Try to concentrate more on progress rather than perfection. And you’ll move the things forward. “Ideas are easy, execution is hard.” What though separated your execution from everybody else? Imagine how hard it’s to start your business, right? And then multiply that by infinity. If you’re still committed, then you’ll see it through. The first time that I ever had Raising Cane’s, I bite it, my mouth is suddenly scalded. Sorry about that. I felt like a child who had never eaten soup before. We all gotta eat and we all gotta start somewhere. Welcome to the show, founder of Raising Cane’s, Todd Graves. And Josh, thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m a big fan, as you know. Stop, man, I’m a big fan of you. I think this show is great because it blends two things I really like, which is food, of course. And then just really good conversation. You know, I love how you get some good points from people. And I pick up stuff every episode I watch. I think you just like the show because you saw Post Malone eating Raising Cane’s shirtless on “Last Meals” once, and then that’s where you’re actually coming from. That’s when I became a super fan, for sure. So, what we’re gonna do today is, we are gonna sort of take stock of your entire life through the lens of food. We’re gonna look at one of your childhood meals, one of the meals that you ate while you were hustling really, really hard, building your business. And then one of the meals you used to celebrate your success. Have you ever really tried to break down your life in that fashion before? No, never have, but I love how you do it. So, I’m looking forward to this journey today. Hey, you and I are on this journey together, man. And we got a cold beer in our hands. Yeah, we do. And sometimes, that’s all that matters. Cheers, brother. You ready to get down to it? Yeah, let’s go. Let’s go. Todd, for your childhood meal, we have the proper Cajun dark roux gumbo. Now this is with sausage and chicken. And then we got the Louisiana style rice. Right in the middle, we have a little bit of toasted French bread with butter, popped in a super hot oven just to get it nice and crispy. And then this one is new for me. This is something called a sensation salad. Yeah, it’s a Baton Rouge original. Yeah, my hometown. Sounds like you had food really be a big part of your life. Yeah. You know, for a long time. And then you went to high school. You said you kind of bridged the gap between like the jocks, the honors kids, the theater kids. Yeah. Which I imagine like really helped you as you ended up managing large crews of people. Yeah, absolutely. Like, just food’s just a uniter, right? Food symbolizes love to me. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. And so, growing up in my mom’s kitchen, we cooked Cajun and Creole food, and we made a gumbo together, right? And a gumbo, you can actually make, you know, an hour, a little bit longer. Yeah. But we drag it out all day. Right, because it’s her and I spending time together and we’re actually cooking this gumbo for our friends and family. And it’s a way to say I love you, right? Yeah. And get to enjoy something good together. I mean, please grab, dig in. Yeah, let’s dig in. We’ll see if you got it. Well done. We did all right? Well done. That’s an authentic Louisiana gumbo right there. I think one of the greatest ironies is that how much you grew up cooking Cajun-Creole food and then how little Cajun-Creole food Raising Cane’s serves. When I wanted to open Raising Cane’s, I wanted to have a good flavor for meal, but I didn’t want it to be regional. I didn’t want it to be Cajun. Yeah. I didn’t want it to be extra spicy. I wanted it just to be good full flavored meal. That’s interesting because at that time too, that was when like Cajun cooking was really, really taking off. So it would’ve made sense you would’ve jumped in there. But obviously, it worked out pretty well for you. Yeah, you know what, I believe in doing one thing and doing better than anybody else. Focus, and that’s why Cane’s has that focus menu, right? Yeah. A lot of people say, it’s a simple menu. Listen, it’s actually, what we put together is not simple, right? It’s the right chicken. Yeah. It’s marinated, like brine for 24 hours, hand battered, and breaded. Hand batter and breaded, and goes down that one fry line, and then goes out the door. Yeah, yeah, please then. Can we dig into the sensation salad? Absolutely. Again, like I said, this is brand new to me. Now, so this is a Baton Rouge original, started by the De Stefano family. Actually, an Italian family in Baton Rouge. And they created this. So, you can tell it’s gonna be a little bit Italian, right? It looks like Caesar salad’s cousin. It’s got the Romano cheese instead of the Parmesan. It’s got iceberg lettuce instead of Romaine, loaded with garlic. Absolutely. Very simple, right, but very flavorful. So, french bread, right? Obviously, we’re very French in Louisiana. So, French bread is a loaf, is our absolute go-to. Some people like to cook the whole loaf, cut it, and put butter on it. I prefer to cut it and do just exactly like you all did. I like the crispy little edges, man. And butter it up and dip in your gumbo. Todd, this is the best time, dude. Why don’t we do this more often? We should. I got a little surprise for you later too. Yeah? Well, maybe. You weren’t one of those people that really knew exactly what you wanted to do early on, right? It took you actually like going to college, experiencing life a little bit, working in restaurants, to know that food