David Senra: I was not expecting to start here, Todd. We were just talking before recording. I didn't expect to start on sleep, but what you just said is exactly how most of history's greatest entrepreneurs are. They just can't stop thinking about their business, because I was asking you like, "How much caffeine do you take? How much sleep do you need?" And then your answer was what?

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

Todd Graves: But what really dictates it is what I have going on in business, and what I have to be thinking about, what might give me a little bit of anxiety about things I got to decide on, the teams, what I have to work through. So, my brain will be working as I'm sleeping, and I think it's trying to figure out solutions. So, then I'll just wake up, and I'll actually wake up pretty refreshed thinking about, you know, that problem I had, and then go jump on the computer in my underwear, in the middle of the night when I wake up and go first thing I'm going to start sending out emails to actually solve that problem, you know?

Todd Graves: But if I get caught up at work and there's nothing, like, really pressing, then I can sleep like a baby. You know, I don't have a problem sleeping. It's having a problem sleeping when I got real business on my mind.

David Senra: This keeps reoccurring in all these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs that I read, and so I just did this episode on Jiro, the best sushi chef in Japan, right? The documentary on him is "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." Why?

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: Because in his sleep, he is thinking about his work, right? Then I did this episode on this guy named Michael Ferrero. It's another family-held business. It's the Ferrero chocolate company, right?

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: 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.

David Senra: Leonardo Del Vecchio, Luxottica, one of the biggest businesses in the world. He just passed away recently. He said he would literally wake up dreaming, he would dream about ideas for his business, and he'd have to either keep a tape recorder next to his bed, or in your case, you're in your underwear and you're at a computer, or he'd have, like, a notebook.

Todd Graves: Nope.

Todd Graves: On the computer.

Todd Graves: Notepad just to write it down.

David Senra: 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 Cane's. You were very kind enough to let us record in here.

Todd Graves: The mothership.

David Senra: You're almost at your 30-year anniversary for running Raising Cane's and starting this.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: I want to ask you a question. I've heard you say this before. What is the advice that these so-called... the bad advice these so-called experts gave you when you were trying to start the very first Raising Cane's?

Todd Graves: So, having a dream to start a chicken finger only concept was just, back then, in Louisiana, kind of was unheard of. It was just a totally new idea. You know, we're known for our Cajun and Creole food here. Like, at lunch, people could get a plate lunch, some Cajun dish, and that's what people are used to. Also in the industry at that time, you know, McDonald's and these other big quick-service restaurant chains, they were adding menu items, because they didn't want the "veto vote" is what they called it.

Todd Graves: 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 were also adding healthy items back then. So, starting, you know, a restaurant and having an idea to focus just on one thing, one singular product focused menu, was just really unheard of at that time. We didn't have In-N-Out Burger in Louisiana, right? And a lot of people-

David Senra: But, but you knew about Harry Snyder.

Todd Graves: Not until I went to L.A. 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-N-Out Burger, that's reaffirmed my belief that, hey, you can do one thing and do it better than anybody else, and then I researched. Then I started studying the In-N-Out model. Since 1948. So, 1948, they had the exact same menu, right? And people know what to go in. It took me one time to go there and someone to recommend, "Get a Double-Double, and get it animal style. Get the fries, get whatever beverage you like, and then get a chocolate shake."

Todd Graves: And it's my same order every time. So, when I first went, I kind of held the order line for a second and, you know, went inside and done. Next time I went there, I went through the drive-through, Double-Double, animal style, fries, and a Coke, and then I also went to get that chocolate shake. And so, seeing that really reaffirmed that belief for me, because since 1948, you think about how many different burger chains opened up and then went all around In-N-Out Burger. And they added all different menu items. And they added unbelievable marketing.

Todd Graves: You know, In-N-Out Burger's marketing is not much. Generally, they put big billboards on the interstate and say, "Here's where it is. Here's where we're at." And they continue to do well, raise their sales, because they stuck to what they're good at. And for that, that really reaffirmed my belief. And when I was able to come back from going to L.A. to work in the refineries, then going to Alaska, when I came back, I think that was a big selling point, being able to add In-N-Out Burger as a successful chain since 1948 with the banks at that time. That's when I got that SBA loan after I raised that capital.

David Senra: So, when I did the episode on you, this is where... Because I read Harry Snyder's biography. He's one of my favorite founders. I mean, the guy was completely obsessed. There's a great line in one of his biographies where he would live across the street from the first In-N-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 back up, he'd get out of his chair and run across the street. He was completely obsessed. And just like you, he bucked the trend in his industry.

David Senra: They went to like, when everybody... I think, McDonald's was like, "No, we're going to freeze our beef," or whatever the case is, he's like, "I'm going to have my own butchers." He's like, "I'm going get the fresh tomatoes."

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: Like, "No, no, I'm not going... I'm all about quality." There's a line, they just gave me a tour of the kitchen, you guys have a mantra that says, "Never sacrifice quality for speed."

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: And he was, like, completely quality obsessed. And then if you just sit there and you think about your business over and over again, like, he's the one, a lot of people don't know this, he invented the drive-through speaker. He's like, "How can we do this better?"

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: Because remember, the prehistory to that was like, you had drive-up restaurants.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: We didn't have drive-through restaurants.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: So, in that episode, I was induced into a state of rage because all these people were telling you, "Oh, you can't have a simple menu." I was like, "No! Just go to the West Coast. They're thriving. They have a cult-like following." Went to visit my brother and sister in Orlando. And you guys had just opened up. You weren't in Orlando before. And I was like, "Have you guys ever had Raising Cane's?" This is after I did your episode. And they're like, "No, what's that?" I go, "First of all, you should've listened to the g****** episode. Second of all, I'm going to take you to Raising Cane's." And so, I saw exactly what you said, where you're like, "I don't hide.

David Senra: You know, we put Raising Cane's right next to, you know, McDonald's, or a Chipotle, or whatever the case is. It's like, "I'm just going to do one thing and do it better than anyone else." So, we pull up. My brother and sister are like, "What the h*** is going on here?" It looked exactly like when... I was just in California two days ago. It looks exactly like when you pull into an In-N-Out. They're like, "Why is there a line out the drive-through? Why can't we find anywhere to sit?" We literally had to wait for people to get up. I was like, "Just taste it, and you will understand." And then I thought of you that day, because we were eating outside. And I look across the street, and I see poor old little Wendy's, and there's a single car in the drive-through.

Todd Graves: I know.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: I go, "It's because Todd is obsessed. He wants to do one thing and do it better than anybody else."

Todd Graves: Yeah, you have to focus on doing one thing and do it better than anybody else. And so, since I have that singular product focus, right? And so, some people call it, like, a simple menu. I say, "Well, it's not simple. It's focused." And here's why it's not simple. Because our chicken has to be exactly right. Look, it comes from the weight of the bird that we want to get the size tender we want. It comes from the species of bird that gives the most tender and flavorful chicken. There's a lot of technical stuff. Rigor mortis on the bone after the chicken's slaughtered.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: Then it stays on the bone a certain amount of time. Then you get it fresh. Then you brine it for 24 hours. Like, all those things are that. Like, our fries, right? So, we have crinkle-cut fry, but a thinner crinkle-cut fry. You get fries from different times of the year, right? They do the crop harvest, and it sits in the warehouses. At certain times of the year, you get more sugar tips in the fries. Those sugar tips have to come out, so we have to remind our crew, "Hey, when you see those black sugar tip ends, take those out. It's not visually pleasing."

Todd Graves: Our bread. So, 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 and baked together, so it's pull-apart bread. It's not sliced loaves. Sliced loaves end up being more stale. This is dense, moist, flavorful bread. Our coleslaw, we secure all over the country. We have to make sure all those vendors have the right type of slaw that we want, from the right type of growers, grown in a certain amount of time. In that slaw, you have cabbage, but you also have purple cabbage. You have carrots. All those things.

Todd Graves: And so, you go down to your tea. Our tea gets brought from three different countries, the tea leaves, but we have to get it at the right time of the year. We might pay more for that, but it's that focus on that. So, my team can focus on those menu items and deliver it every time to where it tastes exactly the same around every Cane's across the country. So, since we're focused, it's not a simple thing, we can focus on those things.

Todd Graves: We have a large culinary department. It's not R&D. It's culinary, right? So, it's culinary, making sure that all those products, those raw products we get, are all perfect, and it makes sense there. Same thing when we opened in the Middle East. It took 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 from the United States, where we get it currently. You have to spend the time to do that.

Todd Graves: So, two years, people would look at that and say, "Man, you know, you should be open in a year. That extra year's going to cost you X amount of dollars." And I'm like, "No, those X amount of dollars are going to make us more money, because our sales are going to be higher, because our food is..." And quality ingredients, and a proper cook system, creates craveable product. So, like, in the food business... And I say this to all entrepreneurs that are in the food business, whether they're wanting to open up, or they have restaurants open, it's like your food has to be craveable, meaning like, "Oh my God, I love that chicken parm from Craig's." So, when I go there, I'm like, "I want to go back and get that chicken parm." Other stuff on the menu is pretty good or whatever. I'll sample just to try different things, because I like food, but I want to go back for that chicken parm. If they didn't have that craveable chicken parm at Craig's, I wouldn't make it a point to go there. There's so many good restaurants. There's so many great places you can choose from in L.A. There's so many great places that have a good vibe, and good atmosphere, and good people.

Todd Graves: But that craveable product's what brings it back. And if you cut that quality... And I've had CFOs over time, not current CFOs, but over time, that have been like, "Hey, you know, if we just cut this just a little bit, you know how much money..."

David Senra: Oh.

Todd Graves: Because it's a pennies business, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: We're doing well if we make 10 cents on a dollar. But like, if you start cutting a little bit here to save a penny, and you start cutting a little bit here, and a little bit here, it's death by a thousand cuts. Then your food one day is not craveable. That's what's happened with so many quick-service chains over the years. They mess with their quality so much. Then they lost the craveability. So, then it comes down to it's just a cheap calorie option, versus a craveable meal that I'm dying to go get.

David Senra: Yeah. The way Steve Jobs would describe that is you want to make products that people lust over.

Todd Graves: Lust over, yes.

David Senra: And so, you nailed the craveable, because I told you, I brought my 13-year-old daughter with me today. And she's obsessed with Raising Cane's, and she DoorDashes it to our house constantly. She's definitely craving the quality chicken finger meals.

David Senra: Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business. He says the most successful people he knows stay in the details of their business. He mentioned learning from a friend who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company and how that friend would pay attention to even how much his company was spending on bottled water.

David Senra: 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. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy-to-use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control.

David Senra: These corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact, like that shipping company with the rampant spending on water.

David Senra: With Ramp, you stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson is the founder of MarketBeat, and he recently switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. "Ramp is the best. The amount of money you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think a company credit card equals 'buy whatever you want' will far exceed the best credit card rewards program." Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There is a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says, "Cost control became nearly an obsession." If Carnegie were alive today, he'd run his business on Ramp.

David Senra: Take the time and set up a demo of the product, and you will see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on Ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com.

David Senra: So, go back to these people are giving you this advice, like you don't know what you're doing. I know the answer to this, but I want to get it on record, it's just like your kind of personality type, just like history's greatest entrepreneurs are all the same. If you tell them that you can't do something, you get the opposite reaction that you think you're going to get.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: Which is like, it's just going to make you want to do it more.

Todd Graves: Absolutely. You know, the best thing for an aspiring entrepreneur to be told is, "I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think you can do that. People haven't done that before. Why do you think you can do that?" Because entrepreneurs have something to prove. They have a vision, they have an idea, they have a passion. If you're an entrepreneur, you're passionate about what you want to start.

Todd Graves: You're like, "I know this is going to work." And you're so passionate about it when someone tells you, "Ah," you know, and do that facial expression, "I just don't think that's a good idea." Your first thought immediately is, "You know what? I'm going to prove it to you that it 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?

Todd Graves: Later in life now, you know, now that we're established and good, I can take those things and not let it fire me up. We still get at times, you know, like going into different countries, they're like, "You know, this mayonnaise-type sauce, it's much more popular as a dipping sauce. They're not going to be using your sauce. You need to add that." If I would've heard that in the early days, I would've said, "You wait until Cane's Sauce all got out."

Todd Graves: Now I can say, "Hey, you know, actually, we've had the same thing all over the United States." You know, ranch was popular out West, and different things like that.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: You know, and we went into Texas. They said, "You had to have cream gravy, you got to have barbecue sauce," you know, things like that. And like, but through tried and true, over time, customers love the Cane's Sauce. And so we want people to have Cane's Sauce with their meal, not with ranch, because it's not nearly as good with ranch. And so, they can understand that. So, you kind of calm later after you've proven yourself. But when you're getting started out, man, it is just fuel.

David Senra: You don't seem calm to me.

Todd Graves: Yeah, I just don't have to prove people wrong anymore.

David Senra: But I can feel your intensity over the table.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: So, I'm very curious about this, like the hours that you're working now, 30 years in, compared to the beginning. So, I just flew to Austin. I got to spend five hours with Michael Dell. And Michael Dell is hilarious. He's been running his business for 41 years. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever met. Very calm and measured, but underneath just a super, you know, relentless person, as you can imagine. And I was talking to him. I was like, "Hey, I heard you on a podcast one time. You said one of the funniest things." Because somebody asked him, like, "You know, when you were starting Dell, in your University of Texas dorm room with $1,000, and you were going to take on the biggest company in the world at the time, which was IBM, like that's so crazy." And they're like, "How many hours did you work when you started your company?" And Dell's face was like, "All of them."

David Senra: He's just like, "I slept at the office."

Todd Graves: Literally all of them.

David Senra: And so, we had a long conversation, because he's also married, he's got kids.

Todd Graves: Uh-huh.

David Senra: And so, he was just like, you know, "At the beginning, it's intensity. But, you know, the value is the consistency and the compounding over decade after decade after decade."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: He's like, "Listen, I love my business." Because I asked him. I was like, "Austin in July is not..."

Todd Graves: A little bit hot.

