July

is not a little bit hot. If I had your place in Hawaii, I know where I'm going to be in July. It's like, why are you here? He's like, I just love my business. Right. So one of the things he gave me advice is 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 not going to be knocked. You're going to sabotage yourself. that is much more likely that you sabotage yourself than somebody else sabotage you. He's just like, 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, he's like, you know, 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 there? 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 fanatic. 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 what are like how do you compare like the hours you're working now compared to when you started this thing so when I started up and I gave young companies 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 a stamina to stick with that then you'll be successful obviously you have to have a good product and 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. Like, we like our plate lunches. We want variety, things like that. I'm like, wait until you have this product.

And then when I was able to start cooking for them, oh, man, that is good. And when they start talking about the next day, hey, man, you can cook some more of that. Yeah, 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 I'm like, they're like, how do you have, you know, how do you have quality of life and work-life balance

when you're starting a business? I'm like, 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 life then because going from one to two is your hardest stuff 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. 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 have my apartment right back here that would go up. And then during the day, we'd be like, hey, go take a nap. You know, go get 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. Well, 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 separated from your customers. You're not separated from your customers. You know, right here in the middle of this place is I constructed with my own hands.

And it's like, you just work constantly. Wait, you constructed what with your own hands? This restaurant, I literally reconstructed all this with my own hands. Everything except something electrical because I literally don't know electric, but plumbing, I did, 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 had 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 strike paneling going down this way because it was an arcade at one time.

And they had ripped up through this old paneling here on the wall, which was 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 I 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 Keynes. I came up the recipe with the bread preparers there. And this was an outside advertising. Highland Road going from downtown Baton Rouge through LSU was the main core. a thoroughfare here. And really like took this as a sign.

This is what we came up with our logo for Keynes. We took this design. I like I literally took it as a sign to say this is going to be the raising Cain's logo. And that's what we ended up with. And like, but I learned this stuff because I didn't have enough money. I got a small SBA loan for $90,000 for $90,000.

I'd raised equity in a sense of like $60,000 with original shareholders. And I've carried them over a little, a little bit of the business today. I just been fun being with them. I pray that one of the things, I don't even want to 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 boiler maker named Wild Bill that owns a couple hundred million dollars of equity in raising 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 Simulized. love to me. So what that means is like when I could 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 rue 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. 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. I made your pie you love. And I'm like, that, 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-thru is 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 work money or 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 of shit. Like that to me is fun, man. That vibe, that energy. And you still do that? Yeah, when I can go to restaurants, I go, I'll go go visit like 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, you know, 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 thing 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, be better if we could do this, that great. Let's get some input because you can get, 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 me, they feel comfortable, and they, and then they'll tell me. but then I'll work with them and they shift and it's fun because 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'd do like, I'd set up like, uh, Halloween haunted houses in my house and like, you know, go around and 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 in my senior year.

And I actually graduated, went to University of Georgia, but I was from Batteners originally. I knew it wanted to come home. And I had a partner when I started the business. Since we wrote the business plan for Raising Cains, it started off your calling it Folly's Chicken Fingers. That was original business plan. Terrible name. But we had a friend that was, the nickname was Folly, called each other Folly. But anyway, we wrote that business plan.

And I wrote the Bible of Chicken Fingers, man. It was like, I knew what our aprons would cost. I knew what would the cost. I knew just college student. I knew what 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 class, which is classic. But it was only a B-minus. The rumor went out. It was a failing grade and all this stuff is. But he actually simple greater. But he said, no, the plan was great. Like literally, you get the most detailed plan in the whole class.

But the concept will 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 of 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.

If mom didn't want this, you know, they're also adding healthy items. You know, someone's going to want a salad in 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 who thought that would be discouraging. Actually, it 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 businessman need to wear a suit. And I thought businessmen got a T-shirt now. Bought the briefcase. I had the same one. Did you? But didn't you feel like a businessman? You're like, yeah. I went to school for a business.

You don't know anything. You don't know, man. You're going into bank, which is pretty intimidating, right? You're like, you're bankers and you think they know everything and literally brought it in and be like, you know, unlock the little safe, you know, a little combo. Was the combo A zero? I don't even remember what it was. Yeah, something like, you know, 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, this chicken finger concept I wanted to start at LSU.

And everybody was nice enough, right? They're nice enough. But it was the banker's response was, you know, just chicken finger south Louisiana. You know, that's not how we eat lunch and never heard of that. And like, well, hold a second. Like, you know, you order pizza. You know, pizza's real, real popular, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You probably order the same pizza every time, not 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, yeah, but you don't have years of management experience, you know, you probably should go work for, you know, great companies.

I mean, good things. You 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 at that point, you know, 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, and they were nice enough. We'll give them credit for that. And they were nice not 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 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's 95-hour work weeks. So what happens is they'll shut down a certain sector of an oil refinery. And they're missing out in production, man, which is just big, big money they're losing. So they'll pay for you to work nonstop. They'll pay whatever needs to get that thing back up and running.

So you go in and you fix things. You put new equipment in and things like that. So you work to 95-hour weeks, and you just work straight through. There's no days off. There's no nothing. You just work straight through. So there's overtime. There's double time.

some kind of crazy thing, you know, that goes into another level. So you can 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, well, they call me Hollywood. We all had nicknames.