is your calling. Was there one single moment that you realized, “Oh, this is what I wanna do with my life. This is how I wanna spend my time.” Yeah, you know, so, I went to college for writing for television and film actually. I liked to write screenplays, I was creative, and I was really interested in that. But I mean, look, I grew up in entrepreneur. I was a kid in the neighborhood that had a lemonade stand, or I’d go cut people’s grass, and, you know, I saw some older kid do some stenciling of address labels, and learned how to do that. And so, I was always out there making money. So I was in college, I worked high school, college, in restaurants, loved the business. Towards my senior year, I was like, when it came time to decide really what I was gonna do, you know, to support myself, I was like, “You know what? If I want to go out to Hollywood, push per rooms, and go through that, I think someday I’ll be successful. But I know this, this me doing a restaurant, I knew the business. Like, I know I’ll be successful at this and it’s a passion of mine. So, I said, “Man, let’s go for it.” So, enlisted in a business planning class. I had a partner there, this is at LSU. I wrote the Bible on chicken fingers. I mean, I wrote a thick business plan. Actually I could show you that business plan too. You have the original still? If you’d like to see. Absolutely, I do. Got it back from the bankers. We went and took around. I am… Wait, no, this is the original. Yes. The original-original. This is the original business plan. That’s incredible. Oh my gosh. It looks an Irish bar and grill in New Jersey. And I’m into it. Craig and I had a friend, and he always called everybody, Folly. We literally wrote this plan. We didn’t have a name for it. So, we wrote, we called it Folly’s Fingers at LSU. The professor gave me the worst grade in the class. All right, but he said, “Hey, look, you did a great plan.” I mean, I knew what aprons had cost that week to get cleaned, right? Yeah. So I knew everything about the business. He said the plan itself was solid and very well thought out. “But you didn’t study the industry.” And all the quick service are adding menu items, ’cause there’s a thing called the veto vote, right? So if there’s somebody in the car, just one person in the car says, “Well, I don’t want that ’cause it doesn’t have it for me.” They said, they’re just going to pass up your place and go eat somewhere else. And so, for me, it didn’t deflate me. I actually understood what the professor was saying. If you didn’t know on the surface. And then the professor also just lost the fact that, look, people love craveable food. Yeah. And serving craveable food that you can literally execute on a great level of the day’s always gonna be a success. And so, look, I’m just an entrepreneur man. That first no, it just- Yeah. It just fired me up, man. And I used it as fuel. I’m like, “You know what? I’m gonna show that professor that I am gonna be a success and that this actually will work.” And took that business plan, bought a cheap suit, bought a briefcase from Office Depot. And I don’t know if you remember them, but they’re the fake leather with the brass combination locks. Yeah, it’s like the movie, “Briefcase.” It looks like a movie prop. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Literally went in and saw every bank had business plan in there. They were nice enough but this, you know, same response. You wanna serve just chicken fingers. But every one of those nos fired me up that much more. Right, so then I had to go, which is a whole ‘nother story, then I had to go raise money. Somebody once said to me, “Ideas are easy, execution is hard.” And like, it sounds like you frankly didn’t have the most unique idea, right? Which I think the professor was probably commenting on. It sounds like you know that a little bit. What those separated your execution from everybody else? When I was in college, I took, I was part of the entrepreneur club. And so, I saw these people had good ideas, right? But then I saw along the way that they would stop doing it. Whether it’s like, “I’m gonna go rent and get a thing to steam clean your carpets, right?” But when it got hard, they just quit. And they’re like, “Oh, I’m just gonna go work for a bank or I’m gonna go do these different things.” And so, when I set my mind out to start Raising Cane’s. And so, and then my partner then, Craig, I was like, “Look, we need to do this, but like, we have to like commit to this.” I mean, through success or failure, we don’t stop. And he was like, “Okay, man.” You know, I said, “No, I don’t think you really know what I’m talking about, man, let’s go out and camp.” So, we went camping in North Carolina. We’re around a campfire. I was like, “We’re gonna commit to this, right?” ‘Cause I had this intuitive sense after getting the bad grade in the business planning class, things like that, I was like, “You have to see this through, right?” How many great ideas did entrepreneurs stop middle down the way? So, when I talk to a business class and people ask me, “You know, what do you need to really make it?” I’m like, “Imagine how hard it’s to start your business.” Right? “And then multiply that by infinity. And if you’re still committed to see that through, because you’re gonna have so many hard times, it’s so hard to raise money. Most people tell you, it’s a bad idea. If you’re still committed, then you’ll see it through.” And sure enough, it worked out for me. You ready to get to the next course? I am. Now Todd, for the hustle meal that