David Senra: "If I had your place in Hawaii, I know where I'm going to be in July." He's like, "Why are you here?" And he was like, "I just love my business."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: So, one of the things he gave me advice, he's like, "Listen..." The advice for younger entrepreneurs. He's like, "I've seen so much over 41 years." He's like, "You think you're going to be knocked out by a competitor. You're not going to be knocked... You're going to sabotage yourself. That is much more likely that you sabotage yourself than somebody else sabotages you."

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: He's just like, "So, what you want to do is just you want to make sure that you're surviving to the next day." He's like, "I work all the time. Do I work? I'm not sleeping under my desk." And then he's like, "You know, I have a team around me." When they say, "Hey, we have a important customer in Japan," he's like, "Do I actually have to be the, are you sure that I have to be the one to be there?"

David Senra: So, his 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 fanatical, and I want to ask you about your great quote about that. But you're just more measured. You're going to live to survive the next day. So, how do you compare the hours you're working now, compared to when you started this thing?

Todd Graves: Right.

Todd Graves: So, when I started up... And I give young entrepreneurs this advice. I'm like, "Imagine how hard it is to start your business, then multiply that by infinity. And if you're still committed to do it, and you have the stamina to stick with that, then you'll be successful."

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: Obviously, you have to have a good product and concept, and you have to have something that's going to work to make something go, which is often hard for people to see. The vision of chicken fingers down here in Baton Rouge was like, "Just chicken fingers? You know, just chicken fingers?" Like, "We like our plate lunches. We want variety," things like that. I'm like, "Wait till you have this product."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And then when I was able to start cooking it for them, "Oh man, that is good." Then when they start talking about the next day, "Hey man, can you cook some more of that?" "Yeah, come on by and have it." When you have to start up, there's so many amazing ideas by just promising entrepreneurs, but they stop, and the world never sees that product or service, because it's so hard to open a business, and it's so hard to make that business successful. Then it's so hard to scale that business and grow.

Todd Graves: And if they just didn't stop, and they knew how hard it's going to be, because they're like, "How do you have quality of life and work-life balance when you're starting a business?" I'm like, "You don't. Flat out, you don't." You're going to live the business every day. You're going to think about the business every day. You're going to be tired. You're going to be fighting through a bad mood because you're not getting enough sleep and things like that. It's like you don't have it, so you have to be committed that you're not going to have it. Now, once you get your business open, and you get it established, and it's working, then if you want to grow, then you're not going to have quality of life then. Because going from one to two is your hardest step you'll ever have.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: 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 my hours in the beginning, you know, when we started this restaurant, we were open every day of the week. We were open until 3:30 AM. And except for Sundays, we closed at 3:00 AM. And look, when we were closing up, it took us two hours to close down.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: When we opened up in the morning at 10:30, we had to be here at 8:00 in the morning. And so, you're getting about three hours of sleep a night. I had my apartment right back here that I 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.

Todd Graves: The hours were just all the time. It was just nonstop. And I was young enough to have that stamina, just to roll. And plus this environment, I love this environment. Cooking in this restaurant, it was very important for me to be in this restaurant so you could feel the vibe here, you could feel the soul of this place.

David Senra: It's right there.

Todd Graves: It's just here, man.

David Senra: You're not separated from your customers.

Todd Graves: You're not separated from your customers. You know, right here in the middle of this place that I constructed with my own hands. And it's like, you just work constantly.

David Senra: Wait, you constructed what with your own hands?

Todd Graves: This restaurant, I literally reconstructed all this with my own hands. Everything except the electrical, because I literally don't know electric. But plumbing, I did plumbing. I learned how to do plumbing. I learned how to do minor construction. All this place is resurfaced. So, when you came in this place, it was a lot of different concepts, college concepts that just didn't work. But they had layered on paneling, even an arcade was here, paneling after paneling. So, rip off one layer of paneling, and there's, like, a rainbow stripe paneling going down this way because there was an arcade at one time, and they had ripped up through this old paneling here on the wall, which was actually an Italian restaurant where it started.

Todd Graves: This was the outside of the building, and they built this onto here. So, when I pulled all these things off, I noticed this stucco all down the wall. But there was one little place I saw brick. I was like, "Oh, man, we have a brick wall." So, I started ripping it out with a crowbar, left stucco down the side. Then I got here and uncovered this old mural. And I took it as a sign, man.

Todd Graves: This was an outside advertising for this bread mural, for this bread bakery in downtown Baton Rouge, where we actually started with our first bread at Cane's. I came up with the recipe with the bread purveyors there. And this was an outside advertising, Highland Road going from Downtown Baton Rouge through LSU was the main thoroughfare here. And we took this as a sign. This is what we came up with our logo for Cane's. We took this design. I literally took it as a sign to say this is going to be the Raising Cane's logo. And then that's what we ended up with.

Todd Graves: But I learned this stuff, because I didn't have enough money. I got a small SBA loan for $90,000. I'd raised equity in a sense of, like, $60,000 with original shareholders, and I carried them over a little, they own a little bit of the business today. It's been fun being with them.

David Senra: I pray that one of the things... I don't even want you to tell me if it's true or not. I want to talk about how you financed 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 in Raising Cane's, because he bet on your chicken finger dream when you were in your 20s.

Todd Graves: He did. But let me take you back a little bit on the start of it.

David Senra: Let's do that.

Todd Graves: So, you know, I worked in restaurants in high school and college. I love the restaurant business. Food symbolized love, to me. So, what that means is, like, when I could spend time with my mother cooking in the kitchen, she's the one that taught me how to cook. We cook Cajun meals, so we would make a gumbo, right? And you make a gumbo, you start with a roux, and you add your onions. And you really take all day making a gumbo. Now, does it take that long to do it? I don't know if it does. It's more about spending time with somebody that you love. And we're cooking for the family and our friends that we love, so that time together. And then you make a good gumbo, and then you sit down and all your friends and family are like, "Oh, man, that's a good gumbo. That's good." And they start talking about, "Well, I do mine a little different. I do this," and those conversations.

Todd Graves: My grandmother would make me a pie, you know, a chocolate pie. She'd come visit, and she's like, "I made you a pie you love." And I'm like, that meant "I love you." And so, for me, restaurant, and food, and delivering food, it's an expression of love. And then the camaraderie when you're working in a kitchen and it's rolling, and the drive-through's going, and I can work any position, but it's that teamwork.

Todd Graves: And it's immediate gratification when you're like, someone spent their hard-earned money, and they give you their money, and they look at that chicken finger box, and they're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, that's a good feeling. It's immediate gratification. So much stuff with corporate work, and administration work, and things like that, it's not immediate gratification. It comes over time. My favorite job is if I can literally come in the restaurant and just crank out a shift. Like, that to me is fun, man. That vibe, that energy.

David Senra: And you still do that?

Todd Graves: Yeah, when I go to restaurants, I'll go visit, like, a market.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And I'll go to one restaurant, and I'll get all the crew to come there. And we have like a town meeting. My main job when I do that is saying, "Thank you. You all are doing great. Thank you so much." And then, "What can we do better?" And I can get that out of the crew and management. You know, it'd be like, you know, the first little bit, they're like, "Oh, no, the support's great." I'm like, "Yeah, it's great, but we're never going to be perfect, so what can we do better?" "Well, you know, the uniform program. It'd be better if we could do this and that." "Great, let's get some input." Because you can get, you can get system-wide really good, like, things from focus groups, you know, with crew or management. And you get good stuff from surveys. But, like, when you actually talk, you can pull it out of them a little bit more, and with me, they feel comfortable, and then they'll tell me.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: But then I'll work with them in that shift, and it's fun because you can just... Everything goes away. You're like, focused on delivering good product, and good service to customers right there. It's great. So, I was in the restaurant business. And so, like, when I went to college, you know, I actually studied scriptwriting for television and film. I thought I might want to be in movies. But I always went back to business when I was working, because I was that original kid in the neighborhood that had the lemonade stand. I was the kid that's going to cut your grass for 10 bucks.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: It was just always... I'd set up, like, Halloween haunted houses at my house and, like, you know, go around putting flyers out and five bucks for kids to go through. So, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and that's when I got serious about it in my senior year. And I actually graduated and went to the University of Georgia, but I was from Baton Rouge originally, and I knew I wanted to come home. And I had a partner when I started the business. And so, we wrote the business plan for Raising Cane's. It started off. We were calling it Folly's Chicken Fingers. That was the original business plan. Terrible name.

Todd Graves: But we had a friend that the nickname was Folly. We called each other Folly. But anyway, we wrote that business plan, and literally, I wrote the bible of chicken fingers, man. It was like I knew what our aprons would cost. I knew what would the cost, I knew what would... I was just a college student. I knew what college students needed to make, and I knew the environment they needed to work in. I knew what college students wanted to eat. I knew what price points they would pay for that. All these things. But that professor gave the worst grade in the class, which is classic. But it was only a B-minus.

Todd Graves: The rumor went out that it was a failing grade, and all this stuff. But he actually a simple grader. But he said, "No, the plan was great. Like, literally."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: "You gave the most detailed plan in the whole class. But the concept won't work." And I said, "Why wouldn't the concept work?" "Well, because you didn't study the industry. We told you to study your industry. You know, McDonald's, 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's this thing called a "veto vote," and people won't come to your restaurant if mom didn't want this. You know, they're also adding healthy items. You know, someone's going to want a salad and that, and to do it." And it's like, you tell that entrepreneur, "No." You're like, "Oh yeah, wait. I will prove it to you." Literally, I took that. And people would've thought that'd be discouraging. Actually, it was that fuel. "I will show you that this will work, right?" So, I took that business plan, bought a cheap suit, went to Office Depot, and bought... I thought that businessmen need to wear a suit, and I thought businessmen... I'm in a T-shirt now.

David Senra: You ended up buying a briefcase.

Todd Graves: Bought the briefcase.

David Senra: I had the same one.

Todd Graves: Did you?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves:  But didn't it feel like a businessman? You were like, "Yeah."

David Senra: I went to school for business. You don't know anything. It's like, yeah.

Todd Graves: I don't know, man. You're going into a bank, which is pretty intimidating, right? You're like these bankers, and you think they know everything, and literally brought it in and be like, unlock the little safe, you know, the little combo.

David Senra: The all zeroes?

David Senra: Was the combo all zeros?

Todd Graves: Yeah, I don't even remember what it was. Yeah, something like that. And you go, opened it up, and then be like, "Here's a business plan for you. Here's mine." Put the business plan down, and proceed to talk about this chicken finger concept I wanted to start at LSU. And look, everybody was nice enough, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: They're nice enough, but the banker's response was, "Ah, just chicken fingers, South Louisiana. You know, that's not how we eat lunch." And, "Never heard of that." I'm like, "Well, hold on a second. You know, you order pizza. Pizza's real popular, right?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "You probably order the same pizza every time, don't you? What do you get?" "Well, I like pepperoni." Or "I like, whatever." I'm like, "You get that every time." Like, "This meal's that flavorful and craveable, you're going to want to get this meal over and over." "Yeah, but you don't have years of management experience. You know, you probably should go work for..." You know, great companies, I mean, good suggestions. "Go work for Brinker for, like, 10 years. Then you'll really know the business, and then you'll have some money, and then da, da, da. And then you'll be bankable at that point." They're like, "Because you have no money, right?"

Todd Graves: I'm like, "No, I don't have any money." And they're like, "You know, you can't get a loan. You can't just get a 100% loan, which I thought you could do." But with every no I got, and they were nice enough, I will give them credit for that. And they were nice enough to take the meeting. Maybe there's some kind of law that you have to actually see somebody and their business plan.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: But then I was like, "Man, I need to go make money myself." And so, through a friend of a friend, I got a job as a boilermaker working in refineries. Louisiana has a lot of refinery work, and so what it is, is turnaround shift work.

David Senra: But this is super intense work. This is like 95 hours.

Todd Graves: It is 95-hour workweeks, man. So, what happens is they'll shut down a certain sector of an oil refinery. And they're missing out on production, man, which is just big money they're losing. So, they'll pay for you to work nonstop. They'll pay whatever it needs to get that thing back up and running.

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

Todd Graves: And that was the first group that was encouraging to me on my chicken finger dream, because they could see me working hard on something I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm willing to do whatever, earn my money when I'm out there, willing to take on any job out there. And they're like, "Todd, you're going to..." Well, they called me Hollywood. We all had nicknames. Interesting story on the Hollywood deal, but we'll leave that out. But, so, they were encouraging. And Wild Bill Tolar, you know, we all had nicknames.

Todd Graves: So, Wild Bill was like, "Hey Graves, man, Hollywood, I see you got what it takes, you know. But if you really want to make some money, and you're not afraid of hard work, this is a really dangerous trade. I fish in the summers, commercial fishing, sockeye salmon in Naknek, Alaska." And he goes, "You can go up there and get a job, and you can make a lot more money doing that than you can boiler making." So, I was like, "Well, what do I do?" He's like, "Basically, get up to Naknek, Alaska." I'm like, "Where is that?" He says, "Above the Aleutian chain." I look it up on a map. Back then, you couldn't look on a computer. You actually had to pull out a map. Buy an Alaska map. And so, I caught a plane to Anchorage. I caught a floatplane to King Salmon, Alaska. I hitchhiked to Naknek, Alaska. There was no Uber back then.

Todd Graves: I literally hitchhiked in.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Set up in a Tent City, where people go before they have a job. You get set up in Tent City, put your tent out, on the tundra, by the way, and you go around to the boats and you ask them for a job. You're basically a greenhorn. It means you're a rookie out there...

David Senra: You have to convince them to get on their crew.

Todd Graves: That you can get on the crew. Right. They're looking for some help. Just a few of the boats. Most people are all staffed out, but a few of them needed just a greenhorn that they could pay a lot less, right? You get a less cut of the take from the boat. But I ended up getting a job on a boat that summer, and had the wildest experience commercial fishing for sockeye salmon in Alaska, man. We were on 32-foot boats, as regulated. You couldn't keep going out to get the salmon. So, the salmon born in a stream swim out to the ocean. Sockeye salmon live out in the ocean. Beautiful silver fish for, like, five years. And somehow in five years, they know it's time to swim back to the original river, go up and spawn, and then they die. It's a crazy cycle.

