Raising Cane’s secret recipe for scaling

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TODD GRAVES: I’m going to open my restaurant. I’m going to do it. I’ll never give up. And when I tell myself that, and it’s a human condition, right? The subconscious believes what you tell it. And that’s where I could get that fuel to keep working hard. Still does today, too.

JEFF BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Todd Graves. Todd is the founder and co-CEO of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. He blitzscaled his fast food concept into a brand worth billions. And it’s well-known both for its deliciously simple menu and its refreshingly friendly stuff. We talked about how he perfected the recipe for success, why he thinks restaurants should be wary of private equity and much, much more. It is a tasty conversation. Stay tuned.

[THEME MUSIC]

Todd, welcome to Masters of Scale.

GRAVES: Thank you for having me here.

Copy LinkWorking toward a chicken finger dream

BERMAN: I’m thrilled to have you. I discovered Raising Cane’s in, I want to say, 2022, after you opened in El Segundo in LA. And for my now 16-year-old and I, it absolutely changed our chicken eating habits, so thank you. Fired up to talk to you and get into the story. Let’s start at the start. Where did the inspiration for Raising Cane’s come from?

GRAVES: It really started as a kid. I was always entrepreneurial. I was the kid that did the lemonade stands in the neighborhood, and then cut people’s grass for $5.00 and just always thought around business. And when I started working high school years, I worked in the restaurant business. And I did that because I like to cook with my mother. Food was, for me, an expression of love. Spending time with my mother, cooking Cajun food, like let’s say a gumbo, or my grandmother made me a pie. And so I’m like, my first job, go work in the restaurants. And I liked the pace. I liked the immediate gratification of cooking something and then serving it to somebody and them being happy. And working with teams, things like that.

So for me during college, I was starting to consider what I was going to do and that entrepreneurial streak just went back in me and I’m like, “You know what? I want to open a restaurant. And I want to open it when I get out of college.”

And I had no idea how hard that would be at that point, but that was the dream. It was just a natural thing for me to go into, do the food business. And when I was in college, if you remember back in these days, this was 1994. Back then it was like ground meat was bad for you, beef was bad and chicken and fish was good for you, but chicken became the number one protein. And I could see… And I grew up in Louisiana on fried chicken, but it was all bone fried chicken. And during that time, I was in college, people started eating the boneless chicken. Whether it was chains like Chili’s, having that with sauce, or it was going to mom-and-pops. And I was like, “Man, this is going to be the next thing.”

BERMAN: Yeah. Okay. So you’re a college student in the ’90s, you had this idea, start working on a business plan back then?

GRAVES: I had a partner when I started the business, and he had one more year of college, and he enrolled in business classes. And we took a business planning class, couldn’t actually go to the class, but I actually wrote that business plan with him for that class. And man, it was good, because I knew the business. I mean, it was a well-done business plan that he presented, but it ended up getting the worst grade in the class.

BERMAN: Why? What was the response?

GRAVES: And actually, I was really glad it was the worst grade, because it motivated me. But the professor said, “The plan’s exceptional.” I knew details. I knew exactly… I knew what our aprons would cost to get washed as I worked in the business. But he said, “You didn’t follow the concept and understand the industry.”

And at that point, quick service restaurants like McDonald’s is adding menu items. They’re worried about a veto vote. One person in the car doesn’t want something from that restaurant, then they’re going to go to another restaurant that has more variety. So they’re adding variety and they’re also adding healthy menu items. They’re adding salads and wraps and things like that. So he said, “Overall, the plan was good, but you didn’t hit what the industry’s doing. So that’s why I did it.”
And I was like, “You know what? I’m going to use that as motivation.”

Because I knew at that point, you go to a place because it’s craveable food. And you’re going to go there. And even though it has 100 different menu items, you’re going to get what you really like. And I’m like, “Being to execute on one thing and do it better than anybody else is going to be a recipe for success.” And it ended up being there. Look, In-N-Out Burger’s done it since 1948. And I didn’t have that as a model then, but I just had that intuitive sense that serving something craveable, people will come back for it.

BERMAN: We have so many entrepreneurs on Masters of Scale who hear 100 nos before they get their first yes. The first no sounds like it was a professor saying, “This is the worst grade in the class for this reason.”

I appreciate the instinct was there, but to go launch a business takes more than instinct. There’s a lot that goes into that. Where do you think that conviction came from, not just to believe it and feel it, but to follow through on it?

GRAVES: Yeah. So I was like one of these nerds in college. I was part of the entrepreneurial club and would read business magazines, reading the paper. And what I saw was a lot of people that had really good ideas that they were passionate about never go and get it done, because it’s so hard to start a business. And so I was like, “If I want to do this, and this is my dream to go to and own restaurant, I got to be committed to success or eventually failure, whatever it is, but never stop till I get it done.”