brought you through the toughest times. There’s a bit of foreshadowing here. We have the chicken top ramen. We have the food club pork and beans sitting directly in some coals. We have the giant brownies with the walnuts in it. Then we have some coffee, a bottle of Jack Daniels. You knew you wanted to start what was then called Folly’s Chicken Fingers at the time. And you didn’t have the money to start it. So you asked a friend, “Where can I make money quick?” And you ended up in an oil refinery and then through a series of events, end up in the Alaskan tundra, which is where we find ourselves with all these foods. You really had the hero’s journey all the way through. I did, I was so fortunate for that, right. He was an adventurer. And working in the refineries of boiler makers were the first ones that are encouraging to me. They knew I was out there- Yeah. Working hard, hard, hard, raising money for this chicken finger dream. And so, one of these boiler makers, his nickname, everybody had nicknames, was Wild Bill. And Wild Bill spent his summers working in the Alaskan fishing trade, and he said, my name was Hollywood, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Did you have the long hair, or what was the Hollywood nickname off? We were working at refineries here in Torts and at El Segundo. We had one night off in, one night off in like 12 weeks. I ended up in Hollywood late the next day for work. Went to the old, The Viper Room, Johnny Depp-Sal bar. And then it was just, I met Drew Barrymore walking in. I was like, “Wow, this is Hollywood.” Anyway, late for work. And so, they gave me that nickname. But Wild Bill said, “You know, Hollywood. You’re a hard worker. I believe you’re gonna get this dream, but if you really wanna make some money, and I know you’re hardworking and you’re not scared, you need to come up to Alaska and work in the sockeye fishing trade.” And I was like, “Great, well, how do I do that?” He goes, “You need to go to a Naknek, Alaska.” I’m like, “Where is that?” He goes, “Above the Lucian chain.” “How do you get out there?” He’s like, “Flying to Anchorage, catch up plane, float plane out to King Salmon, Alaska, and just hitchhike your way up to Naknek.” “Okay, then what do I do?” “Well, bring a tent and to camp out in Tent City. They’ll let you camp out there and go talk to the boat captains every day before they go out.” Yeah. And say, “Hey, I’d like to get a job on your boat as a greenhorn.” And we went up, man, lived on that tundra. Which actually isn’t that bad. It’s actually very soft, you know, it’s got the permafrost. Yeah, tundras get a bad name these days. Yeah. Tundra’s not too bad. It’s not too bad at all. And it’s like now down below, it’s permafrost. I mean, it’s literally ice. But then, it has this moss on top so you can put your tent out there. And us out there trying to get a job, there was, I don’t know, probably 20 of us out there. Yeah. Look, we’re all broke. We’re all out there to make money. So it’s like, “What do we live off of?” And you had no refrigeration, right? And so, we go to the little grocery store and buy ramen noodles top, and they still make this, this brand, which is classic, right? And pork and beans and cheap things like that that we could heat up over a fire in a camp stove, and eat for very cheap. I think back then, you could get a thing of ramen for maybe 50 cents. This was probably 75 cents for a thing of pork and beans. And you could eat for under two bucks every meal. And you’ve got all the sustenance you needed. I’m so incredibly excited that I get to share these memories with you, ’cause this is utterly wild. Oh my gosh, we ate ramen so many different ways that we then we do it, you probably did this too, you know, when it was just even dry and you put the seasoning on it, just eat it that way because you had too much boil. Yeah, yeah, 100%. But it still brings out good memories. And everywhere I travel, let’s say I run a VRBO house or whatever, our team always puts top ramen in there, ’cause late night, go back and make it up. Brings back good memories. That’s so funny, man. I love that you twirl it on the fork. Like it’s a beautiful plate of spaghetti carbonara. I think there’s a certain type of person that’s attracted to intense environments and I think you tend to see a lot of athletes. I think actors also tend to do that. You played sports, you were in theater, you seem to be really attracted to working in restaurants, which is an incredibly intense environment that people who haven’t worked in them don’t quite understand. Was there something about your unique personality type that attracted you to the oil refineries into the tundra to go sockeye fishing? Yeah, I think it’s just testing yourself to the limits, right? Yeah. And so, can I work a 95 hour work week around heavy machinery, the stuff I’ve never done before. Yeah. You know, bringing in big flanges on some 10 story tower and learning this stuff and doing that brings you to limits. Can I work 20 hour days during the peak of the season in Alaska fishing trade? Which I thought was just an amazing adventure. But can I do that, right? Can I work in the restaurant every hour that is open for as long as I have to for months and months on end? That kind of thing tests me. And now I said, it keeps you sharp, right? It keeps you humble. Yeah. It makes you work hard for things and that environment of just pushing yourself, it just keeps your energy up, right? You’re never tired. Can I ask, what is the significance of this bottle of Jack Daniels? And can I pour