Todd Graves, Raising Cane’s | David Senra

1. 0:00 – 2:13

   The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Sleep and Business Obsession

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [upbeat music] 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. 'Cause I was asking you, I was asking you, like, "How much caffeine do you take? How much sleep do you need?" And then your answer was what?

   2. TGTodd Graves0:18

      I just have a really erratic sleep. So I'll go... You know, some nights I'll go maybe three hours of sleep. The next night, I need three to four hours. The next night, I need 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, uh, then I'll be caught up, and I'll go another three hours that night, four hours and five, five hours. But what r- really dictates it is what I have going on in business and what I have to be thinking about, what might give me a little bit of anxiety about things I gotta decide on, the teams, what I have to work through. So my brain will be working as I'm sleeping, 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 [chuckles] , in my underwear.

   3. DSDavid Senra1:04

      [laughing]

   4. TGTodd Graves1:04

      And then, you know, right when I wake up and go first that, and then start sending out emails to actually solve that problem, you know? But if I get caught up at work and, and there's nothing, like, really pressing, then I can sleep like a baby. You know, I don't have a problem sleeping as I have a problem sleeping when I got real business on my, on my mind.

   5. DSDavid Senra1:19

      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?

   6. TGTodd Graves1:26

      Mm-hmm.

   7. DSDavid Senra1:26

      The, the documentary on him is Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Why?

   8. TGTodd Graves1:28

      Mm.

   9. DSDavid Senra1:28

      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?

   10. TGTodd Graves1:37

       Mm-hmm.

   11. DSDavid Senra1:37

       He would say that he dreamed up what he called comforts, which was new products, new chocolates to make, in his sleep. Uh, the Michelin brothers, same thing. They would dream up marketing ideas on how to market tires in their sleep.

   12. TGTodd Graves1:49

       [laughing]

   13. DSDavid Senra1:50

       Uh, 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'd... He would dream about ideas for his business, and he'd have to either keep a tape recorder next to his bed or, in your case-

   14. TGTodd Graves2:02

       Yep

   15. DSDavid Senra2:02

       ... you're in your underwear and you're-

   16. TGTodd Graves2:03

       [laughing] On the computer.

   17. DSDavid Senra2:04

       ... at a computer, or he'd have, like, a notebook. He's-

   18. TGTodd Graves2:06

       Notepad just to write it down.

   19. DSDavid Senra2:07

       It's very fascinating how you see the same personality type appear throughout, over and o- over again throughout history.

2. 2:13 – 3:29

   The Birth of Raising Cane's: Overcoming Skepticism

   1. DSDavid Senra2:13

      So we are in the very first Raising Cane's. You were very kind enough to let us record in here.

   2. TGTodd Graves2:18

      The mothership.

   3. DSDavid Senra2:19

      You're almost at your 30-year anniversary for, uh, running Raising Cane's-

   4. TGTodd Graves2:23

      Mm-hmm

   5. DSDavid Senra2:23

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

   6. TGTodd Graves2:35

      I think, you know, so, uh, having a dream to start a chicken finger-only concept was just, uh, back then was, in Louisiana, was kind of just unheard of. It was just a totally new idea. You know, we're known for our Cajun and Creole food here. Like, at lunch, people would 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 'cause they didn't want the, the veto vote is what they called it. One person in the car that might not have the choice at that restaurant that they could get, they said they would veto the whole car and go somewhere else that had that menu item for their deal. They were also adding healthy items back then. So starting a, you know, a restaurant and having an idea to do, um, 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? Not a lot of people-

3. 3:29 – 7:17

   Inspiration from In-N-Out Burger

   1. DSDavid Senra3:29

      But, but you knew about Harry Snyder?

   2. TGTodd Graves3:30

      Not until I went to, uh, LA to work in the refineries. That's when I... When I went out there and to work in the refineries, when I went to In-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 did the research, and I started, started studying the In-N-Out model, like, since 1948. So 1948, they had the exact same menu, right? And people know what to go with. And it took me one time to go there, and someone to recommend, get a Double-Double-

   3. DSDavid Senra3:54

      [laughing]

   4. TGTodd Graves3:55

      ... and get it Animal-Style, uh, get the fries, get a, get whatever beverage you like, and then get a chocolate shake. And it's my same order every time. So when I first went, I kind of held up the order line for a second and, you know, went inside and done. Next time I went there, I went through the drive-through, Double-Double Animal-Style, fries, uh, and a, and a, and a Coke, and then I also want to get that chocolate shake. And, uh, and so seeing that really reaffirmed that belief for me because since 1948, you think about how many different burger chains opened up and then went all around In-N-Out Burger, and they added all different menu items. They added unbelievable marketing. The In-N-Out Burger's ma- uh, marketing is not much. Generally, [chuckles] they put bill- big billboards on the interstate and say, "Here's where it is. Here, here's where we're at." And they continue to do well, raise their sales 'cause they stuck to what they're good at. And for that, that really reaffirmed my belief. And when I was able to come back from, from a la- from going to LA to work in the refineries, then going to Alaska, when I came back, I think that was a big selling point, being able to add In-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.

   5. DSDavid Senra4:57

      So when I did the episode on you, this is where... 'Cause I read Harry Snyder's biography. He's one of my favorite founders. I mean, the guy was completely obsessed. I, uh... There's a great line in one of his biographies where he would live across the street from the first In-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 [laughing] the drive-through-

   6. TGTodd Graves5:16

      [laughing]

   7. DSDavid Senra5:16

      ... would, would back up, he'd get out of his chair and run across the street. He was completely obsessed. And he, just like you, he bucked the trend in his industry. They went to, like... When, uh, everybody... I think McDonald's was like, "No, we're gonna, like, freeze our beef," or whatever the case is. He's like, "I'm gonna have my own butchers." [laughing] Like, he's like-

   8. TGTodd Graves5:32

      Right

   9. DSDavid Senra5:32

      ... "I'm gonna get the fresh tomatoes." Like, "No, no, I'm not going... I'm, I'm all about quality." There's a line... They just gave me a tour of the kitchen. It says, "Never..." You guys have a, a mantra that says, uh, "Never sacrifice quality for speed."

   10. TGTodd Graves5:45

       That's right.

   11. DSDavid Senra5:45

       And he was, like, completely quality, uh, completely, like, quality-obsessed. And then if you just sit there and you think about your business over and over again, like, he's the one, pe- a lot of people don't know this, he invented the drive-through speaker. 'Cause like-

   12. TGTodd Graves5:57

       Absolutely

   13. DSDavid Senra5:57

       ... like, how can we do this better? [laughing]

   14. TGTodd Graves5:59

       That's right.

   15. DSDavid Senra5:59

       'Cause remember, uh, the prehistory to that was, like, you had drive up-... restaurants.

   16. TGTodd Graves6:04

       That's right.

   17. DSDavid Senra6:04

       You didn't have drive-through restaurants.

   18. TGTodd Graves6:06

       That's right.

   19. DSDavid Senra6:06

       So I, in that episode, I was, like, induced into a state of rage because all these people are telling you, "Oh, this is- this- you can't have a simple menu." I was like: "No! Just go to the West Coast. They're thriving. They have a cult-like following." Went to visit my, uh, brother and sister in Orlando, and you guys had just opened up. You weren't in Orlando before, and I was like: "Have you guys ever had Raising 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 goddamn episode." [laughing] "Second of all, I'm gonna take you to Raising Cane's." And so I saw exactly what you said, where you're like, "I don't hide. You know, we put Raising Cane's right next to, you know, McDonald's or a Chipotle," or whatever the case is. It's like, "I'm just gonna do one thing and do it better than anyone else." So we pull up. My brother and sister are like, "What the hell is going on here?" It, 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. Line- they're like, "Why is there a line out the drive-through? Why can't we find anywhere [chuckles] to sit? We have to wait for- 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, 'cause we're eating outside, and I look across the street, and I see poor old little Wendy's, and there's a single car [chuckles] in the drive-through.

   20. TGTodd Graves7:09

       Yeah.

   21. DSDavid Senra7:09

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

   22. TGTodd Graves7:14

       Yeah, you have to focus on doing one thing and do it

4. 7:17 – 14:49

   The Importance of Quality and Focus

   1. TGTodd Graves7:17

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

   2. DSDavid Senra7:42

      Mm.

   3. TGTodd Graves7:42

      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, our, our fries, right? So we have crinkle-cut fry, but like a, like a thinner crinkle-cut fry. You get fries from different times of the year, right? They do the, they do the crop harvest, then it sits in the warehouses. At certain times of the year, you get more sugar tips in the fries. Those sugar tips have to come out, so we have to remind our crew, "Hey, when you see those black sugar tip ends, take those out. It's not visually pleasing." The, our bread, 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, 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 a certain amount of time. In that slaw, you have cabbage, but you also have purple cabbage. You have carrots, all those things. And so you go down to your tea. Our tea gets brought from three different countries, the tea leaves, but we have to get it the right time of the year. We might pay more for that, but it's that in- that focus on that. So my team can focus on those menu items and deliver it every time 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. We have a large culinary department. It's not R&D, it's culinary, right? And so it's, it's culinary, making sure that all those products, those raw products we get, are all perfect and make sense there. Same thing, we opened in the Middle East. It took two years, two years to get the supply chain just right to make sure it tastes just the same. Two years to do that. Took two years to procure the chicken, two years to get all the ingredients right. There's a lot of stuff you can't import in, plus it's very expensive to do that, for them to import it in from the United States, where we get it currently. You have to spend the time to do that. So two years, people would look at that and say, "Man, you know, you should be open in a year. That extra year is gonna cost you X amount of dollars." And I'm like: "No, those X amount of dollars are gonna make us more money because our sales are gonna be higher, because our food is..." I- And quality ingredients create, and, and a, and a proper cook system creates cravable product. So, like, in the food business, like, and I say this to all entrepreneurs that are in the food business, like, whether they're wanting to open up or they, they have restaurants open, it's like your food has to be cravable. Like, meaning like, "Oh, my God, I love that chicken Parm from Craig's." So when I go, when I go there, I'm like, "I wanna go back and get that chicken Parm." Other stuff on the menu is pretty good or whatever. I'll, I'll sample just to try different things 'cause I like food, but I wanna go back for that chicken Parm. If they didn't have that cravable chicken Parm at Craig's, I wouldn't make it a point to go there. There's so many good restaurants. There's so many great places you can choose from in LA. There's so many great places that you can have good vibe and good atmosphere and good people, but that cravable product is what brings it back. And if you cut that quality... And I've had CFOs over time, not, not current CFOs- [laughing]

   4. DSDavid Senra10:30

      [laughing]

   5. TGTodd Graves10:30

      ... but over time that have been like, "Hey, you know, if we just cut this just-

   6. DSDavid Senra10:34

      Oh

   7. TGTodd Graves10:34

      ... a little bit, you know how much money..." 'Cause it's a pennies business, right?

   8. DSDavid Senra10:37

      Yeah.

   9. TGTodd Graves10:38

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

   10. DSDavid Senra11:01

       Yeah, the way Steve Jobs would describe that is, like, you wanna make products that people lust over.

   11. TGTodd Graves11:05

       Lust over, yes.

   12. DSDavid Senra11:05

       And so you nailed the cravable 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. [chuckles] She's definitely craving the quality chicken finger meals. Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business. He says the most successful people he knows stay in the details of their business. He mentioned learning from a friend who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company, and how that friend would pay attention to even how much his company was spending on bottled water. When I heard that, I thought it'd be a lot easier to do this if that shipping company was running on Ramp, something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common. They know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy-to-use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact, like that shipping company with the rampant spending on water. 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 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 was alive today, he'd run his business on Ramp.... 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. So go back to these people are giving you this advice, like you don't know what you're doing. I- I know the answer to this, but I, I want to get it on record. It's just like your kind of personality type, you just like history's greatest entrepreneurs are the same. If you tell them that you can't do something [laughing] -

   13. TGTodd Graves12:59

       [laughing]

   14. DSDavid Senra12:59

       ... you get the opposite vers- reaction that you think you're gonna get.

   15. TGTodd Graves13:02

       Yeah.

   16. DSDavid Senra13:02

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

   17. TGTodd Graves13:05

       Absolutely. You know, the best thing for a aspiring entrepreneur to be told is, "I don't think that's a good idea."