Interesting story on the Hollywood deal, but we'll leave that out. But so they were encouraging. And while Bill, Tolar, we all nicknames, so while Bill was like, Hey, Graves, man. Hollywood, you know, I see you got what it takes. You know, 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, sock-ass salmon in Nack-Nak, Alaska. He goes, you can go up there, get a job, and 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 Nack-Nak-A-Laska. I'm like, where is that?

He says, above the Lucian Shane, looking up on a map. Back then, you couldn't look on a computer. You should have to pull out a map, buy an Alaska map. And so, look, I called a plane to Anchorage. I called a flow plane to King Sam in Alaska, Hitchtite to Nack, Alaska. There was no Uber back then. Literally, hitchdike did.

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 get on the crew. That you can get on the crew, right? They're looking for some help.

There's a few boats. People were all staffed out, but a few of them needed just a green horn that they could pay a lot less, right? You get a 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 Suckeye salmon in Alaska. We were on 32 foot boats as regulated. You couldn't keep going out to get the salmon. So the salmon born in a stream, they swim out the ocean, Sokai Semen live it 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 and then they die. It's a crazy cycle. So they come during the peak of the sea. they're just rushing into these same rivers. You catch them, but 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, it's a gill net, if you set it up in front of another boat's net, you're going to catch three times as much because you catch them 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.

It was crazy. We catch so much fish. We're out like six-foot seas in a 32-foot boat. And the back of the book 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 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 or 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 scouted. I heard that, seemingly scouted.

I don't know how they got scouted from the boat. Some medical helicopters are going in. National Geographic is 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, make good, money doing both bowlermaking and doing the Alaskan fishing 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're telling a wonderful way. And the way I summarize, this is 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 boiler maker after the, if you buy your suit and your briefcase and they're like, get out of here, kid, we're not getting your right. It's like, that's fine, I'll find another way. 95 hours doing shift work in a boiler maker. You're going to take a flight to Alaska.

You're going to hitchhike. You're going to live in a fucking tent. Right. For a month before I got the job. By the life. 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 in the entire time, what I love about your story is, like, I'm not thinking about sock-eye 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, sounded like a buller 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.

I was like a nerd in the entrepreneurial club in college. Like we had, then people would start up, hey, I got this, you know, like I've steamed 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 Old 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 stop. Then you don't stop. Because during the time, man, there's two years took me to raise money for this. Two years. Tell me, wait, 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. Treat 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 debt. 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, literally, it was literally to say, like, around a campfire. I mean, we did everything but just like become blood brothers, you know, to do the deal. It was like, we're going to do this, right? We're committing this. We're going to 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 full. 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 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 you like yeah man but it's great you know and and I like it too because it's like you can learn from it and you can get inspired by it being established because you need that you need that fuel to keep rolling and you and it's good to

to hear other people are doing what you do. And then you learn from other people. I'm constantly student in the business. So it's like you learn another thing from businessmen and business women. But for me, too, is I love to be around celebrities, like the people that are successful at whether they're an entertainer, whether they're actor, actors, whether they're athletes, whether they're athletes. They all have this common core. And you know what I see at 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 in 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 change the work never satisfied. It's like, we're always going to raise the bar. So we're raised the bar. So we did great of that opening. That was awesome. These were all the good things we did.

But you know what, too, is these are some of 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 to 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 actors. 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 funniest thing. So one, I think one of your most important messages is, is like, we need more founders that refuse to sell their businesses. Like, there's this huge entrepreneurial industry that didn't exist. especially when you were starting your companies, it's like, and the entrepreneur industry is influenced by investors, non-entrepreneurs.

And 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 they create into. And so then what?

Then you're working on your second best idea or your third best idea. And I think 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? That's right.

Like, they're either dead or they sold out. And then I love, somebody asked you the question where, like, out of like the competitors, like, who get you fired up or maybe will keep you up a night? And you're like, and they may 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, this is, like, 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 ready because I'm coming after you. I just saw you at the UFC. Are you a UFC fan?

Yeah, I'm like, I like old sports, you know. And so Dana invited me to come and getting to see Porier, do his last fight, Louisiana legend, man, you know. 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 you were breaking down on like the species of bird and like when it's and like the amount of detail you just explained to us. The thought I had in my mind was not about chicken food. This is an important point you're making.

It's like the same personality type. Just pointed at a different endeavor. John Jones, you know, probably the greatest UFC fighter. UFC is the only sport like 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 people per year month and have an understanding what's going on. And I heard him. He said the same thing that you said in that interviewer was like, oh, you want to come compete with me. This is how I feed my family.

And he was fighting surreal gain. And he's just like, you know, and he was studying him, just like you, 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. That's right. The same level of intensity that you're applying to your business. Absolutely, man.

If I got somebody's coming and compete, like, you're competing with me. My livelihood of my managers and my crew members depend on this restaurant. You're coming, you're going to open up across the street here. These people feed their families off this. We're going to go out and 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 besides you. Great appreciation of customers coming in. paying their hard-earned money to do this, appreciation for 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.