you up a shot? I would love one, please. So, you know, we’re out there, we’re broke. We’re eating ramen noodles, tuna fish out of the can with little mustard, pork and beans. You know, we’re really getting tired of this food and we didn’t have any money to spend on anything else. But my mother sent a care package out to Naknek. And actually, the postman came by our camp thing. “Is Todd Graves out here? I said, “Yes, sir.” And there was this big box that my mother sent and we opened up that box. Everybody, all, everybody in tent city. Yeah. And I pulled out my mom’s amazing brownies that she made, that she sent out all the way to Alaska. A big bottle of Jack in the middle. I think she sent me a carton of cigarettes, which is hilarious your mom doing that. Yeah, yeah. You know, but it was just goodies from home and what happened out there, if you got anything, everybody shared, so we all broke out the Jack, poured it in cups similar to this. And we got to enjoy some brownies and just a little taste of home. Get us out of our element for a second and it just tasted so good. Yeah, hey, cheers, man. Cheers, brother. Still tastes good. I think of that every time I have a sip of Jack. I say it probably tastes better in the tundra, but it still tastes pretty good now. Still tastes good, huh? This is a bit of a philosophical question, but do you think the personality type that you have that attracts you to these intense experiences, do you think that is nature? Or do you think that’s nurtured? Do you think there was somebody deep maybe in your childhood that really encouraged you? Like, “Hey, this hard work is something that it shouldn’t feel like the grind, it shouldn’t feel like something that saps energy from you, but should actually give you energy.” Yeah. So, I think it’s a rare personality. No, it’s a great question. So, I think it’s both. I think it’s nature and nurture. I think along the way, it was teachers and coaches that inspired me to do the best. Right? My track coach, Claney Duplechin, I mean, his whole- What was that name? Claney Duplechin. Claney Duplechin. He pushed us all to do your best, personal best. And so, that personal best thing got in my head, was that, look, even when I was younger, and I wasn’t starting on the four by one. Yeah. But I was that color off. He was like, “It’s okay. Keep doing your personal best.” And so, like for me, as I’ve carried that all the way, it’s like personal best. But with that, your personal best meant you’re gonna work your ass off, you’re gonna train, you’re gonna earn it, you’re gonna do it, and you’re gonna be a good athlete, you’re gonna stay good in school. Those types of things like inspired me, you know, take those things with me and still carry them today. Do you remember your javelin personal best? Through like 180. Anytime I can nerd out about specifically, the throws events with somebody, I have to take that opportunity to do it. This man javelin four by one double. Trackhead, sound off in the comments. You know how rare and how awesome that is. That idea of the personal best. That is also something that drove me and it’s something that drove me specifically to track, which was an individual sport. Right. I love working in a team environment, but also, I love controlling my own destiny in a certain way. Absolutely, right. So, when you’re in the Alaskan Tundra, one, these brownies are like some of the best things I’ve ever eaten. And y’all nailed it too. This is all, mama, not as good, not as good as yours, but it’s pretty dang close. Mama Graves, thank you for the recipe. We intentionally made them slightly worse than yours. You’re welcome so much. And literally called my mother for the recipe, which is great. But was there a number in mind that you had that you needed to save? And once you reached that number, did you immediately come back and you’re like, “I’m opening the first sockeyes chicken fingers, then Raising Cane’s chicken fingers on LSU?” Yeah, no, no, I didn’t. And so, I just knew I had to make as much money as I could. Yeah. In the time period I can. So, this wonderful man, Red Reynolds, was an amazing guy. And this, we started at North Gates of LSU and we love this location, but it was this dilapidated old place, right? And it had been different college concepts, right? Everything from T-shirt shops to everything else. This broker who was doing it for a family, Tallulah Arbor, she was 94 at the time. And he said, “Tallulah, I think Todd’s gonna, he’s gonna make sure you’re gonna be, have a long term tenant. I believe in him, but he has to raise the money.” Right, and so, I told him, I said, “Hey, you know, I gotta go out and raise money now. Will you save the place for us?” He says, “I’ve already talked to Tallulah, but you have to come back. You need to, you got one year to do it.” And he did right by ours. We’re there and the family still owns the lease, and we still go on and do. But him doing that, so I just knew I had to make as much money as I could. Yeah. In the shortest period of time I could, in the highest paying jobs I could. And it actually turned out well. Like I came back. I probably made 50,000, something like that. And this is back in 1995. That’s like $3 million. Right. Yeah. I don’t know what. Whatever it is, it’s good. And then it not even about you making the money, but it was almost about showing other people that drive that you had. Absolutely. So, well, that was the payoff, right? Yeah. I was just out there, going, “I’m gonna do.” When I came back, they were like, “Man, you’re so determined on