   18. DSDavid Senra13:12

       [laughing]

   19. TGTodd Graves13:12

       "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 wanna start. You're like, "I know this is gonna work," and you're so passionate about it when someone tells you, "Ah," you know, and do that facial expression, "Ah, just I don't think that's a good idea," your first thought immediately is, "You know what? I'm gonna prove it to you that it's a great idea." And all those no's that you get, you just use that as fuel. It's like entrepreneurial fuel. It's putting gasoline on a fire because you have something to prove. You know, later in life now is, you know, I can take... You know, now that we're established and good, I can take, uh, I can take those things and not, uh, let- not let it fire me up. We still get it at times, you know, like going into the... You know, going into different countries. They're like, "You know, um, you know, like, a- this mayonnaise-type sauce, it's, it's much more popular as a, as a, as a, uh, dipping sauce. You're not gonna be using sauce. You need to add that." If I would've heard that in the early days, I would've said, "You wait till Cane's Sauce all that out." [laughing]

   20. DSDavid Senra14:12

       [laughing]

   21. TGTodd Graves14:13

       Now, you know, now I can say, "Hey, you know, y- actually, we've had the same thing all over the United States." You know, ranch was popular out west-

   22. DSDavid Senra14:18

       Yeah

   23. TGTodd Graves14:18

       ... and different things like that. You know, and we went into Texas, they said, "You had to have green gravy. You gotta have barbecue sauce," you know, things like that. And like, but through tr- through 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, 'cause it's not nearly as good with ranch, and so then they can understand that. So you kind of call them later after you've proven yourself. But like, but when you're getting started out, man, it is fuel.

   24. DSDavid Senra14:39

       You don't seem calm. You don't seem calm to me. [laughing]

   25. TGTodd Graves14:42

       [laughing] Yeah, I just wanted to prove people wrong even more.

   26. DSDavid Senra14:44

       But I can feel your intensity over-

   27. TGTodd Graves14:46

       Yeah

   28. DSDavid Senra14:46

       ... the table. So I, I, I'm very curious about

5. 14:49 – 19:21

   The Journey to Success: Hard Work and Sacrifice

   1. DSDavid Senra14:49

      this, like, the, the hours that you're working now, 30 years in, compared to the beginning. So, um, I just flew to Austin. I got to spend five hours with Michael Dell, and Michael Dell 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 in- underneath, just a super, you know, relentless person, as you can imagine. And, uh, I was talking to him. I was like: "Hey, I heard you on a podcast one time. You said one of the funniest things," 'cause somebody asked him, like, "You know, when you were starting Dell in your University of Texas dorm room with $1,000, and you're gonna 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, uh, did you work when you started your company?" And Dell's face was like, "All of them." [laughing]

   2. TGTodd Graves15:29

      [laughing] Literally all of them.

   3. DSDavid Senra15:30

      "I slept at the office." And so we had a long conversation because he's also... You know, he's married, he's got kids.

   4. TGTodd Graves15:35

      Uh-huh.

   5. DSDavid Senra15:36

      And so he was just like, "You know, a- at the beginning, it's, um, intensity, but, you know, the value is the consistency and the compounding-

   6. TGTodd Graves15:43

      Right

   7. DSDavid Senra15:43

      ... over decade after decade after decade." He's like: "Listen, I love my business," 'cause I asked him, I was like: "Austin in July is not the [laughing] ..."

   8. TGTodd Graves15:50

      A little bit hot. [laughing]

   9. DSDavid Senra15:51

      "If I had your place in Hawaii, I know where I'm gonna be in July." [laughing] I was like: "Why are you here?" He's like, "I just love my business."

   10. TGTodd Graves15:56

       Right.

   11. DSDavid Senra15:56

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

   12. TGTodd Graves16:11

       Absolutely.

   13. DSDavid Senra16:11

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

   14. TGTodd Graves16:30

       Yeah.

   15. DSDavid Senra16:30

       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, 'cause you're definitely fanatic- fanatical, and I wanna ask you about your great quote about that. But you're just- you're more measured. You're going to live to survive the next day.

   16. TGTodd Graves16:43

       Right.

   17. DSDavid Senra16:43

       So what are... Like, how do you compare, like, the hours you're working now compared to when you started this thing?

   18. TGTodd Graves16:48

       So when I started, uh... And I give, uh, young entrepreneurs this advice. I'm like: Imagine how hard it is to start your business, then multiply that by infinity.

   19. DSDavid Senra16:57

       Mm.

   20. TGTodd Graves16:57

       And if you're still committed to do it, and you have the stamina to stick with that, then you'll be successful. Obviously, you have to have a good product and, and concept, and you have to have something that's gonna work to make something go, which is often hard for people to see. The vision of chicken fingers down here in Baton Rouge was, like, "Just chicken fingers? You know, just chicken fingers?"

   21. DSDavid Senra17:15

       [laughing]

   22. TGTodd Graves17:15

       "Like, we like our plate lunches. We, we want variety," things like that. I'm like, "Wait till you have this product."

   23. DSDavid Senra17:19

       Yeah.

   24. TGTodd Graves17:20

       And then when I was able to start cooking for them, "Oh, man, that is good." Then when they start talking about the next day, "Hey, man, you can cook some more of that?" "Yeah, yeah. Come on by and have it." When you have to start up, there's so many amazing ideas by just promising entrepreneurs, but they stop, and the world never sees that product or service because it's so hard to open a business, then it's so hard to make that business successful, then it's so hard to scale that business and grow. And if they just didn't stop, and they knew how hard it's gonna be, because I'm like... They're like: "How do you have a, you know, how do you have quality of life and, and work-life balance when you're starting a business?" I'm like: "You don't. Flat out, you don't." You're gonna live the business every day. You're gonna think about the business every day. You're gonna be tired. You're gonna be fighting through a bad mood because you're not getting enough sleep and things like that. It's like, you don't have it, so you have to be committed that you're not gonna have it. Now, once you get your business open, and you get it established, and it's, it's working, then if you wanna grow, then you're not gonna have quality of life then.

   25. DSDavid Senra18:15

       Yeah.

   26. TGTodd Graves18:15

       Because going from one to two is, is your hardest step you'll ever have, then two to six, and six to 12, and all those growth phases are there. And so but I just wish people wouldn't stop when they go because, like, my hours in the beginning... You know, when we started this restaurant, we were open every day of the week-... we were open until 3:30 AM, and except for Sundays, we closed at 3:00 AM. [laughing]

   27. DSDavid Senra18:37

       [laughing]

   28. TGTodd Graves18:38

       And, and look, w- w- when we were closing up, it took us two hours to close down.

   29. DSDavid Senra18:41

       Yeah.

   30. TGTodd Graves18:41

       When we opened up in the morning at, at 10:30, we had to be here at 8:00 in the morning, and so you get about three hours of sleep a night. I had my apartment right back here, uh, that I would go up, and then during the day, we'd be like, "Hey, go take a nap. You know, you go get a nap. Go get a nap for, like, two hours, and then wake up and come back to work." The hours were just all the time, and it was just nonstop. And I was young enough to have that stamina just to roll, and plus, this environment. I love this environment, cooking in this restaurant. Well, it was very important for me to be in this restaurant, so you could feel the vibe here. You could feel the soul of this place.
6. 19:21 – 21:23

   The Early Days: Building Raising Cane's from Scratch

   1. DSDavid Senra19:21

      own hands?

   2. TGTodd Graves19:21

      This, this, this restaurant. I literally reconstructed all this with my own hands. Everything except the electrical, because I literally don't know, uh, elect- [chuckles] electric. But plumbing, I did plumbing. I learned how to do plumbing. I learned how to do minor construction. All this place is resurfaced. I... So when you came in this place, it was a lot of different concepts, college concepts, that just didn't work. But they had layered on paneling, uh, even, like, our arcade was here, paneling after paneling. So rip off one layer of paneling-

   3. DSDavid Senra19:45

      [chuckles]

   4. TGTodd Graves19:45

      ... and there's, like, there's a rainbow stripe paneling going down this way, 'cause there was an arcade at one time, and they had ripped up, uh, through this old paneling here on the wall, which was actually an Italian restaurant, where it started. This was the outside of the building, and they built this onto here. So when I pulled all these things off, I s- 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."

   5. DSDavid Senra20:06

      Mm.

   6. TGTodd Graves20:06

      So I started ripping it out with a crowbar, left stucco down the side, and I got here and uncovered this old mural. And I... Look, I took it as a sign, man. This was-

   7. DSDavid Senra20:13

      [chuckles]

   8. TGTodd Graves20:13

      ... this was an outside advertising for this bread mural, uh, for this bread bakery, downtown Baton Rouge, where we actually started with our first Bread at Cane's. I came up with the recipe with, with the, with the bread purveyors there, and this was an outside advertising. Highland Road, going from downtown Baton Rouge through LSU, was the main core, uh, uh, thoroughfare here, and literally, I took this as a sign. This is what we came up with our logo for Cane's. We took this design- Like, I literally took it as a sign- [chuckles]

   9. DSDavid Senra20:39

      [chuckles]

   10. TGTodd Graves20:39

       ... to say, "This is gonna be the Raising Cane's logo," and then that's what we ended up with. And, like, but I learned this stuff, 'cause I didn't have enough money. I got a small SBA loan for 90,000- for, uh, $90,000. I'd raised equity in the sense of, like, $60,000 with original shareholders, uh, and, and I carried them over in a little, very little, a little bit of the business today. Uh-

   11. DSDavid Senra20:59

       I, I just pray-

   12. TGTodd Graves20:59

       It's been fun being with them.

   13. DSDavid Senra21:00

       I pray that one of the things... I don't even want you to tell me if it's true or not. W- I wanna talk about how you financed the business, 'cause it's one of the [chuckles] craziest stories I've ever heard. But I just pray that today there is a boilermaker named Wild Bill that owns a couple [chuckles] hundred million dollars of equity [laughing]

   14. TGTodd Graves21:15

       [laughing]

   15. DSDavid Senra21:15

       ... in Raising Cane's, 'cause he bet on your chicken finger dream-

   16. TGTodd Graves21:18

       [chuckles]

   17. DSDavid Senra21:18

       ... when you were, like, tw- in your 20s. [chuckles]

   18. TGTodd Graves21:19

       He did. He did. But let me take you, take you back a little bit on-

   19. DSDavid Senra21:21

       Let's do that

   20. TGTodd Graves21:22

       ... on, on the start

7. 21:23 – 32:28

   Financing the Dream: Unconventional Paths

   1. TGTodd Graves21:23

      of it. So you know, I, I worked in, uh, restaurants in, you know, high school and college. I lo- I love the restaurant business. Food symbolize love to me. So, uh, what that means is, like, when I could spend time with my mother, uh, cooking in the kitchen... She's the one that taught me how to cook. We'd cook Cajun meals, so we would make a gumbo, right? You make a gumbo, you start with a roux, and you add your onions, and, and you really, you take all day making a gumbo. Now, does it take that long to do it? I don't know if it does. It's more about spending time with somebody that you love, and we're cooking for the family and our friends that we love, so that time together, and then you make a good gumbo, then you sit 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 went... My, my grandmother would make me a pie, you know, chocolate pie. She'd come visit, she like, "I made your pie you love," and I'm like, "That, you know, you know, I love you." And so for me, restaurant and food and delivering food, it's, it's an expression of love. And then the, the camaraderie when you're working in a kitchen, and it's rolling, and the drive-thru's going, and I can work any position, but it's that teamwork, and it's immediate gratification when you're like, "Someone spent their hard-worked money or, or hard-earned money, and they give you their money, and they look at that chicken finger box, and they're like, 'Oh, yeah.'"

   2. DSDavid Senra22:28

      [chuckles]

   3. TGTodd Graves22:28

      Like, that's a good feeling. It's immediate gratification. Like, so much stuff with corporate work and, and administration work and things like that, it's not immediate gratification. It comes over time. My favorite job is if I can literally come in the restaurant and just crank out a shift. Like, that, to me, is fun, man. That, that, that vibe, that energy.

   4. DSDavid Senra22:43

      And you still do that?

   5. TGTodd Graves22:44

      Right, I do. Yeah, when I can go... When I go to restaurants, I go, I'll go visit, like, a market.

   6. DSDavid Senra22:48

      Yeah.

   7. TGTodd Graves22:48

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

   8. DSDavid Senra23:23

      Yeah

   9. TGTodd Graves23:23

      ... a little bit more, and, and do with me. They, they feel comfortable, and they, and they, and, and then they'll tell me. But then I'll work, I'll work with them in the shift, and it's fun, because you can just... Well, everything goes away. You're, like, focused on delivering good product and good service to customers right there. It's great. So I was in the restaurant business, and so, like, when I went to college, you know, I, I actually studied, uh, uh, writing for... script writing for television and film. I thought I might wanna be in movies. But I always went back to business and when I was working, because I was that original kid in the neighborhood that had the lemonade stand. I was a kid that's gonna-

   10. DSDavid Senra23:52

       Yeah

   11. TGTodd Graves23:52

       ... cut your grass for 10 bucks. It was just always... I'd do, like, uh, I'd set up, like, um, uh, Halloween, uh, haunted houses in my house-

   12. DSDavid Senra23:59

       [chuckles]

   13. TGTodd Graves23:59

       ... and, like, you know, go around, put flyers out, and five bucks for kids to go through. So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and that's when I got serious about it my senior year. And I actually graduated, went to University of Georgia, but I was from Baton Rouge originally. I knew I wanted to come home, and I had a, a partner when I started the business. Since we wrote the business plan for Raising Cane's, um, it started off, we were calling it Folly's Chicken Fingers. That was the original business plan.