Took that business plan to every bank in town, bought a cheap suit and cheap briefcase and went in and presented the plan, and no after no after no. Nice enough. But then they also give me some advice like, “Hey, you don’t have any money. You got a college degree. Why don’t you work in the industry for 10 years and then you can do that?”

And we already know it’s the best thing for an entrepreneur to be told, “Hey, I don’t think this is going to work,” because you just use that as fuel.

You want to get a chip on your shoulder. You’re like, “I believe this. I’m going to do this.” And to back that up, when I couldn’t get any money, I’m like, “I’m going to go work and work as long as it takes for me to fund the restaurant myself.”

And so I got a job through a friend of a friend working as a boiler maker, which is turnaround shift work in refineries, one in El Segundo and the other one in Torrance in LA. And that’s when I came out to LA and worked hard. 90 hour weeks. California, you get some double time in there. It’s a great way to make money if you want to work hard.

And met a guy there, interesting, named Wild Bill Tolar. Wild Bill, everybody had nicknames there. And mine was Hollywood, which was a whole nother story. But Wild Bill’s like, “Man, you’re not afraid of hard work. And I know you have this chicken finger dream.” He’s like, “You should come with me, come up to Alaska and I’ll introduce you, show you around and you can work the Alaskan fishing trade, catching sockeye salmon with gill netting.” And he says, “You’ll get a job on a boat. You’re determined.” He said, “Actually, you’re going to make some real money.” He said, “Now, it’s dangerous. The hours are incredibly hard, but you can make some good money.” So sure enough, caught a plane to Anchorage, a plane to King Salmon, hitchhiked to Naknek, and spent that summer commercial fishing in Alaska.

BERMAN: So a guy named, Hollywood, nicknamed, Hollywood, goes up to Alaska to start doing commercial fishing, which to say it’s dangerous and to say that the hours are tough and the working conditions are rough is an understatement. This is one of the toughest jobs in the world.

GRAVES: It is, yeah.

BERMAN: How’d you manage it?

GRAVES: You get about four hours of sleep at night, and that’s 30 minutes here, an hour here, 20 hour days, just like working hard, hard manual labor. Boats are filling up with fish, and captains don’t want to go to the tender boat. And you might sink, and boats are ramming each other. National Geographic helicopters going over. Medical vac helicopters are going… It was this insane deal. And I was just like, “I’m doing this. I’m fueling my chicken finger dream. Nothing’s going to stop me.” But that resolve, having that resolve is what kept me going and then eventually opening up.

BERMAN: And you were telling everyone your why.

GRAVES: Yes.

BERMAN: You were telling, “I’m here because I’m going to make enough money to go open my restaurant.”

GRAVES: That’s right. That’s right.

BERMAN: Wow. And do you think that there’s something psychological when you say it out loud that commits yourself to it? Is there a psychological insight there?

GRAVES: It absolutely is for me. And so being able to say, “I’m going to open my restaurant. I’m going to do it. I’m not going to stop until I do. Nothing’s going to ever stop me for this. I’ll never quit. I’ll never give up.”

And when I tell myself that, and it’s a human condition, right, the subconscious believes what you tell it and the brain believes it. And that’s where I could get that fuel to keep working hard and to do it, and it still does today too. And so, you can choose your mood during the day. You get up the morning and say, “Hey, I’m going to have a great day,” or you can get up and go, “Oh, my gosh, this is going to be a tough day.” And whatever you say is pretty much right.

Copy LinkThe origins of Raising Cane’s

BERMAN: By the end of that Alaskan summer, how much had you saved up?

GRAVES: At that point, maybe like 40 to 60 grand at that point, which was significant money and enough for me to get the project rolling. And also at this point, too, is I was able to get a small group of preferred investors. Because they had seen. It had been roughly two years to where when I opened it up, they were like, “You know what? You are committed to this.” A little, $5,000.00, $10,000.00. Some of them, boilermakers, some of them Alaskan fisher people, my bookie, who invested in cash. It was a little 5, $10,000.00 increments and then got a small SBA loan.
And since I had that equity side of it, and I had to live off it, too, because I had… The money I made, I had to live off of. We were paying ourselves like 5 bucks an hour or whatever we were doing. And I was able to open up.

I secured a place in the North Gates of LSU, right? It’s an old dilapidated building. The broker was a great guy, Red Reynolds. And he said, “I believe…” He’d actually told the landlord, Lou Larber, she was like 96 years old and said… It was all kind of college concepts. It was just in a year, out. He’s like, “He will make a long-term thing that we can just wait for him. So let’s just wait for it.”

But going in, I wanted to be prudent. I didn’t have a ton of money going in to renovate this place. So I just learned what to do. I learned how to do plumbing. I learned how to do contracting work, things like that, and to bring in the experts when we really needed electrician, things I couldn’t do. So figure that out. Same with going to the restaurant. I knew the restaurant business, but I’d never gone out to hire people, never done these things before. So I’d learn it.