this. I heard you talk about this before, but now I know you really are”- Icicles and beard from Alaska. He was like, “You are committed to this.” Yeah. “And look, it’s a chicken restaurant and on the North Gates of LSU, feeding college kids, I believe you can make it work.” So, I raised, I can’t remember how much I raised preferred shares, maybe a hundred. I can’t remember what it was. But there was people that boiler makers I worked with, invested 5, $10,000. My bookie gave me $10,000 in cash, right? I was like, “Is this legal?” And the accountant’s like, “Yes. We’ll 1099 or whatever.” They do with that. That’s so funny. So I had enough money, not only to open and do the renovations, but also to have a little bit of cash, you know, just in case sales weren’t good. And they were all right, we made $30 the first month. $30 profit? 30 whole bucks. But, the important part- Well, the fact that you didn’t make negative several dollars is insane, considering the restaurant is- A hundred percent, it meant I could pay my crew. Yeah. I could pay my vendors, I could pay rent, I could make payroll. Everything was paid for, right? Yeah. And then we just slowly built that sucker up and then started making money. And 18 months later, opened the second Raising Cane’s. Another SBA loan but I actually bought the property. And I say this, ’cause if you wanna start a business, that’s how quickly it can change. Literally 18 months later, after fishing in Alaska and reconstructing this old dilapidated place into a restaurant, I bought the property, built a building, did dine-in, drive-thru, full parking, everything. And that’s what really set us off. When you were in Alaska, when you were going through this like very intense grind period, trying to open that first location, did you have it in your mind that, “I don’t want one location, I don’t want one restaurant.” I wanted one location. You know, that was what I wanted. I wanted a cool place where I could hang out with people around my age, college students, and feed college students, which I knew. But the interesting thing, when we opened the second location, I thought it was just a college concept, right? The traffic flow is also people in town. And so I had, you know, moms and dads stopping on the way home to get food for the family, T-ball teams on Saturday, and church groups on Sunday. I was like, “Man, this could be everywhere.” And that’s the point I said, “You know what? That’s where I got that vision.” I’m like, “I can put this anywhere. You know, I can grow this.” I really got that thing, “It’s hard, man.” And you’d ask why. Why do I want do it? ’cause it didn’t equate to dollars then. It was just like, “I love building teams. I love building something and growing.” And that’s when I got the fire to really grow it. Yeah, we gotta drink this coffee. I imagine it fueled you throughout the entire experience. It’s Louisiana Community Coffee, which is what we drink. And then that came in that care package and I can turn everybody into believers. We actually make some coffee. Oh, cowboy coffee, right? Yeah. Boil it, put it in the bottom of the deal. And we didn’t even have a strainer. We just poured it into the grind. You know, the grinds would almost go in there. End up with a mouthful of sand at the end. Yeah, exactly. Cheers. But it was good coffee and good strong coffee. Sure is. I wanna ask, what was the deepest point of struggle throughout this whole adventure? Fishing on an Alaskan fishing boat and we’re catching so much fish that literally, it’s like, you’re almost getting waves come in and sink the boat. So, out there, you’d hear on the medical radio, you hear so and so got thrown out with nets and drowned. People would die and doing things and then all that work. And then you go back and you’re like, then I came back, and all the guys who were out are still fishing, right? Yeah. And I got lonely that night. It’s just lonely, right? That was kind of like that, those different times. So the struggle was just keeping yourself going, keeping yourself sharp. But then, that’s the struggle makes it so much, so much sweeter. Yeah. Right in the deal. But it’s just keeping yourself going. And that’s why I just reach out to these people and just say, “Never ever give up. That’s the key to being successful.” That’s incredible, man. You ready to move on to the third course? Oh, I’d love to. Cheers, man. Todd, for your third course for your success meal, we have the fully loaded pepperoni pizza with extra pepperoni. Wow. We have this stuffed Dungeness crab over here. And then we have the deluxe fried seafood platter. We got fried oysters, fried scallops, fried shrimp, and then some fried catfish in there with remoulade and tartar sauce, and cocktail sauce. So, you open the second location on the other side of campus and then fast forward to now with a lot of trials and tribulations in between, you’re closing in on a thousand locations, over $5 billion in revenue. That is such an incredible growth story. Well, thank you. What do these success meals mean to you? You know, I think it goes back to memories with food, right? And so, we all have our growth stories. And when I was broke, we’d go to these, you know, classic mom and pop seafood places, right? And, but we never could afford the seafood platter, right? Yeah. And so, literally, I’d get like the roast beef po’ boy I could get for five bucks with fries and a beer, right? But like, the seafood platter was like 30 or 35 bucks. And this one time, my friend, Cajun guy named, Randy Young, we were there and he