Todd Graves: So, they come during the peak of the season. They're just rushing into these same rivers. So, you catch them, but you can't continue to go out. There's a LORAN line back then, and you couldn't cross that line. So, if you set your net, this gill net, if you set it up in front of another boat's net, you're going to catch three times as much, because you're catching the first fish coming in. So, these captains make their entire income just during the summer.

Todd Graves: So, they're heavily motivated to catch that perfect set in front of that other boat. So, you play chicken, and literally somebody veers off in the end, someone chickens out, and sometimes you don't. And we rammed boats. We got rammed. It was crazy. We'd catch so much fish. We're out in like six-foot seas in a 32-foot boat, and the back of the boat gets weighed so much down with salmon, before you could unload it to a tender boat out there in the ocean, that literally you'd be like getting waves over the side. Some boats sank when it was gone. It was just unbelievable work.

Todd Graves: We worked 20-hour days during the peak of the season, which is about two to three weeks. And when you work 20-hour days, you only get like a nap here and there. Like you get, "Hey, go take a nap real quick."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: You know, 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 get in a bad wave, and they'd crack their head or skull open.

Todd Graves: So, imagine this, you're out there fishing, you're getting rammed by boats, you're picking fish. You hear on the radio somebody just got scalped. I heard that. Scalped. I don't know how they got scalped from the boat, so medical helicopters are going in, National Geographic is coming over filming the boat action, and I'm out there for this chicken finger dream. Nothing was going to stop me from doing it. And sure enough, made good money doing both boiler making, and doing the Alaskan fish and trade, came back. I lived off credit cards, because I had no other income.

David Senra: Before we get there, there's this reoccurring theme in all these biographies. There's a story just like this. Now, your story's pretty extreme, and you tell it in a wonderful way, and the way I summarize this is like, how bad do you actually want it? And, like, you have to actually ask yourself, if you're going to compete against Todd Graves, are you willing to work 95 hours a week for a boilermaker after you buy your suit and your briefcase?

David Senra: And they're like, "Get out of here, kid. We're not giving you money." It's like, "That's fine. I'll find another way." Ninety-five hours doing shift work as a boilermaker. You're going to take a flight to Alaska, you're going to hitchhike, and you're going to live in a f****** tent.

Todd Graves: Right. For months, before I got the job, by the way.

David Senra: Trying to convince captains of boats, that you could die on, to hire you, and then to do that, and then to work 20 hours, and the entire time, what I love about your story is just, like, "I'm not thinking about sockeye salmon. I'm thinking about my chicken finger dream."

Todd Graves: Exactly. I would have 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-sounding like a boilermaker, right? But I would have worked... I would have gone and knitted blankets, if that's where the money was at.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Anything I could do to make the money, because I was determined, man. I was like a nerd in the entrepreneurial club in college. And people would start up, "Hey, I got this, you know, I steam cleaned floors, I do these different things." And I saw some of these entrepreneurs have these really cool ideas, and that's when technology was really rolling, but they would just stop, you know? Over the couple of years in college, they'd be like, "Ah, I just 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."

Todd Graves: You don't stop. Actually, with my original partner, we went out to a camping trip in North Carolina. I'm like, "We need to make this, like, we're going to go in and we're going to camp, and we're going to literally commit to this." Because, like, you set an oath that you're not going to ever, ever stop, then you don't stop. Because during that time, man, those two years it took me to raise money for this.

David Senra: Wait.

Todd Graves: Two years.

David Senra: Tell me. Wait. I love this idea. Run that back to me. I just did this episode on Elon Musk, and he has a great mantra. He's like, "Retreat is not an option."

Todd Graves: Retreat is not an option. Burn the ships, man.

David Senra: Yeah. "We're going to succeed or I'm going to..." He's like, "You will know when I give up, because I will be dead."

Todd Graves: That's the spirit. That's what we have to do.

David Senra: So wait, you went on this camping trip to do an oath?

Todd Graves: Yeah. He was literally-

David Senra: But he gave up.

Todd Graves: It was literally to say, like around a campfire... I mean, we did everything but just like become blood brothers, you know, to do the deal.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: It was like, "We're going to do this, right? We're committing this. We're going to make this happen. We're going to see it through, and if somehow it doesn't work, we're going to die trying." And literally, he put that on the line, going out and fishing in Alaska. People died in that fishery. God bless them, you know. But yeah, it's just that, you know, I think another thing too is when you have that relentless focus. So for me, is during that time, I was like, I came up with a quote, man.

Todd Graves: I was like, "Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically." Like, you have to be so fanatical when you have a dream and others don't believe in, and you see it, but you have to be fanatical. So fanaticism is what carries you through, you know? And so I see this fanaticism, and I study people, right? And so, like your podcast, I hear things and I'll get reaffirmed with things, then I'll learn new things. New ways I can look at things and do them. Yeah, man.

David Senra: High five, man. There we go.

Todd Graves: But it's great. You know, and I like it too, because it's like you can learn from it and you can get inspired by it being established, because you need that fuel to keep rolling. And it's good to hear other people are doing what you do. And then you learn from other people. I'm constantly a student of the business. So it's like you learn other things from businessmen and businesswomen, but for me too is I love to be around celebrities, like the people that are successful at whether they're an entertainer, whether they're an actor or actors.

David Senra: Athletes.

Todd Graves: Whether they're athletes, they all have this common core. And you know what I see as the most common core of all the people that are successful? For me is, they're never satisfied. Never satisfied.

Todd Graves: And so, we carry that into our business about never being satisfied, but it's a bad way to say it. So, you say never satisfied, it's like, "Well, you all aren't happy with what we did, you know, with this opening?" No, no, no. Since we changed the word for never satisfied, and it's just like we're always going to raise the bar. So we'll raise the bar. So, we did great at that opening. That was awesome. These were all the good things we did. But you know what too is? These are some of the things we can get better at.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: We can actually get two seconds faster, you know? And then this is how we're going to do this. Look, we needed to staff more. We messed up here. We didn't give enough support because we wore out our crew. We should've had more crew members on staff. You can always learn. So I see that with people, and I see it with the best athletes. I see it with the best actors. It's just like, "That film was good, but man, I could've done this better."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: "I could've done that better." And then like if you don't rest on your laurels, then you're always going to keep striving to get better and better and better. It's like competition. I love competitors because they make you get up even earlier in the morning, because it's just like, "We got other people that are gunning after us."

David Senra: You said the funniest thing. So, one, I think one of your most important messages is just like we need more founders who refuse to sell their businesses.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, there's this huge entrepreneurial industry that didn't exist, especially when you were starting your company. It's just like... And the entrepreneur industry is influenced by investors.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: Not entrepreneurs.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And it's like start, scale, sell. Then what? Then what are we going to do? And you have a great line where you're like, "If you create and do, you never want to stop creating and doing."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And now you just sold the vehicle that you created and do and create into.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And so then what? Then you're working on your second-best idea or your third-best idea.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I think one of the most important ideas that you have is just like, everybody in your business, the reason I said this on the episode I did about you, Todd's smoking them because he's competing against corporations. Who are the founders in your business anymore?

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: Like, they're either dead or they sold out.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And then I love-- Somebody asked you the question, where out of the competitors, who gets you fired up or maybe will keep you up at night? And you're like, "And they may never exist, but they will exist in the future," because you know that same personality type as you.

Todd Graves: They're coming.

David Senra: 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 how I feed my family. So if you want to come, just understand I'm on this 24/7 all the time." And you're going to be there.

Todd Graves: You better be ready. You better be ready because I'm coming after you.

David Senra: I just saw you at the UFC. Are you a UFC fan or are you-

Todd Graves: Yeah. I like all sports, you know? And so Dana invited me to come and getting to see Poirier do his last fight, Louisiana legend, man, you know? But, seeing those guys, it's like-

David Senra: It's the same personality type. So, the reason I brought that up is because you were earlier in the conversation, you were breaking down on the species of bird and the amount of detail you just explained to us.

Todd Graves: They're going at it.

David Senra: The thought I had in my mind was not about chicken fingers. This is an important point you're making. It's like the same personality type, just pointed at a different endeavor. Jon Jones, you know, is probably the greatest UFC fighter.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: UFC is the only sport I'm obsessed with, and I watch all the time because I don't have time to watch anything else, but I can watch one pay-per-view a month and have an understanding of what's going on. And I heard him. He said the same thing that you said in that interview, where it was like, "Oh, you want to come compete with me? This is how I feed my family." And he was fighting Ciryl Gane, and he's just like, you know, and he was studying him just like you, and understanding the detail, and he's like, "I know what he does when he wants to go left and when he goes right and everything else." He goes, "I assume that this guy's trying to destroy my legacy and trying to take the food off my family's table."

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: "And I will not allow that to happen."

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: The same level of intensity that you're applying to your business.

Todd Graves: Absolutely, man. If I got somebody who's coming to compete, like you're competing with me and my livelihood and my managers and my crew members depend on this restaurant, right? You're coming in, you're going to open up across the street here. These people feed their families off this.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: If we're going to go at it, you better be strong because we're not going to give up, man. And look, I've done this for 30 years, and I'm just as fired up as I was the first day. Like it never leaves you, you know?

Todd Graves: 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 who are working so hard beside you. Great appreciation for customers coming in, paying their hard-earned money to do this. Appreciation for communities that embrace you. So that sense of appreciation, which is what our culture is all built off of, 100% off appreciation is, it never leaves you. You always feel appreciative, so you always want to take care of people.

Todd Graves: It's like comes in, people are like, "Oh man, you just have to sell the business. It's worth all these billions. You can just not worry," da, da, da. I'm like, "Yeah, well, then what happens? What happens to my management? Who's supporting 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, it would be really hard to find a buyer that would have the same values that I do, and that I believe in, and have that deep sense of appreciation. They bought it for this. They want it to be worth this because they're probably going to sell it themselves. They're looking at it as an investment, not a vehicle to help people.

Todd Graves: And so, I think when entrepreneurs go and then you get successful and then you grow the business, and then you're successful at growth and you create something, it goes to a level, it goes from fanaticism and passion and a dream, then you get purpose. And so my purpose of Raising 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 who work. I love part-time, quick-service crew members who come in. We have an opportunity, it's most people's first job is a restaurant retail. They get to come in, learn values, man.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: What are those values? "Hey, look, we're going to work hard, we're going to have fun. We're going to deliver great customer service, we're going to deliver that craveable chicken finger box." Why? Because people are spending their hard-earned money here. That's why we're going to do that. And what we're going to do with the money that we make, we're going to help out our communities. We're going to give back 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, we're looking at $3 billion in debt now.

Todd Graves: 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 when I have this free cash flow coming out and doing, we're going to be able to help people in a big way. I can't wait for that phase of our business. But that's the purpose, man. So you start realizing it's not what you make, it's what you give. That's a better way to keep score. So when you have that purpose, and what I want people to do is to keep that purpose, because too many great restaurant entrepreneurs and founders of the business, especially in the restaurant business, they sell. They sell.

Todd Graves: And look, they're so passionate about it and they talk about it like, "Man, I have the passion and I love what I do, da, da, da, da, 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. It's generally, the numbers are 5 or 10 million because entrepreneurs put everything back into the business, growing it. They prove it in a successful model, either regional or they prove it out in different regions of the country, which then makes it a national.

Todd Graves: Multiples go up, and they're like, "Hey, we'll come in, we'll give you 5 million or we'll give you 10 million." But they take control of the business, and these entrepreneurs are like, "Oh my God, we've struggled so long. We're still living by means, I got debt, I got all this stuff." They will sell, and then they lose control of the business. And if your private equity, and private equity serves a lot of good purposes, they also serves some bad purposes. They take founders out of the deal, and so decisions get made differently.

Todd Graves: So a founder is powerful because for a founder, it's 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 personally. My family, I take it personally.

Todd Graves: I'm like, "You spent your money here and we didn't deliver on that promise." I don't know if private equity really cares because it doesn't affect our overall sales. Because it's a small percentage of what we're doing. But you're personal in that. Your crew is personal because they're working their a** off to fulfill your dream. And you're sitting there, and you're in a good financial position, but they're busting their butt. Management's busting their butt. Crew members are busting their butt. I know when I'm working at 3:00 AM and I'm like, "Oh man, I'm tired. I'm going to bed." I know there are crew members still closing up somewhere around the country, right?

Todd Graves: Somewhere around the world, somebody's closing up that way, and it's that appreciation. So when you lose that founder's personal, that it's their baby, you start making the wrong decisions right now. You really do. And so, private equity; they have their shareholders, and they have to make a certain amount of money. They're not getting the returns on their dollar. They'll make other decisions that will go. Maybe they price, maybe they raise their prices, and maybe it's not the right time to raise their prices. Maybe they cut their quality, maybe they cut wages for the crew.

Todd Graves: Maybe they do, maybe they don't do the bonus program. Programs aren't as good as the year before. All those things start to make the business not special, you know? And so, I just encourage people, don't let money be one of your major goals because if it is, you end up living a shallow life, you know? You end up saying, "I need that $10 million," but you lost control of your baby, and then it's not special anymore. It's not worth the dollars.

Todd Graves: 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 private equity can come in and say, "Hey, look at the staff we have in finance, accounting, IT, and all these things that you think are too hard for you to figure out." It's not too hard for you to figure out. They had to figure it out too, at one point. I mean, you can figure that out. Bring in some great people, stretch yourself, hire those people, bring them in, and learn the details yourself. I'm not good at IT, but I know enough to work with great people to still add value, if that makes sense. So I just wish founders would hold on. Hold on.

Todd Graves: Don't get rid of it, man. Like, and why would you? If it's something you're so passionate about, find that purpose. Find that purpose.

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David Senra: I think that's one of the most important messages that we could possibly get out there. There are two things. I have this idea, this maxim of an anti-business billionaire, which I'll get to in one second. But what I'm trying to do is exactly try to bring attention to exactly what you're talking about. It's like we celebrate the sale, but we don't-- It's like, what happened to the guy for the rest of his life? Is he still happy about this? And so, you know, Trader Joe's, right? The founder of Trader Joe's, his name is Joe Colombo or something like that. I can't even pronounce his last name.

