My conversation with Todd Graves

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3475ca13d9bb8037

I've started a new show where I have conversations with some of the greatest living founders. That show is called David Sunera. It will be on a separate podcast feed.
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This conversation.
is with one of my favorite living founders, Todd Graves.
Todd owns over ninety percent of Raisin Canes, a business that is worth over twenty million dollars.
And he's been working on this business for almost thirty years. Todd has an extreme level of focus.
And a love of radical simplicity that I love and I try to apply to my own.
craft. I am posting our entire conversation on this feed.
So you know what the new show is like.
I hope you enjoy our conversation and please don't forget.
To follow the new show, David Sunra.
now so you don't miss future episodes. And by the way.
Nothing.
is changing with founders. I'm still doing episodes every week.
And it will work on founders until I die.
I was not expecting to start here, Todd. We were just talking before recording. I didn't expect to start on sleep, but what you just said.
is exactly how most of history screen entrepreneurs are, they just can't stop thinking about their business. Cause I was asking I was asking you like how much caffeine do you take?
How much sleep do you need? And then your answer was what?
I has to have a really erratic sleep. So I'll go, you know, some nights I'll go maybe three hours of sleep. The next night might be three to four hours. The next night maybe five hours.
And usually about that point is the next night I have to crash. So I'll sleep ten or eleven hours to catch up, and then I'll actually wake up feeling great, feel like I don't have to muscle through a day keeping myself awake, and then uh then I'll be caught up. I'll go another three hours that night, four hours and five five hours.
But w really dictates it is what I have going on in business and what I have to be thinking about, what might give me a little bit of anxiety about things I gotta decide on, the teams, what I have to work through. So my brain will be working as I'm
Sleeping. I think he's trying to figure out solutions. So then I'll just wake up.
And I'll actually wake up pretty refreshed thinking about, you know, that problem I had and then go jump on the computer in my in my underwear. And then I wake up and go first that and then start sending out emails.
Just actually solve that problem. You know, but if I get caught up at work and and there's nothing like really pressing that I can sleep like a baby, you know I don't have a problem sleeping, as I have a problem sleeping when I got real business on my on my mind. This keeps reoccurring in all these biographies of Hase Entrepreneurs that I read.
And so I just did this episode on Jiro, the best sushi chef in Japan, right? The the documentary on him is Jiro dreams of sushi. Why? Because in his sleep, he is thinking about his work, right? Then I did this episode on this guy named Michael Ferrero. It's another family held business, it's the Ferero 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. Uh Leonardo Vecchio.
Luxotico, one of the biggest businesses in the world. He just passed away recently. He said he would literally wake up
Dreaming. He'd he would dream about ideas for his business and he'd have to either keep a tape recorder next to his bed or in your case your in your underwear and your computer. Or he'd have like a notebook. 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 chains. You were very kind enough to let us record in here. The mother showed.
You're almost at your thirty year anniversary for
uh running racing case and starting this. I want to ask you a question. I love I've heard you say this before.
What is the advice that these so called the bad advice these so called f experts gave you when you were trying to start the very first racing cane?
Thank you. So having a dream to start a chicken finger only concept was just uh back then was in Louisiana was kinda just 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 the veto vote is what they called it. One person in the car that might not
Have the choice at that restaurant that they could get, they said they would veto the whole car.
and go somewhere else that had that menu item for their deal. They're also adding healthy items back then. So starting a you know a restaurant and having an idea to do on to focus just on one thing.
one single product focused menu was just really unheard of at that time.
We didn't have In and Out Burger.
In Louisiana, right? But you knew about Harry Snyder. Not until I went to uh LA to work in the refineries. That's when I when I went out there and to work in the refineries, when I went to In and Out Burger, that's reaffirmed my belief that hey, you can do one thing and do it better than anybody else.
And then I did I research and I started started studying the in and out model like 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 uh get whatever beverage you like, and then get a chocolate shake. And it's my same order every time. So when I first went, I kinda held up the order line for a second and you know, went inside and done. Next time I went there, I wrote the drive thru, double double animal style fries, uh and a and a and a Coke, and then I also want to get that chocolate shake. And uh and so seeing that really reaffirmed.
That belief for me because since Norty.
You think about how many different burger chains opened up and then went
All around in and out burger.
And they added all different menu items and they added unbelievable marketing. In and out burgers m uh marketing is not much.
And they continue to do well, raise their sales, because they stuck to what they're good at. And for that, that really reaffirmed my belief. And when I was able to come back.
From from a la from going to LA to work in the refineries, 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 nineteen forty eight 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'cause I read Harry Snyder's
biography. He's one of my favorite founders. I mean the guy was completely obsessed. I uh 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, watch TV, but he'd look out the window, and as soon as the drive through would 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 buck the trend in his industry. They went to like
When uh everybody I think McDonald's is like, No, we're gonna like
Freeze our beef or whatever the case is. She's like
I'm gonna
Have my own butchers. Like he's like, I'm gonna get the fresh tomatoes. Like, no, no, I'm not going. I'm I'm all about quality. There's a line they just gave me a tour of
The kitchen. It says never you guys have a a mantra that says uh never sacrifice quality for speed. And he was like completely quality.
Uh 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 people a lot of people don't know this. He invented the drive-thru speaker.
Like how can we do this better? That's right. Because remember, uh the prehistory to that was like you had drive up.
restaurants. But you didn't have drive through restaurants. So I in that episode was like induced into a state of rage because all these people are telling you, Oh, this is 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 uh 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 Kaynes? 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 gonna take you to Raising Cains. And so
I saw exactly what you said, where you're like I don't hide.
You know, we put raising cane's right next to you know McDonald's or Chipotle or whatever the case is. It's like I'm just gonna do one thing and do better than anyone else. So we pull up.
My brother and sister's like what the hell?
is going on here. It's it looked exactly like when I was just in California.
two days ago. Looks exactly like when you pull into an in and out.
Line 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 it we look at 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.
'Cause we're eating outside. And I look across the street.
And I see poor old little Wendy's.
And it's a single car and the drive-thru. Yeah. I go, it's because Todd is obsessed. He wants to do one thing and do it better than anybody else. Yeah, you have to focus on doing one thing and do it better than anybody else. And so since I have that singular product focus, right? And so people some people call it like a simple menu. I say, Well, it's not simple, it's it's focus, 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. We're given it on the bone after the chicken slaughtered, then it stays on the bone a certain amount of time. Then you get it fresh.
Then you brine it for twenty four hours. Like all those things are that. Like are are our fries, right? So we have crinkle cut fry, but like a thinner crut fry. You get fries from different times of the year, right? They do the they do the crop harvest, then it sits in the warehouses. At certain times of the year you get more sugar tips in the fries, those sugar tips have to come out. So we have to
Remind our crew, hey, when you see those black sugar tip ends, take those out. It's not visually pleasing.
the our bread. We get bread made by bakeries all over the country, but that recipe has to be exactly right. And it's little dough balls put together.
Bait together so it's pull apart bread. It's not sliced s loaves. Sliced loaves end up being more stale. This is
dense moist flavorful bread. Our cold slow we secure all over the country. We got to make sure all those vendors have the right type of slaw that we want for the right type of growers grown a certain amount of time. In that slaw you have cabbage, but you also have purple cabbage, you have carrots, all those things
And so you go down to your tea, our tea gets brought from three different countries, the tea leaves, but we have to get at the right time of the year. We might pay more for that, but it's that in that
Focus on that. So my team can focus on those menu items and deliver it.
Every time door tastes exactly the same around every case 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 it's culinary.
making sure that all those products those were all products we get are all perfect and make sense there. Same thing we opened in the Middle East. It took two years, two years
to get the supply chain just right to make sure it tastes just the same. Two years to do that 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's gonna cost you X amount of dollars. And I'm like, No, those X amount of dollars are gonna make us more money because our sales gonna be higher because our food is it in quality ingredients create in in a in a proper cook system.
creates cravable 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 learning to open up or they 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 Craig's. So I'll go when I go there, I'm like, I want to go back and get that chicken parm. Other stuff on the menu's pretty good or whatever. I'll I'll sample this to try different things because I like food, but I want to go back to that chicken parm. Yet they didn't have that cravable chicken parm at Craig's.
I wouldn't make it a point to go there. There's so many good restaurants, there's so many great places you can choose from in LA. There's so many great places that you could have good vibe and good atmosphere and good people, but that cravable product's 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 how much money because it's a penny's business, right? We're doing well if we make 10 cents on a dollar. But like if you start cutting a little bit here to save a penny, and you start cutting a little bit here and a little bit here, it's death by a thousand cuts.
Then your food one day is not cravable. That's what's happened to so many quick service chains over the years. They they mess with their quality so much.
Then they lost the cravability. So then it comes down to is this a cheap
calorie option versus a cravable 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. Lust over. And so you nailed the cravable because I told you I brought my thirteen year old daughter with me today.
And
She's obsessed with raising canes and she door dashes into our house constantly. She's definitely craving the quality chicken finger meals.
Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business. He says the most successful people he knows stay in the details of their business. He mentioned learning from a friend who runs a multi billion dollar shipping company.
And how that friend would pay attention to even how much his company
With spending on bottled
Water. When I heard that.
I thought it'd be a lot easier to do this.
If that shipping company was running on ramp, something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common.
They know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny.
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So go back to
These people are giving you their this advice.
Like you don't know what you're doing.
I I know the answer to this, but I I wanna get it on record. It's just like
Your kind of personality type.
History scary. If you tell them
that you can't do something. You get the opposite reaction that you think you're gonna get, which is like it's just going to make you want to do it more. Absolutely. Yeah, the best thing for a aspiring entrepreneur
To be told is
I don't think that's a good idea.
I don't think you can do that.
People haven't done that before. Why do you think you can do that? Because entrepreneurs have something to prove. They have a vision. They have an idea. They have a passion. If you're an entrepreneur, you're passionate about what you want to start. You're like, I know this is gonna work. And you're so passionate about it when someone tells you, uh, you know, do that facial expression, ah just
I don't think that's a good idea.
Your first thought immediately is you know what, I'm gonna prove it to you.
That is a great idea. And all those no's that you get, you just use that as fuel. It's like entrepreneurial fuel. It's putting gasoline on a fire because you have something to prove. You know, uh later in life now is, you know, I can take, you know, now that we're established and good, I can take uh
I can take those things and not uh let not let a fire be up. We still get it times, you know, like going into the you know, going into different countries are like, you know, um you know, like uh this mayonnaise type sauce, it's w it's much more popular as a as a as a uh dipping sauce. You're not gonna be used for sauce, you need to add that.
I would have heard that in the early days, or said, you wait till Cain Salt's all that day out. You know, now I can say, hey, you know, y actually we've had the same thing all over the United States. Ranch was popular out west and different things like that. You know, and we went into Texas, they say you have to have cream gravy, you gotta have barbecue sauce, you know, things like that. And like but through thro through 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 it can understand that. So you're kinda calm later after you've proven yourself, but like but when you're getting started out, then it is.