said, “Yeah, I got this new credit card.” We’re like college students. And back then, you could get a credit card, $5,000 limit, but it was like 22% interest rate. And he was like, “Let’s just splurge and get that seafood platter.” And we did, we got a seafood platter. It looked like this. No meal has ever tasted that good to me since that time. For me, it’s actually really similar to this because I remember my dad talking about the shrimp cocktail at Clearman’s North Woods Inn. Now, when I was a kid, I thought that Clearman’s North Woods Inn was the fanciest restaurant in the world. Turns out, it was like a themed restaurant that had like fake snow on the roof and the shrimp cocktail was probably like $9. But it was something that, for me, was like the height of luxury. And so, I have always held shrimp cocktail to be like the fanciest, most expensive food in the world. Please dig in. Remoulade sauce. This is the same thing you have in Louisiana, right? And the hot horseradish sauce here. The cocktail sauce and then the homemade tartar sauce. Yes, sir. Cheers. Oh, and the stuffed crab. No, we didn’t have Dungeness crab. We had blue crabs, which is half this size. But look how brilliant this is. We tried to find blue crabs locally, couldn’t find them fresh. Decided it wasn’t good enough to serve you frozen. This is beautiful. My hat’s off to the chef. Incredible. Thank you, thank you. I’m gonna tell you about the first time that I ever had Raising Cane’s because I had seen y’all like advertising during college football, which I watched obsessively. And that was probably the first time I had ever seen the name and seen the logo. And then I’m going to visit my grandma. I was on the corner, I believe El Toro and Moulton, down in Laguna Hills, California. Out of nowhere, I see a Raising Cane’s spring up in a new building. I’m like, “Oh my God. That’s the place that I’ve seen on the commercials.” I take the box and I open it. I’m like, “Some good looking tenders, I love it.” Generally, pink sauce. I dip it in, I bite it. My mouth is suddenly scalded with hot chicken juice. I literally, I felt like a- Sorry about that. You were just doing your job. I felt like a child who had never eaten soup before and just scalded his mouth because I’d never had chicken that was that hot and fresh out of a fast food restaurant. I’d eaten all the other major chicken chains and you can just throw that in your mouth immediately and it’s pleasantly lukewarm and fine. But I was so impressed and consistently have been by like the actual quality and attention to detail. People say that the reason fast food is successful is because the replicability is because of that consistency. However, we’ve seen with so many different chains as they expand that consistency drops for- Yeah, yeah, you know, I think what happens with that is, honestly, is I think there’s a lack of founders that care. Like you care, like I care that everybody gets a good quality craveable meal in a place that’s food safe friendly. We’re getting them their food fast. Like, I want to earn people’s money, so does my crew, right? So, when venture capitals come on, they take controlling interest of the business and that’s when the CFOs jump in and say, “You know what? We don’t need to make our sauce in house at every restaurant.” Yeah. You know, we can make it in a commissary. We can put it in the vacuum seal lids and we’ll save X. Yeah. And it’s like a death by a thousand cuts that go, because ultimately, if your motivation is money, then you’re not gonna care. You’re gonna let those great quality things go down. You’re not gonna pay your people well. You’re not gonna treat them well. You’re not gonna do this. That’s what’s happened to fast food, man. So, if you care about people, meaning your own crew and then your customers, like, I take an expression myself. I want them to have a meal that they say like, your first time you remember, “Raising Cane’s. I had a great meal, it was craveable, I’m gonna be back. But they treated me right.” Right? That’s what makes me happy. Where do you see the ultimate end goal? Is there a point where you’re like, “Hey, we have expanded enough or we’ve done enough.” Or I mean, are you one of those people who are like, “I wanna see a Raising Cane’s on every single continent.” It’s that. That’s a division. Yeah. I wanna have locations all over the world. The Antarctic Research Institute, Raising Cane’s. I wanna be right next door there, right? Even if it’s a little stand to me out there doing it, feeding the researchers, right? I’ll be out there doing it. He’s got experience with the cold, folks. Mama mail and brownies. So, for me, it’s like, so, you know, you start off, you have a dream. You gotta be passionate and determined, focused. Work hard, you gotta make that happen as. If you are open to it, you get purpose, right? Yeah. And so my purpose is ultimately to help people, right? You have 75,000 crew members. Most people’s first job comes on with me at Cane’s, right? They learn good values. They have a place that’s fun, but we work hard. We have fun, we have positive motivational management. That’s why you see people are happy, right? Yeah. So you do that. They carry it on to other jobs or a lot of them stay with us and become great leaders in our company. And so, it’s that people then also with money you can make and it’s getting to where we’re making really good money, is then I can get back to do meaningful things to help out. Whether it’s any community calls, small or big, you can also give back. So when you have