It's like, comes in, people are like, oh, man, you just sell the business worth all these billions. You can just not worry that I'm like, yeah, well, then what happens? What happens to my management who support in 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, you know, 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 as an investment, not a vehicle to help people. So I think when 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. Most people's first jobs at restaurant retail. They had to come in and learn values, man. One of 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, we'll like a $3 billion in debt 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 when you have that purpose, and what I want people to do is to keep that purpose because too many great restaurant entrepreneurs and founders 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, da, da, da, da, and then all of a sudden they sell a majority stake of their business because private equity is so good at putting that package together. Generally, the numbers are five or ten million because entrepreneurs put everything back to the business growing it. They prove in a successful model, either regional or they prove it out different regions of country, which men make it a national.

multiples go up, and they're like, hey, we'll come in, we'll give you $5 million, or we'll give you $10 million, but they take controlling 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 property 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.

My family, I take it personal. I'm like, you spent your money here and we didn't deliver on that promise. I don't know private equity really cares because it doesn't affect our overall sales. It's a small percentage of what we're doing this. 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 profit 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 prices. 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, you know. And so I just, I just encourage people don't, don't let money be one of your,

your major goals because if it is, if it is, you end up believing a shallow life, you know, you end up, 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. Stay with it, grow, learn, bring in other people to help you, business, the things you need help with, learn it and do it. The profit that we 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. I mean, 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. 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. The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only used.

using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter 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 maximum of anti-business billionaire, which I'll get to him 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, it's like, 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, 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, he wind 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% 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, right? But he made the mistake that you didn't. He got scared.

There was 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.

He 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. I wish like, what a good man to just be honest, right? To everybody, and I wish I didn't do it because he wants to inspire people not to make the same mistake. Paul Orfalia, the founder of Kinkos.

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 exactly 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 Avon Chonard 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 it 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. Right? It's very equivalent. It'd be like owning a $20 billion company today. He says money comes naturally as a result of service. Exactly what you said. It's that fucking worrying about the money.

If you just serve, can you make somebody else's life better? You're doing an active 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're obsessed with the quality of the 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. Do you think to the right reasons in business, money will come? Yes. 100% money would come. You know, so it's 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 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 customer 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, 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. more happy customers, you have more repeat business, volumes, and you get the volumes,

then 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, 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 shareholders make plenty of money. The dollars, the dollars are coming. It's proven time and time again, and I'm an example of that. You talk about entrepreneurs going a certain point, they get scared of us. certain times. Great example is Tony Tansh Chikong, who had Jollybee, right? So Jollybee's is a Filipino

concept, and he was a, like, engineering student. He explained to me, he said, look, if you were smart, Filipino kid, your parents are like, you're going to be an engineer. He's like, I hate an engineer. He goes, like, but we don't tell me, 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. I was watching them do the ice cream and run the register. So he started an ice cream shop. Then he had a burger. Then he had a spaghetti. Crazy. crazy menu and became this like success he opened that one little ice cream shop turns it into a restaurant and then he starts growing it so he's like my goal i want to be the largest restaurant tour in the philippines

he's setting on his goal he has his fanaticism all of a sudden McDonald's announces we're going to we're going to we're going to the Philippines they saw success that he was selling all these burgers and his accountant and his like financial people were like you got to sell you got to sell you got this concept's amazing McDonald's started in the u.s they're just going to go and blow us away sell now, you're going to make all kind 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?

He said, it made me nervous as hell, right? And being counters will do that. They're like, and they were showing them what could happen. McDonald's put him out of business. It could be a millionaire or, you know, 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 to all the Philippines. Well, he did that. McDonald's came in. He blew them away. He grew all out through the Philippines, get the largest restaurateur in all the Philippines. Said his next goal, right?

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

I want to be top five largest restaurant tour 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, 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 are 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 of 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 next 28 and that insane story. So you got the wild bill, you got the refinery money, you got the sock-eyed 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 a night when I was, we were working with a build business plan, and then, you know, then trying to start the business. I'm literally, I don't have any any income. So I'm just, 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 percent interest rates. And you can get as many as you wanted with $5,000 limits. So that's what I did. I just said in, yeah, I have a job bartending. And I'm, okay, well, sure, here's $5,000 credit line on this deal, but you're going to pay 20 to 22% 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. So these we would call it like angel investors. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, these are like my bookie. Guys I weren't bull or making.

And he's got cash. Yeah, yeah. It was, can you take this $10,000 investment in cash? I'm like, sure. If I get to the bank, I'm like, came from my investor. But I was able to get a, I was able to get a $90,000 SBA loan. And it was enough money for me to come in at this place, North Gates and LSU. I had a wonderful 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, laying in Tulula 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 were 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 Bullermakers.

He believed in me. I'm like, okay. hey, okay, that's just a little wind in my sales to do this. And basically told her, hey, it's going to take them a year to put all this together, but I believe you'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 hundred-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 years, 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, aid 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, no. No, no, they like being a part of it, right? You know, but they give me good, I got a good lease term on here. And plus, you know, what I put into this place. Look, I had to learn things, you know, like I said, I had to learn plumbing. I had to learn construction. I had to learn the stuff. I really didn't have a lot of money too to come in and and spend much money on this. But this place is sacred, man. I can tell you every square inch. And later on after how to get in our discussion, I'll show you all these little points of this. This is original furniture that I went. I got a U-Haul went around all

these equipment supply stores. I hope you have bed sheets that look like this summer. That's a damn good idea. There's some pajamas too, right? But it means something, right? And keeping this like 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 open it. No, so it didn't sign the lease. It doesn't want to hold it for it, right?