I I'm very curious about this.
the the hours that you're working now thirty years in compared to the beginning. So
Um I just flew to Austin. I got to spend five hours with Michael Dell.
And Michael Dell's hilarious. He's been running his business for forty-one years. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever met, very calm and measured.
But in underneath, just a super, you know, relentless person, as you can imagine.
And
Uh, I was talking to him, I was like, Hey, I heard you on a podcast one time. You said one of the funniest things, cause somebody asked him, like, you know, when you were starting Dell.
in your University of Texas dorm room with a thousand dollars, and you're gonna take on the biggest company in the world at the time, which is IBM. Like that's so crazy.
They're like how many hours
Uh, did you work when you started your company? And Dell's face was like
All of them.
And so we had a long conversation because he's also, you know, he's married, he's got kids. Uh-huh. And so he was just like, you know.
At the beginning it's um intensity.
But you know, the value is the consistency and the compounding over decade after decade after decade. He's like, Listen, I love my business, because I asked him.
Austin in July is not in the little bit hot. If I had your place in Hawaii, I know where I'm gonna be in July. Like, why are you here? He's like, I just love my business. Right. So one of the things he gave me advice, he's like, Listen,
The the the advice for young entrepreneurs, he's like, I've seen so much over forty one years. He's like, You think you're gonna be knocked out by a competitor.
You're not gonna be not you're gonna sabotage yourself.
That is much more likely
that you sabotage yourself that somebody else sabotages you. Absolutely. He's just like so what you wanna do is just like
You wanna 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 he 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 am 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 was just like over time, you're still working
A lot, but you're not as 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 you like how do you compare like the hours you're working now compared to
When you started this thing.
Амадні хар із це стартю бізнес.
Then multiply that by infinity.
And if you're still committed to do it and you have the stamina to stick with that, then you'll be successful. Obviously you have to have a good
product and and concept and you have to have something that's gonna 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 we like our plate lunches. We we want variety, things like that. Like wait till you have this product. And then when I was able to start cooking for them, Oh man, that is good. Then when they start talking about the next day, hey man, you can cook some more of that. Yeah, 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 gonna be, because I'm like, they're like, how do you have uh you know how do you have quality of life and and work life balance when you're starting a business. I'm like, you don't.
Flat out you don't. You're gonna live the business every day, you're gonna think about the business every day, you're gonna be tired, you're gonna 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 gonna have it. Now
Once you get your business
open and you get it established and it's it's working.
Then if you want to grow, then you're not gonna have quality of life then. Because going from one to two is is your hardest stub you'll ever have. Then two to six and six to twelve and all those growth phases are there. And so but I just wish people wouldn't stop.
when they go because like my hours in the beginning
You know, when we started this restaurant, we were open every day of the week.
We're open until three thirty AM.
And except for Sundays we closed at three a.m. And look we w when we were closing up, it took us two hours to close down. When we opened up in the morning at uh ten thirty, we had to be here at eight in the morning. And so we're getting about three hours of sleep a night. I have my apartment right back here.
uh 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. Why 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.
There's no. You're not separated from your customers. You're not separated from your customers. You're right here in the middle of this place that I construct it with my own hands. And it's like you just work isolated. You constructed what with your own hands? Everything except the electrical.
because I literally don't know uh electric, but plumbing, I did plumbing, I learned how to do plumbing, I learned how to do minor construction. All this place has resurfaced. I so when you came in this place, it was a lot of different concepts, college concepts that just didn't work. But they layered on paneling, uh even like 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'cause there was an arcade at one time, and they had ripped up uh through this old paneling here on the wall, which is actually an Italian restaurant where it started. This was the outside of the building.
And they built this onto here. So when I pulled all these things off.
I s 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 I uncovered this old mural. And I look I took it as a sign, man. This was this is an outside advertising.
for this bread mural, uh for this bread bakery, Downtown Batrouge, where we actually started with our first bread at Kane's. I came up with a recipe with with the with the bread preparers there. And this was an outside advertising, Highland Road going from downtown Baton Rouge through LSU was the main core uh thoroughfare here. And we like took this as a sign. This is what we came up with our logo.
For Kane's. We took this design. I like I literally took it as a sign to say this is gonna be the raisin canes logo. And 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 uh 90,000. I'd raised equity.
in a sense of like sixty thousand dollars with original shareholders, uh and and carry them over a little their little a little bit of the business today. Uh it's been fun being with them. I pray that one of the things I don't even want you to tell me if it's true or not.
We I want to talk about how you finance the business, because it's one of the craziest stories I've ever heard. But I just pray that today there is a boilermaker named Wild Bill.
That owns a couple hundred million dollars of equity. And raise your case, because he bet on your chicken finger dream when you were like tw in your twenties. He did, he did. But let me take take you back a little bit on on on the start of it. So you know, I I worked in uh restaurants in you know high school and college. I l I love
The restaurant business food symbolized love to me. So uh what that means is like when I can spend time with my mother.
uh 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? And you make a gumbo, you start with a roux and you add your onions and and you really you take all day making a gumbo. Now does it take that long to do it? I don't know if it does. It's more about spending time with somebody that you love. And we're cooking for the family and our friends that we love. So that time together and then
You make a good gumbo then
You sit out and all your friends and family are like, Oh man, that's a good gumbo, that's good. And they start talking about I do mine a little different. I do this and those conversations went my my grandmother would make me a pie, you know, chocolate pie. She come visit, she'd I made you a pie you love. And I'm like, that you know you know
I love you, and so for me.
restaurant and food and delivering food. It's it's an expression of love. And then the the camaraderie when you're working in the kitchen and it's rolling and drive through's 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 and administration work and things like that, it's not immediate gratification, it comes over time.
My favorite job is if I can literally come in the restaurant and just crank out a ship. Like that to me is fun, man. That that that vi that's still that yeah. Yeah, when I can go when I go to restaurants, I'm gonna I'm gonna go visit a like a market and I'll go to one restaurant and I'll I'll get all the crew to come there and we have like a town meeting. Hey, what you know, my 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 would be like, you know, first thing a little bit, oh no, the support's great. I'm like, Yeah it's great, but we're never gonna be perfect, so what can we do better? Well, you know, the 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 with crew or management. And you get good stuff from from surveys. But like when you actually talk, you can pull it out of them a little bit more and and do it maybe they they feel comfortable and they and they and and then they'll tell me. But then I'll work 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 I actually studied uh uh writing for script writing for television and film. I thought I might want to be in movies, but I always went back to business and when I was working because I was that original kid in the neighborhood that had the lemonade stand. I was a kid that's gonna cut your grass for ten bucks. And just always I do like uh I'd set up like uh
uh Halloween uh haunted houses in my house and like you know go around put flyers out and five bucks for kids to go through. So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and that's when I got serious about it my senior year.
And I actually graduated went to the University of Georgia, but I was from Batteners originally. I knew I want to come home and I had a partner when I started the business. So we wrote the business plan for raising canes. Um started off there calling it Folly's Chicken Fingers, that was the original business plan. Terrible name. But um we had a friend that was his nickname was Folly, we called each other Folly.
But anyway, we wrote that business plan and uh lit I wrote the I wrote the Bible of chicken fingers, man. It was like I knew what our aprons would cost. I knew what what would the cost, I knew what would col I was college college students. 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 is but but but that proфе
Gave you the worst grade to class.
Which is classic.
Uh but it was only a B minus. The the the rumor went out the it was a failing grade and all this stuff is but he he was it actually somewhat greater, but he said no the plan was great, like like literally. You get the most detailed plan in the whole b in the whole class.
But the concept will work.
And say, well, how about the concept work? Well, because you didn't study the industry. Until you study your industry. You know, McDonald's is adding, um, you know, they've been at it a long time and they're the best in the business. They're adding these menu items. There this thing called veto vote, and people won't come to your restaurant. If if the if mom didn't want this, you know, they're also adding uh healthy items, you know, someone's gonna want a salad and that and do it. And that's like
You tell that entrepreneur no, you're like, Oh yeah, wait, I will prove it to you. Literally, I took that and uh people thought that'd be discouraging actually was that fuel. I will show you.
that this will work, right? And so took that business plan, bought a cheap suit.
Went to office depot, bought I thought the businessmen need to wear a suit and I thought businessmen's suitcase
Bought the briefcase. I had the same one. Did you? But didn't you feel like a businessman? You're like I went to school for business. You don't know anything. No, man. You're going in a bank, which is pretty intimidating, right? You're like these bankers and you think they know everything and and literally brought it in and be like
You know, unlock the the little safe, you know, the O zero combo. I don't even remember what it was. Yeah, something like.
Open it up and they'd be like, here's a business plan for you, here's mine, put the business plan down. And proceed to talk about this this this chicken finger uh concept I want to start at LSU. And look at everybody was nice enough, right? They're nice enough, but the but it was the
The 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. Yeah, pizza's real real popular, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably order the same pizza every time, don't you? What do you get? I like pepperoni or like whatever. Like you get that every time.
This meal's that flavorful, incredible. You're gonna want to get this meal over and over.
Yeah, yeah, but you you don't have years of uh management experience, you know. You probably should go work for you know great companies. I mean good suggestion go work for Breaker for like ten years. Then you'll really own the business and then you'll have some money and and then da and then then you'll be you'll be bankable at that point, you know, like and'cause you have no money, right? I'm like, no, don't have any money. You can't get a loan. You can't just get a hundred percent loan, which I thought you could do.
But with every no I got, they were nice enough. I I we'll give them credit for that. And they were nice enough to take the meeting. Maybe there's some kind of law that you have to actually see somebody in their business plan. But then that, like I was like, man
I need to go make money. 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 it is is turnaround shift work. But this is super intense work. Oh, ninety five hour work. So what happens is they'll they'll shut down a certain s um section of a of a of the oil refinery.
And they're they're missing out on production, man, which is just big, big money they're losing. So they'll pay for you to work nonstop, they'll pay whatever they need to get that thing back up and running. So you go in and you fix things, you add you put new equipment in and things like that. So you worked uh ninety five hour weeks.
And uh and you just work straight through. There's no there's no days off, there's no nothing, you just work straight through. So there's overtime, there's double time, there's some kind of crazy thing, you know, that goes into another level. So you 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 gonna you're gonna well they call me Hollywood. We all had nicknames. Uh interesting story on the Hollywood deal, but we'll leave that out. But uh but uh it s so so they were encouraging and while Bill Tolar that we all nicknames so while Bill's like
Hey Graves, man, you know.
Hollywood, you know, I I see you got what it takes, you know, and but if you really want to make some some money and it's you're not s you're not afraid of hard work.
But uh
This is a really dangerous trade. I fish the summer's commercial fishing socket salmon and
Alaska. He goes, you can go up there and get a job and you can make a lot more money doing that, then you can't bore making it. So I was like, Well what do I do? He's like basically get up to Natneck, Alaska. I'm like, where is that? He says above the Lucent chain, look it up on a map. Back then you couldn't look up a computer, you actually had to pull out a map. Buy an Alaska map.