that purpose, there’s no end to that, right? There’s no, you know, I got to this point and, “Yeah. Sell now, da da da da.” No, it’s like, it should be multi-generational. My kids are in the business, ’cause the larger we get, the more we have, the more we can help people. Yeah. What’s the story behind the pizza? ‘Cause this is a very, very loaded pizza. Well, yeah, the pizza’s gorgeous. It looks a lot better than the one that I had. This was in Alaska. It goes back to that story again. Thank you, thank you. And eating ramen noodles, and pork and beans, and all those good things, on the boat actually. I was the chef because I was from Louisiana, right? There’s four on the boat, so I cooked the meals too. We had a lot of salmon, which was great. I actually made salmon roe. You know, you take the salmon roe. Yeah. And these are all fishermen out of Washington. They thought I was crazy. I get the eggs sack, and put it in a bowl, and put salt on it, right? Yeah. And I would eat it, eat the bowl of it, you know. And so, they eventually tried it and liked it. We got done fishing in Bristol Bay. We went down to Seward, Alaska. They actually had a hotel there. They didn’t have that up at Naknek. Yeah. They had tent city. And, man, we were like, me, Craig, and then this other guy. We were like, “Y’all wanna all go in threes and get a hotel room, like we can watch TV, and there’s like air conditioning, and a heater at night.” Yeah. And we rent a hotel room. I remember it was like one bed, two of us up on the floor. I was one of them. I guess we played rock, paper, scissors. And I remember we got a pizza, which was the biggest delight. Literally came in and we ate a pepperoni pizza. And like I said, these two meals, nothing will ever taste good as those meals. I had just splurging for a second. That was success to me. Cheers. Oh, man, your team knocks it out. So many people, they think of things like caviar, and Wagyu, and truffles, and foie gras, and when they think of like, the most expensive success meals, but especially as a chef, somebody who tells stories through food, it’s just a feeling. It’s a feeling of making somebody feel accomplished or feel cared about. Right? A hundred percent. It’s the feeling of seeing an employee when you walk in, to you, Raising Cane’s. For me, on the West coast, who is in and out, where I was like, “Why do the people behind the counter there seem so much happier than the people behind the counter at?” Another place, right? Another place. Right? Right. And how do you keep those people actually bought in? Especially when you have near a thousand locations. Yeah, yeah, it’s just caring, right? Look, I’ve started the first restaurant, and my crew works so hard, like, literally worked so hard. And one night, like, they all got together, say, “Can we have a meeting with you after the shift?” I said, “Yeah,” it’s like 3:30 in the morning. And they’re like, “You know how we came in, we wanted a part-time job while we’re in school?” I’m like, “Yeah, how’s it going?” They’re like, “We’re all working like 90 hour shifts, Todd. We’re failing out of school. We gotta hire some more people.” And I was like, I was so grateful. Yeah. So grateful for that crew. They were part of my dream, working hard to fuel that. And so, what that did was that created what our culture’s built off of. Appreciation. Appreciation for the crew that’s working hard. Appreciation for our customers coming in and helping us. And that’s where it goes. So if you have a culture built on appreciation, you’re gonna do the right things and you’re always gonna care about them. Like, so specifically when you start, when you say, “Hey, what are we doing?” My thing is how the crew doing. You can see on crew surveys, you can see how things are going. You can actually drill on places that’s not good. It’s usually ’cause the leader’s not good. Yeah. And not treating them well and doing all the things. What it is, so, like when I interview people, it’s like if I interview somebody that’s young, it’s you like serving people. When I hire people for executive positions, I hate that word, but like that deal is I ask them, “What motivates you?” And when you hear about things about like, you know, purposeful things, I like to take, you know, “I like what we can do through our business to help people, blah, blah, blah.” You have that aura if you hear, “Well, I wanna build this. I wanna go from this job to this, then I wanna do this, this, and it’s title hopping and da da da.” I know that person’s not gonna work out in our business. So, the whole thing is continually to bring good people in that believe in your values, right? Yeah. Believe in your non-negotiables. Believe in the things that make you up. And then, you display with that leadership, constant thing. So, I created this department called Cane’s Love. It’s a whole department called Cane’s Love. Started from the first restaurant when people, we just said, “Hey, here’s a little Cane’s love. Here’s a coffee card to the place down the street,” ’cause you came in on three shifts, and you went out, and cleaned the dumpster and da da da. It’s like, “Hey, thanks for the Cane’s love.” Right? Yeah. So I created a whole department, fully staffed, that’s Cane’s love. Respect, recognition, rewards for crew members, right? Yeah. Put the dollars towards that, see these amazing programs come through, and all these things that actually, you know, that the crew feels appreciated. That’s all it is. Yeah. Was there any point where somebody within the company or from outside of the company