   14. DSDavid Senra24:19

       [chuckles]

   15. TGTodd Graves24:19

       Terrible name. But, um, we had-

   16. DSDavid Senra24:21

       [chuckles]

   17. TGTodd Graves24:21

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

   18. DSDavid Senra24:52

       [laughs]

   19. TGTodd Graves24:52

       - and all this stuff is... But he, he was- it actually said something greater, but he said, "No, the plan was great. Like, like-"

   20. DSDavid Senra24:56

       Yeah.

   21. TGTodd Graves24:56

       - "literally, you get the most detailed plan in the whole bi- in the whole class, but the concept won't work." And we said, "Well, why won't the concept work?" "Well, because you didn't study the industry. We told you to study your industry. You know, McDonald's is adding, um... You know, they've been at it a long time, and they're the best in the business. They're adding these menu items. There's this thing called veto vote, and people won't come to your restaurant if, if, if Mom didn't want this. You know, they're also adding, uh, healthy items. You know, someone's gonna want a salad in that and do it." And it's like, you tell that entrepreneur no, you're like, "Oh, yeah, wait, I will prove it to you." Literally, I took that, and, uh, people would've thought that'd be discouraging. Actually, it was that fuel. I will show you that this will work, right? So took that business plan, bought a cheap suit, went to Office Depot, bought... I thought that businessmen need to wear a suit, and I thought businessmen-

   22. DSDavid Senra25:40

       You had to buy a briefcase.

   23. TGTodd Graves25:42

       - I got a briefcase. Bought the briefcase-

   24. DSDavid Senra25:43

       I had the same one. [laughing]

   25. TGTodd Graves25:45

       [laughing] Did you? Did you?

   26. DSDavid Senra25:47

       Yeah.

   27. TGTodd Graves25:47

       But didn't you feel like a businessman? You're like, "Yeah-"

   28. DSDavid Senra25:49

       I went to school for bus- you don't know anything.

   29. TGTodd Graves25:50

       officially-

   30. DSDavid Senra25:51

       Like, yeah. [laughs]
8. 32:28 – 33:02

   The Relentless Pursuit of Success

   1. TGTodd Graves32:28

      like a boilermaker, right? But I would've worked... I would've gone and knitted, uh, blankets-

   2. DSDavid Senra32:32

      Yeah

   3. TGTodd Graves32:32

      ... if that's what- where the money was at. Anything I could do to make the money, because I was determined, man. It was like I was like a nerd in the entrepreneurial club in college. Like, we had... Then people would start up, "Hey, I got this, you know, like I, I, I steam-clean floors. I do these different things." But I saw these en- 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 years in college, they'd be like, "Uh, I just, I don't think I can do that and do it," and I'm like, that's the key, man, is when you set a goal, you do it to success or failure, but you don't stop.

9. 33:02 – 34:02

   Commitment and Oaths: The Camping Trip

   1. TGTodd Graves33:02

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

   2. DSDavid Senra33:18

      Wait, wait.

   3. TGTodd Graves33:18

      Two years.

   4. DSDavid Senra33:18

      Tell me... Wait, wait. Run- [laughing] I love this idea.

   5. TGTodd Graves33:21

      [laughing]

   6. DSDavid Senra33:21

      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." [laughing]

   7. TGTodd Graves33:26

      Retreat is not an option. Burn the ships, man.

   8. DSDavid Senra33:28

      We- [laughing] yeah.

   9. TGTodd Graves33:29

      [laughing]

   10. DSDavid Senra33:29

       "We are gonna succeed, or I'm going to..." He's like, "You will know when I give up, 'cause I will be dead." [laughing]

   11. TGTodd Graves33:33

       [laughing] That's the spirit. That's what you have to do.

   12. DSDavid Senra33:36

       So wait, you went on this camping trip a- to do an oath?

   13. TGTodd Graves33:39

       Yeah, it was literally-

   14. DSDavid Senra33:39

       But he gave up!

   15. TGTodd Graves33:40

       Li- liter- literally-

   16. DSDavid Senra33:41

       Yeah

   17. TGTodd Graves33:41

       ... it was, it was literally to say, like, around a campfire. I mean, we, we, we did everything but just, like, become blood brothers, you know, to do the deal. It was like, "We're gonna do this, right? We're committing to this. We're gonna make this happen. We're gonna see it through, and somehow it doesn't work, we're gonna die trying." And literally put that on the line, going out and fishing in Alaska.

   18. DSDavid Senra33:59

       [laughing]

   19. TGTodd Graves33:59

       People died in that, in that fishery. God bless them, you know?

10. 34:02 – 34:53

    Fanaticism and Relentless Focus

    1. TGTodd Graves34:02

       And, but yeah, it's just that... Anyway, I think another t- thing, too, is I think when you have that relentless focus... So for me, it's during that time, I was like... I came up with a quote, man. I was like, "Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically." Like, you have to be so fanatical when you have a dream, and others don't believe in, and you see it. You have to be fanatical. So fanaticism is what carries you through, you know? And so I see this fanaticism, and I study people, right? And so, like, like your podcast, I, I, I'll hear things, and, and, and I'll get reaffirmed with things, then I'll learn new things-

    2. DSDavid Senra34:31

       Right

    3. TGTodd Graves34:31

       ... new ways I can look at things and do them.

    4. DSDavid Senra34:33

       High five. Yeah, man.

    5. TGTodd Graves34:34

       There we go. [laughing]

    6. DSDavid Senra34:34

       [laughing]

    7. TGTodd Graves34:34

       But it's great, you know? And, and, and, and, and I like it, too, 'cause it's like you can learn from it, and you can get inspired by it being established, because you need that. You need that fuel to keep rolling, and you... And it's good to hear other people are doing what you do, and then you learn from other people. I'm constantly a student of the business, so it's like you learn another thing from businessmen and businesswomen.

11. 34:53 – 35:06

    Learning from Others and Continuous Improvement

    1. TGTodd Graves34:53

       But for me, too, is I love to be around celebrities, like the people that are successful at... Whether they're an entertainer, whether they're, um, they're a, a actor or actors-

    2. DSDavid Senra35:03

       Athletes

    3. TGTodd Graves35:04

       ... whether they're athletes, they all have

12. 35:06 – 36:04

    The Never-Satisfied Mindset

    1. TGTodd Graves35:06

       this common core. And you know what I see the most common core of all the people that are successful, for me, is they're never satisfied. Never satisfied. And so we, we carry that into our business about never being satisfied, but it's a bad way to say it. So you say, "Never satisfied," it's like, "Well, y'all aren't happy with what we did, you know, with this opening?" "No, no, no." So we changed the word from never satisfied. It's just like we're always gonna raise the bar, so we 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."

    2. DSDavid Senra35:34

       Yeah.

    3. TGTodd Graves35:35

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

    4. DSDavid Senra35:52

       Yeah.

    5. TGTodd Graves35:52

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

13. 36:04 – 39:55

    The Importance of Founders in Business

    1. TGTodd Graves36:04

       us."

    2. DSDavid Senra36:04

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

    3. TGTodd Graves36:11

       Yeah.

    4. DSDavid Senra36:11

       Like, this... There, there's this huge entrepreneurial industry that didn't exist, uh, especially when you were starting your company. This is like... And the entrepreneurial industry is influenced by investors-

    5. TGTodd Graves36:20

       Right

    6. DSDavid Senra36:20

       ... not entrepreneurs.

    7. TGTodd Graves36:21

       Right.

    8. DSDavid Senra36:21

       And it's like, start, scale, sell. Then what? Then what are we gonna do? And you have a great line where you're like, "If you create and do, you never wanna stop creating and doing."

    9. TGTodd Graves36:29

       Right.

    10. DSDavid Senra36:29

        And now you've just sold the vehicle that you created and dude, and, and, and create into.

    11. TGTodd Graves36:34

        Right.

    12. DSDavid Senra36:35

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

    13. TGTodd Graves36:38

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DSDavid Senra36:38

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

    15. TGTodd Graves36:53

        That's right.

    16. DSDavid Senra36:53

        Like, they're, they're either dead or they sold out.

    17. TGTodd Graves36:56

        Right.

    18. DSDavid Senra36:56

        And then I loved... Somebody asked you the question where, like, out of, like, the competitors, like, who gets you fired up or maybe will keep you up at night? And you're like-... and they may not even exist, but they will exist in the future, 'cause you know that same personality type as you-

    19. TGTodd Graves37:09

        They're coming.

    20. DSDavid Senra37:09

        They're gonna- they're coming. It's like the young Todd Graves that has that fire in his soul, and he wants to do exactly what I'm doing, and you're like, "That's fine, but you don't understand. This is what I do. This is in my DNA. This is, this is, like, this is, uh, how I feed my family. So if you wanna come, just understand I'm on this 24/7, all the time."

    21. TGTodd Graves37:28

        You better be ready.

    22. DSDavid Senra37:29

        Yeah.

    23. TGTodd Graves37:29

        You better be ready, 'cause I'm coming after you.

    24. DSDavid Senra37:31

        I just saw you at, uh, the UFC. Are you a, are you a UFC fan, or are you-?

    25. TGTodd Graves37:34

        Yeah, I just, I like, I like all sports, you know? And so, uh, Dana invited me to come, and, uh, getting to see Poirier do his last fight, Louisiana legend, man-

    26. DSDavid Senra37:41

        He's-

    27. TGTodd Graves37:41

        ... you know. But seeing those guys, like-

    28. DSDavid Senra37:43

        It's the same personality type. So the reason I bring that up-

    29. TGTodd Graves37:45

        Going at it

    30. DSDavid Senra37:45

        ... is because you were earlier in the conversation, you were breaking down on, like, the species of bird, and, like, when it's... And, like, the, the amount of detail you just explained to us, 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, but just, uh, pointed at a different, uh, endeavor. Jon Jones, you know, probably the greatest UFC fighter.
14. 39:55 – 51:52

    The Purpose Beyond Profit

    1. TGTodd Graves39:55

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

    2. DSDavid Senra40:29

       Mm.

    3. TGTodd Graves40:29

       They... To come in, learn values, man. What are, what are those values? "Hey, look, we're gonna work hard, and we're gonna have fun. We're gonna deliver great customer service. We're gonna deliver that craveable chicken finger box. Why? Because people are spending their hard-earned money here. That's why we're gonna do that. And what we're gonna do with the money that we make, we're gonna help out our communities. We're gonna give back to, to people." And as we scale this business, and it grows, this thing's getting into values of billions of dollars, and someday, when I clear debt... I'm like $3 billion in debt now. Eventually, with our growth, you know, as we go, God willing, we'll go, and then we'll be able to pay down debt, and we'll have... Oh, when I have this free cash flow coming out and doing- we're gonna be able to help people in a big way. I can't wait for that phase of our business, but that's purpose, man. So you start realizing it's not what you make, it's what you give. That's a better way to keep score. And so when you have that purpose... And what I, what, what I want people to do is to keep that purpose, because too many great restaurant entrepreneurs and founders of the business, especially in the restaurant business, they sell. They sell. And look, they're so passionate about it, and they talk about it like, "Man, I have the passion, and I love what I do, 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 to the business growing it. They've proven a successful model, either regional, or they prove it out in different regions of the country, which then make it a national. Multiples go up, and they're like, "Hey, we'll come in, we'll give you, we'll give you 5 million," or "We'll, we'll give you 10 million." But they take control in the business, and then, and these entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, my God, we've struggled so long. We're still living by means. I got debt. I got all this stuff." They, they will sell, and then they lose control of the business. And if you're private equity... And private equity serves a lot of good purposes. They also serve some bad purposes. They take founders out of the deal, and so decisions get made differently. So a founder is powerful, because 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 personal. My family, I take it personal. I'm like, "You spent your money here, and we didn't deliver on that promise." I don't know if private equity really cares, because it doesn't affect our overall sales. It's a small percentage of what we're doing is, but you're personal on that. Your crew is personal, because they're working their ass off to fulfill your dream, and you're sitting there, and you're in a good financial position, but they're busting their butt. Management's busting their butt. Crew members are busting their butt. I know when I'm working at 3:00 a.m., and I'm like, "Oh, man, I'm tired. I'm going to bed," I know there's crew members still closing up somewhere [chuckles] around the country, right? Somewhere around the world, somebody's closing up that, that way, and it's that appreciation. So when you lose that founder personal-... that this is their baby, you start making the wrong decisions right now. You, you, you really do. And so, so private equity, they have their shareholders, and they have to make a certain amount of money. They're not getting the returns on their dollar, they'll make other decisions that will go. Maybe they price- maybe they, they raise their prices, and maybe it's not the right time to raise their prices. Maybe they cut their quality. Maybe they cut wages for crew. Maybe they do- maybe they don't do the b- bonus pro- their programs aren't as good as the year before. All those things start to make the business not, not special, you know? And so I just, I just encourage people, don't, don't let money be one of your, your major goals. Because if you- if it is, if it is, you, you end up living a shallow life, you know? You, you, you end up, you end up, you end up saying, "I need that $10 million," but you lost control of your baby, and then it's not special anymore. It's not worth the dollars. Stay with it. Grow, learn, bring in other people to help you business, the things you need help with. Learn it and do it. The private equity can come in and say, "Hey, look at the staffs we have in finance, accounting, IT," and all these things that you think are too hard for you to figure out. It's not too hard for you to figure out. They had to figure it out, too, at one point. I mean, you can figure that out. Bring in some great people. Stretch yourself, hire those people, bring them in, learn the details yourself. I'm not good at IT, but I know enough to work with the great people to still add value, if that makes sense. I just wish founders would hold on. Hold on. Don't get rid of it, man. Like, and why would you? If it's something you're so passionate about, find that purpose. Find that purpose.