It's like look, I called a plane to um to Anchorage, I call a flow plane to King Salmon, Alaska, I hitchhiked to Natneck, Alaska. There was no Uber back then. Literally hitchhiked in. Set up in Tent City where people go to get a uh to to 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
That you can get on the crew. Right. They're looking so looking for some help. There's a few of the boats. Most 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 of the of the 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 Saka salmon in Alaska, man. We were all in
thirty two foot boats is regulated. You couldn't keep going out to get the salmon. So the salmon born in a stream, they swim out the ocean, Saka salmon living 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 season they're just rushing into these uh to these same rivers. You catch'em, 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, skill net.
If you set it up in front of another boat's net, you're gonna catch three times as much because you're catching the first fish coming in. So these captains make their entire income just during the summer. So they're heavily motivated to to catch that perfect set in front of that other boat. So you played chicken.
And literally somebody veers off in the in, 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 thirty two foot boat. And the back of the boat gets weighed so much down with salmon before you get unload it 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 it was just unbelievable work. We worked twenty hour days during the peak of the season, which is about two to three weeks. And when you work twenty hour days you only get like a nap here and there. Like you get hey go take a nap real quick and 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 to 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 rambub boats, you're picking fish
You hear on the radio somebody somebody just got scalped. I heard that stinkly scalp. I don't know how they got scalp from the boat. So medical helicopters are going in. National Geographic's coming over filming the boat action and I'm out there for this chicken finger dream. Nothing was gonna stop me from doing it.
And sure enough, made good money doing both mower making and doing the Alaskan fish and trade. Came back. I lived off credit cards because I had another income. Before we get there.
So there's this recurring theme in all these biographies.
There's a story just like this. Now your story's pretty extreme and you tell in a wonderful way.
And the way I summarized this is like how bad do you actually want it?
And like you have to actually ask yourself like if you're gonna compete against Todd Graves.
Are you willing to work ninety-five hours a week for a boilermaker after the p if you buy your suit and your briefcase and they're like get out of here, kid, we're not getting that's fine, I'll find another way. Ninety five hours doing shift work in a boilermaker. You're gonna take a flight to Alaska, you're gonna hitchhike, you're gonna live.
In a fucking tent. Right.

Captains of boats that you can die on.
To g hire you.
And then to do that and then to work twenty hours and the entire time. What I love about your story is it's like I'm not thinking about Sakai salmon. I'm thinking about my chicken finger dream. Exactly.
I would've worked construction in Nebraska if that's what paid. I love the fact that I went to Alaska and did that and did something as cool as sounding like a bowler maker, right? But I would've worked I would have gone and knitted
uh blankets if that's where the where the money was at.
Anything I could do to make the money because I was determined, man. It was like
I wasn't 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 I steam clean floors, I do these different things. And I saw these 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 the couple of years in college and be like, uh just I don't think I can do that and do it. And I'm like, that's the key, man, is when you set a goal, you do it to success or failure, but you don't stop. You don't stop actually with my original partner. We went out to a camping trip in North Carolina. I'm like, we need to make this like
We're gonna go in and we're gonna camp and we're gonna literally commit to this because like you said an oath that you're not gonna ever 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 where I I love this idea. Run that back to me. I just did this episode on Elon Musk and he has a great mantra. He's like, retreat is not an option. Retreat is not an option. We are gonna succeed, or I'm going to he's like, You'll know when I give up, because I will be dead.
That's the spirit.
And to do an oath? Yeah, he was literally gave up. L liter literally it was it was literally to say
Like
round a campfire. I mean we we we did everything but just like become blood brothers, you know, to do the deal. It was like
We're gonna do this, right?
We're committing this, we're gonna make this happen.
We're gonna see it through, and somehow it doesn't work, we're gonna die trying. And literally put that on the line, going out and fishing Alaska. People died in that in that fishery. God bless them, you know. And but yeah, it's just that and I think another teen 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 pursued a vision fanatically.
Like you have to be so fanatical when you have a dream and others don't believe in, and you see it, you have to be fanatical. So fanaticism what carries you through, you know? And so I see this fanaticism and I study people, right? And so like like your podcasts, I'll I I'll hear things and and and I'll get reaffirmed with things, then I'll learn new things, new ways I can look at things and do I think.
Yeah. But it's great. You know, and and and and and I like it too,'cause 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 hear other people are doing what you do. And then you learn from other people. I'm constantly student the business. So it's like you learn other things 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 um they're uh actor, actors. Athletes. Whether they're athletes. They all have this common core. And you know what I see the most common core of all the people that are successful for me is
They're never satisfied.
Never satisfied. And so we we care in our business about never being satisfied, but it's a bad way to say it. So that you say never satisfied. You know, with this opening. No, no, no. So we change the word for never satisfied, it's like we're always gonna raise the bar. So we'll raise the bar. So we did greater that opening.
That was awesome. These were all the good things we did.
But you know what too is these are some of the things we can get better at. We can actually get two seconds faster, you know, and this is how we're gonna do this. Look, we needed the staff more. We messed up here, we didn't give enough support because we wore out a crew. We should have had more crew members on staff. You can always learn. So I see that with people, I see it with the best athletes, I see it with the best 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 rest in the rules, then you're always gonna 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 because it's 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 like we need more founders that refuse to sell their businesses. Like this the there's this huge entrepreneurial industry that didn't exist.
Especially when you were starting your companies like
And
The entrepreneurial is influenced by investors, not entrepreneurs. Right. It's like start, scale, sell.
Then what?
Then what are we gonna do? And you have a great line where you're like if you create and do, you never wanna stop creating and doing. And now you just sold the vehicle that you created and do and and and and create into. Right.
And so then what? Then you're working on your second best idea or your third best idea. And I think like one of the most important ideas that you have is just like
F everybody in your business.
The reason I I said this on the episode I did about you
Todd's smoking them because he's competing against corporations.
All the f who are the founders in your business anymore? Like they're 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 at night and you're like
And they may not even exist, but they will exist in the future,'cause you know that same personality type as you. They're coming 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 have to understand this is what I do. This is in my DNA. This is this is like this is
Uh how I feed my family. So if you want to come, just understand I'm on this twenty four seven all the time. You better be ready because I'm coming after you. I just saw you at uh the UFC.
Are you a a U F C fan or I I like all sports, you know? And so uh Dana invited me to come and uh getting to see Poirier do his last fight, Louisiana Legend, and uh 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 and like
the species of bird and like when it's and like the the amount of detail you just explained to us. The thought I had in my mind was not about chicken finger, this is an important point you're making. It's like the same personality type just uh pointing at a different uh endeavor.
John Jones, you know, probably the greatest UFC fighter. UFC's the only sport like I'm obsessed with and I w I watch all the time.'Cause I don't have time to watch anything else, but I can watch one pay per view a month and have an understanding of what's going on. And I heard him
He said the same thing that you said in that interview, it was like, Oh, you wanna come compete with me? And this is how I feed my family.
And he was fighting surreal gain. 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's trying to destroy my legacy and trying to take the food.
off my family's table. And I will not allow that to happen. The same level of intensity that you're applying to your business. Absolutely, man. If if if I got somebody to come in and compete, like you're competing
With me, my livelihood and my managers and my crew members depend on this restaurant, right? You can come in, you're coming to open up across the street here. These people feed their families off this. We're gonna go out and you better be strong because we're not gonna give up, man. And look, I've done this, I've done this for thirty years.
And I'm just as fired up as I was the first day.
It never leaves you. It's i i it's a blessing that entrepreneurs have.
Because when it's so hard to start your business.
You
Gain this
great sense of appreciation.
Appreciation for your crew that are working so hard beside you.
great appreciation. Customers coming in, paying their hard earned money to do this, appreciation for compu communities that embrace you. So that sense of appreciation, which is what our culture is all built off of.
hundred percent 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. I'm like, Yeah well then then what happens? What happens to my management?
Who support their families. What happens with the crew members that come up? Because if I sold the business, you think they might have the same values? I mean, really hard to find.
Find so 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 gonna sell it themselves. They're looking at as an investment, not a vehicle to help people. So I think when entrepreneurs go and then you
Get successful and then
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 perpis and so my perp
of of race and cane's 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 uh crew members that come in.
We have an opportunity. It's most people's first jobs are restaurant retail. They have to come in and learn values, man. What are those values? Hey, look, we're gonna work hard, we're gonna have fun, we're gonna deliver great customer service, we're gonna deliver that cravable chicken finger bops. Why? Because people are spending their hard earned money here.
That's why we're gonna do that. And what we're gonna do with the money that we make, we're gonna help out our communities. We're gonna give that to to people, and as we scale this business.
And it grows, this thing's getting into values of billions of dollars. And someday when I clear debt, I'm gonna get three billion dollars 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 uh when I have this free cash flow coming out and doing we're gonna be able to help people in a big way. I can't wait for that phase of our business, but that's purpose, man. So you start realizing.
It's not what you make, it's what you give. That's a better way to keep score. So we have that purpose. And what I what we want people to do is to keep that purpose because
Too many great restaurant entrepreneurs and founders of the business, especially in the restaurant business, they sell. They sell and look, they're so passionate about it and they talk about it like, man, I have the passion and I love what I do, dah 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 in different regions of the country, which may make it a national
Multiples go up.
And they're like, Hey we'll come in, we'll give you a we'll give you five million or we'll we'll give you ten million, but they take control of the business and the 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 they will sell and then they lose control of the business.
And if you're private equity, and private equity serves a lot of good purposes, they also serve some bad purposes. They take founders
out of the deal, and so decisions get made differently. So 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 you know 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 is, but you're personal on that. Your crew is personal because they're working their ass off to fulfill your dream. And you're sitting there and you're in a good financial position, but they're busting their butt. Management's busting their butt. Crew members are busting their butt.
I know when I'm working at three AM and I'm like, Oh man, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. I know those crew members still closing up somewhere around the country, right? Somewhere around the world. Somebody's closing up that 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 y you really do. And so so private equity, they have their shareholders and they have to make a certain amount of money.
They're not getting the returns on their dollar, they'll make other decisions that will go. Maybe they price, maybe they 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. May they do maybe they don't do the bonus pl their programs aren't as good as the year before. All those things start to make the business not 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 you if it is if it is y you end up leaving a shallow life, you know, you y you end up you end up you end up saying I need that ten million dollars, 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 provider can come in and say,
Hey, look at the staffs we have in the 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 details yourself. I'm not good at IT, but I know enough.
To work with great people still add value.
That makes sense. I just wish Fallards would hold on. Hold on. Don't get rid of it, man. Like and why would you? If it's something you're so passionate about.
Find that p
Purpose.
For that purpose.
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I think that's one of the most important
messages that we could possibly get out there. There's two things. Uh I have this idea, this maxim of anti business billionaire, which I'll get to in one second. But
W tr what I'm trying to do is exactly
Uh trying to like
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 is 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 future generations of entrepreneurs, because he writes this autobiography that's excellent, and he tells the story of Trader Joe's.