But this location was available. It was going to be awesome. It took two years, two years from the business plan to, where I actually opened up the restaurant took me two years. And so literally from writing the business plan 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'd be the fall of 95 when I got back. Then, so I had somebody at a 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 look like the equipment I went, got from, 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 friar that'll work 60 days. Like, give me your cheapest friars. And they had to be 85-pound friars. And they're like, well, this one's good. I'm like, yeah, it's 10 times as much. I need some of the last because I know as soon as I proved this will work, I know I can get another loan, you know? Thank goodness, we made money. And so we opened up, like, I was, I was so excited. We reconstructed. We're ready to open up. We got registers back to Office Depot. There are these 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 $30 the first month. That's what we made. People were 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. This 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.

18 months later, I was able to buy the piece of property, construct a new building, and open 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 another side of campus. It also had traffic flow from neighborhoods. office buildings, things like that. So 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 and dads picking up food on the way home. We had tea 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

to what I thought it was. I thought it's 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 that point was, and 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 cravable chicken finger meals, great crew, cool culture, and active community involvement. Like, those are the things that turn me on with that deal, right? What do you mean it wasn't articulated that way? Well, so I just, 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. I'm like, and I'm like, 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 get 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, it was. The crap, there's 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 was just a negative feeling.

I can get people from other restaurants where they're not treated 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 stuff out to 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 it's teamwork and it's good. And also, too, is why I love operators is it's like when I was on a football team. It's constant coaching. Oh, yeah, it's a good pass. Oh, man, you screw 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. Toast, Toast needs to hurry up. Da-da-da.

Hey, great, that's great toast. Like, you can mix those things in in the corporate environment, and this is how you get weeded out of Kane'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's an eval. Like, every day we want to get better, and a lot of corporate people, one, if you make mistakes,

like I encourage, made 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, 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 learn this. We're going to do this differently. Let's move on. Like, 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. you don't want to, one, you don't admit it mistakes and two, you don't want to be, 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 always to say, man, I screwed up on that and 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, you know, but we do need to learn from. Like, 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 challenge and growth. And, in, in, in, in 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 to the people, they want to make a good living, of course. Title doesn't matter, right? You know, it's like this BP 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 who 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 have an experience, but they will learn that, right? They have the intelligence to do it. But it's hard. It's 100% heart. You're intrinsically motivated to do really well, okay? I love the idea that you said that they have this almost like theoretical, like 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. Like what is actually happening? Separate from the customer and separated from the crew.

Corporate environments, like when I started up, I was the first guy to wear a cane, t-shirt to like conferences, right? Everybody else is in a suit and tie. But there are crew members in the restaurant are wearing like, you know, jeans and t-shirts. It was like, you know, 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 Lesh 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. And 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, like, compete. 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.

Okay. So 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 60, 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 my name off the business. Take my name of the business. And he's like,

old school guy, he's cursing all the other boys. 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 going to love this guy. I already know this for 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%. Why we call a restaurant support office. We're not corporate office. We are a restaurant support offer. We're here to support the people that are serving our customers, 100%.

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, a 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. are like, ladies and gentlemen, that's where we do our business. And our jobs 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. Like, you have to, like, you also, if they do, is entrepreneurs are very erratic, unscheduled bad, you know what I mean? Like, so, you know, most of us. So it's a general deal. It's like the people like, what's your schedule like? I'm like, my schedule is all the time everywhere, however, whatever. It could be three o'clock in the morning. Are my eyes open? Yeah, literally it is. It is like it means 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.

You know, whatever call 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 start. structure and do it. And so, like, for me, is to scale, I created the Kane's Love department in our business. Respect, recognition and rewards, man. Like, so, you know, when you have crew members that are working hard, right? 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, it's just respect, man. It's like, do I want to work on July 4th? No,

I don't. I want to be 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 want to 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, 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 is something you should recognize achievement.

You should recognize tenure. You should recognize all these things. There seems to recognize all the taste. It starts from the simple things like, hey, that's great toast. Thanks for being so friendly in the drive-thew. They love you today. Things like that. They're like, you work a year at Raisin-Kane.

You get a hard hat. It symbolized the first year I was there. All the crew member signs, it is fun, right? Five years you're getting the salmon. Those are the recognizing things, recognizing that deal, and rewarding. So it's like, whether it's a, you know, a $5 gift card 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 like, if I just think of these ideas and they come and go, it's like, no, create a department around that. Like, like literally department that thinks of nothing but we're respect, recognizing, rewarding crew members every day. And put a bunch of brilliant people, most of them came from, from operations in the restaurant. And they know this stuff, but build systems. So our next thing with that is, first is saying, here's the gift card or here's, here's a new cane's 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 filled shifts, right? Like, hey, so-and-so was sick, do you mind coming in and work? And they come in. You get points and 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, that, raising the bar. That's smart.