    4. DSDavid Senra44:28

       The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data, because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations, unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together, so you can see the patterns that matter, because when you know more, you grow more, and that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. I think that's one of the most important messages that we could possibly get out there. There's two things. Uh, I have this idea, this maxim of anti-business billionaire, which I'll get to in one second. But w- try- what I'm trying to do is exactly, uh, trying to, like, bring attention to exactly what you're talking about. It's like we celebrate the sale, but we don't... It's like, what happened to the guy for the rest of his life? Is he still happy about this? And so, you know, Trader Joe's, right? The founder of Trader Joe's, his name's, like, Joe Colombo or something. I can't even pronounce his last name. He did such a wonderful service to future generations of entrepreneurs, 'cause he writes this autobiography that's excellent, and he tells the story of Trader Joe's. 90% of the book... Okay, he, he wind up selling Trader Joe's in, like, the '70s, okay? And then he lives for, like, another, like, 40 years. 90% of the book is, this guy is so fired up. He loves Trader Joe's. He came up with a new concept. 90% of the book is just talking about how amazing Trader Joe's was, all the different ideas. J- he's the same personality type that you had, right? But he made the mistake that you didn't. He got scared. There, there, there was a bad economic climate. He, he, he wind up selling, I think it was to Aldi, which still owns the business today, if I'm right, if I never mistake- if I, if I'm not mistaken. What's fascinating is just look at the time and effort he dedicated to Trader Joe's in the book, and then the ne- last 10% is, "Yeah, I invested in some real estate. I did some consulting." And it's like, it goes from, like, "This guy's fired up every day- "

    5. TGTodd Graves46:20

       Yeah.

    6. DSDavid Senra46:20

       " ... I'm in love," to-

    7. TGTodd Graves46:21

       Yeah

    8. DSDavid Senra46:21

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

    9. TGTodd Graves46:33

       Wow.

    10. DSDavid Senra46:33

        Okay, that's the last page. The book is published, he dies the same week.

    11. TGTodd Graves46:37

        Gives me chills.

    12. DSDavid Senra46:38

        Think about that.

    13. TGTodd Graves46:39

        Yeah.

    14. DSDavid Senra46:39

        He's like, "Don't do this. I sh- I wish I had the courage. I wish I wasn't so scared. I wish, like-

    15. TGTodd Graves46:46

        Yeah

    16. DSDavid Senra46:46

        ... I just stayed-"

    17. TGTodd Graves46:47

        What a good man, what a good man to just, just, just be honest, right? To everybody, "And I wish I didn't do it"-

    18. DSDavid Senra46:50

        Paul-

    19. TGTodd Graves46:50

        ... 'cause he wants to inspire people not to make the same mistake.

    20. DSDavid Senra46:52

        Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko's, I did an episode on him, too. He thought, "Oh, I'm- I sell it for billions of dollars, I'm a success." He's like, "I can't even go in the store. I can't look at it. Like, I got the money, but, like, I don't have exactly the purpose." I love the word, the word he used, "purpose." So this is something I'm trying to draw attention to on Founders Podcast. It's like these anti-business billionaires, right? They're not in it for the money. Somebody like James Dyson, like 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 f- the be- 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. 1919, he owned 100 [chuckles] he bought out all his old investors, owned 100% of Ford Motor Company, right? It's, it's very equivalent. It'd be like owning a $20 billion company today. [chuckles] He says, "Money comes naturally as a result of service."

    21. TGTodd Graves47:49

        It does.

    22. DSDavid Senra47:49

        Exactly what you said.

    23. TGTodd Graves47:50

        100%.

    24. DSDavid Senra47:50

        Stop fucking worrying about the money.

    25. TGTodd Graves47:52

        Okay.

    26. DSDavid Senra47:52

        If you just ser- can you make somebody else's life better? Then you're- by through 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.

    27. TGTodd Graves48:01

        It will come.

    28. DSDavid Senra48:02

        So the anti-business billionaires, this is they put the quality... They're so obsessed with the quality of the product they're making, they retain control, and guess what? If you're obsessed with the quality of the product you're making, and you retain control, you wind up with the money anyways.

    29. TGTodd Graves48:13

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

    30. DSDavid Senra48:17

        Yes!
15. 51:52 – 55:47

    Financing the Dream: Credit Cards and SBA Loans

    1. TGTodd Graves51:52

       So you got the wild bill, [laughs] you got the refinery money, you got the sockeye salmon money. Now you're playing credit card roulette? Yeah, yeah. Is that- Yeah, but I had to do it the whole time when I graduated, right? Okay. I mean, I bartended at night when I was... We were working with a build business plan, and then, you know, then, then trying to start the business. I mean, literally, I don't have any, uh, any income, so I'm just- I'm living off bartender money from tips at night, and then, like, literally back then, too, you could get credit cards that were 18 to 22% interest rates- [laughs] ... and you can get as many as you wanted- [laughs] ... with $5,000 limits. So that's just what I did. I just said send in, "Yeah, I have a job bartending." And, "Okay, well, sure, here's $5,000, uh, credit line on this deal, but you're gonna pay 20 to 22% on that." [laughs] And so I just lived off of that. And you know what? So but what I did was, I had enough money of my own to come back a- and to live off of and put into the project. At that point, I was able to raise some preferred shareholders, uh, and I raised, uh, maybe $60,000. These were people with- So these we would call, like, angel investors today? Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, they were... You know, these were, like, my bookie, uh, guys I- [laughs] ... Well, guys I worked, uh, uh, boilermaking with. Hey, bookie's got cash. [laughs] Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, "Can you take this $10,000 investment in cash?" I'm like- [laughs] ... "Sure." Yeah, I mean, if I get it to the bank, I'm like, "Came from my investor." But I was able to, uh, raise that, and I was able to get, um... I was able to get, um, a $90,000 SBA loan. Mm. And it was enough money to, to, for me to come in. I had this place, Northgate and LSU. I had a wonderful, uh, real estate broker, one of my mentors, Mr. Red Reynolds. This place had, had flipped over so many different times, and he was like, "I wanted... I want, for the landlord, Lana Tulua 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- How, how did- Basically held, held the location for a year for me. How impactful were those words of encouragement? Mm. 'Cause you're, you're, you're young. Like, somebody you respect, that was a- just a good man and a really good, good real estate broker, uh, I really respected that. 'Cause he saw that it was affirmation that w- while I was being so fanatical and trying to talk everybody into it, you know what I mean? Except for the boilermakers, well, he believed in me. I'm like, "Okay, okay, that's a, that's just a little wind in my sails to do this." And basically told her, "Hey, it's gonna take him a year to put all this together, but I believe he'll do it, and then I believe you'll have a long-term tenant." Look, sure enough, we've been here for- [laughs] ... almost 30 years, and we got, like, a hundred, a hundred-year lease going forward. [laughs] And, and, and the, the family... She passed away, but the family's like, "No, you know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to buy it." They're like, "We just have pride in this, you know? So we'll just keep doing, uh, just keep doing a lease," I said, "but we'll give you 100 years, you know, and options to, to stay in this original location." Do you h- do you buy the real estate now for the new stores? Wherever I can. Absolutely wherever I can, I do. Just, just good real estate, A, A-quality real estate, it's just there's so many people that own it. It's part of larger shopping centers, larger developments. A lot of it's in trust, you know, family trust and things like that, but everyone I can buy, I buy. Absolutely. [laughs] They won't sell you this one, though? No. No, no, they just- [laughs] ... they, they like being a part of it, right? You know, but they give me a good... I got a good lease term, uh, on here. And plus, you know, what, what I put into this place. Like, I had to learn things. You know, like I said, I had to learn plumbing, I had to learn construction, I had to learn this stuff. 'Cause I didn't have... I really didn't have a lot of money, too, to come in and, and, and, and, and spend much money on this. But this place is sacred, man. I can tell you every square inch, and, and later on, after, after we get 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 in, in Texas. I hope you have bed sheets- [laughs] ... that look like this somewhere. [laughs] Oh, that's a damn good idea. Maybe some pajamas, too, right? [laughs] But, uh, but it, but it means something, right? And keeping this like this, like, like this, I can bring in management to here and show them this place. We have big bui- pretty buildings, all functional, everything, and they come here and go, "This is our soul. Just remember, this is, this is where we started."... and we gotta keep that spirit going here.

    2. DSDavid Senra55:23

       Dude, the one in Miami Beach by my house looks like a nightclub. [chuckles]

    3. TGTodd Graves55:26

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like literally the deal. I love that location.

    4. DSDavid Senra55:28

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

    5. TGTodd Graves55:36

       So yeah, yeah. No, so he- but they didn't sign the lease that I was gonna hold it for you-

    6. DSDavid Senra55:39

       Okay

    7. TGTodd Graves55:39

       ... right? So but, but this location was available-

    8. DSDavid Senra55:41

       Okay

    9. TGTodd Graves55:41

       ... and I knew it was gonna be awesome. It took two years, two years from the business plan to where I actually opened up the restaurant.

16. 55:47 – 57:56

    Building the First Restaurant

    1. TGTodd Graves55:47

       It took me two years, and so literally from writing the business plan from class, going to the banks, getting turned down, working in, uh, refineries, then working in, um, in Alaska for the summer, then coming back that fall, and we opened in '96, so it'd be the fall of '95 when I got back. Then, so I had s- had some money in the deal. I went and got that S- SBA loan and got, got the investors, and from there, then we started the construction process. We started getting the used equipment, and, like, the equipment I went, I got from, from... I went into Houston and Dallas restaurant supply houses, 'cause, you know, restaurant business go out. Nine out of 10-

    2. DSDavid Senra56:20

       Yeah

    3. TGTodd Graves56:20

       ... go out of business. 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." [chuckles]

    4. DSDavid Senra56:27

       [chuckles]

    5. TGTodd Graves56:27

       They had to be 85-pound fryers, and they're like, "Well, this one's good." I'm like, "Yeah, that's 10 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?

    6. DSDavid Senra56:36

       Okay.

    7. TGTodd Graves56:36

       Thank goodness we made money, and so we, we... When we opened up, like, I was, I was so excited. We reconstructed. We're ready to open up. We got registers back to Office Depot. They're these little registers.

    8. DSDavid Senra56:46

       Yeah.

    9. TGTodd Graves56:46

       And once they figured out how to program them, I went and started waving people in the restaurant, and people came, and people liked it. And man, 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. I could replace equipment as we went, just basically dumped everything back into the restaurant. And sure enough, then I was like, like, "This is working great. We can go to the other side of campus, and we can go in and do that." I brought the business plan to the SBA lenders that did us, and I got to that one. Literally, 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 the f- this first one on a shoestring budget. The second one, I have a piece of property, and I got a brand-new building that we opened up, and it showed efficiencies there. And what was really amazing with that location is that it was on the other side of campus. It also had traffic flow from neighborhoods, office buildings, things like that, so we had not just students coming in. All of a sudden, we had, you know, businessmen and women coming in for lunch. We had moms and 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

17. 57:56 – 58:59

    Expanding the Vision

    1. TGTodd Graves57:56

       the vision. I was like, "This isn't just a college concept," which I thought it was. I thought it just worked for college kids. I'm like, "This works for everybody," and that's when I got that fire, man, to grow at that point. That's when I got the vision, man, and the vision at that point was... And it wasn't, it wasn't articulated this way-

    2. DSDavid Senra58:09

       Mm

    3. TGTodd Graves58:09

       ... but what I wanted was locations all over the world. And I'm like, "I wanna be known as the brand for cravable chicken finger meals, great crew, cool culture, and active community involvement." Like, those are the things that turn me on with that deal, right?

    4. DSDavid Senra58:22

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

    5. TGTodd Graves58:24

       Well, so I just, like, I thought-

    6. DSDavid Senra58:25

       Like, uh, subconscious?

    7. TGTodd Graves58:25

       ... the vision was there. I just didn't put it down, and so I'm like... I asked myself, you know? It's like, I was like, "You know, why do you want locations all over the world?" I'm like, " 'Cause I wanna go in every community, because I love hiring people to come in and build teams, creating opportunities, job growth, teaching them values." And I'm like, "Man," he's like... Like, I, I get, I get turned on by customers coming in and, and, and loving the food. I'm like, "And I'm gonna keep giving them quality chicken finger me- meals, that cravable product." And I was like, "Now I'm able to give money back to the community." I'm like, "Now I wanna be able to give money back to the community, that active community involvement." I'm like, "But we have this cool culture, man. I wanna g- I wanna emulate that in other places.