Ninety percent of the book. Okay, he w he wound up selling Trader Joe's
In like the seventies.
Okay, and he lives for like another like forty years. Ninety percent of the book is
This guy so fired up, he loves Tritter Joe's. He came with new concept.
Ninety percent of the book is just talking about how amazing Trader Joe was.
All the different ideas.
J he's the same personality type that you had, right? But he made the mistake that you didn't. He got scared.

he he he wind up selling, I think it was to Aldi, which still owns the business state if I'm if I'm saying if I 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 neck last ten percent is
Yeah, invest in some real estate.
I did some consulting.
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.

I have to tell you something.
Uh
I was not true to my own self.
I regret selling.
Thank you for listening, Joe Colombo. Okay, that's the last page.
The book is published, he dies the same week.
Gives me chills. Think about that. Yeah he's like don't
Do this.
I sho I wish I had the courage. I wish I wasn't so scared. I wish like a good man. Just just just be honest, right? To everybody. And I wish I didn't do it. Paul Orfalia, the founder of Kincos. I did an episode on him too. He thought, Oh I'm I sell for billions of dollars. I'm a success. He's like, I can't even go in the store.
I can't look at it.
Like I got the money.
But like I don't have exact the purpose. I love the word 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 Ivan Chenard from Patagonia.
It's like these people are just like you.
So obsessed with the quality of the product that they're making.
Right. That is the main goal. I'm going to make a f the b uh the best in the world, right? Then they retain control. And the point I make on this is one of my favorite maximums from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, who also owned a hundred percent of his business. 1919. He owned a hundred he bought out all his whole investors, owned a hundred percent of Ford Motor Company.
Right? It's it's very equivalent. It'd be like owning a twenty billion dollar thing.
He says money comes naturally as a result of service. Stop fucking worrying about the money. If you just serve can you make somebody else's life better?
The you're an actor service, then keep doing that and then figure out a way to scale up.
To serve more people. And guess what? The money will come automatically too. So the anti business billionaires is they put the quality they're obsessed with the quality
product they're making, they retain control, and guess what? If you obsessed
With the quality of the park you're making.
And you retain control, you wind up with the money anyways. Absolutely. Do you think for the right reasons in business, money will come. Yes.
Sales driven.
Do you gonna be do you wanna be profit driven or do you wanna be sales driven? Sales cures all woes. You can graze your sales and we're we're uh number two on average unit volumes.
in uh quick service restaurants, Chick-fil-A than us, I think McDonald's might be a million behind us per per unit.
per restaurant, all the way down to our a lot of our competitors are like a third of what we do sales wise.
But you if you're sales driven, you're gonna do exceptional customer service. You're gonna have more people on shift, right? Than than cutting it shorter to try to save labor. You're gonna uh you need highest quality products to do cravable, all those things that you do.
that do that, then you end up making more profit because you have more sales, you have more c happy customers, you have more repeat business volumes, and you get the volumes and you get flow through dollars and you make more money. This is where the finance industry gets it wrong. And I think Bezos said this perfectly. He's just like No, over the long term
If you put the interest of customers first, and is the interest of the shareholders.
It just takes longer, but that that's where you actually create the value. That's like
Serve the customers and then the your your chairs are McPhone. It's proven time and time again and I'm an example of that. So Jollibee is um is a Filipino concept.
And he was a uh like engineering student. He explained to me, he said, look we if you were smart Filipino kid, your parents are like you're gonna be an engineer.
He's like, I hate an engineer. He goes, like, but we don't tell him he 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. And he goes, that's what I was interested in. I was watching them do the ice cream and run the register. So he started ice cream shop.
Any uh
A burger, then he had a spaghetti, crazy, crazy menu. And became this this like success. He opened that one little ice cream shop, turns it into a restaurant, then he starts growing it. So he's like my goal.
Only be
The largest restaurantur in the Philippines. We set on his goal. He has his fanaticism. All of a sudden McDonald's announces we're going we're going to the Philippines. It's all success that he was selling all these burgers. And his accountant and his like financial people were like, You gotta sell. You gotta sell this this concept's amazing. McDonald's uh started in the US, they're just gonna blow us away. Sell now.
You're gonna make all kind of money, you can live the rest of your life and and be happy. He's like, No, I won't be happy. I like what I do. And he said, What do I do? He said it made me nervous as hell, right? And and and bean counters will do that. They're like and they were showing him what what could happen if McDonald's put him out of business. 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 gonna put the goal, I'm gonna beat McDonald's, and I will be the still be the largest restaurant in all the Philippines. Well he did that. McDonald's came in, he blew them away, he grew all out through the Philippines, get the largest restaurant in all the all the Philippines. Set his next goal, right? Fanaticism, right? I'm not stopping there. I wanna be the largest restaurant tour in all of Asia. Think of all of Asia.
He did that, he did acquisitions of other restaurants and did his largest restaurant on tour in Asia.
Tell me what's next goal. I want to be top five largest restaurateur in the world.
This is what I'm gonna do. This is the big boys, this is the McDonald's, this is all the big ones. That's his next goal. But that fanaticism keeps him going versus getting scared. It's okay to be scared. It's actually a good thing.
But then say, Well, I'm fanatical. I'm gonna beat it. I'm gonna 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 can tell you, believe in yourself like you always did, and don't give up.
Don't give up. You're if you if if you didn't give up when you started, that's the hardest part. You didn't give up when you're growing in that deal, that's the hardest part. Don't give up now. Go, go. And you don't need those other things because if you lose your baby, you lose purpose, then you lose purpose in life. There's other things to do, but it's not your passion. Let's go back to how you're financing this one. And then I want to go to how you finance the
The next chunky. 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, yeah. I had to do it the whole time when I graduated, right? I mean I bartended at night when I was we're working with build business plan and then you know, then then trying to start the business. I'm literally I don't have any uh 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 that were eighteen to twenty two percent interest rates and you can get as many as you wanted with five thousand dollar limits. So that's just what I did. I just said send in, yeah, I have a
job bartending and okay, well sure, here's five thousand dollars uh credit line on this deal, but you're gonna pay twenty to twenty two percent on that. And so I just lived off of that. And you know so but what I did was I had enough money of my own to come back and and to live off of and put into the project.
At that point I was able to raise some preferred shareholders, uh and I raised maybe sixty thousand dollars. These are people. So these are called like angel investors. Yeah, yeah. I mean they're you know, these are like my bookie.
Uh guys I guys I weren't uh uh bowler making it but he's got cash. I'm like sure. If I get to the bank I'm like came from my investor. But I was able to raise that and I was able to get a uh I was able to get a um
a ninety thousand dollar SBA loan. And it was enough money to to for me to come in. I had this place, North Gates and Mellish. I had a wonderful uh real estate broker, one of my mentors, Mr. Red Reynolds. This place had had flipped over so many different times. And he was like I wanted I want for the landlord, landing to Lua Arbor, she was ninety four 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 basically held held the location for a year for me. How impactful were those words of encouragement?
You're young.
Somebody you respect that was a just a good man and a really good good real estate broker, uh I really respect that because he saw that. It was affirmation that w why I was being so fanatical and trying to talk everybody into it.
You know what I mean? Except for the Bull Mackers? He believed in me. I'm like, okay, okay, that's it. That's his little wind of my sales to do this. And basically told her, Hey, it's gonna take him 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 thirty years and we got like a hundred hundred year lease going forward and and and the the family she passed away, but the family's like, No, you know I'm trying to I'm trying to buy. They're like we just have pride in this, you know. So
We'll just keep doing uh just keep doing a lease, I said, but we'll give you a hundred years, you know, and options to to stay in this original location. Do you h do you buy the real estate now for the new stores? Wherever I can.
Absolutely wherever I can I do. Just just good real estate, a a quality real estate. It's just there's so many people that own it. It's part of larger shopping centers, larger developments. A lot of it is in trust, you know, family trust and things like that. But everyone I can buy, I buy. Absolutely. No, no, they just they they they like being a part of it, right? You know, but they give me good I got a good lease term.
uh on here. And plus, you know, w when 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 because I didn't have I really didn't have a lot of money too to come in and and and and and spend much money on this. But this place is sacred, man. I can tell you every square inch and and later on after
after we get in a lot of 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 to all these
But uh but it but it means something, right? And keeping this like this, like like this, I can bring in management to here.
And show'em this place. We have big bu m pretty buildings, all functional, everything, and they come here and go, This is our soul.
Just remember this is this is where we started.
We gotta keep that spirit going here. Dude, the one in Miami Beach by my house looks like a nightclub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge. So credit cards, SBA loan. You said it took a year.
For the development of
So you had the lease before it. Yeah, yeah. No, so they didn't sign a lease that doesn't hold it for but this location was available and I thought it was gonna be awesome. It took two years. Two years from the business plan to where I actually opened up the restaurant. It took me two years. And so literally from writing the business plan from class, going to the banks, getting turned down.
working in uh refineries, then working in um in Alaska for the summer, then coming back that fall.
And we opened in ninety six, so it'd be the fall of ninety five when I got back.
Then so I had s had somebody on the deal, I went, got that S S BA loan and got the got the investors and from there then we started the construction process, we started getting the used equipment and look at the equipment I went, I got from from I went into Houston and Dallas.
restaurant supply houses'cause you know, restaurant businesses go out. Nine out of ten go out of business. I could go buy stuff and I'm like I need a fryer that'll work sixty days. Like give me your cheapest fryers. They had to be eighty five pound fryers. And they're like, well this one's good. I'm like, yeah, it's ten times as much. Like I need something to last because I know as soon as I prove this will work, I know I can get another loan.
You know, thank goodness we made money. And so we we 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's little registers. And once they figured out how to program'em, I went and started waving people in the restaurant and people came and people liked it. And then we made thirty dollars the first month. That's what we made. People are 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 payrolls taken care of, I can pay the vendors. We're working, and steadily off of that we started making more and more money. I could replace equipment as we went. Just basically dumped everything back into the restaurant. And sure enough, I was like, like, this is working great. We can go to the other side of campus.
And we can go in and do that. I brought the business plan to the SBA lenders that did us and I got to that one literally eighteen months later I was able to buy the piece of property, construct a new building.
And open up eighteen months after the first one. It took two years to start the f this first one on a shoestring budget. The second one, I have a piece of property.
And I got a brand new building that we opened up and it showed efficiencies there. And what was really amazing with that location.
is that it was on the other side of campus, it also had traffic flow from neighborhoods, office buildings, things like that. So we had not just students coming in, all of a sudden we had, you know, businessmen and women coming in for lunch. We had moms and dad picking up food on the way home. We had T ball teams on Saturday. We had church groups on Sunday. And that's when I got the vision.