But have people around that. Not just the field. You have to put programs and things around these great thoughts. You have to get structured 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 member of the Mary Kay. Cosmetics and they would

They would wear people with like the pink catalogs and everything. And I feel Mary Kay was a master to understanding sales and human psychology. So she had, you know, one of the biggest and most successful sales departments. And 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 hard driving person like you. I can be a bit of a dick. Just being clear.

It's like I'm, you know, kind of obsessed. And that just knowing that is like actually help me interact with other people better and to kind of like modulate my behavior. It's just like they just want that person wants to feel special just like you do. Just like the person that helps you secure this. Absolutely. 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 already mentioned. And at the time, 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 carried a fuel source with you. And so he winds up meeting. Thomas Edison. At the time, Henry Ford

meets him. So cool. Henry Ford, no one knows who he is. He's not successful. I think he's already failed. He had two or three, two failed car companies before he finally succeeded to start, too. 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, 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 goes, he hits the table. And he goes, that's it, young man. You have it. Keep at it. And then Henry Ford says this is 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. Fantastic. Yeah, it's absolutely. But it's our own encouragement. Edison knew he had it, right? You know, and so sometimes tough love, I had to learn on Shark Tank. Tough Love is also when you get different entrepreneurs and things like that, and sometimes the ideas aren't good. And 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 going to have to learn tough love like like Cuban do me right and then in the beginning of Mr. Wonderful then they're like I know it's heartbreaking but sometimes the ideas aren't good and are 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 say uh this but then

help them to focus on what's really no disrespect to shark tank but fuck that like 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, it's humans failing to predict the future accurately. Why would you sit there and 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 got actually going to go. I hate people to do that. Yeah. And so my idea is like, obviously there's a huge millions of founders listen 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, there's 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 a little.

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 Cains. You're an expert in Raising Cains. And I'm sure you have a ton of ideas, which are obviously,

transferable to other businesses. But there's, you don't, we don't have predictive ability. I just did this episode on Elon Musk. Let me give you a simple. There's a guy named Michael Moritz, who might be the most successful venture capitalist at all time, he's at Sequoia. He invested in PayPal, which is a successful exit.

Okay, they sold it to eBay for, I don't know, $1.8 billion or something like that, if you want exits. So they sell that. Then he already knew who Elon was. He invested in PayPal, which it was Elon's company. Then Elon goes to start Tesla, and he pitches Michael and Michael's like uh he's like invest in my new company you just made money with me michael's like you're trying to compete with toriota that's impossible i'm passing okay that's a

multi-billion dollar mistake on michael's part okay the funny part is and and i'm not doing this to shame michael because in the book later on he goes that was he's saying years like 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. Might take them 10 years. There's a book next to me

that I just showed you before we started, 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 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 companies 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 I cry himself asleep covered in dust.

That's what his kids see. But he's like, so it's easy for me to say, like 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 a year.

And he's got, he's all over. 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. Excellence is the capacity to take pain.

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.

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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 senora. 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 and bad examples. Like people started saying stuff like, hey, you know, Todd, you're so much in the details.

You just need to delegate. delegate. God, I was hated hearing that word, delegate. I mean, like, explain to me. I'm like, explain delegating to me. What do you mean by that? Well, delegate means you give other, I'm like, no, I know what the word means, but how do I do this? How do I delegate this? Well, you just hire good people and you delegate, you delegate down 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, no, that's perfect. But let's say operations. I'm in a 95. But if I hire someone is good, but they end up being in the 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. Hey, you can run this better than me. So now I'm going to ease off on some of those things that I was supplementing all the deal is. but I'll still check and make the end. But I still know enough, too, 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're down to the minutia and all this stuff. You're wasting your time doing that stuff. You should be a big picture. You should be that. 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 those partners. in another shipyard business had told me, oh, when I was explaining this to my, there's a YPO forum business group and saying, people are saying, I'm just too much in the details. They're like, hey, Gary Suisse knows exactly

what the bottled water costs at his place. And he's like, look, and there's formulas to give it to him. He doesn't go and count water bottles, right? 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 to little bottled waters,

it means they're doing that in everything. phase of the business. So knowing those details, but that reaffirmation from me going, yes, me into the details matters. 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 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 and we're doing it and we're being innovative and we're getting faster and drive-thus and doing it. Our co-CEO in the business is a much better operator than me.

I'm still in the details with him into business, and I know enough about it. I'm good at it to add value in the deal list. So the word delegations 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 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. You all have products, and you also refer people to products that can help consolidate the information to write quicker, efficient, more decisions like that. You get better at that, but stay into 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 to anybody else. Be relentless. I do it better at anybody else. Can you expand on, but that, I told, if it 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'm like that. I feel that way too. Walt Disney has a great line about this, right? If we lose the details, we lose everything. Because they're not after. There's not something you think about after. It's like this is what makes the magic, you call it cravable,

like the magical experience. Like, why there's, 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 reason King's like, 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 Keynes. 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, the whole week I was there. His kindred spirits, man. Yeah. But this is what I'm obsessed with.

It's exactly what Harry Snyder thought the way he thought as well. It's not just the principle of doing one thing and doing better and everything else. It's just 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 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. No. Okay. What I wanted was, what I wanted was crabable product.

You know, and I knew from restaurants. You had that one crabable 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, 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. What they, you know, the restaurant companies is craveable. So what I want to do is create that credible product there by doing.