David Senra: He did such a wonderful service to future generations of entrepreneurs because he wrote this autobiography that's excellent, and he tells the story of Trader Joe's. Ninety percent of the book, okay, he wound up selling Trader Joe's in the '70s. Okay? And he lives for another 40 years. Ninety percent of the book is that this guy is so fired up. He loves Trader Joe's. He came up with a new concept.

David Senra: Ninety percent of the book is just talking about how amazing Trader Joe's was, all the different ideas, he has the same personality type that you had, right? But he made the mistake that you didn't. He got scared. There was a bad economic climate. He wound up selling, I think it was to Aldi, which still owns the business today, if I'm not mistaken.

David Senra: What's fascinating is, just look at the time and effort he dedicated to Trader Joe's in the book, and then the last 10% is, "Yeah, I invested in some real estate. I did some consulting." And it's like, it goes from, "this guy is fired up every day, I'm in love" to "I sold my baby."

Todd Graves: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: And then it ends, the last page, he's like, "I have to tell you something. I was not true to my own self. I regret selling. Thank you for listening, Joe Colombo."

Todd Graves: Wow.

David Senra: Okay? That's the last page. The book is published, he dies the same week.

Todd Graves: Gives me chills.

David Senra: Think about that.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: He's like, "Don't do this. I wish I had the courage. I wish I wasn't so scared. I wish I just stayed in and-"

Todd Graves: Yeah.

Todd Graves: What a good man to just be honest, right, to everybody, "And I wish I didn't do it."

David Senra: Paul-

Todd Graves: Because he wants to inspire people not to make the same mistake.

David Senra: Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko's, I did an episode on him, too. He thought, "Oh, I sell for billions of dollars, I'm a success." He's like, "I can't even go in the store. I can't look at it. Like, I got the money, but I don't have the purpose." I love the word they 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.

David Senra: Somebody like James Dyson, like a Steve Jobs, like an Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia, it's like these people are just like you, so obsessed with the quality of the product that they are making, right? That is the main goal, "I'm going to make a-- I'm the best in the world," right? Then they retain control. And the point I make on this is one of my favorite maxims from the "History of entrepreneurship", comes from Henry Ford, who also owned 100% of his business. In 1919, he owned 100%. He bought out all his old investors, owned 100% of Ford Motor Company, right?

David Senra: It's very equivalent. It'd be like owning a $20 billion company today. He says, "Money comes naturally as a result of service."

Todd Graves: He does.

David Senra: Which is exactly what you said.

Todd Graves: A hundred percent.

David Senra: Stop f***ing worrying about the money.

Todd Graves: Okay.

David Senra: Can you make somebody else's life better by doing an act of 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 to you.

Todd Graves: It will come.

David Senra: So the anti-business billionaires, is they're obsessed with the quality of the product they're making, they retain control, and guess what? If you're obsessed with the quality of the product you're making and you retain control, you wind up with the money anyway.

Todd Graves: Absolutely. If you do things for the right reasons in business, money will come.

David Senra: Yes.

Todd Graves: A hundred percent, money will come. You know, so it's just sales-driven. Do you want to be profit-driven or do you want to be sales-driven? Sales cure all woes. You can raise your sales, and we're number two on average unit volumes in quick service restaurants, Chick-fil-A, then us, and I think McDonald's might be a million behind us per unit, per restaurant, all the way down to a lot of our competitors are a third of what we do sales-wise.

Todd Graves: But if you're sales-driven, you're going to do exceptional customer service, you're going to have more people on shift, right? Than cutting it shorter to try to save labor. You need the highest quality products to be craveable. All those things that you do, that do that, then you end up making more profit because you have more sales, you have more happy customers, you have more repeat business volumes, and you get the volumes and you get flow through dollars and you make more money.

David Senra: This is where the finance industry gets it wrong, and I think Bezos said this perfectly. He's just like, "No, no, over the long term, if you put the interest of customers first, it is the interest of the shareholders. It just takes longer, but that's where you actually create the value."

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: It's like, serve the customers, and then your shareholders will make plenty of money.

Todd Graves: The dollars will come.

David Senra: Yes.

Todd Graves: It's proven time and time again, and I'm an example of that. When you talk about entrepreneurs going to a certain point and get scared at certain times. A great example is Tony Tan Caktiong, who had Jollibee, right? So Jollibee's is a Filipino concept, and he was an engineering student, he explained to me.

Todd Graves: He said, "Look, if you were a smart Filipino kid, your parents were like, "You're going to be an engineer." And he's like, "I hate engineer." He goes, "But one time I went and looked at a dairy to see the engineering behind doing a dairy or whatnot." 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 would run the register." So he started an ice cream shop. Then he added a burger, then he added spaghetti, crazy, crazy menu, and it became this success. He opened that one little ice cream shop, turned it into a restaurant, and then he started growing it.

Todd Graves: So he's like, "My goal, I want to be the largest restaurateur in the Philippines." So he set on his goal. He has this fanaticism. All of a sudden, McDonald's announces, "We're going to the Philippines." They saw success that he was selling all these burgers, and his accountant and his financial people were like, "You have to sell. You have to sell. This concept's amazing. McDonald's started in the US. They're just going to blow us away. Sell now, you're going to make all kinds of money, you can live the rest of your life and be happy." He's like, "No, I won't be happy. I like what I do." And he said, "What do I do?" He said, made me nervous as hell, right?

Todd Graves: And being founders will do that. They were showing them 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 going to put the goal. I'm going to beat McDonald's. I will still be the largest restaurateur in all the Philippines." Well, he did that. McDonald's came in, he blew them away, he grew all out through the Philippines to be the largest restaurateur in all the Philippines. Set his next goal, right? Fanaticism, right? "I'm not stopping there. I want to be the largest restaurateur in all of Asia." Think of all of Asia. He did that.

Todd Graves: He did acquisitions of other restaurants and did it. The largest restaurateur in Asia. "Tell me what's the next goal." "I want to be top five largest restaurateurs in the world. This is what I want to do." And this is the big boys. This is McDonald's, this is all the big ones. That's his next goal. But that fanaticism keeps him going, versus getting scared. It's okay to be scared. It's actually a good thing, but then say, "Well, I'm fanatical. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to see it." And so I wish just more entrepreneurs would do that, because so many things can be out there that'll scare you. So many people are going to tell you; believe in yourself like you always did, and don't give up. Don't give up.

Todd Graves: If you didn't give up when you started; that's the hardest part. You didn't give up when you were growing an idea. 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 are other things to do, but it's not your passion.

David Senra: Let's go back to how you were financing this one. And then I want to go to, how you financed the next 28 in that insane story.

David Senra: So you got the Wild Bill, you got the refinery money, you got the sockeye salmon money. Now you're playing credit card roulette?

Todd Graves: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Senra: Is that the next thing?

Todd Graves: Yeah, but I mean, I had to do that the whole time when I graduated, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: I mean, I bartended at night when we were working on the business plan. And then, you know, then trying to start the business, I'm literally, I don't have any income. So I'm living off bartender money from tips at night, and then, literally, back then, too, you could get credit cards that had 18 to 22% interest rates.

Todd Graves: And you can get as many as you want with $5,000 limits. So that's just what I did. I just sent in, "Yeah, I have a job bartending." And they're, "Okay, well, sure, here's a $5,000 credit line on this deal, but you're going to pay 20 to 22% on that." And so I just lived off of that. And you know, what I did was, I had enough money of my own to come back and to live off of and put into the project. At that point, I was able to raise some preferred shareholders. And I raised maybe $60,000. These were people like-

David Senra: So these are what you call angel investors today?

Todd Graves: Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were, you know, these were my bookie. Well, guys, I worked bowler making with.

David Senra: Hey, bookies, got cash?

Todd Graves: Yeah. Yeah, it was, "Can you take this $10,000 investment in cash?" I'm like, "Sure."

Todd Graves: Yeah, when I get to the bank, I'm like, "It came from my investor." But I was able to raise that, and I was able to get a $90,000 SBA loan.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: And it was enough money for me to come in. I had this place, North Gates of LSU. I had a wonderful real estate broker, one of my mentors, Mr. Red Reynolds. This place had flipped over so many different times. And he was like, "I want it for the landlord," land owner, "Tulula Arbor," she was 94 at that time, "to have something solid. I believe in you. I believe in your fanaticism. You will make this work." So I'm telling her to hold it. And basically held the location for a year for me.

David Senra: How impactful were those words of encouragement?

Todd Graves: Mm.

David Senra: Because you're young.

Todd Graves: Like, somebody you respect that was just a good man and a really good real estate broker. I really respected that. Because he saw that, and it was an affirmation of why I was being so fanatical in trying to talk everybody into it. You know what I mean? Set for the bullwreckers, well, he believed in me. I'm like, "Okay, okay. That's as little wind in my sails to do this." And I basically told her, "Hey, it's going to take him a year to put all this together, but I believe he'll do it, and then I believe you have a long-term tenant." Look, sure enough, we've been here for almost 30 years, and we have a 100-year lease going forward.

Todd Graves: And the family, she passed away, but the family's like, "No, you know, I'm trying to buy it." They're like, "We just have pride in this, you know? So we'll just keep doing a lease," they said, "but we'll give you 100 years, you know, and options to stay in this original location."

David Senra: Do you buy the real estate now for the new stores?

Todd Graves: Wherever I can. Absolutely, wherever I can, I do. This is good real estate, A-quality real estate. It's just, there are so many people who own it. It's part of larger shopping centers, larger developments. A lot of it is in trusts, you know, family trusts and things like that. But every one I can buy, I buy. Absolutely.

David Senra: They won't sell you this one?

Todd Graves: No. No, they like being a part of it, right? But I got a good lease term on here. And plus, what I put into this place. Look, I had to learn things, you know. Like I said, I had to learn plumbing, and I had to learn construction. I had to learn these things because I really didn't have a lot of money, too, to come in and spend much money on this. But this place is sacred, man. I can tell you every square inch. And later on, after we get done with our discussion, I'll show you all these little points in this. This is original furniture that I went... I got a U-Haul, went around to all these equipment supply stores.

David Senra: I hope you have bed sheets that look like this somewhere.

Todd Graves: Well, that's a damn good idea. Maybe some pajamas too, right? But it means something, right? And keeping this like this, I can bring in management here and show them this place. We have pretty buildings, all functional, everything, and they come here and go, "This is our soul. Just remember, this is where we started, and we have to keep that spirit going here."

David Senra: Dude, the one in Miami Beach by my house looks like a nightclub.

Todd Graves: Yeah, yeah, I just like living the deal. I love that location.

David Senra: It's huge. So, credit cards, SBA loans. You said it took a year for the development of... So you had the lease before you opened it?

Todd Graves: So...

Todd Graves: Yeah, yeah. No, so really he didn't sign the lease and doesn't hold it for you.

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: Right? But this location was available and I knew it was going to be awesome.

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: And 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 refineries, then working in Alaska for the summer, then coming back that fall. And we opened in '96, so that'd be the fall of '95 when I got back. So I had some money on the deal. I went and got that SBA loan and got the investors.

Todd Graves: And from there, we started the construction process. We started getting the used equipment. And the equipment I went and got from, I went into Houston and Dallas restaurant supply houses, because, you know, restaurant businesses go out. Nine out of ten go out of business.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: I could go buy stuff, and I'm like, "I need a fryer that'll work for 60 days." Like, "Give me your cheapest fryers." And they had to be 85-pound fryers. And they're like, "Well, this one's good." I'm like, "Yeah, that's ten times as much." Like, I need something that lasts because I know as soon as I prove this will work. I know I can get another loan, you know?

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: Thank goodness we made money, and so when we opened up, I was so excited. We reconstructed, and we were ready to open up. We got registers back at Office Depot. They're these little registers, and once they figured out how to program them, I went and started waving people in the restaurant. And people came and people liked it. I mean, we made $30 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, payroll's taken care of. I can pay the vendors. We're working. And steadily off of that, we started making more and more money.

Todd Graves: I could replace equipment as we went. Just basically dumped everything back into the restaurant. And sure enough, I was 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. And literally 18 months later, I was able to buy the piece of property, construct a new building, and open up 18 months after the first one. It took two years to start this first one on a shoestring budget.

Todd Graves: The second one, I have a piece of property, and I got a brand new building that we opened up, and then we showed efficiencies there. And what was really amazing with that location is that, it was on the other side of campus and 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 dads picking up food on the way home. We had T-ball teams on Saturday. We had church groups on Sunday. And that's when I got the vision. I was like, "This isn't just a college concept." It's what I thought it was.

Todd Graves: I thought I'd just work with college kids. I'm like, "This works for everybody." And that's when I got that fire, man, to grow, at that point. That's when I got the vision, man. And the vision at that point was... And it wasn't, it wasn't articulated this way, but what I wanted was locations all over the world.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: And I'm like, "I want to be known as the brand for craveable chicken-finger meals, great crew, cool culture, and active community involvement." Like, those are the things that turned me on with that deal, right?

David Senra: What do you mean it wasn't articulated that way?

Todd Graves: Well, so I thought the vision was there.

David Senra: Was that like subconscious?

Todd Graves: I just didn't put it down. And so I'm like, I asked myself, you know, I was like, "Why do you want locations all over the world?" I'm like, "Because I want to go in every community because I love hiring people to come in and build teams, creating opportunities, job growth, teaching them values." And I'm like, man, I get turned on by customers coming in and loving the food.

Todd Graves: I'm like, "And I'm going to keep giving them quality chicken-finger meals, that craveable product." And I was like, "Now I'm able to give money back to the community." I'm like, "And I want to be able to give money back to the community that actively involves them." I'm like, "But we have this cool culture, man. I want to emulate that in other places. I want to be the place that..." Look, I worked in the restaurant business out of high school and college, man. It was like, it was not positive motivational management, man. It was like, "Do this, do that." You know?

David Senra: They yelling at you?