really like, challenge your expertise, and that you realized you had to actually rise to that challenge throughout all of this? Yeah, constantly, man. I mean, you learn more from mistakes than you do successes, I think. Yeah. I used to want everything so perfect. Let’s say it’s a new training program. I wouldn’t release it because I wanted it to be this amazing program and you could just edit the thing every day. And I had a older man told me, “Hey, man. Try to concentrate more on progress rather than perfection and you’ll move the things forward.” And he said, “You’re gonna have your ultimate thing you want. Like what you have in your head for this training program. It’s coming, like you will get that program. But start with version one. That might be version a hundred.” Yeah. But push the business forward on that. That was a great challenge, I think, for me because then I was like, “You know what? I am holding up the business.” Financial advice. I mean, look, after Hurricane Katrina, we had 21 to 28 restaurants go down. I had to over-leverage the business, doing some really creative financing. Really creative. Wasn’t smart at all. You had to go back to the bookie that invested. I need a little loan. But that told me never over-leverage the business, right? I could have put us out of business. Is there a moment that you think you’ll be able to recognize that you’re say expanding too fast, that you’re say, doing too much, that something is wrong? How do you know when to actually recognize that, ’cause a lot of people can get just lost in the sauce of forward, forward, forward. Yeah, yeah, I go with past experiences, so- Sure. Moving out of Louisiana, we opened up in Houston and Dallas, right? I’m really excited for these big markets. You got a lot of people in Louisiana there. We have a little brand knit recognition. I put two of our best general managers, one in Dallas, one in Houston, and literally burned them out, and didn’t give them the support they needed, right? And so, they were great general managers, but they were around our ecosystem. They weren’t the people that were set up it remotely and independently, right? I didn’t know how to look for that. And then the second thing, we didn’t give them the support services to go with that. Yeah. So, these restaurants did terrible, terrible. Like they were just dead. I learned from that, so, right now, we’re opening about a hundred restaurants a year. Other concepts that have been around, I’ve been around 29 years, are opening 200 restaurants. You know, they’re opening way more. And even bankers will ask like, “You have plenty of capacity, you can open up more restaurants.” We’re like, “No, this is what we can do to operate restaurants.” Yeah. Really well right now. You’ve seen companies that, you know, say, founded in 1948 and have slowly, and slowly, and slowly been matriculating along. Todd, we ask every guest, if you were to have a conversation with 14-year-old you, telling him about what has transpired in your life, what do you think 14-year-old you would say to you now? You know, like I said earlier, you know, we’re talking about more concentrate, more on progress rather than perfection? Yeah. Was probably something I would tell myself then to do that. But I think what I would do too is like, “Hey, this is gonna be a long journey and it’s gonna be really, really hard. And try to take better care of yourself. Like, try to get some decent sleep, which I still don’t. Try not to drink so much because you’re so worn out at the end of the night, you gotta set your mind off.” This is non-alcoholic. You gotta- By the way, this is… No, it’s a real deal. And things like that, ’cause your health is very important on things. Yeah. But I still am struggling with that but I probably would’ve said- Also, very tough for a 14-year-old to actually internalize. You know what I mean? True too. Yeah, yeah. Dude, I’m going back like myself now, I was 14. Exactly. I probably would’ve just taken care of myself physically a little better along the way. Yeah, yeah. You know? There’s always hope for tomorrow, right? Amen, tomorrow. But for today, it’s pizza, beer, and fried seafood because you deserve it truly, man. You’ve built something absolutely incredible. Built something that means a hell of a lot to me and it means a hell of a lot to me that you’re able to stop by today. Truly. Well, thank you for having me, I love your show. I love what you do. You’re built off of a purpose as well. You got anything else to plug? Believe in yourself because no one’s gonna believe in yourself like you believe in yourself. Don’t let people discourage you because they will use it as fuel. Work hard and you will achieve your dreams. We can achieve our dreams in this country and you will do it. Just don’t ever give up. Hell yeah, man. But I did wanna finish off with just one more meal. And that’s my Raising Cane’s meal. I brought the Raising Cane’s food truck outside. I know you like Cane’s. I got it fresh for you and all the crew. I’d love to go outside and have a little Raising Cane’s chicken finger meal, my friend. I would be honored. Let’s do it. For some reason, I just love getting my own combo and then splitting the bread apart with my fingers, and then tucking everything in there, and sealing it back up. I don’t know, there must be some like Montessori school childhood thing where I just wanna play with my food all the time. For all you, bigfoot believers, stomp on over to mythical.com, and check out a new hoodie, long sleeve tee, and glow in the dark key chain.