I was like, this ain't just a college concept. I thought it was. I thought it was 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
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 turned me on with that deal, right? What do you mean it wasn't articulated that way. The vision was there. I just didn't put it down. And so I'm like I asked myself, you know, it's like I was like, you know
Why do you want location all the world? I'm like,'Cause 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 I get
I get turned on by customers coming in and loving the food. I'm like, and I'm gonna keep giving them quality chicken finger mail meals, that cravable product. And I was like, now I'm able to give money back to the community. I'm like, and I wanna be able to give money back to the community, that active involvement. I'm like
But we have this cool culture, man. I wanna I wanna emulate that other places. I wanna 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 you screwed up. Yeah, it was in the the crowd, there's no music in the kitchen. Can you imagine working back there? It was just negative environment because the manager was was negative because the owner.
Didn't appreciate everybody. You know what I mean? So it was just this negative feeling. I can get people from other other other restaurants where they're not treated right, and they're not like good and good customer service. They come here, they're treated right, they have a good environment, we got music crank in the kitchen, we're having fun, we're a team, and it's positive man motivational management. It is like
Good job. Hey, thanks for thanks for uh for taking the stuff out to the the trash out to the dumpster. Wow, that's good toast. Hey, good job on the ship, man. That's how you motivate people. Praise costs nothing and means everything. Means everything. Absolutely, man. And this teamwork and it's good. And also too, is why I like op uh I love operators is it's like when I was on the football team. It's constant coaching.
Oh yeah, it's good pass. Oh man, you screwed that up, man. Like make sure your arm goes back and you know, hey, block hard or do this, you know, like you're getting constantly coached.
And nobody takes it bad. Nobody takes criticism bad because it's all about
Doing better, winning the game. It's all the same thing in the kitchen. You're like
Hey man, toast toast needs to hurry up.
Hey, great, that's great toast. Like you can mix those things in a corporate environment.
And this is how you get weeded out of Kane's corporate is the people that
Can't take constant constant coaching.
And it's coaching, right? You know, it's like well no, we should we should meet every six months on a 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, make mistakes and 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 don't address that issue. You just say, Oh, we're doing dah dah da. It's just like, hey man, we screwed up on this, we learned this, we're gonna do this differently, let's move on.
Like it takes all of thirty seconds when you create that kind of environment.
like in a coaching situation or in operations that's that's that's 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.
Uh you don't you don't wanna be you don't one you don't want to make mistakes and two you don't want you don't want to be you don't wanna be coached. It's this academia
type of uh of things like that like, look, man, I'm learning every day. And I I'm the first one to always say, Man, I screwed up on that. That was a bad decision. Then the team knows
Hey well once it's validation, two, he doesn't think he knows everything, and two, it's okay for me to make mistakes, you know, we we we but we do need to learn from'em. Like Tom's not gonna make that same mistake over and over.
Like we know that and and I won't either, right? And so that's some of the uh the challenge in growth and in in in in restaurant growth.
We get the operators and and if you're an operator man, you just have that culture. And we we have to get is people that are intrinsically motivated.
Right. And so we can pay people really well because we do we do good, but the 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 VP executive all these like titles and stuff like that. People are like title.
Crunching up, I can literally interview somebody w 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
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.
They have the intelligence to do it. But it's heart. It's 100% heart, but if 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. But 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 separate from the crew.
Corbett environments like i w like when I started up, I w I was the first guy to wear a Canes T shirt.
to like conferences. Yeah. 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. Like, you know, it was it was this business mentality from here. You're separated from the customer because you're not in your restaurant seeing who's 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 different title. You know the Schwab Tire Company on the West Coast?
Okay, I'm gonna f I'm gonna send you his book. It's very hard to find. Um I found this because Charlie Munger's like one of my heroes and
he you know, the he had he had like the a 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 Lush,'cause he sounds exactly what you're saying, where
He competed in very difficult business. You come into
Fast food QSRs is like 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 sixties. The business is named after him. Okay. So and 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 sixty on a fifty year old typewriter. He goes, This is how I want the business to run. If the business is not gonna be run this way, take my name off the business. Take my name off the business. And he's like,
you know, old school guys 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 if you're out you're you're gonna love this guy. I already know this for a fact. I'll send it to you. Uh he's like if you spend thirty days outside of a store, you forgot half of what you know.
І за бизлай евий син, хіза, ви е зіст.
To serve the people that are serving our customers. Why we call it a restaurant support office. We're not calling it a support office. We are a restaurant support office. We're here to support
the people that are serving our customers, a hundred percent. We have these monitors set up
In our offices.
It has restaurants and you can pull up any restaurant, our whole system.
I want people when they're leaving the our office, our restaurant support office
To see
There's people still working.
Right. When they get there in the morning, there's people opening up.
Doing the restaurant, doing it. There's constantly working. So you see it every day. You're walking by that every day. You're like
Ladies and gentlemen.
That's where we do our business and our job is to support them because when you go to bed at night, they're gonna be working.
When you get up in the morning they're gonna be opening the restaurants. We got seventy five thousand 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 keep that going. Like and say you have to like
Yeah, so is entrepreneurs are very uh erratic, unscheduled that. You know what I mean? Like so you know, most of us. So it's a general deal. It's like the people are like, What's your schedule like? I'm like, My schedule's all the time.
Everywhere, however, whatever. It could be three o'clock in the morning. Are my eyes open? Yeah, it's literally it is. It means I can take off a a day and go go plom a mountain. I'm gonna do that. Whatever call for the business.
then you answer that. So there there is no schedule, there is no that. And so the discipline comes from the focus and the fanaticism. You're always gonna be there, you're gonna do it. But there are there are the things you have to structure and do it. And so like for me as to scale, I created the Keynes 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 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 fourth? No.
I know. I wanna be my family and friends, I wanna enjoy the holiday. I wanna take off Christmas Eve, I wanna not work on uh on Christmas Day. I w I wanna be you know, holidays and things like that, I wanna be there. So if I respect my crew members, if I'm not gonna work, you're not gonna 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 fourth I was open at this restaurant.
I saw the crew was dragging. I was here w working with them, right? But they're like uh'cause all their friends were doing something fun, their family do something fun. I was like, You know what, that's not worth it. So that's respect. Recognition.
It's something you should you should recognize achievement. You should recognize tenure. You should recognize all these things. It starts from less of simple things like hey, that's great toast. Thanks being so friendly in the drop through. Then they loved you today. It's things like that.
You work a year raising cane, you get a hard hat. Symbolize the first year I was there. All crew member signs and it's fun, right? Five years you're getting the the salmon. Those are the rec recognizing things, recognizing that deal, and rewarding. So it's like whether it's a you know a a five dollar 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 and I don't want to m I wanna 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 respect, recognizing, and 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
versus saying here's the gift card or here's here's a new Kane's hat or things like that. It's like build a point system, right? It's kinda fun, right? You do like
You know, you come in, you get it for every year you work, every month you work, you build shifts, right? Like hey, so so and so was sick, do you mind coming in and work and they come in? You get points, so on building up a really exclusive type merch and stuff you could build up to and do, but like constantly getting better at that, raising the bar. But have people around that. Not just the field. You have to put programs and things around
These great thoughts. You have to get structure to do that. Sometimes that's tough for an entrepreneur.
One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever read in a book is came from Mary Kay, who built that massive remember the Mary Kay cosmetics.
Yeah.
And I feel Mary Kay was a master at 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 principal for her salespeople.
Sounds like 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 I'm, you know, kind of obsessed.
And
That just knowing that is like actually helped me.
Interact with other people better.
And to kinda 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. 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. Absolutely. It does work. Words of encouragement matter. And so I remember reading
uh biography of Henry Ford or uh already mentioned. And at the time he was like a he was a
He was not successful.
All the cars that were on the road
at that time were either electric or steam. That's what people don't understand. It's like electric cars are not new. They were the default at the very beginning. He had this idea to make one with an internal combustion engine.
Because he's like then the fuel source you carry the fuel source with you.
Right.
And so hinds up meeting.
Thomas Edison at the time Henry Ford

Henry Ford
No one knows who he is. He's not successful. I think he's already failed tw he had two or three f uh two failed
uh car companies before he finally succeeded was to start too. Again, just I'm common no matter what.
Thomas Edison is the most famous person, one of the most famous people in the country. He has a hard time hearing. They're at dinner like a huge dinner.
And Henry but
Henry Ford's an engineer, and so he gets a 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 obvio obviously brilliant, he just gets it right away. And he goes he s hits the table.
And he goes, That's it, young man. You have it.
Keep at it.
And then Henry Ford says in his autobiography, which he's writing forty 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 gonna keep going, but a little boost was very freaking helpful. And I heard
Edison, my hero saying
You're good at this. You have a good idea. Don't give up.
I think it's really important. Yeah, absolutely is. But it's our own encouragement.
He had it. You know, and so uh sometimes tough love. I had to learn that on on um short tank. Tough love is also
when you get different entrepreneurs and things like that, and sometimes the ideas aren't good. And I I wasn't good at it. Like I it was always encouraging and you'll find a way and do. But like on Shark Tank, they're like, hey man, you're gonna have to learn tough love. Like Cuban newbie, right? And then then being around Mr Wonderball, then they're like
I know it's heartbreaking, but sometimes the ideas aren't good.
And or the or they're doing it the wrong way and you're not doing them a service doing it that way. So the tough love is to say
Say a disbet help them.
To focus on what's really important. Like I cannot stand.
I said this in the episode I did about you. It's just like
The future's unpredictable.
Like if you read history as much as any like I think I read history more than almost anybody else. Like all it is is humans failing to predict the future accurately. Why would you sit there and you think you sit on a stage with a in a suit and a bunch of makeup on and tell say this kid's not gonna succeed. Fuck you. How about that? Like let's see how it actually's gonna go. I hate people that do that. Yeah and so my idea is like
I obviously there's a sheet uh millions of founders listen to the founders. And I get emails and all this kind of stuff and we have conversations. It's like what do you think?
У 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 are like, There's too many podcasts out there.
It's like two thousand it was ten years ago. There's no podcasts out there. Yeah, like no one's gonna listen to a solo podcast. No one's gonna listen to a podcast where you can't make a living reading books for l like that's ridiculous. It's like
It doesn't matter. I just I I actually hate that show, no offense to them. But it's just like the idea of
I'm
I'm all knowing, I'm an expert. There is no such thing as an expert in entrepreneurship. You know what you're gonna be an expert in?
Raising canes. You're an expert in raising canes. And I'm sure you have a ton of ideas, which are obviously
Transferable to other businesses. But 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.
So
might be the most successful venture capitalist of all time, he's at Sequoia.
He invested in PayPal, which is a successful exit. Okay, they sold it to
Uh.
eBay for I don't know, one point eight billion dollars, something like that.
If you want exits. So they sell that.
Then
He 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 just made money with me.
Michael's like
You're trying to compete with Toyota, 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 to shame Michael because in the book later on he goes
That was saying years later he goes.
That was his 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 that m it might take them five years, might take them ten years. There's a book next to me that I just showed you.