Todd Graves: Like, "You screwed up." Yeah. It was like crap. And no music in the kitchen. Can you imagine working back there? It was just a negative environment because the manager 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 restaurants where they're not treated right, and they're not giving good customer service. They come here, and they're treated right. They have a good environment. We got music cranking in the kitchen. We're having fun. We're a team. And it's positive motivational management. It is like, "Good job. Hey, thanks for taking this stuff out to the trash, out to the dumpster."

Todd Graves: "Wow, that's good toast. Hey, good job on the shift, man." Like, that's how you motivate people.

David Senra: Praise costs nothing and means everything.

Todd Graves: Means everything. Absolutely, man. And it's teamwork, and it's good. And also, too is why I love operators, it's like when I was on the football team. It's constant coaching. "Oh, yeah, that was a good pass. Oh, man. You screwed that up, man. Like, make sure your arm goes back." And, you know, "Hey, block harder. Do this." You're getting constantly coached, and nobody takes it badly. No one takes criticism badly 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 needs to hurry up." Da, da, da. "Hey, great. That's great toast." Like, you can mix those things in.

Todd Graves: In a corporate environment, and this is how you get weeded out of Cane's corporate, is the people who can't take constant coaching. And it's coaching, right? You know, it's like, "Well, no. We should meet every six months on an eval on how we're doing and blah, blah, blah," and all that stuff. It's like, no. Every day is an eval. Like, every day we want to get better, and a lot of corporate people... One, if you make mistakes... Like, I encourage making mistakes. If 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.

Todd Graves: I see corporate people come in, and it's like you don't address an issue. You just say, "Oh, we're doing da, da, da, da, da." It's just like, "Hey, man. We screwed up on this. We learned this. We're going to do this differently. Let's move on." Like, it takes all of 30 seconds, and when you create that kind of environment, like in a coaching situation or in operations. That's a challenge for me on growing the business because we're bringing in some really experienced people from other organizations, right?

David Senra: Right now?

Todd Graves: Yeah, right now. As we do that. A lot of the culture is that you don't admit mistakes. One, you don't admit mistakes, and two, you don't want to be coached. It's this academia type of thing. Like, "Da, da, da." I was like, "Look, man. I'm learning every day." And I'm the first one to always say, "Man, I screwed up on that, and that was a bad decision." Then the team knows, hey, well, one, it's validation too. He doesn't think he knows everything, and two, it's okay for me to make mistakes, you know? But we do need to learn from them. Like, Todd's not going to make that same mistake over and over. We know that.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And I won't either, right? And so, that's some of the challenges in growth. In restaurant growth, we get the operators. And if you're an operator, man, you just have that culture. And we have to get as people who are intrinsically motivated, right? And so, we can pay people really well because we do good. But pay doesn't matter, man. It's like, to the people. They want to make a good living, of course. Title doesn't matter, right? You know, it's like this VP executive. All these titles and stuff like that. People are title crunching up.

Todd Graves: I can literally interview somebody, and I can see the things that are like, they're going after the title, they're going after pay.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: They're going after these things versus intrinsic motivation. Like, I like to lead people. I like to be part of good teams. I like to be part of high-performing teams because it gets the most out of me. I like to be excited about 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 you 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 are plenty of brilliant people. There are so many brilliant people who can do the same job or who haven't had the experience, but will learn that, right? They have the intelligence to do it, but it's heart.

Todd Graves: It's 100% heart, man, if you're intrinsically motivated, you do really well at Cane's.

David Senra: I love the idea that you said that they have this almost theoretical academic understanding of business, and that usually only survives in an environment where you're separated from the customers.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: It's like, if you're working here, there is no theory. It's like, "We made it. We can see the customer eating it." Look at their face.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: Like, what is actually happening?

Todd Graves: Separated from the customer and separated from the crew.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: In corporate environments, when I started off, I was the first guy to wear a Cane's T-shirt to conferences.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Right? Everybody else is in a suit and tie. But there are crew members in the restaurant wearing, you know, jeans and T-shirts.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And like, you know, it was this business mentality from here. You're separated from the customer because you're not in your restaurant seeing who's being served, and you're also not with your crew to see what gets it. You're in this 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 into a restaurant, I'm dressed exactly like them.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And I speak their language, and I talk to customers. They're like... There's no separation, "Oh, that's the boss." They're like, "Oh, that's the founder." Right? That's a different title.

David Senra: You know Les Schwab Tire Company on the West Coast? Okay. I'm going to send you his book. It's very hard to find. I found this because Charlie Munger is one of my heroes, and, you know, he had like the complete history of American business in his head. And he's like, "You need to read about this guy." I just read the book. You would love Les, because he sounds exactly like what you're saying, where he competed in a very difficult business. You come into fast food, QSRs. It's like, that was an established thing.

David Senra: You're coming in and you're like, compete. There's competition everywhere, and he goes into selling tires, and he just smokes every single other person. And the book starts because he's like in his 60s, the business is named after him, okay? And he goes, "I need to put this in a book. Just so you know, I didn't have a ghost writer. I wrote this all myself on a 50-year-old typewriter." He goes, "This is how I want the business to run. If the business is not going to be run this way, take my name off the business."

Todd Graves: Take my name off the business.

David Senra: And he's like, you know, old school guy, he's cursing off to other boys like, "Goddamn it th-" 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."

Todd Graves: Exactly.

David Senra: And then he would talk about this. He's like, "If you're out..."

Todd Graves: I love it.

David Senra: You're going to love this guy. I already know this for a fact. I'll send it to you. He's like, "If you spend 30 days outside of a store, you forget half of what you know." He's like, "You have to be..." He's like, every single thing, he's like, "Oh, we exist to serve the people that are serving our customers."

Todd Graves: A hundred percent. It's why we call it a restaurant support office. We're not a corporate office.

David Senra: Oh, that's a great line.

Todd Graves: We are a restaurant support office. We're here to support the people who are serving our customers, 100%. We have these monitors set up in our offices, and it has restaurants, and you can pull up any restaurant, our whole system. I want people, when they're leaving our office, a restaurant support office, to see there are people still working, right? When they get there in the morning, there are people opening up, doing the restaurant, doing it, there's constantly working. So you see it every day.

Todd Graves: You're walking by that every day, you're like, "Ladies and gentlemen, that's where we do our business." And our job is to support them, because when you go to bed at night, they're going to be working. When you get up in the morning, they're going to be opening the restaurants. We have 75,000 crew members across the system. We're here to support them. We're here to make their job better, easier, more efficient, more fulfilling, the whole bit. And keep that going. Like, and saying, you have to like... entrepreneurs are very erratic, unscheduled, you know what I mean?

Todd Graves: Like so, most of us, so as a general deal. It's like when people are like, "What's your schedule like?" I'm like, "My schedule's all the time everywhere, however, whatever." It could be 3:00 in the morning.

David Senra: What's your schedule like? Are my eyes open?

Todd Graves: Yeah. Into little it is. If it means no sleep that week, it is what it is. It means I can take off a day and go climb a mountain, I'm going to do that. You know, whatever the call is for the business, then you answer that. So there is no schedule. There is no that. And so, the discipline comes from the focus and the fanaticism. You're always going to be there, you're going to do it. But there are the things you have to structure in doing. And so, like for me, is to scale. I created the Cane's love department in our business, respect, recognition, rewards, man.

Todd Graves: Like so, you know, when you have crew members that are working hard, right? One, the things of respect are things that you should just do. You shouldn't get credit for them. So like, we're closed on every major holiday. That's not a reward, that's not recognition. It's just respect, man. It's like, do I want to work on July 4th? No, I don't. I want to be with my family and friends. I want to enjoy the holiday. I want to take off Christmas Eve. I want to not work on Christmas Day. I want to be, you know, holidays and things like that, I want to be there. So I've got respect for my crew members.

Todd Graves: If I'm not going to work, you're not going to work. I work nights, I work weekends, I work all that, but we don't want to work on those days. And on the first July 4th, I was open, at this restaurant, and I saw the crew was dragging. I was here working with them, right? But they were like, "Oh." Because all their friends were doing something fun. Their family is doing something fun.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: I was like, "You know what? That's not worth it." So that's respect. Recognition is something... You should recognize achievement, you should recognize tenure, you should recognize all these things. There are things to recognize all day. It starts from just the simple things, "Hey, that's great toast. Thanks for being so friendly in the drive-through. Man, they loved you today." It's things that that like... You work a year at Raising Cane's, and you get a hard hat to symbolize the first year I was there. All the crew members sign. It is fun, right? In five years, you're getting the salmon. Those are the recognizing things, recognizing that deal.

Todd Graves: Then rewarding, so it's like whether it's a $5 gift card to go get a coffee at the local coffee shop, or on to other bigger and better things that you get; there are rewards that you get. And I want to build that better and better. But like, if I just think of these ideas and they come and go, it's like, no, create a department around that. Like, literally a 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 operations, in the restaurant, and they know this stuff about building systems.

Todd Graves: So, our next thing with that is, versus saying, "Here's the gift card," or, "Here's a new Cane's hat," or things like that. It's like building a point system, right?

David Senra: Hmm.

Todd Graves: It's kind of fun, right? You'd be like, 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 is sick. Do you mind coming in and working?" They come in. You get points, and I want to build it up to a really exclusive type of merch and stuff you could build up to and do. But like, constantly getting better at that, raising the bar.

David Senra: That's smart.

Todd Graves: But have people around that. Not just the feel, 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.

David Senra: One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever read in a book came from Mary Kay, who built that massive... Remember the Mary Kay Cosmetics?

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Out of Dallas.

David Senra: And they would reward people with, like, the pink Cadillacs and everything.

Todd Graves: Uh-huh.

David Senra: 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 principle 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 a hard-driving person like you. I can be a bit of a d*** [unintelligible].

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

David Senra: Just being clear. It's like, I'm, you know, kind of obsessed. And that, just knowing that, like, actually helped me interact with other people better and to kind of, like, modulate my behavior. It's just like, they just want... That person wants to feel special just like you do, just like the person that helps you secure this.

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: They're like, "Man, Graves, I believe in you." And it makes a difference, even to hard-driving, you know, psychotically-obsessed fanatical people like you.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: It does work. Words of encouragement matter. And so, I remember reading a biography of Henry Ford, who I already mentioned. And at the time, he was not successful. He had this idea. He was like, "Hey, all the cars that were on the road at that time were either electric or steam." That's what people don't understand is like, electric cars are not new. They were the default at the very beginning. He had this idea to make one with an internal combustion engine, because he's like, "Then the fuel source, you carry the fuel source with you," right? And so, he winds up meeting Thomas Edison. At the time, Henry Ford meets him.

Todd Graves: So cool.

David Senra: Henry Ford, no one knows who he is. He's not successful. I think he's already failed... He had two failed car companies before he finally succeeded with his third, too. Again, just, "I'm coming' no matter what." Thomas Edison is the most famous person, one of the most famous people in the country.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: He has a hard time hearing. They're at, like, a huge dinner. But Henry Ford's an engineer, and so he gets a minute with his hero, Thomas Edison. And he's having to, like, yell in his good ear about this. And I think it's, like, seven words or something like that. But Edison, obviously brilliant, he just gets it right away. And he hits the table, and he goes, "That's it, young man. You have it. Keep at it."

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

Todd Graves: Fantastic. Yeah, it is.

David Senra: Yeah. It's really important.

Todd Graves: Absolutely is. But it's earned encouragement. Edison knew he had it, right?

David Senra: Yes.

Todd Graves: You know, and so sometimes it's tough love. I had to learn that on  "Shark Tank." Tough love is also when you get different entrepreneurs and things like that, and sometimes the ideas aren't good. And I wasn't good at it. Like, it was always encouraging, and, "You'll find a way," and "Do." But, like, on "Shark Tank," they're like, "Hey, man, you're going to have to learn tough love." Like, Cuban knew me, right? And then, being around Mr. Wonderful, then they're like, "I know it's heartbreaking, but sometimes the ideas aren't good."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And, "Are they doing it the wrong way," and, "You're not doing them a service doing it that way."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: So, the tough love is to say, "Ah, this..." But then to help them to focus on what's really important.

David Senra: No disrespect to "Shark Tank," but f*** that. Like, I cannot stand... I said this in the episode I did about you. It's just like, the future is unpredictable. Like, if you read history, as much as any... Like, I think I read history more than almost anybody else. It's like, all it is is humans failing to predict the future accurately.

Todd Graves: Yeah, that's right.

David Senra: Why would you sit there? You think... You're sitting on a stage in a suit and a bunch of makeup on, and say, "This kid's not going to succeed." F*** you. How about that? Like, let's see how it's actually going to go. I hate people that do that.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: And so, my idea is like, obviously there's a... Millions of founders listen to "Founders." And I get emails and all this kind of stuff, and we have conversations. It's like, "What do you think?" What I think doesn't matter. I was like, "I don't know. I have no way to predict the future." All I know is, like, when I started my podcast, people were like, "There's too many podcasts out there." It's, like, 2000... That was 10 years ago. There were no podcasts out there.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: They're like, "No one's going to listen to a solo podcast. No one's going to listen to a podcast where... You can't make a living reading books for a... Like, that's ridiculous." It's like, it doesn't matter. I just, I actually hate that show. No offense to them. But it's just, like, the idea of, "I'm all-knowing. I'm an expert." There is no such thing as an expert in entrepreneurship. You know what you're going to be an expert in? Raising Cane's. You're an expert in Raising Cane's. And I'm sure you have a ton of ideas which are obviously transferrable to other businesses. But we don't have predictive ability. I just did this episode on Elon Musk. Let me give you an example.

David Senra: There's this guy named Michael Moritz, who might be the most successful venture capitalist of all time. He's at Sequoia. He invested in PayPal, which was a successful exit. Okay? They sold it to eBay for, I don't know, $1.8 billion or something like that, if you want exits. So, they sell that. Then, he already knew who Elon was. He invested in PayPal, which was Elon's company. Then, Elon goes to start Tesla, and he pitches Michael. And Michael's like, he's like, "Invest in my new company. You just made money with me."

David Senra: 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 I'm not doing this to shame Michael, because in the book, later on, he goes, "That was..." He's saying years later, he goes, "That was a mistake, because I severely underestimated the level of Elon's determination." That's why I don't like shows like that. You don't know what's inside that person's heart, inside that soul. It might take him five years, might take him 10 years.