18. 58:59 – 1:00:51

    Positive Motivational Management

    1. TGTodd Graves58:59

       I wanna be the place that..." Look, I worked in the restaurant business, high school, college, man. It was like... It was not positive motivational management, man. It was like, "Do this, do that," you know?

    2. DSDavid Senra59:07

       Yeah, like you-

    3. TGTodd Graves59:08

       "You screwed up." Yeah, it was... And there was probably no music in the kitchen. Can you imagine working back there? It was just negative environment because the manager was, was negative because the owner didn't appreciate everybody. You know what I mean? So it was just this negative feeling. I can get people from other, other, other restaurants where they're not treated right, and they're not, like, giving good customer service. They come here, 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 mo- motivational management. It is like, "Good job. Hey, thanks f- thanks for, uh, for taking the stuff out to the... the trash out to the dumpster. Wow, that's good toast. Hey, good job on the shift, man." Like, that's how you motivate people.

    4. DSDavid Senra59:42

       Praise costs nothing and means everything.

    5. TGTodd Graves59:44

       Means everything, absolutely, man. And just teamwork, and it's good. And also, too, is why I like op- uh, why I love operators is it's like when I was on the football team. It's constant coaching. "Oh, yeah, that's a good pass. Oh, man, you screwed that up, man. Like, make sure your arm goes back," and, you know, "Hey, block harder. Do this," you know? Like, you're getting constantly coached, and nobody takes it bad. No one takes criticism bad, because it's all about doing better, winning the game. It's all... The same thing in the kitchen. You're like, "Hey, man, toast, toast needs to hurry up, da, da, da. Hey, great, that's great toast." Like, you can mix those things in. In a corporate environment, and this is how you get weeded out of Cane's corporate is the people that can't take constant, constant coaching, and it's coaching, right? You know, it's like, "Well, no, we should, we should meet every six months on a eval, and how we're doing, and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff." It's like, "No, every day is an eval. Like, every day we're gonna get better," and a lot of corporate people... One, if you make mistakes, like, I encourage. Make mistakes, and we're not making mistakes, we're not pushing ourselves, we're not trying new things, we're not doing things, but let's learn from them. But let's admit our mistakes. I see corporate people come in, and it's like, like you don't, don't address 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 gonna do this differently. Let's move on." Like, it takes all of

19. 1:00:51 – 1:01:42

    Creating a Coaching Culture

    1. TGTodd Graves1:00:51

       30 seconds, and when you create that kind of environment, like in a coaching situation or in operations, that's, that's, that's, that's a challenge for me on growing the business, 'cause we're bringing in some really experienced people from other organizations, right?

    2. DSDavid Senra1:01:03

       Right now.

    3. TGTodd Graves1:01:03

       Yeah, right now. As we do that, a lot of the culture is you don't admit mistakes, uh, you don't, you don't wanna... You don't- one, you don't wanna admit mistakes, and two, you don't wanna, you don't wanna be, you don't wanna be coached. It's this academia type of, of, of things, like they're... I'm like, "Look, man, I'm learning every day," and I, 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, well, once it's validation, too, he doesn't think he knows everything, and two, it's okay for me to make mistakes. You know, we, we, we- but we do need to learn from them. Like, Todd's not gonna make that same mistake over and over. Like, we know that.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:01:32

       Yeah.

    5. TGTodd Graves1:01:32

       And, and I won't either, right? And so that's some of the, uh, the challenge in growth. And, and, and, in, in restaurant growth, we get the operators, and, and if you're an operator, man, you just

20. 1:01:42 – 1:02:41

    Intrinsic Motivation vs. Titles

    1. TGTodd Graves1:01:42

       have that culture. And what we have to get is people that are intrinsically motivated, right? And so we can pay people really well, 'cause we do, we do good, but the- but pay doesn't matter, man. It's like, to the people, they wanna make a good living, of course. Title doesn't matter, right? You know, it's like this VP, executive VP, all these, like, titles and stuff like that. People are, like, title crunching up. I can literally interview somebody wh- and, and I can see the things that's like, it's like they're going after title, they're going after pay-

    2. DSDavid Senra1:02:09

       Mm-hmm

    3. TGTodd Graves1:02:09

       ... 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, 'cause 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 y'all do back in the community. Hey, have you ever thought about supporting this? I think this is a great organization." When you hear that kind of stuff... Because there's plenty of brilliant people. There, there's so many brilliant people who can do the same job, or that haven't, that haven't had the experience, but will learn that, right? They have the intelligence to do it, but it's heart. It's 100% heart, man. If you're intrinsically motivated, you do

21. 1:02:41 – 1:06:35

    The Importance of Being Present

    1. TGTodd Graves1:02:41

       really well, okay?

    2. DSDavid Senra1:02:42

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

    3. TGTodd Graves1:02:51

       That's right.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:02:51

       So like, if you're working here, there is no theory. It's like, "We made it, and we can see the customer [chuckles] eating it. Look at their face-"

    5. TGTodd Graves1:02:57

       Right

    6. DSDavid Senra1:02:57

       ... like, what is actually happening?

    7. TGTodd Graves1:02:58

       It's-

    8. DSDavid Senra1:02:58

       Separated from the customer, and separated from the crew.

    9. TGTodd Graves1:03:00

       Corporate environments, like, eh- wh- like, when I started off, I wa- I was the first guy to wear a Cane's T-shirt to, like, conferences.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:03:07

        Yeah.

    11. TGTodd Graves1:03:07

        Right? Everybody else is in a suit and tie, but there are crew members in the restaurant [chuckles] wearing, like, you know, jeans and T-shirts.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:03:13

        Yeah.

    13. TGTodd Graves1:03:13

        And like, you know, it was th- it was this business mentality from here. You're separated from the customer, 'cause you're not in your restaurant seeing who's, who's being served, and you're also not with your crew to see what gets it. You're in the suit. So immediately, when you go in with your suit into a restaurant, they're immediately like, "There's a separation. There's a divide." When I walk in a restaurant, I'm dressed exactly like them.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:03:32

        Yeah.

    15. TGTodd Graves1:03:32

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

    16. DSDavid Senra1:03:40

        You know Les Schwab Tire Company on the West Coast? Okay, I'm gonna f- I'm gonna send you his book. It's very hard to find. Um, I found this, 'cause Charlie Munger is, like, one of my heroes, and he, you know, he, he had, like, the complete history of American business in his head. And if this- he's like: "You need to read about this guy," I just read the book. You would love Les, 'cause he sounds exactly what you're saying, where he competed in very difficult business. You come into fast food, QSRs, it's like that was an established thing. You're coming in, and you, 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, and the business is named after him, [chuckles] okay? So then he goes, "I need to put this in a book. Just so you know, I didn't have a ghostwriter. I wrote this all myself on a-"

    17. TGTodd Graves1:04:24

        [laughs]

    18. DSDavid Senra1:04:24

        "... on a 60- on a 50-year-old typewriter." He goes, "This is how I want the business to run. If the business is not gonna be run this way, take my name off [chuckles] the business."

    19. TGTodd Graves1:04:31

        Take my name off the business.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:04:32

        And he's like, you know, old-school guy, he's cursing all the other... But he's like, "Goddamn it, D..." And he's just like, "I'd always tell the goddamn people in the office, like, the only reason they have a job is 'cause the people in the store selling tires."

    21. TGTodd Graves1:04:43

        Yeah.

    22. DSDavid Senra1:04:43

        And then he would talk about this. He's like, "If you're-

    23. TGTodd Graves1:04:45

        Oh, I love it

    24. DSDavid Senra1:04:45

        ... if you're out..." You're, you're gonna love this guy. I already know this for a fact. I'll send it to you. Uh, he's like, "If you spend 30 days outside of a store, you forgot half of what you know." He's like, "You have to be..." He's like, "Every single thing," he's like, "all- we exist to serve the people that are serving our customers."

    25. TGTodd Graves1:05:00

        It's 100%. It's why we call it a restaurant support office.

    26. DSDavid Senra1:05:03

        Oh, that's a great line.

    27. TGTodd Graves1:05:03

        We're not a corporate office, we are a restaurant support office. We're here to support the people that are serving our customers, 100%. We have these monitors set up in our offices, and it has restaurants, and you can pull up any restaurant, our whole system. I want people, when they're leaving the, our office, the restaurant support office, to see there's people still working, right? When they get there in the morning, there's people opening up, doing the restaurant, doing it. There's constantly working, so you see it every day. You're walking by that every day, you're like, "Ladies and gentlemen, that's where we do our business, and our job is to support them." Because when you go to bed at night, they're gonna be working. When you get up in the morning, they're gonna be opening the restaurants. We got 75,000 crew members across the system. We're here to support them. We're here to make their job better, easier, more efficient, more fulfilling, the whole bit, and keeping that going. Like, and so you have to, like... You also- a thing, too, is entrepreneurs are very, uh, erratic, unscheduled, bad.

    28. DSDavid Senra1:05:58

        [chuckles]

    29. TGTodd Graves1:05:58

        You know what I mean? Like, so, you know, most of us, so, you know, as a general rule, 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."

    30. DSDavid Senra1:06:06

        What's your schedule like? Are my eyes open? [chuckles]
22. 1:06:35 – 1:09:12

    Respect, Recognition, and Rewards

    1. TGTodd Graves1:06:35

       Respect, recognition, and rewards, man. Like, so, you know, when you have crew members that are working hard, right, one, things of respect are things that you should just do. You shouldn't get credit for them. So, like, we're closed on every major holiday. That's not a reward, that's not recognition, it's just, it's just respect. And it's like, do I wanna work on July 4th? No, I don't. I wanna be with my family and friends. I wanna enjoy the holiday. I wanna take off Christmas Eve. I wanna not work on, uh, on Christmas Day. I, I wanna be, you know, holidays and things like that, I wanna be there. So if I have respect for my crew members, if I'm not gonna work, you're not gonna work. I work nights, I work weekends, I work all that, but we don't wanna work on those days. I mean, the first July 4th I was open at this restaurant, I saw the crew was dragging. I was here work- working with them, right? But they're like, "Oh," 'cause all their friends were doing something fun, their family doing something fun.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:07:19

       Yeah.

    3. TGTodd Graves1:07:19

       I was like, "You know what? That's not worth it." So that's respect. Recognition-... is something you should res- you should recognize achievement, you should recognize tenure, you should recognize all these things. There seems to recognize all the time. It starts from the simple things like, "Hey, that's a great toast. Thanks for being so friendly in the drive-through. Man, they loved you today." It's things like that, that like, you work a year at Raising Cane's, you get a hard hat. It symbolizes the first year I was there.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:07:41

       Yeah.

    5. TGTodd Graves1:07:41

       All the crew members signs it, it's fun, right? Five years, you're getting the, the salmon. Those are the recogn- recognizing things, recognizing that deal, then rewarding. So it's like, whether it's a, you know, a, a, a $5 gift card to go get a coffee at the local coffee shop, onto other bigger and better things that you get, there's rewards that you get. And, and I don't want to, I wanna build that better and better. But like, if I just think of these ideas, and they come and go, it's like, no, create a department around that. Like, like, literally a department that thinks of nothing but re- respect, recognizing, and rewarding crew members every day. And put a bunch of brilliant people, most of them came from, from operations in the restaurant, and they know this stuff, but build systems. So our next thing with that is, versus saying, "Here's the gift card," or, "Here's, here's a new Cane's hat," or things like that, it's like build a point system, right? It's kind of fun, right? You'd be like, you know, you come in, you get it for every year you work, every month you work, you filled shifts, right? Like, "Hey, so- so-and-so is sick, do you mind coming in to work?" And they come in. You get points, and I want to build it up a really exclusive type merch and stuff you could build up to and do, but like, constantly getting better at that, raising the bar-

    6. DSDavid Senra1:08:39

       That's smart

    7. TGTodd Graves1:08:39

       ... but have people around that. Not just the feel, you have to put programs and things around these great thoughts. You have to get structured to do that. Sometimes that's tough for an entrepreneur.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:08:48

       One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever read in a book is, came from Mary Kay, who built that massive-

    9. TGTodd Graves1:08:53

       Mm-hmm

    10. DSDavid Senra1:08:53

        ... remember the Mary Kay cosmetics?

    11. TGTodd Graves1:08:54

        Absolutely, yep.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:08:55

        And they would-

    13. TGTodd Graves1:08:55

        Down with them

    14. DSDavid Senra1:08:55

        ... they would reward people with, like, the pink Cadillacs-

    15. TGTodd Graves1:08:57

        Uh-huh

    16. DSDavid Senra1:08:57

        ... and everything. 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 a lot like what you're doing

23. 1:09:12 – 1:18:10

    The Power of Encouragement

    1. DSDavid Senra1:09:12

       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-

    2. TGTodd Graves1:09:22

       Mm-mm

    3. DSDavid Senra1:09:23

       ... dick. [chuckles]

    4. TGTodd Graves1:09:24

       Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:09:24

       Just being clear. It's like, I'm, I'm, you know, kind of obsessed, and that, just knowing that, has, 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 helped you secure this.