Uh before we start, okay? The reason that I've read four hundred biographies of uh of history's greatest entrepreneurship, yeah. So I've read that book l 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 four hundred books that I've read
That this is my number one recommendation.
Із на аселеціо.
Ninety percent of this book.
Is
James Dyson failing.
He goes to
Five thousand one hundred and twenty seven prototypes і get screwed over by

Uh
Partners.
Join ventures.
He was just like you.
Please
I wanna 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 you own 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 it's forty four.
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 s to say to not give up.
Right.
But
There was times when
Yeah.
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 and I cry himself to sleep, covered in dust. That's what his kids see.
But he's like
So it's easy for me to say.
Like not to give up.
But because I'm on the other side of that. And at the where the book ends, he goes.
They have one product, which is the vacuum cleaner. They're in one market and they're doing three hundred million a year in sales. And then what happens?
Now his company's doing billions of dollars a year. And he's got he's all over he's got a a bunch of different products. He's in all markets all across the world. The compounding between forty four and seventy five 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
Paint.
And you see that over and over again. It is, a hundred percent is. It really is. And founders need and they work with their heart and soul. Yeah, absolutely.
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For me, you know, when I was growing
and 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 examples, bad examples. Like
People start saying stuff like, Hey look you know, Todd, you you're just you're you you're so much in the details that you you just need to delegate.
The delegate hated hearing that word delegate. I mean
Explain to me. I've I've heard that explain. Explain delegating to me. What do you mean by that? Well delegate means you give up the I'm like no, I know what the the word means, but how do I this how do I delegate this off? Well you you just hard good people and and you delegate you delegate them to do the work.
Now mine.
I hire good people.
And
Let's say at a hundred point scale, if I can if I can do it at ninety five.
Pretty good. No but not no that's perfect, but let's say operations. I'm I'm in a ninety five.
But if I hire somebody good, but they end up being eighty five.
But we need to be at that ninety five to have success.
I can't just delegate that, I have to supplement.
And over time, they might get to the ninety five. So at that point that they're at the ninety five, then I'm like, hey, you can run this good. Then they get to ninety six. Hey you can run this better than me. So now I'm gonna now I'm gonna ease off on some of those things that I was supplementing on the deal is, but I'll still still check and make that 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, y you all this you're down to the minutiae and all this stuff. You're wasting your time doing that stuff. You should be big picture. You should be there. I'm like well, yeah, yeah, you gotta be big picture too. But the but the but the devil's in the details on this thing is and so I got reaffirmed.
by this and this is uh Edison's West large shipping company here in Louisiana.
And actually was w one of his partners.
In another shipyard.
Business.
had told me oh w when I when I was explaining this to my YPO forum business group and say and people are saying I'm just too much in the details are like, hey
Gary Swiss knows exactly what the bottled water costs at it at his place. And he's like, look, and there's there's 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 twenty five percent too much on bottled water and and people aren't going up to the thing and getting out of the big thing and they're they're using which is wasteful two little bottled waters, it means they're doing that in every phase of the business. So knowing those details, but that reaffirmation of me going, yes, me into the details matter. So
I say you don't delegate, you hire great people, you help them in do it, and if they do it better than you, then you can back off and you make sure all those components of the business. Look, I'm not great at IT, I have an exceptional IT team.
They do it better than me, but I'm still into the details to make sure we're doing what we need to do. We're supporting our operators we're doing and we're being innovative and we're getting faster in drive throughs and doing it. Well, a co CEO in the business is a much better operator than me.
I'm still to in the details with him and the business and I know enough about it. I'm good at it to add value in the deal is so the word delegation's used way too much, like trust your instincts.
learn and grow and let people grow themselves
But B
Into what they do and absolutely stay into the details of your business. If that's what made you successful, don't lose those things. Get better at it, get more efficient, get the reports and things like that.
And I 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 in the things that stick to what you know. Second on a concept, man, I'm fully believe
Be good at one thing and do it better than anybody else. Be relentless, I do it better than anybody else. Can you expand on but that

Sometimes you can just hear a person say a sentence.
Like what you just said about delegation. It's like
If I that's the first thing I ever heard, I was like I know him.
I'm like the I feel that way too. Walt Disney has a great line about this, right?
If we lose the details, we lose everything.
These are not after this is not something you think about after is like this is what makes the magic you call it cravable, like the magical experience, like why there's you people have an emotional reaction.
To your company.
Right. Like you v your product evokes emotion just like his evoked emotion. Right. But the reason the very first I didn't
I was unaware of raising case. There weren't any in Florida where I live. I um
And I actually saw a clip when you were on Theo Vaughan's podcast. It was a TikTok.
And you said something and I was like, I know him.
Like I I have to find out who this is. Yeah. And then my brother in law lives in um 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, lunch and dinner.
The whole week I was there. Yeah, but this is what I'm obsessed with. This is exactly what Harry Snyder uh thought the way he thought as well.
It's not just the principle of doing one thing, doing better and everything else. It's just like how it applies to every single thing. And you talked about in that podcast where it's just like, well, simple menu uh has all these other positive effects that you know you can really focus again, all the details good, you can make it better. But also you even had the concept that
It's going to allow you in the future to serve more people.
Because it's a 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. I what I wanted was what I wanted was
Crable product.
Yeah, you know, and new from restaurants. You had that the one critical 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 carbonara, 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 gonna be nothing to anybody, right? You have to be what people will be fanatical about. What they in the restaurant because it's cravable. So but what I what I want to do is create that cravable product there by doing then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive through, right? And so it starts from when customer pulls up to the to the order deal. The first time in a raising games, 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 whatever their whatever their order is. So the order's quick.
Coming to the drive through we have a single product.
Focus, right?
For that one menu item, we have one line, I'll take it back to the kitchen later. You can see down the line.
toast is grilled on the end, you got the chicken fryers, you got the 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 you're making one basically one meal just with
three, four, six chicken fingers. So you can make an assembly quicker. You have your your your drinks that are popular, comes up in and out, it gets out there. Thank you very much for your for your order and you go through.
And so then I saw the speed on that deal. So it's like
Our concepts.
Cravable food spur served with fast food, speed, and convenience. That's what it is, right? Fast food, speed, and convenience, cravable product. So the both of those together.
Yeah.
I added menu items, right?
Then he would slow me down.
Right.
And that say well get 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're then adding heat lamps. And we don't have heat lamps we don't cold times we don't any of that stuff. Right in that cook to order process. So like you go in and out burger. You know what you want and you're cooking ahead. So it's literally like
You're looking at now if you if you show up, you're the first customer at Raising Cains could take you four minutes to get your order.
Four to five minutes.
We're dropping the chicken, we're doing that. But when the when the when the line picks up, then you're cooking a little bit ahead, then you know during your rushes you're cooking way ahead. You're just meaning it's coming out, it's getting served immediately, right? We're two minutes thirty five seconds drive through and counter service, right?
For if we added different products.
And we lost two seconds. Every two seconds that I can get faster.
Is a point.
on sale. So but just say it's roughly one percent. If we do
Six billion in sales this year. What's one per six million? Six sixty million dollars in sales you can do if you can tweak that, tweak that.
That
That
Order time two seconds. Now it flips on the other side, right? If if you add two seconds, you add two seconds, you add two seconds, is then those sales go down and then the flow through dollars. Once you get to the flow through point, then you then you lose less money. So not having all those different things, it keeps the concept. So that's knowing what your concept is and sticking to that concept.
Then you know what what here's the engine, here's what drives, here's what drives sales, what eventually drives profitability, it does. There's other benefits too.
In the restaurant business, you look at the 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 it's they learn that, they do that. It's a distraction of what you do. Then the next sixty 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 cells of actation, 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. Where's the time to walk out and talk to the customers and actually see
Their food. How clean is our is our restaurant right now? What's the general vibe here? Oh wait, the music's a little lower, someone knocked it down. Where's those things? So our management can focus on that, the crew member and customer experience and make sure that goes because they're not these LTOs they have to learn, go through training modules and do that. 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 don't happen. They're like you're not gonna get the frequency because you need frequency gets driven by different menu items because you get that all that stuff. Our frequency is just as high as any other quick service restaurant, meaning how many times somebody comes back in a month period of time. I see the door dash bills, I know how frequently you come back.
It's like there's there's no veto boat.
There's no there's no uh variety drives more sales. It's actually frequency, our frequency is as high as anybody else's serving the exact same thing people have day in, day out, because it's good. Because it's good. Our competitors can run chicken, finger chicken, straight up, 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 they're coming back in their chicken.
Chicken finger meal from us because it's the best. You know, it's actually it actually I love it when they run all these specials, they do all this stuff because it adds more it adds more advertising out there for chicken fingers, and we're known for the chicken fingers, man. It's like when I when when I want people to talk about chicken fingers, chicken strips, whatever they're talking about, Bono's chicken being dipped, I want them to say grays and canes in their mind. Like Xerox. You know, it's not a cop anymore. Go give me a Xerox.
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, cravable product with fast food, speed, and convenience and being friendly and doing that. When you focus on that day in, day out, the whole organization is around that, then you can look at stuff like Cain's glove. You have time to do those other things that enhance that crew member experience. And when crew's happy.
They're gonna be they're gonna be friendly to your customers. That th that's why people come back. They don't just come back to Kane's cause of the food's so craving, but come back because
They know it's gonna be food safe, they know people are gonna be friendly, they know people are appreciate, right? Customers wanna be appreciated, they wanna say thank you for your food and peop our people mean that. It's like we appreciate you spending your hard hard earned dollars here. In fact, they wanna go to the restaurant, it's gonna be clean. Those things get you that repeat business. Yeah, we went to we landed and went went directly to one last night and
Just greeting every single person that went to the door.
Like I it was like how obsessive.
Again, focusing on one thing and being the best in the world at it, right?
To me that's
Should be
Completely obvious.
I think humans crave simplicity, but our default state is we tend to overcomplicate things. So your competitors like okay.
Todd's just gonna have
Chicken fingers.
I'm gonna 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 gotta say we're gonna do chicken fingers, but we're gonna have a hundred different sauces.
People go back and get their same sauce. They might come try it one time, and then there's also slowing down their order process, 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 narrow down to three sauces. What are the what are the most popular? Narrow down your menu items. You're seeing more and more
Buy nine restaurants.
narrowing their menu. It's happening. I'm not saying I I was 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 fifty different menu items on the stage.
Uh and you know it's a three star Michelin restaurant, it's ten seats. Maybe you can get me in. I can't actually. I have a friend that knows how to do it. So Jiro's uh uh really old, so he he only comes in frequently, but his son was the one that served us, but like you don't even get to choose. You sit down and he's like
I'm the best in the world I might do, and I'm gonna you sure it. Brilliant. It's actually nice. I don't have to think of as long as you can get in.
No, not to think of anything else. Like the like the uh what's the w the the restaurant that has a like a book this size. Something um
California uh kitchen.