David Senra: There's a book next to me that I just showed you before we started. Okay? The reason that I've read 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs...

Todd Graves: Look at your notes, man. I love it.

David Senra: Yeah, so I've read that book, like, four times. I'm about to do another episode on it. But the reason I bring that up, and the reason that out of the 400 books that I've read, that this is my number one recommendation, is because this is not a celebration of success. 90% of this book is James Dyson failing. He goes through 5,127 prototypes. He gets screwed over by...

Todd Graves: Incredible.

David Senra: He gets screwed over by partners, joint ventures. He was just like you. "Please, I want to sell you a piece of my company. I need to raise investment. Please take it." Everybody's like, "No, your company's not worth anything," so that's why he owns 100% of his company to this day. But the reason it's so fascinating about this, right, is because he has the idea. I think he's 44 by the time he finally has a product up to his standards that he owns completely that he is now selling.

David Senra: And the book ends where he's just like, "Listen, it's easy for me to   to say to not give up," right? "But there was times where my kids grew up seeing their dad as a failure." He would go in the back, do prototypes, be covered in dust because he's doing vacuum cleaners, carry himself inside at night, cry himself to sleep covered in dust.

David Senra: 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 where the book ends, he goes, "They have one product, which is the vacuum cleaner, they're in one market, and they're doing 300 million a year in sales." And then what happens?

Todd Graves: This is working.

David Senra: Now his company is doing billions of dollars a year, and he's got... He's all over. He's got a bunch of different products. He's in all markets all across the world. The compounding between 44 and 75 was so important, and it wouldn't have happened if he couldn't endure the pain. I have one of my favorite quotes.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: Endure the pain. It's accurate.

David Senra: "Excellence is the capacity to take pain."

Todd Graves: It is.

David Senra: And you see that over and over again.

Todd Graves: It is, 100% is. It really is.

David Senra: And founders lead and they work with their heart and soul.

Todd Graves: Yeah, absolutely.

David Senra: In my conversation with Daniel Ek on this podcast, he said one of the most important ideas I've ever heard. He said, "I'm not obsessed about time. I'm obsessed about energy management. If you have time but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyways." I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast, and when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response, in all caps, was "MAXIMUM ENERGY." All of the founders, CEOs, and extreme winners I have studied have excessively high energy levels.

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Todd Graves: For me, you know, when I was growing and seeking advice, and I got a lot of really good advice. I also got a lot of bad advice that I was able to, like, see through it. You know what I mean? And learn from. You learn from good and bad, good examples, bad examples. Like, people started saying stuff like, "Hey, look, you know, Todd, you're just so much in the details, like, you just need to delegate. To delegate." God, I hated hearing that word 'delegate.' I'll be like...

David Senra: Yeah.  

Todd Graves: "Explain to me..."

David Senra: High-five for that.

Todd Graves: I'm like, "Explain delegating to me."

David Senra: Again, come on.

Todd Graves: "What do you mean by that?" Like, "Well, delegate means you give other..." I'm like, "No, I know what the word means, but how do I just... How do I delegate this off?"

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: "Well, you just hire good people, and you delegate them to do the work." And I'm like, "I hire good people." And let's say, out of a hundred-point scale, if I can do it at 95, pretty good. Nothing's perfect, but let's say operations, I'm at a 95. But if I hire somebody good, but they end up being at an 85, but we need to be at that 95 to have success, I can't just delegate that. I have to supplement to get us back up to 95, working with that person to do it.

Todd Graves: And over time, they might get to the 95. So at that point that they're at the 95, then I'm like, "Hey, you can run this good." Then they get to 96. "Hey, you can run this better than me." So now, I'm going to ease off on some of those things that I was supplementing on the deal list, but I'll still check and make [unintelligible]. 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 I can't be in the details? What do you mean on the details?" "Oh, man, like, all this... You're down to the minutiae in all this stuff. You're wasting your time doing this. Like, you should be big picture. You should be that."

Todd Graves: I'm like, "Well, yeah, you got to be big picture, too, but the devil's in the details on this thing is." And so I got reaffirmed by this, and this is Edison's Chouest, a large shipping company here in Louisiana, and actually, it was one of his partners in another shipyard business had told me... Oh, when I was explaining this to my... It was a YPO Forum business group, and saying, "People are saying I'm just too much in the details." They're like, "Hey, Gary Chouest knows exactly what the bottled water costs at his place."

Todd Graves: And he's like, "Look..." And there are formulas to give it to him. He doesn't go and count water bottles, right? He looks at the program because he's like, "If we're paying 25% too much on bottled water, and people aren't going up to the thing and getting out of the big thing, and they're using, which is wasteful too, little bottled waters, it means they're doing that in every phase of the business." So knowing those details, but that reaffirmation of me going, "Yes, me into the details matters." So I say you don't delegate. You hire great people. You help them in doing it. They do it better than you, then you can back off and you make sure all those components of the business.

Todd Graves: 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, and we're supporting our operators in what we're doing, and we're being innovative, and we're getting faster in drive-throughs, and doing it. My co-CEO in the business is a much better operator than me. I'm still 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 list. So the word 'delegation' is used way too much. Like, trust your instincts, learn and grow, and let people grow themselves, but be into what they do, and absolutely stay into the details of your business. If that's what made you successful, don't lose those things. Get better at it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Get more efficient, get the reports and things like that. You all have products, and you also refer people to products that can help consolidate the information to write quicker, efficient, more decisions like that. You get better at that, but stay in the things that... Stick to what you know. Second on the concept, man, I fully believe, be good at one thing and do it better than anybody else. Be relentless. I'd do it better than anybody else.

David Senra: Can you expand on... But that... I said on this episode, it's like, sometimes you can just hear a person say a sentence, like what you just said about delegation. It's just like, if that's the first thing I ever heard, I was like, "I know him." I'm like that. I feel that way too. Walt Disney has a great line about this, right? "If we lose the details, we lose everything." Because these are not after... This is not something you think about after.

David Senra: It's like this is what makes the magic. You called it craveable, like, the magical experience, like, why there's... People have an emotional reaction to your company.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: Like, your product evokes emotion just like his evoked emotion.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: But the reason the very first... I didn't... I was unaware of Raising Cane's. There weren't any in Florida where I live. And I actually saw a clip when you were on Theo Von's podcast. It was a TikTok, and you said something, and I was like, "I know him." Like, I have to find out who this is.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: You resonate with it, yeah.

David Senra: Yeah. And then my brother-in-law lives in Austin, and that's when I had my first Raising Cane's. 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.

Todd Graves: It's kindred spirits, man.

David Senra: Yeah. But this is what I'm obsessed with, is exactly what Harry Snyder thought, the way he thought as well. It's not just a principle of doing one thing and doing better than everything else. This is like how it applies to every single thing, and you talked about it in that podcast where it's just like, well, a simple menu has all these other positive effects that, you know, you can really focus, get all the details good. You can make it better. But also, you even had the concept that it's going to allow you in the future to serve more people because it's a shorter order time.

Todd Graves: Right.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: When did you figure that out? Did you know that at the beginning?

Todd Graves: Yeah. No, no, no, I didn't. No.

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: What I wanted was craveable product.

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: You know, and I knew from restaurants. You had the one craveable 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? It's like, focus on that, and do it extremely well. Don't try to be all things to all people, or you're going to be nothing to anybody, right? You have to be what people will be fanatical about, what they, in the restaurant business, craveable. So, but what I wanted to do is create that craveable product that everybody does.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: Then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive-through, right? And so, it starts from when customer pulls up to the order deal. The first time at a Raising Cane's, they look, they have to decide what they want. They do it. After that, they know what they want. Box combo, sweet tea, extra sauce. You know, whatever their order is, so the order is quick. Coming through the drive-through, we have a singular product focus, right? For that one menu item, we have one line. I'll tell you about the kitchen later. You can see down the line. Toast is grilled on the end. You got chicken fryers.

Todd Graves: You got fry fryers, and you got the board. You can watch that cook-to-order process happen. Like, you're cooking, and so you can cook, and you have that product, and you're making basically one meal just with three, four, six chicken fingers, so you can make an assembly quicker. You have your drinks that are popular, it comes up, in and out. It gets out there. "Thank you very much for your order," and you go through. And so then, I saw the speed on that deal.

Todd Graves: So it's like, our concept is craveable food served with fast food speed and convenience. That's what it is, right? Fast food speed and convenience, craveable product, so the both of those together. So, if I added menu items, right? Then it would slow me down, right? And I'd say, "Well, what could 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.

Todd Graves: Then your quality goes down worse if you're then adding heat lamps, and we don't have heat lamps. We don't have hold times. We don't have any of that stuff, rather than that cook-to-order process. It's like if you go to In-N-Out Burger. You know what you want, and you're cooking ahead. So, it's literally like you're cooking ahead. Now, if you show up, you're the first customer at Raising Cane's, it could take you four minutes to get your order, four to five minutes, because we're dropping the chicken.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: We're doing that. But when the the line picks up, then you're cooking a little bit ahead, then, you know, during your rushes, you're cooking way ahead. You're just... Meaning it's coming out. It's getting served immediately, right? We're two minutes 35 seconds, drive-through and counter service, right? 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 let's just say, just roughly 1%. If we do six billion in sales this year, what's 1% of 6 billion?

Todd Graves: That's $60 million in sales you can do if you can tweak that order time. Two seconds. Now it flips on the other side, right? If you 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 lose.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: That's money. So, not having all those different things, it keeps the concept... So, knowing what your concept is, and sticking to that concept, then you know what... Here's the engine. Here's what drives. Here's what drives sales, what eventually drives profitability. It does. There are other benefits too. In the restaurant business, you look at a lot of the quick-service competitors. They're adding all these LTOs, Limited-Time Offerings. Management and crew have to learn a new product that's going in, and how that works in the service model, and do it, and as they learn that, they do that. It's a distraction of what you do. Then the next 60 days, there's another one, then there's another one, then there's another one. There are all these things going on.

Todd Graves: Management has to spend so much time on learning those new products, delivering those new products, hitting the sales of expectations, all that. Where's the time to encourage the crew, and do positive motivational management, and point out, "That's good toast." You know, "You're great in the drive-through."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Where's the time to walk out and talk to the customers, and actually see their food. How clean is our restaurant right now? What's the general vibe here? Oh, wait, the music is a little lower, someone knocked it down. Where are those things? So, our management can focus on that, the crew member and customer experience, and make sure that goes. Because there are not these LTOs they have to learn, go through training modules, and do that. You focus on what you do good. And so, like, you go back to that business plan. They talked about not having all these different menu items. No, veto vote doesn't happen.

Todd Graves: They're like, "You're not going to get the frequency, because you need..." Frequency gets driven by different menu items because you get all that stuff. Our frequency is just as high as any other quick-service restaurant, meaning how many times somebody comes back in a month's period of time.

David Senra: Oh, I see the DoorDash bills.

Todd Graves: How many times...

David Senra: I know how frequent it is.

Todd Graves: But then come back, right? Then you come back, there's that...  So it's anti what they say is what drives this stuff.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: It's like, there is no veto vote. There's no, "Variety drives more sales." It's actually frequency. Our frequency is as high as anybody else. It's serving the exact same thing people have day in, day out, because it's good. Because it's good. Our competitors can run chicken finger, chicken strip, whatever type of sales. It doesn't affect our sales. It doesn't affect it because people say... They might try it, but two days later, they're coming back, getting their chicken finger meal from us because it's the best, you know?

Todd Graves: Actually, I love it when they run all these specials, and they do all this stuff, because it adds more advertising out there for chicken fingers, and we're known for the chicken fingers, man. It's like, when I want people talking about chicken fingers, chicken strips, or whatever they're talking about, boneless chicken being dipped, I want them to say Raising Cane's in their mind, like Xerox, you know? It's not a copy anymore.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Go get me a Xerox of that. That's what you want to be known for. Do what you're good at. Do what you're good at, and you will execute on a consistent basis consistently, and you can teach other people how to do it, and they can execute and operate the same way, and you stay focused on that, and delivering that high-quality, craveable product with fast food speed and convenience, and being friendly, and doing that. When you focus on that day in, day out, the whole organization is around that, then you can look at stuff like Cane's Love. You have time to do those other things that enhance that crew member experience.

Todd Graves: And when crew is happy, they're going to be friendly to your customers. That's why people come back. They don't just come back to Cane's because the food is so craveable. They come back because they know it's going to be food-safe. They know people are going to be friendly. They know people appreciate, right? Customers want to be appreciated. They want to say, "Thank you for your food." And our people mean that. It's like, "We appreciate you spending your hard, earned dollars here." In fact, they want to go to the restroom, it's going to be clean. Those things get you that repeat business.

David Senra: Yeah, we landed and we went directly to one last night, and just greeting every single person that went through the door. It was, like, obvious how obsessive...

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: I love this idea because, again, focusing on one thing and being the best in the world at it, right? To me, that should be completely obvious. I think humans crave simplicity, but our default state is we tend to overcomplicate things. So, your competitor's like, "Okay, Todd's just going to have chicken fingers."

Todd Graves: Right, we overcomplicate...

David Senra: "I'm going to have chicken fingers and nine other things."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: The problem with that is the distracted do not beat the focused.

Todd Graves: That's exactly right.

David Senra: The distracted don't beat the focused.

Todd Graves: They're going to say, "We're going to do chicken fingers, but we're going to have 100 different sauces." People go back, get their same sauce. They might come try it one time, and then there's also slowing down their order process, they're 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 it, you might have narrowed down to three sauces? What are the most popular? Narrow down your menu items. You're seeing more and more fine dining restaurants narrowing their menu. It's happening now.

Todd Graves: I'm not saying I was a part of that, but maybe they looked at Cane's and said, "Wait a minute, I bring my kids here, we come here all the time. Maybe I don't need 50 different menu items on this thing."

David Senra: And people don't actually want to make choices. They want you to make...

Todd Graves: No, they want to know it.

David Senra: It's like, "What do you do the best?" I went to Jiro in Tokyo, and, you know, it's a three-star Michelin restaurant, it's 10 seats.