    6. TGTodd Graves1:09:41

       Absolutely.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:09:41

       Like, "Man, Graves, I believe in you." Like, and it makes a difference, even to hard-driving, you know, psychotically obsessed- [chuckles]

    8. TGTodd Graves1:09:50

       Yeah

    9. DSDavid Senra1:09:50

       ... fanatical people like you.

    10. TGTodd Graves1:09:51

        Absolutely.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:09:51

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

    12. TGTodd Graves1:10:25

        So cool

    13. DSDavid Senra1:10:26

        ... Henry Ford, no one knows who he is. He's not successful. I think he's already failed tw- he had two or three fa- uh, two failed, uh, car companies before he finally succeeded with his third, too. Again, just uncommon, no matter what. Thomas Edison is the most famous person, one of the most famous person in the country.

    14. TGTodd Graves1:10:41

        Mm-hmm.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:10:41

        He has a hard time hearing. They're at din- uh, like, a huge dinner, and Henry- but Henry Ford's an engineer, and so he gets a, a minute with his hero, Thomas Edison, and he's having to, like, yell in his good ear about this. And I think it's, like, seven words or something like that. But Edison, obv- obviously brilliant, he just gets it right away. And he go- he hits the table, and he goes, "That's it, young man. You have it. Keep at it." And then Henry Ford says in his autobiography, which he's writing 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 gonna keep going, but a little boost was very freaking helpful, and I heard Edison, my hero, saying, "You're good at this. You have a good idea. Don't give up." I think it's really important.

    16. TGTodd Graves1:11:30

        Fantastic.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:11:30

        Yeah, it's really important.

    18. TGTodd Graves1:11:31

        It absolutely is, but it's earned encouragement. Edison knew he had it, right?

    19. DSDavid Senra1:11:35

        Yes.

    20. TGTodd Graves1:11:35

        You know, and so, uh, sometimes tough love, I had to learn that on, on, um, Shark Tank. Tough love is also when you get different entrepreneurs and things like that, and sometimes the ideas aren't good. And I, I wasn't good at it. Like, it was always encouraging, and you'll find a way and do. But like, on Shark Tank, they're like: "Hey, man, you're gonna have to learn tough love."

    21. DSDavid Senra1:11:52

        [chuckles]

    22. TGTodd Graves1:11:52

        Like, like, Cuban knew me, right? And then, and then being around Mr. Wonderful and them, they're like: "I know it's heartbreaking, but sometimes the ideas aren't good."

    23. DSDavid Senra1:12:00

        Yeah.

    24. TGTodd Graves1:12:00

        "And or, or they're doing it the wrong way, and you're not doing them a service doing it that way."

    25. DSDavid Senra1:12:05

        No, dude-

    26. TGTodd Graves1:12:05

        "So the tough love is to say, say, uh, this..." But, but then help them to focus on what's really important.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:12:11

        No disrespect to Shark Tank, but fuck that.

    28. TGTodd Graves1:12:13

        [chuckles]

    29. DSDavid Senra1:12:13

        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.

    30. TGTodd Graves1:12:23

        [chuckles]
24. 1:18:10 – 1:22:57

    The Myth of Delegation

    1. SPSpeaker1:18:10

       examples, bad examples. Like, people started saying stuff like, "Hey, look, you know, Todd, you, you just, you're, you're so much in the details that you, you just need to delegate. Delegate." God, I hated hearing that word, delegate. I mean, like-

    2. DSDavid Senra1:18:20

       Yep

    3. SPSpeaker1:18:20

       ... explain to me dele-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:18:21

       I've, I've heard that. [chuckles]

    5. SPSpeaker1:18:22

       I'm like-

    6. DSDavid Senra1:18:22

       Come on

    7. SPSpeaker1:18:22

       ... explain, explain delegating to me.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:18:25

       [chuckles]

    9. SPSpeaker1:18:25

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

    10. DSDavid Senra1:18:32

        Yeah.

    11. SPSpeaker1:18:32

        "Well, you just hire good people, and, and you delegate, you delegate them to do the work." I'm like, I hire good people, and let's say out of 100-point scale, if I can, if I can do it at 95, pretty good. No, but none, none that's perfect, but let's say operations, I'm, I'm at a 95. But if I hire somebody good, but they end up being an 85, and but we need to be at that 95 to have success, I can't just delegate that. I have to supplement to get us back up to 95, working with that person to do it, and over time, they might get to the 95. So at that point, that they're at the 95, then I'm like, "Hey, you can run this good." Then they get to 96. "Hey, you can run this better than me." So now I'm like, now I'm gonna ease off on some of those things that I was supplementing on the deal is, but I'll still, still check and make that... But I still know enough, too, to where I can still add value on improving and doing things like that. And so, like, like, "Did you say I can't be in the details? What do you mean know the details?" "Oh, man, look, you, all this, you're down to the minutiae and all this stuff. You're wasting your time doing that stuff. You should be big picture. You should be that." I'm like, "Well, yeah, you gotta be big picture, too, but the, but the, but the devil's in the details on this thing is..." And so I got reaffirmed by this, and this is, uh, Edison West, a large shipping company here in Louisiana, and actually, it was, it was, it was w- one of his partners-

    12. TGTodd Graves1:19:44

        ... in another shipyard business, had told me, oh, when, when I, when I was explaining this to my, my- there's a YPO forum business group, and saying, people are saying I'm just too much in the details. They're like, "Hey, Gary Schweiss knows exactly what the bottled water costs [chuckles] at his, at his place." And he's like, "Look," and there's, there's, there's-

    13. DSDavid Senra1:20:00

        [chuckles]

    14. TGTodd Graves1:20:00

        ... formulas to give it to him. He doesn't go and count water bottles, right? He looks at the program, 'cause he's like, "If we're paying 25% too much on bottled water, and, and people aren't going up to the thing and getting out of the big thing, and they're, they're using, which is wasteful, two little bottled waters, it means they're doing that in every phase of the business." So knowing those details, but that reaffirmation of me going, "Yes, me into the details matters." So I say you don't delegate. You hire great people, you help them in doing it, and if they do it better than you, then you can back off, and you make sure all those components of the business... Look, I'm not great at IT. I have exceptional IT team. They do it better than me, but I'm still into the details to make sure we're doing what we need to do, and we're supporting our operators, and we're doing it, 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, but I'm still t- in the details with him in the business, and I know enough about it, and I'm good at it, to add value in the deal list. So the word delegation's 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-

    15. DSDavid Senra1:21:00

        Yeah

    16. TGTodd Graves1:21:00

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

    17. DSDavid Senra1:21:19

        Can you expand on... But that, the- I told... I, 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 I- 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." These are not after- these are not something you think about after. It's like this is what makes the magic... You called it craveable, like the magical experience, like, why there's, you- people have an emotional reaction to your company.

    18. TGTodd Graves1:21:51

        Right.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:21:51

        Like, you've- your product evokes emotion, just like his evoked emotion.

    20. TGTodd Graves1:21:55

        Right.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:21:55

        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. I, um, 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-

    22. TGTodd Graves1:22:09

        Mm-hmm

    23. DSDavid Senra1:22:09

        ... I, I have to find out who this is.

    24. TGTodd Graves1:22:10

        You resonate, yeah, yeah.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:22:11

        And then my brother-in-law lives in, um, 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-

    26. TGTodd Graves1:22:23

        [chuckles]

    27. DSDavid Senra1:22:23

        ... lunch and dinner, lunch and dinner, lunch and dinner, the whole week I was there.

    28. TGTodd Graves1:22:26

        We're kindred spirits, man.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:22:27

        Yeah, but this is what I'm obsessed with. This is exactly what Harry Snyder, uh, thought, the way he thought as well. It's not just 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 on that podcast, where it's just like, well, a simple menu, uh, has all these other positive effects that, you know, you can really focus. Again, all the details are 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-

    30. TGTodd Graves1:22:50

        Right
25. 1:22:57 – 1:30:07

    Focus on What You Do Best

    1. TGTodd Graves1:22:57

       didn't. No, I-

    2. DSDavid Senra1:22:57

       Okay

    3. TGTodd Graves1:22:57

       ... what I wanted was, what I wanted was craveable product.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:23:01

       Okay.

    5. TGTodd Graves1:23:01

       And, you know, and I knew from restaurants, you had that, 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? Like, it's like, focus on that, that, and do it extremely well. Don't try to be all things to all people, or you're gonna be nothing to anybody, right? You have to be what people will be fanatical about, what they... In the restaurant business, craveable. So but what I, what I wanted to do was create that craveable product that everybody do.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:23:26

       Mm-hmm.

    7. TGTodd Graves1:23:26

       Then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive-through, right? And so it starts from when customer pulls up to the, to the order deal. The first time 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, whatever, whatever their, whatever their order is, so the order's quick. Coming to the drive-through, we have a singular product focus, right? For that one menu item, we have one line. I'll take you back to the kitchen later. You can see down the line, toast is grilled on the end, you got the chicken fryers, you got the fry fryers, and you got the board. You can watch that cook-to-order process happen, like, you're cooking. And so you can cook, and you have that product, and you, you're making one, basically one meal, [chuckles] just with three, four, six chicken fingers. So you can make and assemble it quicker. You'll have your, your, your drinks that are popular, comes up, in and out, it gets out there. "Thank you very much for your, for your order," and you go through. And so then I saw the speed on that deal. So it's like, our concept's craveable food spur- served with fast food, speed, and convenience. That's what it is, right? Fast food, speed, and convenience, craveable products, 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, we 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, then your quality is now worse if you're then adding heat lamps, and we don't have heat lamps. We don't hold items, we don't have any of that stuff, right, in that cook-to-order process. Like if you go up 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, 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-

    8. DSDavid Senra1:25:06

       Yeah

    9. TGTodd Graves1:25:06

       ... we're doing that. But when the, when the, when the line picks up, then you're cooking a little bit ahead, then, you know, during your rushes, you're cooking way ahead. You're just... Meaning, it's coming out, it's getting served immediately, right? We're two minutes, 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 sales. So but just say just roughly 1%. If we do-... six billion in sales this year. What's one percent of six billion? That's six- $60 million in sales you can do if you can tweak that, tweak that, that, that order time, two seconds. Now, it flips on the other side, right? [chuckles] If, if you add two seconds, you add two seconds, you add two seconds-

    10. DSDavid Senra1:25:49

        [chuckles]

    11. TGTodd Graves1:25:50

        ... then those sales go down, and then the flow-through dollars, once you get to the flow-through point-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:25:53

        Yeah

    13. TGTodd Graves1:25:53

        ... then you, then you lose less money. So not having all those different things, it keeps the concept. So then, then knowing what your concept is and sticking to that concept, then you know what, what... Here's the engine, here's what drives, here's what drives sales, which eventually drives profitability. It does. There's other benefits, too. In the restaurant business, you look at the, a lot of the quick-service competitors, they're adding all these LTOs, limited time offerings. Management and crew have to learn a new product that's going in, and how that works in the service model, and do it. And it's they learn that, and they do that. It's a distraction of what you do. Then, the next 60 days, there's another one, then there's another one, then there's another one. There's all these things going on. Management has to spend so much time on learning those new products, delivering those new products, hitting the sales 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?

    14. DSDavid Senra1:26:41

        Yeah.

    15. TGTodd Graves1:26:41

        "You're great in the drive-through." Where's the time to walk out and talk to the customers and actually see their food? How clean is our, is our restaurant right now? What's the general vibe here? Oh, wait, wait, the music's a little lower. Someone knocked it down. Where's those things? So our management can focus on that, the crew member and customer experience, and make sure that goes, 'cause there's not these LTOs they have to learn, go through training modules, and do that. You focus on what you do good. And so, like, you go back to that business plan. They talked about not having all these different menu items. No veto vote doesn't happen. They're like, "You're not gonna get the frequency, because you need- frequency gets driven by different menu items, 'cause you get that... all that stuff." Because our frequency's just as high as any other quick-service restaurant, meaning how many times somebody comes back in a month period of time.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:27:18

        Oh, I see the DoorDash bills.

    17. TGTodd Graves1:27:19

        Yeah.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:27:19

        I know how frequent it is. [laughs]

    19. TGTodd Graves1:27:21

        [laughs] But then you come back, right?

    20. DSDavid Senra1:27:22

        You come back.