Cheesecake Factory Cheesecake Factory. I don't go there. It's like I don't want homework. Like I got other shit in my head. I don't want to think about it. This is what we love. It's like last night we were like, okay, what do you want?
You want three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, or six? 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.
Wolf.
They they're the franchise model.
Why did you not choose to go down that path? Yeah.
Like one of the obvious ways to do it. And so everybody was franchising. Why do they do that? Well, I mean there's a lot of advantages. One is uh less capital costs. If you can grow off franchisees money. So let's say you have a good concept, you have a few 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 uh take in a lot of debt to do that. Restaurants are very expensive. You can't, you know, you literally and that's not a manufacturing plan, if I could do all chicken fingers from one location, send it out, right, the cost wouldn't be there, the capital costs. But y every every month is a new restaurant, a lot of money. So people are like
You can grow in different areas.
and to use other people's money to grow. There's also um the thought of that other restaurateurs will bring other things to the table, other knowledge. They're good in their regions, they know the local knowledge better and it's better to grow that way.
And do it. But I think mainly it's the money play. It's literally we don't keep growing with our capital, we'll take a royalty off the deal. So I had the model of like I'm gonna go
fifty percent. I knew I wanted to go company, but I'm like I'm not gonna be able to grow fast enough and I'm not gonna have the capital to be able to grow in all the areas. So I got
really great people from the industry. People that were CEOs and other great big billion dollar businesses and they're good people. They're people that I trust trusted in good people. And so I'm like that will fuel my company growth, right? Getting franchise royalties in and I'll be able to grow will grow quicker. And so I did open up in different pockets of the country. I opened up in Ohio, opened up in Minnesota, opened up in
Nevada, over these these different areas.
And they were good franchisees. And because I had the f real friendship with them, we could talk through any problems or anything like that.
The thing is they operated, we were saying we'll say we're at 95 out of 100. They were about eighty five out of a hundred, which I think other franchisees were like sixty five out of a hundred, honestly, on what they're doing. So the other people have been thrilled with those franchisees, but that eighty-five
To ninety five gap drove me crazy. And I was just like, I know we could operate these better. I know I could do it better. We had test it in our company restaurants, we knew it made us faster or it was better for management and crew, it was a better system.
To talk them into changing that system took so much time that was just totally inefficient because it's their business that you you had to respect to show them like ah this doesn't work for us because it's different so like
Well what's different? The crew and and customer customers are exact same in both these areas. No, we just like it better this way. We think da.
Or even crazy things, like well, we don't want to get that much faster because we like the the longer interactions. Like well, the longer interaction Well you can still be just as friendly but quick as they want to get out the door anyway, but talking them into things took
too long. And I was spending and me and the team were spending too much time on something that should have been implemented overnight. And I'm like the our company restaurants, once we test it out and like five restaurants and we felt good about it.
our operator said, Man, great system, boom, let's roll it. And so that time was less efficiency on us building the business and making our existing restaurants better and getting higher same restaurant sales. And so I ended up buying all them back.
And uh they did really well and they were great and they they they're all happy and actually too is they looked at like a more of a merger'cause we kept their teams and they had more opportunities for growth and it it it it worked out really well. But for me it's like you know, franchise the
Is never gonna run it.
like you do, because it's your baby, it's your thing, and they're not getting quite as personally.
And they're not quite as fanatical as you are, right? I'm a fro cooking cashier, man. That's what I live to do, right? And they were
Eighty five. That was at ninety-five. And so and I could I could hire the people that had those same types of values as I did. And so like franchising for me.
It's just you're gonna lose quality service, you're gonna lose those things, and you're also gonna lose a tremendous amount of efficiency because you're talking into things versus just adopt something system wide really quick. So we got way more efficient when we bought them out. We actually operated ninety five, sales went up in all the franchise markets. Sales went up.
Wages went up, everything went up, and it actually it proved out better. So look, I I I I think it works for some organizations. I for me personally, especially in the restaurant business, I think the company model just rules.
You know, a lot of people
the like hey like what should I work on this or w what what's the uh idea I should pursue
And uh I actually get this idea from uh 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. You just 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
Um he you know, he was in his early twenties, 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 of the president and help him. And the guy's like twenty years older than him.
And I found an interview with that guy who's now in his eighties talking about what it was like working with Michael Down in his twenties.
And he's like, you know, I I loved it, but it can only last four years.
Because we're we're playing for high stakes. There's a thousand other computer companies we're
Taking on some of the biggest companies in the world. He's like, So after four years like
I'm losing my hair. My back hurts. Like I got digest. He's like I got digestive issues. I'm drinking too much. And he goes, and Michael
Is
Mm.
Dwell he's like energized because then he's headed in this great line, he goes because Michael built a business that was natural to him.
It was unnatural to me where my body is shutting down, and Michael's like, Yes, let's do this like natural as a better
description than authentic. It has to be natural to the creator, it has to be natural to the founder. Absolutely.
I spend
eight hours of straight hand
editing the transcript that no one gives a shit about because
I care about it.
Everyone tells me outsource, delegate, they use that word all the time.
No, I don't want to delegate. Like I wanna feel it. I have a feeling for it. That's common in everybody that's that's successful, I believe. The p time period you're describing, where in Cain's history was this happening?
For the franchising? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean I me I was that five years into it? Uh yeah, probably three years I started talking about it. Because when no no no so so for second restaurant was was second restaurant was eighteen months after the first restaurant. Okay.
Then from there I had an opportunity when I really knew I wanted to grow. And that's when my partner got out, which was really interesting. You said it has to be natural to you.
My partner Craig who was
Great. He loved the finance part of it. He loved the IT. He loved the business administration stuff. He wasn't a fry cook like me. And he's like, Todd, when when when I get a nine off, I get a nine off. I'm gonna read the Wall Street Journal.
He goes, you know what you do? You get a night off. You're you're writing new schedules that lead better on the dealers. He's like, I just just doesn't make me happy. And so he but he ended getting uh we didn't have much money to buy out then, but he he ended up getting a scholarship way for us, did business, he did all the things he did. He actually came back to Keynes for several years doing the things he likes to do.
Uh has his own business now. He does he does really well. Still one of my dear friends. But it wasn't happening. He had the courage to say
I don't
I don't like this. Like this is all we're doing is is is is is being fry cooks. Doesn't turn me on. It doesn't do it. And so like I 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 I'm working, I'm not working now. I mean like I'll I'll be at the beach and it's like
You know.
Checking in and we got calls and I'm well roll heads on the beach, you know, you're talking, doing and then you get back to hey, what's happening, Margarita. You know, it's like it's a part of what you do. So you have to do what you love, right? You have to and if you do, you'll never you'll never work. Words like career.
It's not a career. It's a passion. It's just what you do. It's the same thing as I get up and I go take a walk and I love my dogs, I love my business, I love my kids. Things like that are what makes
makes the difference in being whole.
I believe. So one of the disadvantages of having other partners in your business is that
They might have
different goals in mind that you have in your business, right? So an entrepreneur and a founder brings on an equity partner, whether it's an individual or whether it's a professional group, private equity.
I mean very careful.
on what their motives are. And if their motives is is about a financial return, you're generally gonna end up bad because you have a you have a fiduciary responsibility
to the other owners of your business to meet their their goals, right? And if those goals are financial,
on that deal is it can change your thinking. You change your thinking on quality in my in my business. You could change
You could try to
lower food to make more profitability, which is a short term game. You could you could cut wages.
Right, and so your crew members aren't as happy, they're not as appreciated on the on the deal. You could try to do different avenues of sales just to raise sales that's
gonna lose your focus. There's all kind of bad things that go with that.
Only way I do a partner if they believe a hundred percent in what you believe in.
And then you also believe that they're not gonna
sell that stock to somebody else that doesn't in the future. And rarely does that work out. Especially you hold on to your equity.
Take the risk.
Get more financing, but keep it yours because you'll always be able to protect your baby. You know what makes it work work better than anybody else.
I have one thing to add to I think it's super important that you said that.
There is this the 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 there's this investor named Nick Sleep who write these legendary um
Let uh 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 he he
They wound up being very tax efficient.
But
If you look at his combined wealth that came from Walmart, right? That's still concentrated in the family t last time I looked it up was like a month ago. It's like four hundred and thirty two billion dollars. 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?
It's like I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing this because I wake up with a burning desire he says something like he wakes up with a burning desire every day to improve something. And he was 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 two hundred 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 a
Underlying reason to that because
Work is going to be a grind. You are going to run in times where you are
crying when you're in pain every day you want to give up, and if you don't love it.
You will give up because you're sane. 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 irrational, they make better products. That's right. And then customers
You know how many people I've told about raising canes?
Like I didn't meet him before I knew I was gonna met you uh I was gonna meet you.
She's'cause 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. Nonprofit. No one keeps it to themselves. Humans don't do that. They're just like you gotta have this chicken. This is just great it's incredible.
And so that it all this stuff, the love, the staying in s being hyperfocused, staying in something for a long time. Mildly obsessive and compulsive. Mildly obsessive and compulsive. Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh, it's funny you say that because um there's this line in this elon biography. So Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, he only ever joined two boards.
And he was best friends with Steve Jobs, he's on Apple's board, he's good friends with Elon, Elon consistent mentor, he's on Tessa's board. And he's like, Oh and he was asked one time.
What do they both have in common?
O C D. O C D What do I have in common? Like it's obvious like what what they have in common to him. Yeah, being bolly obsessive balsam is actually a good thing.

I I 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 s you had to be so good at your job.
That somebody wrote a book about your life. And in cases of people I'm super fascinated with, like you, it's like uh oh no no book? Fine, I'm gonna 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.
Um, it's the the same with the personalities like whether you're playing basketball or you're you're building raise and cane. So wait, so how many years uh of doing a franchise you're like shit.
This is not the right move. Yeah, I mean so it was exciting getting in, it was exciting to open up uh new restaurants, exciting to teach what we do and do well, exciting to learn. Um
A couple years into is when I started seeing the lack of efficiencies and a little bit less you know, like since 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 of years into it, I started seeing it, we bought'em out probably about the ten year mark, which was good because they were able to grow there and make good money. Another advantage of having company owned restaurants is the business is valued way higher. Like for franchises, you'll get
You you get a valuation of the six percent you're getting off that restaurant. That's part of their deep, but it's but it's based off a valuation of where franchises markets go. So let's say franchise multiples
Awfully a bit uh minus debt. Parents multiple would be like
Four to seven percent.
is what they could sell in their market, right? We're trading on not trading in a trade, but we're valued on over twenty times IDA. Those company restaurants
go into that. So the profitability that goes into all of it gets on that that higher multiple. That's why we have a twenty billion plus valuation for the business. So it's a it's a better better valuation model, too, if you do company. Okay, so let's go.
From
Two.
How did you finance
When you got it to twenty eight.
Oh man. So this is this is interesting, man. I said I said, look, after the second restaurant I had an opportunity to go into some of these failing uh double drive through burger places and so Greg got Dr. Hill, another great mentor of mine. He's like, look, we're just not operators, man. We we we they had like thirty something, you know, they could call fast track and then burger joints. We're down to like four.
of just our best units and our best we consolidated the best crew.