Todd Graves: Maybe you can get me in.

David Senra: I can actually.

Todd Graves: You can? Thank you.

David Senra: I have a friend that knows how to do it. So Jiro is really old, so he only comes infrequently, 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 at what I do, and I'm going to serve it."

Todd Graves: Brilliant.

David Senra: It's actually nice. I don't have to think of... As long as you can get in, then I don't have to think about anything else.

Todd Graves: I don't flip through a menu.

David Senra: No, like, the... What's the restaurant that has, like, a book this size? Something... Not California Kitchen. What is...

Todd Graves: Cheesecake.

David Senra: Yeah, Cheesecake Factory.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: I don't go there. It's like, I don't want homework. I'm like, "I got other s*** in my head."

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: "I don't want to think about this."

Todd Graves: It causes anxiety. "What am I going to get here?"

David Senra: This is what we love, is like, last night, we were like, "Okay, what do you want? You want three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, or six?" Like that's all you have to...

Todd Graves: That's it.

David Senra: You already know.

Todd Graves: That's it.

David Senra: Like, that's all you have to think. So, another way that you buck... So, you have this limited menu, right? And then most people in your industry will... They're the franchise model. Why did you not choose to go down that path?

Todd Graves: You know, when I started out, you know, when I had that vision. You know, grow Cane's.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: So, franchising was, like, one of the obvious ways to do it. And so everybody was franchising. So, I thought...

David Senra: Why do they do that?

Todd Graves: Well, I mean, there are a lot of advantages. One is less capital cost. If you can grow off franchisee's money... So, let's say you have a good concept, you have a few locations, and then from that, for you to grow company restaurants, then you have to keep putting in, injecting a lot of capital, and on top of that, you have to take in a lot of debt to do that. Restaurants are very expensive. You can't... You know, you literally... And that's not a manufacturing plant. If I could do all chicken fingers in one location and send it out, right, the cost wouldn't be there, the capital costs.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: But every month is a new restaurant, a lot of money. So people are like, "You can grow in different areas, and use other people's money to grow." There's also the thought 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 have to keep growing with our capital, we'll take a royalty off the deal.

Todd Graves: So, I had a model of, like, I'm going to grow 50%. I knew I wanted to grow company, but I'm like, "I'm not going to be able to grow fast enough, and I'm not going to have the capital to be able to grow in all the areas." So, I got really great people from the industry, people that were CEOs at other great big billion-dollar businesses, and they were good people. They were people that I trust, trusted in good people. And so I'm like, "That will fuel my company growth, right? Getting franchise royalties in, and I'll be able to grow, and we'll grow quicker." And so I did, I opened up in different parts of the country.

Todd Graves: I opened up in Ohio, I opened up in Minnesota, I opened up in Nevada, I opened these different areas. And they were good franchisees, and because I had the for-real friendship with them, like, we could talk through any problems, or anything like that. The thing is, they operated... We'll say we're at 95 out of 100. They were about 85 out of 100, which I think other franchisees were more like 65 out of 100, honestly, on what they were doing. So, other people have been thrilled with them as franchisees, but that 85 to 95 gap drove me crazy. And I was just like, "I know we can operate these better."

David Senra: Of course you did.

Todd Graves: "I know I could do it better." It was this thing we're going to change in operational procedure. We had tested 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. You had to respect to show them, they're like, "Ah, that just doesn't work for us, because it's different." It's like, "Well, what's different? The crew and customer... Your customers are the exact same in both these areas." "No, we just like it better this way. We think da-da-da."

Todd Graves: Or even crazy things, like, "Well, we don't want to get that much faster, because we like the longer interactions." Like, well, the longer interaction... Well, you can still be just as friendly but quick, because they want to get out of the door anyway. But talking them into things took too long.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And I was spending, and the team were spending too much time on something that should've been implemented overnight. And I'm like, our company restaurants, once we tested it out in, like, five restaurants, and we felt good about it, our operators said, "Man, great system. Boom, let's roll with it." And so that time was less efficiency on us building the business ,and making our existing restaurants better, and getting higher or at same-restaurant sales. And so I ended up buying all of them back, and they did really well, and they were great, and they were all happy. And actually, too, as they looked at, like, more of a merger, because we kept their teams, and they had more opportunities for growth.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: And it worked out really well. But for me, it was like, you know, a franchisee is never going to run it like you do, because it's your baby, it's your thing, and they're not going to take it quite as personally. And they're not quite as fanatical as you are, right? I'm a fry-cooking cashier, man. That's what I live to do, right? And they were 85, I was at 95. And so, I could hire the people that had those same types of values as I did.

Todd Graves: And so, like, franchising for me, is just, you're going to lose quality, service, you're going to lose those things, and you're also going to lose a tremendous amount of efficiency, because you're talking them into things versus just adopting something system-wide really quick. So, we got way more efficient when we bought them out. We actually operated at 95. Sales went up in all of the franchise markets. Literally, sales went up, wages went up, everything went up, and it actually improved out better.

David Senra: Oh, wow.

Todd Graves: So, look, I think it works for some organizations. For me, personally, especially in the restaurant business, I think the company model just rules. I really do.

David Senra: Well, I think, and the important part of that, you know, a lot of people, they're like, "Hey, like, should I work on this?" Or, "What's the idea I should pursue?" And I actually got this idea from Michael Dell, where I used to say, "Well, like, you just have to build a business that's 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.

Todd Graves: Right, not suited for our personality.

David Senra: 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 that's authentic to you." And then I was reading Michael Dell's autobiography, and, you know, he was in his early 20s, so he's like, "S***, man, this is really hard competing with IBM." So, he actually gets a guy to come in and be, I think, the vice president or president, and help him, and the guy is, like, 20 years older than him. And I found an interview with that guy who is now in his 80s, talking about what it was like working with Michael Dell in his 20s.

David Senra: And he's like, "You know, I loved it, but I could only last four years, because 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..." He's like, "I got digestive issues."

Todd Graves: Been there.

Todd Graves: I'm drinking too much. Yeah.

David Senra: And he goes, "And Michael is thrilled. He's, like, energized because..." And then he said 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." It's, like, 'natural' is a better description than 'authentic.' It has to be natural to the creator. It has to be natural to the founder.

Todd Graves: Absolutely.

David Senra: It's just, like, I don't... I'm the same way. I'm obsessed with control. I spent eight hours yesterday hand-editing the transcript that no one gives a s*** about, because I care about it.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: This is like, I don't... And everybody is like... Everybody tells me, "Outsource, delegate." They use that word all the time. No, I don't want to delegate. Like, I want to feel it.

Todd Graves: Yes.

David Senra: I have a feeling for it.

Todd Graves: Well, but that's the key to success. That's common in everybody that's successful, I believe.

David Senra: The time period you're describing, where in Cane's history was this happening? And how long...

Todd Graves: For the franchising?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Yeah, so I mean, I went for...

David Senra: Was that five years into it?

Todd Graves: Probably three years I started talking about it. Because when we got the...

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: No, no, no. So, the second restaurant was 18 months after the first restaurant.

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: 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, because you said it has to be natural to you. My partner, Craig, who was great... He loved the finance part of it, he loved the IT, he loved the business administration stuff. He wasn't a fry cook like me. And he's like, "Todd, when I get a night off, if I get a night off, I go read the Wall Street Journal." He goes, "You know what you do when you get a night off? You're writing new schedules that we vet on that deal list." He's like, "I just... This doesn't make me happy."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And so he ended up getting a... We didn't have that much money to buy out then, but he ended up getting a scholarship to Wake Forest. Did business, he did all of the things he did. He actually came back to Cane's for several years doing the things he likes to do. Has his own business now. He does really well. Still one of my dear friends. But it wasn't happy to him. He had the courage to say, "I don't like this."

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: "Like, this is... All we're doing is being fry cooks. Doesn't turn me on, you know, it doesn't do it." And so, like, I encourage people, like, do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life, right? It's just a part of your DNA. Like, there's no work, there's no, "I'm working, I'm not working now." I mean, like, I'll be at the beach and it's like, you know, checking in, and we've got calls, and then being able to roll heads on the beach. You know, you're talking, doing.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And then you get back to, "Hey, let's have a margarita." You know, it's like it's a part of what you do, so you have to do what you love, right? You have to... And if you do, you'll never work. Words like 'career.' It's not a career, it's a passion. It's just what you do. Just the same thing as I get up, and I go take a walk, and I love my dogs, I love my business, love my kids. Things like that are what makes the difference in being whole, I believe. So, one of the disadvantages of having other partners in your business is that they might have different goals in mind that you have in your business, right?

Todd Graves: So, an entrepreneur and a founder bring on an equity partner, whether that's an individual, or whether that's a professional group, private equity. I'd be very careful on what their motives are. And if their motives are about a financial return, you're generally going to end up bad, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to the other owners of your business to meet their goals, right? And if those goals are financial on that deal list, it can change your thinking. It can change your thinking on quality, in my business.

Todd Graves: You can change vision on quality food, you could try to lower food to make more profitability, which is a short-term gain. You could cut wages, right? And so, your crew members aren't as happy, they're not as appreciated on the deal. You could try to do different avenues of sales, just to raise sales. That's going to lose your focus. There are all kinds of bad things that go with that.

Todd Graves: The only way I do a partner is if they believe 100% in what you believe in, and then you also believe that they're not going to sell that stock to somebody else that doesn't in the future. And rarely does that work out. If it's special to you, hold onto your equity. Take the risk, get more financing, but keep it yours, because you'll always be able to protect your baby. You know what makes it work better than anybody else.

David Senra: I have one thing to add to that. I think it's super important that you said that. There is something that I've come across in a lot of the biographies, it's like, many times the best financial decision are not financial at all.

Todd Graves: Oh, for sure.

David Senra: And so there's this investor named Nick Sleep who wrote these legendary letters to his partners, and he made a great line. He's like, "The best investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold." And what he was talking about is the fact that, like, if you took, obviously, Sam Walton, right? He gave away the equity in Walmart to his kids before it was valuable, and that's how they wound up being very tax efficient. But if you look at his combined wealth that came from Walmart, right? That's still concentrated in the family today. The last time I looked it up was like a month ago. It's like $432 billion, okay?

David Senra: So, one of the greatest fortunes that has ever been created. Do you think Sam Walton woke up every day being like, "Oh, I need to maximize shareholder value. What's my stock price?" No. He woke up serving his customers.

Todd Graves: Customers.

David Senra: And then they're like, "Why didn't you ever sell?" He's like, "Why would I?" He's like, "I'm not doing this for money."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: "I'm doing this because I wake up with a burning..." He said something like he wakes up with a burning desire every day to improve something.

Todd Graves: And he was the most wealthy man in the world. He drove the old pickup truck and went to work every day.

David Senra: Yes.

Todd Graves: It's not about the money.

David Senra: I've heard this for 200 years of entrepreneurial history. It's like, people think it's like some Willie Foo-Foo stuff. "Oh yeah, you should do what you love." There's an underlying reason to that, because work is going to be a grind. You are going to run into times where you are crying, when you're in pain, and you want to give up.

Todd Graves: You're going to get the grind.

Todd Graves: Every day.

David Senra: And if you don't love it, you will give up because you're sane.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And so you have to love it. You have to be irrationally obsessed with it. And then what happens? It goes back to the anti-business billionaires. The people that are irrationally obsessed with it, they make better products.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: And then customers... You know how many people I've told about Raising Cane's? Like, even before I knew I was going to meet you. It's just like, because I... It's in human nature. When we find anything that we love, it could be a quality chicken finger meal, it could be a movie, it could be a podcast, it could be a piece of art.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It could be a city, a nonprofit.

Todd Graves: It can be whatever.

David Senra: No one keeps it to themselves. Humans don't do that.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: They're just like, "You got to have this chicken. This is... It's incredible." And so that, all this stuff, the love, the just staying and being hyper-focused, staying in something for a long time.

Todd Graves: Mildly obsessive compulsive.

David Senra: Say again?

Todd Graves: Mildly obsessive compulsive.

David Senra: Yeah, 100%. Oh, it's funny you say that, because there's this line in this Elon biography. So, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, he only ever joined two boards. And he was best friends with Steve Jobs, he was on Apple's board. He's good friends with Elon, Elon considers him a mentor. He's on Tesla's board. And he was asked one time, "What do they both have in common?" He goes, "OCD."

Todd Graves: OCD, 100%. 100%.

David Senra: It's just like, "What do you mean what do they have in common?" Like, it's obvious what they have in common to him.

Todd Graves: Yeah, being mildly obsessive compulsive is actually a good thing.

David Senra: I'm only interested in fanatics. My entire podcast is just about... Think about, to get on the podcast, right, it's like you had to live a life... You had to be so good at your job that somebody wrote a book about your life. It's like that's the tiniest... And in cases of people I'm super fascinated with, like you, it's like, "Oh, no book? Fine, I'm going to make my own." I literally printed out the transcripts for every single one of your interviews, and I went through it just like I did for this book.

Todd Graves: Like that.

David Senra: It looks the exact same way. It's just the same with personalities, like, whether you're playing basketball, or you're building Raising Cane's.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: So wait, so how many years of doing the franchises you're like, "S***, this is not the right move"?

Todd Graves: Yeah, I mean, so it was exciting getting in, it was exciting opening up a new restaurant, it was exciting to teach what we do and do well.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: It was exciting to learn. A couple years into it is when I started seeing the lack of efficiencies, and a little bit less... You know, they still did a good job, and so I want to give them credit, they did a good job. But not as good as we could do it. So, if we couldn't do it as well, you know, we might be like, "Oh wow, look, they took us to another level." They just didn't operate as good as we did. They cared about the crew, they cared about the customers. They just didn't operate as well as we did. And so, a couple years into it, I started seeing it. We bought them out probably about the 10-year mark, which was good.

David Senra: Right.

Todd Graves: Because they were able to grow, they were able to make good money. Another advantage of having company-owned restaurants is the business is valued way higher. Like, for franchises, you'll get a valuation off the 6% you're getting off that restaurant. That's part of their idea. But it's based off a valuation of what a franchise's markets go. So, let's say franchise multiples off of EBITDA, minus net... Franchise multiple would be like 4% to 7% is what they could sell in their market, right?