    21. TGTodd Graves1:27:23

        So you come back. 'Cause that- so it's, so it, so it's, it's anti what they say is what drives-

    22. DSDavid Senra1:27:26

        Yeah

    23. TGTodd Graves1:27:26

        ... this stuff. It's like there... th- there's no veto vote. There's no, there's no, uh, variety drives more sales. It's actually frequency. Our frequency's as high as anybody else's, serving the exact same thing people have day in, day out, because it's good. Because it's good. Our competitors can run chicken finger, chicken 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, they're coming back, getting their chicken finger meal from us, because it's the best, you know? It's actually, it... Actually, I love it when they run all these specials, they do all this stuff, because it, [chuckles] it adds more, it adds more advertising out there for chicken fingers, and we're known for the chicken fingers, man. It's like, when I want, when I want people to talk about chicken fingers, chicken strips, whatever they're talking about, boneless chicken being dipped, I want them to say Raising Cane's in their mind, like Xerox. You know?

    24. DSDavid Senra1:28:07

        Yeah.

    25. TGTodd Graves1:28:07

        It's not a copy anymore. "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. When you can execute on a consistent basis, consistently, and you can teach other people how to do it, and they can execute and operate the same way, and you stay focused on that, and delivering that high-quality, cravable product with fast food speed and convenience, and being friendly and doing that, when you focus on that day in, day out, the whole organization is around that, then you can look at stuff like Cane's Club. You have time to do those other things that enhance that crew member experience. And when crew's happy, they're gonna be, they're gonna be friendly to your customers. That- that's why people come back. They don't just come back to Cane's 'cause the food's so cravable. They come back because they know it's gonna be food safe. They know people are gonna be friendly. They know people are appreciate, right? Customers want to be appreciated. They want to say, "Thank you for your food," and pe- our people mean that. It's like, we appreciate you spending your hard-earned dollars here. In fact, if they want to go to the restroom, it's gonna be clean. Those things get you that repeat business.

    26. DSDavid Senra1:28:59

        Yeah, we went to... We landed and went, went directly to one last night, and just greeting every single person that went to the door. Like, I- it was, like, obvious-

    27. TGTodd Graves1:29:07

        Absolutely

    28. DSDavid Senra1:29:07

        ... how obsessive... I love this idea, 'cause again, focusing on one thing and being the best in the world at it, right? To me, that's should be completely obvious. I think humans crave simplicity, but our default state is we tend to overcomplicate things.

    29. TGTodd Graves1:29:20

        Right, we overcomplicate.

    30. DSDavid Senra1:29:20

        So your competitor's like, "Okay, Todd's just gonna have chicken fingers. I'm gonna have chicken fingers and nine other things."
26. 1:30:07 – 1:30:59

    Dining at Jiro in Tokyo

    1. DSDavid Senra1:30:07

       to make-

    2. TGTodd Graves1:30:07

       They want to know it.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:30:07

       Just say, "What do you do the best?" I went to, um, I went to Jiro, uh, in Tokyo, uh, and you know, it's a three-star Michelin restaurant. It's 10 seats.

    4. TGTodd Graves1:30:15

       Maybe you can get me in. [laughs]

    5. DSDavid Senra1:30:16

       [laughs] I can't, actually.

    6. TGTodd Graves1:30:17

       You can't. Thank you.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:30:17

       I have a friend that does that do it. So Jiro's, uh, uh, really old, so he, he only comes in frequently, but his son was the one that served us. But, like, you don't even get to choose. [chuckles] You sit down, and he's like, "I'm the best in the world at what I do, and I'm gonna you- serve it."

    8. TGTodd Graves1:30:29

       Brilliant.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:30:29

       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 of anything else.

    10. TGTodd Graves1:30:33

        I'll flip through a menu.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:30:34

        No, like the, like the, uh, what's the, w- the, the restaurant that has a, like, a book this size? Something, um, Californ- not California, uh, Kitchen. What is it?

    12. TGTodd Graves1:30:43

        Cheesecake Factory.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:30:43

        Cheese- yeah, Cheesecake Factory.

    14. TGTodd Graves1:30:44

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:30:44

        I don't go there.

    16. TGTodd Graves1:30:45

        [laughs]

    17. DSDavid Senra1:30:45

        It's like I don't want homework.

    18. TGTodd Graves1:30:47

        [laughs]

    19. DSDavid Senra1:30:47

        Like, I got other shit in my head.

    20. TGTodd Graves1:30:48

        Yeah.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:30:48

        I don't want to think about this.

    22. TGTodd Graves1:30:49

        It causes anxiety. What am I gonna get here?

    23. DSDavid Senra1:30:51

        I... 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-

    24. TGTodd Graves1:30:58

        That's it.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:30:58

        You already know.

27. 1:30:59 – 1:32:50

    The Franchise Model Debate

    1. TGTodd Graves1:30:59

       That's it.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:30:59

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

    3. TGTodd Graves1:31:12

       The, you know, when, when I started out, uh, you know, when, when I had that vision-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:31:14

       Yeah

    5. TGTodd Graves1:31:14

       ... you know, grow Cane's, you know, so franchising was, like, one of the obvious ways to do it, and so everybody was franchising. So I thought-

    6. DSDavid Senra1:31:20

       Why do they do that?

    7. TGTodd Graves1:31:21

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

    8. DSDavid Senra1:31:45

       Yeah

    9. TGTodd Graves1:31:45

       ... send it out, right, the cost wouldn't be there, the capital cost. But e- every, every one is a new restaurant, a lot of money. So people are like, "You can grow in different areas, and use other people's money to grow." There's also, um, the thought of that other restaurateurs will bring other things to the table, other knowledge. They're good in their regions. They know the local knowledge better-

    10. DSDavid Senra1:32:04

        Right

    11. TGTodd Graves1:32:04

        ... and it's better to grow that way and do it. But I think mainly it's the money play. It's literally, "We want to keep growing with our capital. We'll take a royalty off the deal." So I had the model of, like, "I'm gonna grow 50%..." I, I knew I wanted to grow company, but I'm like, "I'm not gonna be able to grow fast enough, and I'm not gonna have the capital to be able to grow in all the areas." So I got really great people from the industry, people that were CEOs in other great, big billion-dollar businesses, and they were good people. They were people that I trust- trusted and 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 pockets of the country. I opened up in Ohio, opened up in Minnesota, opened up in Nevada, opened in these, 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

28. 1:32:50 – 1:35:21

    Challenges of Franchising

    1. TGTodd Graves1:32:50

       like that. The thing is, they operated... We were say- we'd say we're a 95 out of 100. They were about 85 out of 100, which I think other franchisees were, like, 65 out of 100, honestly, on what they're doing. So they- other people have been thrilled with them as franchisees, but that 85 [chuckles] to 95 gap drove me crazy.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:33:06

       [chuckles]

    3. TGTodd Graves1:33:06

       And I was just like, "I know we can operate these better.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:33:08

       Of course.

    5. TGTodd Graves1:33:08

       I know I could do it better." It was a singular 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, that you, you have the respect to show them. They're like, "Ah, this doesn't work for us, because it's different." It's like, "Well, what's different? The crew and, and customer, your customers are [chuckles] exact same in both these areas." "No, we just like it better this way. We think..." Da, da, da. Or even crazy things like, "Well, we don't want to get that much faster, because we like the, the longer interactions." Like, "Well, the longer interaction-

    6. DSDavid Senra1:33:45

       [chuckles]

    7. TGTodd Graves1:33:45

       ... well, you can still be just as friendly but quick-

    8. DSDavid Senra1:33:47

       Yeah [chuckles]

    9. TGTodd Graves1:33:47

       ... 'cause they wanna get out the door anyway." But talking them into things took too long.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:33:52

        Yeah.

    11. TGTodd Graves1:33:52

        And I was spending, and me and the team were spending too much time on something that should've been implemented overnight. And I'm like, the, 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 it." And so that time was less efficiency on us building the business and making our existing restaurants better and getting higher rest- same-restaurant sales. And so I ended up buying all them back, and, uh, they did really well, and they were great, and they, they, they're all happy. And the action, too, is they looked at, like, a more of a merger, 'cause we kept their teams-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:34:21

        Mm

    13. TGTodd Graves1:34:21

        ... and they had more opportunities for growth. And it, it, it, it worked out really well. But for me, it's like, you know, a franchisee is never gonna run it like you do, because it's your baby, it's your thing, and they're not gonna take it quite as personally, and they're not quite as fanatical as you are, right? "I'm a fry-cooking cashier, man.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:34:39

        [chuckles]

    15. TGTodd Graves1:34:39

        That's what I live to do," right? And they were 85. I was at 95, and so... And I, and I could, I could hire the people that had those same types of values as I did. And so, like, franchising for me, it's just you're gonna lose quality, service. You're gonna lose those things, and you're also gonna lose a tremendous amount of efficiency because you're talking 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 the franchise markets. Literally, sales went up-

    16. DSDavid Senra1:35:10

        Oh, wow

    17. TGTodd Graves1:35:10

        ... wages went up, everything went up, and it actually, it proved out better. So look, I, I, I think it works for some organizations. I- for me, personally, especially in the restaurant business, I think the company model just rules.

29. 1:35:21 – 1:37:07

    Building a Business Authentic to You

    1. TGTodd Graves1:35:21

       I really do.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:35:21

       Well, I think the important part that, you know, a lot of people, they'll, they're like, "Hey," like, "what, should I work on this? Or what, what's the, uh, idea I should pursue?" And, uh, I actually got this idea from, uh, Michael Dell, where I used to say, "Well, like, you just have to build a business authentic to you." It doesn't even matter if you could make more money from franchising. You just- it's not suited for your personality.

    3. TGTodd Graves1:35:40

       Right.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:35:40

       So it doesn't matter-

    5. TGTodd Graves1:35:41

       Not suited for our personality

    6. DSDavid Senra1:35:42

       ... it has to be... And I used to use the word authentic all the time. "You should build a business authentic to you." And then I was reading Michael Dell's autobiography, and, um, he, you know, he was in his early 20s, so he's like, "Shit, man, this is really hard competing with IBM." So he actually gets a guy to come in and be, I think, the vice president or president and help him, and the guy's, like, 20 years older than him. And I found an interview with that guy, who's now in his 80s, talking about what it was like working with Michael Dell in his 20s. And he's like, "You know, I, I loved it, but I could only last four years, because we're, we're playing for high stakes. There's 1,000 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, my s- I got diges- [chuckles] " He's like, "I got-

    7. TGTodd Graves1:36:21

       Been there

    8. DSDavid Senra1:36:21

       ... I got digestive issues." [chuckles]

    9. TGTodd Graves1:36:22

       I'm drinking too much. [chuckles]

    10. DSDavid Senra1:36:23

        I got... [chuckles] 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, [chuckles] where my body is shutting down, and Michael's like, 'Yes, let's do this!'" So, like, natural is a better description than authentic. It has to be natural to the creator. It has to be natural to the founder.

    11. TGTodd Graves1:36:44

        Absolutely.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:36:45

        Which is like, I don't- I'm the same way. I'm obsessed with control. I spent eight hours yesterday hand-editing the transcript that no one gives a shit about, because I care about it.

    13. TGTodd Graves1:36:54

        That's right.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:36:54

        This is like, I don't... And everybody's like, everybody tells me, "Outsource. Delegate." They use that word all the time. No, I don't wanna delegate. Like, I wanna feel it.

    15. TGTodd Graves1:37:01

        Yeah.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:37:01

        I have a feeling for it.

    17. TGTodd Graves1:37:02

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

30. 1:37:07 – 1:49:13

    Financing and Expansion Strategies

    1. DSDavid Senra1:37:07

       The p- time period you're describing, where in Cane's history was this happening? And how long-

    2. TGTodd Graves1:37:11

       For the franchising?

    3. DSDavid Senra1:37:12

       Yeah.

    4. TGTodd Graves1:37:12

       Yeah, so I, I mean, I would-

    5. DSDavid Senra1:37:13

       Was that five years in?

    6. TGTodd Graves1:37:14

       Uh, yeah, eh-... yeah, probably three years I started talking about it, because when-

    7. DSDavid Senra1:37:20

       Okay.

    8. TGTodd Graves1:37:20

       Not the- no, no, no. So, so for second restaurant was, was- second restaurant was 18 months after the first restaurant.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:37:25

       Okay.

    10. TGTodd Graves1:37:26

        Then from there, I had an opportunity when I really knew I wanted to grow, and that's when my partner got out, which, which is really interesting. You said it has to be natural to you. My partner, Craig, who was great, he loved the finance part of it. He loved the IT. He loved the business administration stuff. He wasn't a fry cook like me, and he's like, "Todd, when, when, when I get a night off, [chuckles] when 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, you're writing new schedules that we put on the deal is..." He's like, "I just, this doesn't make me happy."

    11. DSDavid Senra1:37:50

        Yeah.

    12. TGTodd Graves1:37:51

        And so he, but he ended up getting a- we really didn't have much money to buy out then, but he, he ended up getting a scholarship at Wake Forest. He did business, he did all the things he did. He actually came back to Cane's for several years, doing the things he likes to do. Uh, has his own business now. He does, he does really well. Still one of my dear friends, but he wasn't happy, and he had the courage to say, "I don't, I don't like this."

    13. DSDavid Senra1:38:08

        Yeah.