We just we wanna be landlords, like we're not operators. And you can use the equipment, you can have all this. Look, uh uh whatever you need and look just we'll give you cheaper at.
And so i I didn't want to go into them because I was like, it was these like double dry throughs. I thought like, you know, this place had a lot of soul, big dine-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're we can do well we can do well all over town.
And we went into those places, we just painted them, used the equipment they had in there, and we started just doing sales, man. I mean, like people loved it everywhere and they loved it. And so eventually turned all those into
big, you know, dine in dry through locations. So I d was able to do that into a mall food court. So I'm able to get all these places. So we went from what is that, two to eight restaurants. We opened five restaurants in five months, man. We started rolling, made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot, burned myself out, like like I couldn't be in 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 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 gonna come up with a prototype.
Like what is Raisin Cain's ultimate location, the prototype I wanna do, and I want to do it out of town and so out of Baton Rouge.
Why we chose that. Because 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 can really do. So Lily, one year I'm like, no more growth.
We're gonna we're gonna set up what the prototype is. And by the prototype, I didn't mean just just architectural design, kitchen design, and where our look and feel was. Everything marketing systems, human resource systems, training systems.
Everything globally.
And I had a I I I used to go to restaurant conferences to learn.
From people who are experienced.
I was able there to get I know the I know the marketing guy, I know the human resources training and operations person, I know the you know the the crew relations. So I was able to assemble a team together with architects and with uh interior designers.
And branding people and was able to assemble a team coming in. We call them partners, not consultants, is like they were partnered into the success of the business. And we came with that first prototype, race and chains opened up in Lafayette, and we just went gangbusters, dude. We killed it. It was just like we had operational efficiencies, our drive throughs got faster, we could stack more people around the restaurant. I had all these really good people that came in and engaged.
Davis great that 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 Rachel Caines One Love. All those things went into it. Comboing meals, I didn't combo, I had you know it was the box.
And a drink. And then we sometimes combo it because people make it easier. You don't have to decide to. It's like just get get those menu items.
And we created that. And so but I got that on another commensual low. Now I'm like, you know, with the money coming in and doing this thing is I'm bankable, but I'm not bankable to where I want to grow, which ended up being the twenty eight. And so back then bank regulations were a lot uh more lenient, man. So what what I said was
Why don't we go in?
to all these commun to go to these community banks. 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 who had those fast tracks. He wanted to be landlord. He also liked the new deals and he said, Hey, let me buy equity in the company.
I don't want to have equity partners, uh, but I'll give you a sub debt a sub debt deal. So Dr. Hill, let's say I borrow$200,000 from you. I'll give you a fifteen percent interest.
Right. Subordinated debt. I mean this is a one page deal. Subordinated debt means subordinated to the banks. I know I can take that.
That
That's subordinated debt.
At two hundred thousand.
And the bank will look at that as equity, right? So it's two hundred two hundred thousand dollar and a million dollar deal. So I could go into the to to to 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 my rent for thirty days. I had to pay my vendors for thirty days.
You know, all those things came so 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 I was young. I was 10 fin toll in Bulletproof or gonna work. I mean I'd have zero fear of any kind of risk uh on debt, right? And so I was going in, creating cash, doing this stuff. I get up to twenty eight restaurants and all of a sudden we have a we have a storm coming in named Katrina.
coming into Louisiana. We're used to used to hurricanes. We knew what to do. We put crew to safety, shut down the restaurants, buckled everything down. Hurricanes would come through. We open up the next day. We'd have some power outage, whatever.
But Katrina was different'cause it came up, went over to New Orleans and it hovered.
And then the levee's broke, right? And we're watching on TV from our second location across here, where you all go
We got this whatever crickets up this power to where we could actually watch television and when the levee's broke or 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 gonna take a while to open up.
And every single Kane's location is
Twenty one out of the twenty-one out of the twenty-eight were down from either power to damage to flooding to whatever it was. And so no cash is coming in. I got the company's levered to the hilt, right? I owe everybody. And in times like that, you think that you know you think that the bank the bank 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 damaged the houses and do all these things. We had to keep up through like
SMS texting to make sure everybody we actually said that up pretty good before.
Am I look?
We need a rally.
And when I tell you we need to rally, we need to rally to save this business. And I explained to them how
We had financed everything, and they understood.
And I said, We need to open up.
Because one when you say the business.
Two.
We need a place for our crew to come back to work because they have bills too. You got managers and things like that displaced, they're coming back and they don't have a job and we don't have money now, like we have with vendors and things like that.
to to pay for their livelihood and and then three, people are gonna start coming back to New Orleans and they they need a place to eat.
And we symbolized as a team and we had that same fanatical view of
We're gonna do it. We figure it out. I figure out how to get into New Orleans right away, talking to the governor's office, they got us passes to go in, they weren't letting anybody in.
We we worked with the state on doing bull water acts because we didn't have formalizable water acts. You have to bowl the water because I mean like some of the the the rivers and all these things that hit everything. But we came up with we're working with them on like how do you bowl the water, how do you test it to where it's safe, those sort of things.
And we reopen, man. We reopen like we start off on the North Shore.
You know, slide in all those areas on the West Bank.
Some areas we open up like like a mettery.
which is just a mass population of people. We're the only restaurant open. We opened up thirty days after the storm. Other restaurants didn't open like ninety days. We opened up in the West Bank. So you had the whole market to yourself the whole market stuff o opened up in in in like the West Bank. We open up in Harvey and like it wasn't 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. Like more come in and eat, right? Because it was like we can come in, we got power, he's all generated power. We got generation all the country. Got him in to set it up. And we galvanized that point.
Like the team.
And the community and like us being open. And then sales were nuts, like it was nuts. So now we had cash flow coming in. We could do these massive crew bonuses. We could give back to the community organizations. And I mean, I was just really, really proud of the team. And at the same time proud I was I was disappointed in myself. And I was disappointed myself because I put all that in jeopardy.
You know what I mean? I put all that in Jeopardy for financing.
That day when I watched the levy's 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 work towards it took us a couple of years to get there, but we work 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 kinda
you know, lending, but but we won't but we won't go past the 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 like you can't get f you can't serve, can't do food.
We were an uh we were a necessary business. They said essential business to be open because we need to feed the public because they felt com they felt okay with going through drive-through through COVID because there's limited contact. But we had to learn everything. It was like literally hey guys, we can when we talked to the restaurant industries and all the the authorities were like, we're gonna tape off every six feet for people to be. We're gonna put
uh shields between people. It's like the symbolizing the team like that. And then we took parking lots and we had three drive-through lanes. When I tell you
We're like we were the
Like of the first that figure that out. Could you imagine people now have a place to go get some food and not just eat at their house with what they get from the grocery store, man? It's like our sales went crazy. We're able to do huge crew bonuses, uh, 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 are better at it than me, but like
in the weeds with them in the restaurants, I flew to all of our markets and saw everybody, but you c 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've just waved everybody outside.
Go to the next restaurant. Wait, fly 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 you're not gonna get that from some private acad group with with a that's a bunch of corporations. You know, these are my people.
These are my customers, these are my communities. You figure out a way, you know, you figure out a way. And that's why
That's why I just wish more founders would hold on.
And uh and and and 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 gonna jeopardize like this is my life's work. This is a part of me.
I cannot let this die. Th one of my great uh favorite um quotes about this is Steve Jobs says victory in our industry is spelled survival.
You see this over and over again biography is like just stay in the game long enough to get lucky.
You took two.
One of the two gigantic
You know
Tragedies.
That were outside of your control, which of course you're gonna run into things that are outside of your control. And you turn them in.
to 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 perfect every single detail. So now these people
They they've n maybe never would have tried recent case if that didn't happen'cause you no 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 g has g has given you.
The one one thing that comes to mind about this, like it sounds crazy, but one of my favorite entrepreneurs I've ever come across. I found this bi biography, autobiography of Estee Lauder.
Published in the 1980s. Okay. Sh at the time, sh SELR was not the public company. It was still village successful, but it was a family owned business. And she would get a lot of shit from people.
'Cause they're like her main distribution sh channel was like she wants your like Bloomingdales or Niman Marcus to take care to to 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 gonna show up when you do that. And so she would go
She uh oh a big Neiman Marcus open in Houston, that makes all sense. You're gonna have a thousand customers. Why Estate, why are you going down to Corpus Christi? There's gonna be twenty people there.
And she's like every single customer matters. And so what she would do is
On these trips.
She wasn't 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 from Estee, just like me and you're sitting across from she sees a woman, she says, Hi, I'm Estee Lauder, would you mind twenty give me twenty minutes your time, I'll give you a free makeup. I make beauty products.
Makeover, rather. Oh, I guess we're just in her students. And then she does it one on one attention. People like oh that doesn't scale, you can't do that. Bullshit. It's gonna scale because you're gonna do this for the rest of your life. And so she says thirty years later
Шілес фелли да ще гев у фри Мейкап он а тренер
Talking about how much they love the products. Think about how many
people that one woman that you spent twenty minutes with has told if she's a cover. Absolutely not the fans telling everybody they know. Exactly. I've been customers of yours for I don't know, four years.
And then make a podcast that's been listened to by like half a million people. You couldn't have predicted that. There's probably gonna be millions of people that watch what we're doing. The fact is that all stems from the fact that you're a fanatic. In purpose, right? And so what what excites me about talking to you today is
Is that
the people that listen, if they get a little nugget.
From this little nugget.
that changes their life, that helps people.
Like that fires me up.
The reason why you're doing this and you're so phonetical about having and like and the the questions you sent me before, right, 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 if people 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.
An insane amount of information and knowledge. How many people work on the same thing for thirty years? Just like so few people, because everybody wants the way we talked about earlier. They want to start scale sell. It's just like I've my favorite entrepreneurs. Like sometimes I've got to speak to entrepreneurs. I just had dinner with uh one of the wealthiest people in the world.
He's seventy six years old. He's been working 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 no distros anywhere else with like the startup founder that ran the business for two years. They're still in diapers. And even you, I love that you keep hitting that you haven't met uh I'm just im implying here, but like you're like, Yeah, we can get to ninety five.
Yeah, because you know there's no such thing as ever getting to a hundred. You're always looking for different ways to improve. Todd, you're gonna do this the rest of your life. I'm gonna have conversations with with founders for the rest of your life. I really appreciate you taking a risk and being one of my first guests. Absolutely, man. I'm a big fan of what you do, man. I hey fire me up that'll make one of the first, man. It's like'cause everybody's gonna want to watch it and see it, and it's like uh
I so I'm gonna keep having these conversations forever. I think we'll hopefully talk, you know, c 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. We can actually talk for another five hours. All right, let's go check out the the apartment. I'm not. Show me show wanna show you the kitchen here, and then I want to go back and uh and then let's go check out the bar. 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 four hundred biographies of history's great 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.