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Todd Graves: We're trading on... Not trading, we don't trade, but we're valued on over 20 times EBITDA. Those company restaurants go into that, so the profitability that comes into all of it gets on that higher multiple. That's why we have a 20 billion plus valuation for the business.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: So it's a better valuation model, too, if you do company.

David Senra: Okay, so let's go from two, how did you finance when you got up to 28?

Todd Graves: Oh man. So, this is interesting, man. I said, look, after the second restaurant, I had an opportunity to go into some of these failing double drive-through burger places. And so, great, I got Dr. Hill, another great mentor of mine, he's like, "Look, we're just not operators, man." They had like 30-something, you know, they're called Fast Track, and they're burger joints. "We're down to, like, four of just our best units and our best. We consolidated the best crew. We just want to be landlords. Like, we're not operators. And you can use the equipment, you can have all this. Look, whatever you need, and look, we'll give you a cheap rent."

Todd Graves: And so, I didn't want to go into them. It was these, like, double drive-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, not just on campus that we can do well, we can do well all over town." And we went into those places, we just painted them, used the equipment they had in there, and we started just doing sales, man. I mean, like, people loved it everywhere, and they loved it.

Todd Graves: And so, I eventually turned all those into big, you know, dine-in drive-through locations. So, I was able to do that, and do a mall food court. So, I was able to get all these places. So, we went from, what is that, two to eight restaurants. We opened five restaurants in five months, man. We started rolling. Made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot. Burned myself out. I couldn't be at all the locations, so then I really learned how to set up leaders at different restaurants, and give them the support they need, versus me bopping around to restaurants, and then, like, putting out fires basically is all I was doing.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: 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 Raising Cane's ultimate location? The prototype I want to do. And I want to do it out of town, and so out of Baton Rouge, and we chose Lafayette.

David Senra: Why?

David Senra: Why was this important?

Todd Graves: 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.

David Senra: Oh, okay.

Todd Graves: So, literally, one year, I'm like, "No more growth. We're going to set up what the prototype is." And by the prototype, I didn't mean just architectural design, kitchen design, and what our look and feel was. Everything. Marketing systems, human resource systems, training systems, everything globally. And I used to go to restaurant conferences to learn from people that were experienced. And I was able there to get... I know the marketing guy, I know the human resources, training, and operations person. I know, you know, the crew relations.

Todd Graves: So, I was able to assemble a team together, with architects, and with interior designers, and branding people, and I was able to assemble a team coming in. We called them partners, not consultants, because it was like they were partnered into the success of the business. And we came up with that first prototype, Raising Cane's opened up in Lafayette, and we just went gangbusters, dude. We killed it. It was just like, we had operational 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 gave us great... We came up with... Original black and white logo, we changed it to this logo, because we got it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: That's where we came up with Raising Cane's "ONE LOVE." All those things went into it. Combo-ing meals. I didn't combo. I had, you know, it was the box and a drink, and then we said let's combo it, because it makes it easier.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: You only have to decide to. It's like, just get those menu items.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: And we created that. And so, but I got that on another conventional loan. Now, I'm like, you know, with the money coming in and doing this thing is, I'm bankable, but I'm not bankable to where I want to grow, which ended up being the 28. And so, back then, banking regulations were a lot more lenient, man. And so, what I said was, "Why don't we go into all these community banks?" Let's say we want to open up in Houma, Louisiana.

Todd Graves: Go to the community bank in Houma, and let me go to angel investor, and this was Dr. Hill who had those Fast Tracks. He wanted to be a landlord. He also liked to do deals, and he said, "Hey, let me buy equity in the company." "I don't want to have equity partners." "But I'll give you a sub-debt deal." I said, "Dr. Hill, let's say I borrow $200,000 from you. I'll give you a 15% interest rate, subordinated debt." I mean, this is a one-page deal. Subordinated debt means subordinated to the banks. I know I can take that subordinated debt, that $200,000, and the bank will look at that as equity, right? So, it's $200,000 on a million-dollar deal, so I could go into the location, get that financed. Boom.

Todd Graves: And I was creating cash when I did that, because basically, I could open up. I didn't have to pay my rent for 30 days. I didn't have to pay my vendors for 30 days. You know, all those things came. So, opened up, got this cash flowing, and do it. Boom. Do the next one. Subordinated debt, no equity. And it was a really stupid way to finance a business, man, but I was young. I was 10-feet tall and bulletproof. We're going to work. I mean, I had zero fear of any kind of risk on debt, right?

Todd Graves: And so, I was going in, creating cash, doing this stuff. I get up to 28 restaurants, and all of a sudden, we have a storm coming in named Katrina. It's coming into Louisiana. We're used to hurricanes. We knew what to do. We put crew to safety, shut down the restaurants, buckled everything down. Hurricanes would come through, we'd open up the next day. We'd have some power outage, whatever. But Katrina was different, because it came up, went over New Orleans, and it hovered, and then the levees broke, right?

Todd Graves: And we're watching on TV from our second location across here where we'd all go. We got this whatever cranks up this power to where we could actually watch television. And when the levees broke, we were like, "We've never seen this before. What is this?" Flooding, terrible, awful, whole bit. And I thought, "Man, you just screwed up bad. You screwed up bad. You just put this company in such bad financial condition, because now, there ain't no sales coming in." And we knew it was going to take a while to open up.

David Senra: And every single Cane's location is...

Todd Graves: 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 companies levered to the hilt, right? I owe everybody. And in times like that, you would think that, you know... But the banks still want their money. Landlords still want their money. And I gathered people together. We had teams that helped people that actually had damage at houses, and do all these things, and we had to keep up through, like, SMS texting to make sure everybody... And we actually set that up pretty good before.

Todd Graves: And I'm like, "Look, we need to rally. And when I tell you we need to rally..." Like, I said, "We need to rally to save this business." And I explained to them how we had financed everything, and they understood. And I said, "We need to open up, because, one, we need to save the business. Two, we need a place for our crew to come back to work, because they have bills too." You've 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, we owe vendors and things like that, to pay for their livelihood. And then, three, people are going to start coming back to New Orleans, and they need a place to eat. And we symbolized as a team, and we had that same fanatical view of, "We're gonna do it."

Todd Graves: I figured out how to get into New Orleans right away, talking to the governor's office. They got us passes to go in. They weren't letting anybody in. We worked with the state on doing boil water acts, because we didn't have formalized boil water acts. You had to boil the water, because, I mean, some of the rivers and all these things had hit everything. You had to boil the water.

David Senra: Oh, boil.  

David Senra: Okay.

Todd Graves: But we came up with... We're working with them on, like, how do you boil the water? How do you test it to where it's safe? Those sort of things. And we reopened, man. We reopened. Like, we started off on the North Shore, you know, Slidell, those areas, on the West Bank. Like, some areas we opened up, like in Metairie, which is just a mass population of people. We're the only restaurant open. We opened up 30 days after the storm. Other restaurants didn't open for, like, 90 days. We opened up the West Bank...

David Senra: So you had the whole market to yourself?

Todd Graves: The whole market to ourselves. Opened up in, like, the West Bank. We opened up in Harvey, and it was, like, in the 120 days or whatever for the next restaurant to open. We fed first responders first, and when people came back, they just came in, and we were the only place to eat. They'd come in and eat. More would come in and eat, right? Because it was like, you can come in, we got power. It was all generator-powered.

David Senra: Right.

Todd Graves: We got generators from all over the country. Got them in and set it up. And we galvanized, at 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 disappointed in myself. And I was disappointed in myself because I put all that in jeopardy. You know what I mean? I put all that in jeopardy for financing.

Todd Graves: From that day, when I watched the levees break, I said, "I'll never, ever, ever put the company in a position that we're financially strapped. I'll never do that again." And from that day, we got our metrics, and we worked towards it. It took us a couple years to get there, but we worked towards those right, you know, it's like three times debt, equity, you know, sales, all that stuff is we'll never cross that. Like, I have a capacity to get all kind of, you know, lending, but we won't go past our metrics, right?

David Senra: Oh, unlimited.

David Senra: Yeah.

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

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: But we had to learn everything. It was like literally, "Hey guys, we can..." We talked to the restaurant industries, and all the authorities. We're like, "We're going to tape off every six feet for people to be. We're going to put shields between people." It's like, symbolizing the team like that. And then we took parking lots, and we had three drive-through lanes. When I tell you, we were of the first that figured 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 can get from the grocery store, man?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: It's like our sales went crazy. We were able to do huge crew bonuses, customer bonuses. But it's that fanaticism to figure it out right now. And it's like, me leading with the people. And I have so many people who are better at it than me, but, like, in the weeds with them in the restaurants. I flew to all of our markets, and saw everybody. But, at that point, too, I couldn't even go in the restaurant, because there'd be cross-contamination.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: Like, if I had it and went in.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: So, I just waved to everybody outside. Go to the next restaurant, wave. Fly to the next market, wave. You know, and do that sort of thing. But like, that's how you get galvanized. But that same entrepreneurial fanaticism, like, I'm sorry, you're not going to get that from some private equity group that's a bunch of corporate people. I mean, are they going to fly all over the country to do that and say, "Let's go tape this in the restaurants and do this stuff?" It's when it's personal to founders, 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 I just wish more founders would hold on, and stay with the business.

David Senra: I love what you said. It's like, "I watched the levees break, and there's no way I'm ever going to jeopardize. Like, this is my life's work. This is a part of me. I cannot let this die." One of my favorite quotes about this is, Steve Jobs says, "Victory in our industry is spelled survival." You see this over and over again in biographies. Like, just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. You took two gigantic, you know, tragedies that were outside of your control, which of course, you're going to run into things that are outside of your control.

Todd Graves: Acts of God, right.

David Senra: And you turn them into... Not a lot. 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 maybe never would have tried Raising Cane's if that didn't happen, because now, you're the only game in town.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: And then you're like, "Oh, this is pretty good." And then think about how many customers that one person has given you. One thing that comes to mind about this is, like, this sounds crazy, but one of my favorite entrepreneurs I've ever come across... I found this autobiography of Estée Lauder published in the 1980s, okay? At the time, Estée Lauder was not the public company. It was still really successful, but it was a family-owned business. And she would get a lot of s*** from people, because her main distribution channel was, like, she wants your, like, Bloomingdale's or Neiman Marcus as a distribution center.

Todd Graves: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: So, she goes, "Okay, if you're willing to sell my products that I love, that I gave my life to, I'm going to show up when you do that." And so, she would go. "Oh, a big Neiman Marcus opened in Houston. That makes a lot of sense. You're going to have 1,000 customers." "Estée, why are you going down to Corpus Christi? There's going to be 20 people there." And she's like, "Every single customer matters." And so, what she would do is on these trips, she didn't have any money to fly, so she'd have to take trains and buses. And let's say you're sitting across from Estée, just like me and you are sitting across right now, and she sees a woman. She's like, "Hi, I'm Estée Lauder. Would you mind giving me 20 minutes of your time? I'll give you a free makeup. I make beauty products, or a makeover rather."

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: It's like, "Oh, I guess. We're just sitting here. Let's do this." And then she does it, one-on-one attention. People are like, "Oh, that doesn't scale, you can't do that." Bulls***. It's gonna scale because you're gonna do this for the rest of your life. And so she says 30 years later, she would get letters from people that she gave a free makeup on a train, talking about how much they love the products.

Todd Graves: Right.

David Senra: Think about how many people that one woman that you spent 20 minutes with has told, if she's a customer of yours for...

Todd Graves: Oh, absolutely. Fanatical fans telling everybody they know, "Listen to this story."

David Senra: Exactly. I've been a customer of yours for, I don't know, four years, and then I make a podcast that's been listened to by, like, half a million people. Like, you couldn't have predicted that.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: There's probably going to be millions of people that watch what we're doing.

Todd Graves: That's right.

David Senra: The fact is it all stems from the fact that you're a fanatic.

Todd Graves: In purpose, right? And so, what excites me about talking to you today, is that the people that listen, if they get a little nugget from this, a little nugget that changes their life, that helps people, like, that fires me up. The reason why you're doing this, and you're so fanatical about having... I mean, like, and the questions you sent me before, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: I had those questions. I was able to get to wrap my mind around it, because you want it to be good for the listeners. But that's purpose, man.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: If it was just slapping something out to say this is success and do it, it's what people learn, and what people will benefit out of this conversation is what matters.

David Senra: You have an insane amount of information and knowledge. How many people work on the same thing for 30 years? It's just like, so few people, because everybody wants to... What we talked about earlier, they want to start, scale, sell.

Todd Graves: Yeah.

David Senra: And it's just like, my favorite entrepreneurs, like, sometimes I've got to speak to entrepreneurs. I had just had dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world. He's 76 years old. He's been working in the family business since he was six. Do you understand what's in that guy's head?

Todd Graves: Absolutely, yeah.

David Senra: It's so much more impressive than the... No disrespect to anyone else, but, like, the startup founder that ran the business for two years. These are like, they know nothing. They're like a baby. They're still in diapers. And even you. I love that you keep hitting, that you haven't met... I'm just implying here, but you're like, "Yeah, we can get to 95." Yeah, because you know there's no such thing as ever getting to 100. You're always looking for different ways to improve. Todd, you're going to do this for the rest of your life. I'm going to have conversations with founders for the rest of my life. I really appreciate you taking a risk and being one of my first guests.

Todd Graves: Absolutely, man. I'm a big fan of what you do, man. It fired me up that I'm one of the first, man. It's like, because everybody's going to want to watch it and see it, man. It's like...

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

Todd Graves: Oh, well, I appreciate what you do. I appreciate you having me on.

David Senra: Yeah.

Todd Graves: I loved the conversation. And we could actually talk for another five hours.

David Senra: All right, let's go check out the apartment. I'm [unintelligible].

Todd Graves: Yeah, yeah. Well, so, I want to show you the kitchen here, and then I want to go back, and then let's go check out the apartment.

David Senra: All right, let's do it.

David Senra: 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 have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."