    14. TGTodd Graves1:38:08

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

    15. DSDavid Senra1:38:30

        Yeah. [chuckles]

    16. TGTodd Graves1:38:30

        ... 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 ne- you'll, you'll never work. There won't work. Words like career. It's not a career, it's a passion. It's just what you do. It's the same thing as I get up, and I go take a walk, and I love my dogs, I love my business, I love my kids. Things like that are what makes, makes the difference in being whole, I believe. So one of the disadvantages of having other partners in your business is that they might have different goals in mind that you have in your business, right? So an entrepreneur and a founder brings on an equity partner, whether that's an individual or whether it's a professional group, private equity. I'd be very careful on what their motives are, and if their motives is, is about a financial return, you're generally gonna end up bad, because you have a- you have a fiduciary responsibility to the other owners of your business to meet their, their goals, right? And if those goals are financial on that deal is, it can change your thinking. It can change your thinking on quality. In my, in my business, it could change vision on quality food. You could try to lower food to make more profitability, which is a short-term game. You could, you could cut wages, right? And so your crew members aren't as happy, they're not as appreciated on, on, on the deal. You could try to do different avenues of sales just to raise sales, that's gonna lose your focus. There's all kind of bad things that go with that. The only way I'd do a partner is if they believe 100% in what you believe in, and then you also believe that they're not gonna sell that stock to somebody else that doesn't in the future, and rarely does that work out. If it's special to you, hold on to your equity. Take the risk, [chuckles] get more financing, but keep it yours, because you'll always be able to protect your baby. You know what makes it work, work better than anybody else.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:40:13

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

    18. TGTodd Graves1:40:23

        Exactly.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:40:23

        And so there's, there's this investor named Nick Sleep, who write- who wrote these legendary, um, let- uh, letters to his partners, and he made a great line. He's like, "The best investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold." And what he was talking about is the fact that, like, if you took... Obviously, Sam Walton, right? He gave away the equity in Walmart to his kids before it was valuable, and that's how he, he, they wound up being very tax efficient. But if you look at his combined wealth that came from Walmart, right, that's still concentrated in the family today, the last time I looked it up was, like, a month ago, it's, like, $432 billion, okay? So one of the greatest fortunes that have ever been created, do you think Sam Walton woke up every day being like, "Oh, I need to maximize shareholder value. What's my stock price?" No, he woke up serving his customers.

    20. TGTodd Graves1:41:05

        Customers.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:41:06

        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."

    22. TGTodd Graves1:41:10

        Right.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:41:10

        "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.

    24. TGTodd Graves1:41:14

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

    25. DSDavid Senra1:41:18

        Yes.

    26. TGTodd Graves1:41:18

        It's not about the money.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:41:19

        I've heard this for 200 years of entrepreneur history. It's like people think it's, like, some willy foofoo stuff. "Oh, yeah, you should do what you love." There's a underlying reason to that, because work is going to be a grind.

    28. TGTodd Graves1:41:30

        It's going to be a grind.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:41:30

        You are going to run into times where you are crying, when you're in pain-

    30. TGTodd Graves1:41:34

        Every day
31. 1:49:13 – 1:55:48

    Surviving Hurricane Katrina

    1. TGTodd Graves1:49:13

       cash, doing this stuff. I get up to 28 restaurants, and all of a sudden, we have a, we have a storm coming in named Katrina. It's coming into Louisiana. We're used to, used to hurricanes. We knew what to do. We put crew to safety, shut down the restaurants, buckled everything down. Hurricanes would come through, we'd open up the next day, we'd have some power outage, whatever. But Katrina was different 'cause it came up, went over New Orleans, and it hovered, and then the levees broke, right? And we're watching on TV from our second location across here, where we all go... We got this Whatever creeks up, this power to where we could actually watch television. And when the levees broke, we're like, "We've never seen this before. What is this?" Flooding, terrible, awful, whole bit. And I thought, I said, "Man, you just screwed up bad. You screwed up bad. You just put this company in such bad financial condition because now there ain't no sales coming in," and we knew it was gonna take a while to open up. And-

    2. DSDavid Senra1:50:02

       And every single Cane's location is-

    3. TGTodd Graves1:50:04

       21 out of the... 21 out of the 28 were down from either power, to damage, to flooding, to whatever it was, and so no cash is coming in. I got the company-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:50:13

       [laughs]

    5. TGTodd Graves1:50:13

       ... levered to the hilt, right? I owe everybody.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:50:16

       [laughs]

    7. TGTodd Graves1:50:16

       And in times like that, you think that, you know, you'd think that the b- the banks still want their money. Landlords still want their money. And I gathered, I gathered people together. We had teams that helped people that actually had damage to their 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. 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 got managers and things like that displaced. They're coming back, and they don't have a job, and we don't have money now, like we owe vendors and things like that, to, to pay for their livelihood. And, and then, three, people are gonna start coming back to New Orleans, and they, they need a place to eat. And we symbolized as a team, and we had that same fanatical view of, "We're gonna do it." We figured out... I figured out how to get into New Orleans right away, talking to the governor's office. They got us passes to go in. They weren't letting anybody in. We, we worked with the state on doing boil water acts 'cause we didn't have formalized boil water acts.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:51:27

       What-

    9. TGTodd Graves1:51:27

       You have to boil the water because, I mean, like, like some of the, the, the rivers and all these things had hit everything.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:51:31

        Oh, oil.

    11. TGTodd Graves1:51:31

        You had to oil the water.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:51:33

        Okay.

    13. TGTodd Graves1:51:33

        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 Northshore, you know, Slidell, those areas. On the West Bank, like, some areas we opened up, like, 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-

    14. DSDavid Senra1:51:57

        So you had the whole market to yourself?

    15. TGTodd Graves1:51:59

        The whole market to ourselves. O- Opened up in, in, in, like, the West Bank. We opened up in the Harvey, and, like, it was in, like, 120 days or whatever for the next restaurant 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. They're like, "Lord, come in and eat," right? Because it was like, "You can come in. We got power. It's all generator power."

    16. DSDavid Senra1:52:17

        Yeah.

    17. TGTodd Graves1:52:17

        "We got generators from all over the country, got them in to set it up." And we galvanized that point, like the team and the community and, like, us being open, and then sales were nuts. Like, it was nuts. So now we had cash flow coming in. We could do these massive crew bonuses. We could give back to the community organizations, and I mean, I was just really, really proud of the team. At the same time I'm proud, I was, I was disappointed in myself, and I was disappointed in myself because I put all that in jeopardy. You know what I mean? I put all that in jeopardy for financing. From that day, when I watched the levees break, I said, "I'll never, ever, ever put the position... the company in the position that we're financially strapped. Like, I'll never do that again." And from that day, we got our metrics, and we worked towards it. 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 the capacity to get all kind of, you know, lending but-

    18. DSDavid Senra1:53:09

        Oh, unlimited

    19. TGTodd Graves1:53:09

        ... but we won't, but we won't go past the, our metrics, right?

    20. DSDavid Senra1:53:12

        Yeah.

    21. TGTodd Graves1:53:12

        We won't go past that, so we learned that one the hard way. A- And a lot of the same things with COVID, you know. When COVID happened, we're like, "Oh, my God," like, like, "You can't get- you can't serve, you can't do food." We were an, uh, we were a necessary business. They said, "Essential business to be open because we need to feed the public," because they felt com- they felt okay with going through drive-through for COVID-

    22. DSDavid Senra1:53:30

        Yeah

    23. TGTodd Graves1:53:30

        ... because there was limited contact. But we had to learn everything. It was like literally, "Hey, guys, we can..." We talked to the restaurant industries and all the, the authorities. We're like: We're gonna tape off every six feet for people to be. We're gonna put, uh, shields between people. It's like b- symbolizing the team like that, and then we took parking lots, and we had three drive-through lanes. When I tell you, we like... We were the, like, the first that figured that out. Could you imagine? People now have a place to go get some food-

    24. DSDavid Senra1:53:54

        Yeah

    25. TGTodd Graves1:53:54

        ... and not just eat at their house, what, what they get from the grocery store. Man, it's like our sales went crazy. We were able to do huge crew bonuses, uh, customer bonuses, but it's that fanaticism to figure it out right now, and it's like me leading with the people. And I have so many people 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 you... That point, too, I couldn't even go in the restaurant-

    26. DSDavid Senra1:54:17

        Yeah

    27. TGTodd Graves1:54:17

        ... because it'd be cross-contamination-

    28. DSDavid Senra1:54:19

        Yeah

    29. TGTodd Graves1:54:19

        ... like, if I had it and went in.

    30. DSDavid Senra1:54:20

        Yeah.
32. 1:55:48 – 1:58:06

    Lessons from Estée Lauder

    1. DSDavid Senra1:55:48

       is pretty good," and then think about how many customers that one person has got- has get- has, has given you. The one, one thing that comes to mind about this, like, this sounds crazy, but one of my favorite entrepreneurs I've ever come across, I found this bi- biography, autobiography of Estée Lauder, published in the 1980s, okay? She- at the time, sh- Estée Lauder was not the public company. It was still very successful. It was a family-owned business, and she would get a lot of shit from people, 'cause they're like, her main distribution ch- channel was, like, she wants your, like, Bloomingdale's or Neiman Marcus to take care... to, to, as a distribution center.

    2. TGTodd Graves1:56:18

       Mm.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:56:18

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

    4. TGTodd Graves1:56:55

       Right.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:56:55

       It's like, "Oh, I guess. We're just sitting here. Let's do this." And then she does it tr- one-on-one attention. People are like, "Oh, that doesn't scale. You can't do that." Bullshit!

    6. TGTodd Graves1:57:01

       [laughing]

    7. DSDavid Senra1:57:01

       It's gonna scale because you're gonna do this for the rest of your life. And so she says-

    8. TGTodd Graves1:57:05

       Right

    9. DSDavid Senra1:57:05

       ... 30 years later, she, she would get letters from people that she gave a free makeup on a train, talking about how sh- much they love the products. Think about how many people that one woman, that you spend 20 minutes with, has told, if she's a customer of yours-

    10. TGTodd Graves1:57:18

        Oh, absolutely.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:57:19

        I've been a customer-

    12. TGTodd Graves1:57:19

        Fanatical fans telling everybody they know-

    13. DSDavid Senra1:57:20

        I've been a customer-

    14. TGTodd Graves1:57:21

        ... Listen to their story.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:57:21

        Exactly. I've been a customer of yours for, I don't know, four years, and then you make a podcast that's been listened to by, like, half a million people. [laughing]

    16. TGTodd Graves1:57:27

        [laughing] That's right.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:57:27

        Like, you couldn't have, you couldn't have predicted that. There's probably gonna be millions of people that watch what we're doing.

    18. TGTodd Graves1:57:31

        That's right.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:57:31

        The fact is, it all stems from the fact that you're a fanatic.

    20. TGTodd Graves1:57:34

        And purpose, right? And so what, what excites me about talking to you today is, is that the people that listen, if they get a little nugget from this, 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... And then, like, and the, the questions you sent me before-

    21. DSDavid Senra1:57:53

        Yeah

    22. TGTodd Graves1:57:53

        ... right, I had those questions, I was able to get to wrap my mind around it, 'cause you want it to be good for the listeners.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:57:57

        Yeah.

    24. TGTodd Graves1:57:57

        But that's purpose, man. If, 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.

33. 1:58:06 – 1:59:16

    Final Thoughts and Reflections

    1. DSDavid Senra1:58:06

       You have an insane amount of information and knowledge. How many people work on the same thing for 30 years? Just, like, so few people, 'cause everybody wants to... What we talked about earlier, they wanna start, scale, sell.

    2. TGTodd Graves1:58:16

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:58:17

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

    4. TGTodd Graves1:58:28

       Absolutely, yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:58:29

       It's so much more impressive than the... N- no disrespect to anybody else, but, like, the startup founder that ran the business for two years. He's like- they know nothing. They're like a baby. They're still in diapers.

    6. TGTodd Graves1:58:37

       [laughing]

    7. DSDavid Senra1:58:37

       And even you, I love that you keep hitting that you haven't met, uh... I'm just i- implying here, but, like, you're like, "Yeah, we can get to 95." Yeah, 'cause you know there's no such thing as ever getting to 100. You're always looking for different ways to improve. Todd, you're gonna do this for the rest of your life. I'm gonna have conversations with, with founders for the rest of our life. I really appreciate you taking a risk and being one of my first guests.

    8. TGTodd Graves1:58:55

       Absolutely!

    9. DSDavid Senra1:58:55

       I'm a big fan of what you do, man.

    10. TGTodd Graves1:58:57

        I... Hey, it fired me up that I may be one of, one of the first, man. It's like, 'cause everybody's gonna wanna watch it and see it, and it's like, uh-

    11. DSDavid Senra1:59:02

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

    12. TGTodd Graves1:59:13

        Oh, well, I appreciate-

    13. DSDavid Senra1:59:14

        Thank you

    14. TGTodd Graves1:59:14

        ... what you do. I appreciate you having me on.

Episode duration: 1:59:44