Then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive-three, right? And so it starts from when customer pulls up to the, to the order deal. The first time at raising 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, whatever their order is. So the order is 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 in the kitchen later. You can see down the line, toast is grilled on the end, you got chicken fires, 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'll have your drinks that are popular. It comes up in and out. It gets out there. Thank you very much 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? And I'd say, well, good speed it 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 goes down worse if you've been adding heat lamps.

And we don't have heat lamps going to hold times without any of that stuff, right, and that cook-to-order process. So I can go up to end-and-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 Cain's 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 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 I would just say just roughly 1%. If we do six billion in sales this year, what's one per six basis? $60 million in sales you can do if you can tweak that, 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, then those sales go down and then you flow through dollars. Once you get to the flow-through point, then you lose that's money. So not having all those different things, it keeps the concept. So knowing what your concept is and sticking to that concept, then you know 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 they learn that, they do that. It's a distraction of what you do. Then 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 expectations, all that, where's the time to encourage the crew and do positive motivational management, point out, that's good toast. You know, you're great in the drive thing. 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.

And where's those things? So our management can focus on that, the crew member and customer experience. and make sure that goes because there's not these LTOs they have to learn go through training modules and do that you 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 vote 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 that all that stuff is our frequency is our frequency is that so it's so it's 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 door dash bills I know how frequent it's so it's so it's anti what they say is what they say is what they're 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 high as anybody else is serving the exact same thing people have day and 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 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 talking about chicken fingers, chicken strips, whatever they're talking about, bonus chicken being dipped, I want them to say grazing canes 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 can 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 and day out, the whole organization is around that. Then you can look at stuff like Keynes 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 Keynes because the food's because they know it's going to be food safe. They know people are going to be friendly.

They know people are appreciate, right? Customers want to be appreciated. They want to say, thank you for food. And people mean that. It's like, we appreciate you. spending your hard-earned dollar share. In fact, they want to go to the restroom. It's going to be clean.

Those things get you that repeat business. Yeah, we went to, we landed and went directly to one last night and just greeting every single person that went to the door. Like, it was like obvious how obsessed. I love this idea because, again, focusing on one thing and being the best in the world at it, right? To me, that should be completely obvious. I think humans crave simplicity, but our default status, 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 100 different sauces. People go back 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 buying restaurants, narrowing their menu. It's happening. I'm not saying I was a part of that, but maybe they looked at Keynes 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.

And people don't actually want to make choices. They want you to make. Oh, they want to know it. What are you the best? I went to Jiro in Tokyo. And, you know, it's a three-star Michelin restaurant. It's 10 seats. Maybe you can get me in.

I can't, actually. I have a friend that does that do. So Jiro's really old, too. He only comes in frequently, but his son was the one that served this, but like, you don't even get to choose. You sit down and he's like, I'm the best in the world 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 have to think of anything else. I'll flip through a menu. Like the, what's the restaurant that has like a book this size, something, um, California, not California kitchen. Chiefcake 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 of anxiety. What am I going to go here? This is what? we love is like last night we were like okay what do you want you want three chicken fingers four chicken fingers are six like that's all you have to you already know like that's all you think so another way that you buck so you have this limited menu right and then most people in your industry will 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 yeah grow pains you know so franchising was like one the obvious ways to do it and so everybody was franchising so i do they do that Well, I mean, there's a lot of advantages. One is less capital costs. If you can grow all 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 it a lot of debt to do that. Restaurants are very expensive. You can't, you know, literally, and that's not a manufacturing plan. If I could do all chicken fingers, one location, send it out, right? The cost wouldn't be there, the capital costs. But 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 to model of like, I'm going to grow 50%. I knew I wanted to grow company, but I'm like, I'm not going to build 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 at people from the industry, people that were CEOs and other great, big, billion-dollar businesses, and they were good people. There are people that I 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 will grow quicker.

And so I did open up in different pockets of the country. I opened up in Ohio, open up in Minnesota, opened up in Nevada, open these 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, we were 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 who have been thrilled with them as franchisees, but that 85 to 95 gap drove me crazy. And I was just like, I know we could operate these better.

I know I could do it better. It was a significant change in operational procedure. We had tested in our company restaurants. We knew it made us faster or it was better for management and crew. is a better system to talk them into changing that system took so much time that was just totally inefficient because it's their business that you had to respect to show them like ah that just doesn't work for us because it's different. Like what's different? The crew and customer customers are exact same in both these areas. No, we just like it better this way. We think

or even crazy things like we don't want to get that much faster because we like the longer interactions like well the longer interaction where 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 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 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 the same restaurant sales. And so I ended up buying all them back. And they did really well and they were great. And they're all happy. And actually, too, is they looked at like 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 is 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 fric-cooked and 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 like 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 into things versus just adopting something system-wide really quick. So we got way more efficient. We bought them out. We actually operated 95.

Sales went up in all the franchise markets. So we lose. Sales went up. Wages went up. Everything went up. And it actually proved 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, like, 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, like, you just have to build a business authentic to you. It doesn't even matter if you could make more money from franchise. So it's not suited for your personality. Right. 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, you know, he's in his early 20s, so he's like, shit, man, this is really hard to competing with IBM. So he actually gets a guy to come in and be, I think, the vice 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. And he's like, you know, I loved it, but I can only last four years because we're playing for high stakes. a thousand other computer companies

were 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've been there. I got digestive issues. I'm drinking too much. And he goes, and Michael is drilled. He's like energized because,

and then he's headed this great line, he goes, because Michael built a business of his natural to him. It was unnatural to me where my body is shutting down. And Michael's like, yes, let's do this. And like, natural is a better description than authenticity. It has to be natural to the creator. It 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 shit about because I care about it. It's like, I don't,

and 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. That's the key. That's key to success. That's common in everybody that's successful, I believe. The time period you're describing

where in Keynes history was this happening For the franchising? Yeah. Yeah. Is that five years in time? Yeah. Probably three years I started talking about it. No, no, no.

So second restaurant was, second restaurant was 18 months after the first restaurant. 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. He loved the IT. He loved the business administration and stuff.

He wouldn't a fry cook like me. And he's like, Todd, when I get a night off, if 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 that would be better on the deal is. He's like, I just, just doesn't make me happy. And so he ended up getting, we haven't had done much money to buy out then, but he ended up getting a scholarship, wait for us, the business. He did all the things he did.

He actually came back to Keynes 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 happy to him. He had the courage to say, I don't, I don't like this. Like, this is all we're doing is. is being fried cooks, doesn't turn me on. You know, it doesn't do it. And so, like, I encourage people, like, 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'm being well, roll heads on the beach, you know, you're talking, do it. 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, right? And if you do, you'll never work. They'll 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, love my kids. Things like that is 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 on what their motives are. And if their motives is about a financial return, you're generally going to end up bad because you have a fiduciary responsibility to the other owners of your business to meet their goals, right? And if those goals are financial on that deal is it can change your thinking. You can change your thinking on quality in my business. You 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 stop to somebody else that does it 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 worth ever than anybody else. I have one thing to add to that. I think it's 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. And that's how they wound up being very tax efficient.

But if you look at his combined wealth that came from Walmart, right, that's still concentrating 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.

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-foo-foo 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 saying. Right. And so you have to love it. It has to be, 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 I've told about Raising Cains?

Like, I didn't, even before I knew I was going to met you, or it was going to meet you. It's just like, because I, it's in human nature. When we find anything that we love, it could be a chicken, 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. Just humans don't do that. They're just like, you got to have this chicken. This is incredible. It's incredible. And so that, all this stuff, the love, staying in being hyper-focused, staying in something for a long time.

Oddly success and compulsive. Nodally obsessive 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's only ever joined two boards. And he was best friends to Steve Jobs.

He was on Apple's board. He's good friends with Elon. Elon Consistent Mentor, he's on Tessus Board. And he's like, oh, and he was asked one time, what do they both have in common? He goes, OCD. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. What do you mean when they have in common?

It's obvious, like, what they have in common to him. Yeah, being Molly obsessing the bullsems 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 tiny. And in cases that 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.

It looks the exact same way. It's the same personality. It's like whether you're playing basketball or you're building Raising Keynes and Key. So how many years of doing the franchise are like, shit, this is not the right move? Yeah, I mean, so it was exciting getting in. It was deciding to open up new restaurants, deciding to teach what we do and do well, deciding 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 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 that started a couple 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.

Another advantage of having companies. company-owned restaurants is, the business is valued way higher. Like for franchises, you'll get, you get a valuation of the 6% you're getting off that restaurant. That's polarity, but it's based off the valuation of what franchises markets go. So let's say franchise multiples off of Ibida 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 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-draft-thuber places. And so Greg got Dr. Hill, another great mentor of mine. He's like, look, we're just not operators, man. We, they had like 30-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, you can have all this. Look, whatever you need and look, just we'll give you cheaper at.

And so I didn't want to go into it. It was these like double dry-thrus. I thought like, you know, this place had a lot of soul, big din-ins 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, 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, use 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 eventually turned all those into big, you know, dining drive-through locations. So I was able to do that into a mall food courts. 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, burn myself out. Like, I couldn't be at all the locations. So then I really learned how to set up leaders at different restaurants and give them the support they need versus me bopping around to 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 Kane'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? Why? What was that? Because I wanted to prove the prototype, starting off when no one really has the brand recognition that we have and show what this thing you really do.

So, really, one year, I'm like, no more growth. We're going to set up what the prototype is. And by the prototype, I didn't mean just architectural design, kitchen design, and where I look and feel was, everything. Marketing systems, human resource systems, training systems, everything globally. And 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, who's like they were partnered into the success of the business. And we came with that first prototype, Raising Cains opened up in Lafayette and we just went gangbusters, dude. We killed it. It was just like, we had operational efficiencies. Our drive-thrues got faster, we could stack more people around the restaurant. I had all these really good people that came in and gave us great. We came up with the original black and white logo. We changed it to this logo because we got it. This is where we came up with Raising Cain's One Love. All those things went into it. Combowing meals. I didn't combo. I had, you know, it was the box and a drink. You know, we said it'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. And so, 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, I'm not bankable to where I want to grow, which ended up being 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 all these community banks? So let's say we want to open up in Homa, Homa, Louisiana. Go to the community bank in Homa. And let me go to Angel Investor, and this was Dr. Hill had those fast tracks.

He wanted to be landlord. He also liked a new 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-dead 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, this is a one-page deal.

Subordinated debt means subordinated to the banks. I know I can take that 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. 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 really stupid way to finance a business, man. But I was young.

I was 10-fit-tall and bulletproof. We're going to work. I mean, I had zero fear of any kind of risk on debt, right? And so I was going in, creating cash doing this. I'd get up to 28 restaurants, and all of a sudden we have a storm coming in named Katrina. It's coming into Louisiana. We were used to hurricanes. We knew what to do.

We'd put crew to safety, shut down in the restaurants, buckled everything down. Hurricanes would come through. We opened 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 we all go. We got this, whatever, Craig said, this powered where we could actually watch television.

And when the levee's broke, we're like, we've never seen this before. What is this? Flooding, terrible, awful, whole bit. 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 Cain'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 company levered to the hilt, right? I owe everybody. And in times like that, you think that, you know, you'd think that the bank's still want their money. Landlords still want their money. And I gathered, 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 said about that pretty good before. And I'm like, look, we need to rally. And when I tell you we need

to rally, I said, we need a 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 state of 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 had that same fanatical view of we're going to do it. We figured out, I figured how to get into New Orleans right away, talking to the governor,

office they got us passes to go and they weren't letting anybody in we we worked with the state on doing bull water acts because we didn't have formalized bull water acts you have to bull 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 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 all those areas on the west bank like some areas we open up like like like a Metery, which is just a mass population of people, where the only restaurant open, we opened up 30 days after the storm. Other restaurants didn't open, like 90 days. We opened up the West Bank.

So you had the whole market to yourself. The whole market itself opened up in like the West Bank. We opened up in the Harvey. 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. More come in and eat, right? Because it was like, you can come in. We got power. He's all generated power. We got generators in all the country. Got him 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 was just really really proud of the team and the same time proud I was I was disappointed myself and I was just a morning myself because I put all that in jeopardy. You know what I mean? I put all that in jeopardy for financing. And that day when I watched the levees 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, 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, Like, you can't get, you can't serve, can't do food. We were a necessary business. They said essential business to be open. We need to feed the public because they felt, they felt okay with going through drive-through COVID

because there's limited contact. But we had to learn everything. It was like, literally, hey, guys, we talked to the restaurant industries and all the authorities. We're 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, we were the first that figured that out.

Can you imagine people now have a place to go get some food and not just eat at their house what they'd 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 solid 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'd just wave thereby outside. Go the next restaurant, wave, 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 active 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 in the restaurants and do this stuff is the one that'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 I just wish more founders would hold on and stay with the business. I love what you said. It's like, I watch the levees break and there's no way I'm ever going to jeopardize. Like, 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, as Steve Jobs says, victory in our industry is spelled survival. You see this over and over again bribery. 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 going to run into things that are outside of your control.

And you turn them into, not a lie, 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, you know, the amount of details, you protect every single detail. So now these people, they've maybe never would have tried recent cases that didn't happen because you're now but you're the only game in town and then you're like oh this is pretty good and then think about how many customers that one person has got has given you the one one thing

that comes to mind about this like it sounds crazy but one of my favorite entrepreneurs have ever come across i found this biography autobiography of est aladdin published in 1980s okay at the time sallel was not the public company it was so very successful was a family-owned business and she would get a lot of shit from people because they're like her main distribution channel was like she wants your like 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 big Neiman Marcus open in Houston that makes a lot of sense you're going to have a thousand customers. Why Estate? Why are you going down to Corpus Christi? There's going to be 20 people there.

And she's like every single customer matters and so 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. And let's say you're sitting across a Meste, just like me and you're sitting across her. And she sees a woman. She said, hi, I'm S.A. Lauder. Would you mind giving me 20 minutes your time?

I'll give you a free makeup. I make-a-products. Or makeover, rather. It's like, oh, I guess we're just sitting here those two years. And then she does it one-on-one attention. People are like, oh, that doesn't scale. You can't do that. Bullshit.

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 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 search. Absolutely. A 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 I make a podcast that's been listened to by like half a million people. Like, you couldn't have predicted that. There's probably going to be millions of people that watch what we're doing. That's right. 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 that the people that listen, if they get a little nugget.

from this, a 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 then the questions she 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 was just slapping something out to say, this is success and do it, it's what people learn and what people will benefit out of this conversation is what matters. You have 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 a scale sell. It's just like, my favorite entrepreneurs, like sometimes I've got to speak to entrepreneurs, I just had dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world. He's 76 years old.

He's been working in the family business, he was six. Do you understand what's in that guy's head? Absolutely. It's so much more impressive than the, no disrespect anywhere else with like the startup founder that ran the business for two years. They don't nothing.

They're like a baby. They're still in diapers. And even you, I love that you keep hitting, you haven't met, I'm just implying here, but like, 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 us your life. I'm going to have conversations with founders for rest of your life. I really appreciate you taking a risk and being one of my first guests. Absolutely, man. A big fan of what you do, man. Hey, fired me up that I made one of the first, man. It's like, because everybody's going to want to watch it and see it. And 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, well, 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 me the kitchen here and 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.