BERMAN: Was there a piece of advice you got from someone who’d been there, done that before that was particularly instrumental in this phase of the process?

GRAVES: Not at that point, because to be honest with you, I had a lot of bad examples. So working in restaurants, high school and college, the restaurant business was… It was more militant. It was, “Do this, do that.” No music going in the kitchens. There wasn’t a semblance of having fun or teamwork. It was the, “Yes, Chef,” type of deal.

And so I knew what I didn’t want. You know what I mean? I knew I wanted people to wear casual uniforms, just Raising Cane’s shirt, jeans, shorts, whatever. I wanted people to listen to music. I wanted them to have fun, but taking pride while they worked and did those things. So those types of things helped me on doing that.

So a lot of these restaurateurs were just not good people. They were good culture people. But look, National Restaurant Association gave us a lot of good things on actually the formats on how to do things, how to do templates for scheduling and things like that. And then I reached out to the restaurateurs I did respect in Baton Rouge and being like, “Hey, man, how are you getting good people and what are some incentives you go and do it?”

My wife, who I started dating back then, was a McDonald’s franchisee. So we spent a lot of our time just talking about, “How do you motivate the crew? How do you salt your fries?” Things like that.

BERMAN: Was there a point where there was an inflection where you said, “Oh, we’ve got this. We really have this right now.”

GRAVES: Luckily we made money from the first month. Like, I said, 30 bucks, then we started doing well. And actually we had so much success that I opened my second location 18 months later, got a full SBA loan, 18 months on that, and construction from the ground up on this building. And so, I was always fortunate that we were making money and doing it. So I never had the, “It’s not going to work,” moment. I had that, “Look, I’m just hoping I keep this energy going,” because I was working nonstop and doing it and doing that and I need to get other people to come help me and do this.

I thought this was just a college concept, right? Opened my first location one side of campus, the second on the other side, but that other location had traffic flow of not just students. So now I’m having mom and dad pick up food on the way home from work. I got T-ball teams on Saturday, church groups on Sunday, and business people would come in for lunch.

And then I’m like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t just a college concept. I think this can work.” And that’s when I got the bug, man. I was like, “I’m enjoying this. I’m figuring things out. I’m enjoying having teams build and I’m enjoying this, man.” I’m like, “I want to grow.”

I love serving customers. And I was able to start doing a few things in the LSU community and I got that bug. Man, I wanted to grow. And I never thought that would be that. But that point I was like… And that’s where the vision was from that point was like, as many Raising Cane’s as I can do in the world, that’s what I want to do.

Copy LinkInside Raising Cane’s scale model

BERMAN: I know you have skewed a franchise model, and I’m keen to hear about that theory of growth and scale. Maybe we can enter some of that through. How do you come into a community and really get to know it so you’re serving their needs and not serving your own objectives first?

GRAVES: For us, it’s hiring local people. And so, hiring local leaders and being there. Now, we send our crews to go help get this established, bring in the cultural things, the training and things like that, but hiring local leaders and people that are intrinsically motivated. And meaning, they want to take care of the crew and they want to create greater opportunities for them, and they want to give back to the community. And it’s actually seeing, you can see it all the time in the restaurant business is, most restaurant business chains are into doing community things. You can tell the ones that are into it and the ones that are not into it. You can tell the ones that are into their crew or really not into the crew.

BERMAN: Why didn’t you go the franchise route as you looked to start scaling outside of either side of the LSU campus?

GRAVES: When I started, I did start with franchisees and my idea was going to be that I’d be mostly company, maybe 60% company and about 40% franchised, right? And that was going with strong restaurant operators that have the same intrinsic values, crew, people, community, and those sorts of things. And we did well with them. They were great franchisees and they cared. They just didn’t operate as well as us. And so let’s say we’re rated, our company restaurants, 95 out of 100. They’d run at like 85 out of 100, which is really good, because most franchisees are 65 out of 100. I would say that 5, 10% difference drove me crazy.

And it’s also the efficiency. So working with those franchisees, it’s their business and they care about it, but like maybe we have a new training program, a way to get faster in the drive through things. It was such a talk into certain things. “No, we like to do it this way and da, da, da,” that I spent more time on convincing versus moving forward on things that I knew that worked.
But for me, it’s an expression of my family, you know what I mean? We want to do a good job and do that. So we bought them back. They were happy to. And I’m like 100% company restaurant operations.

BERMAN: How many restaurants now?

GRAVES: We’re almost at 1000 right now.

Copy LinkChoosing ownership and culture over franchise compromise

BERMAN: We’re in an era where, whether it’s private equity or it is simply like squeezing out every last penny to achieve the best returns for that quarter and appease the marketer, appease investors. And there are a lot of companies, a lot of companies that are doing this to the detriment of the wellbeing of their team members or their crew members. You’ve taken a bit of a different approach. Just talk a little bit about how you’ve approached building a team at 1000 and a growing number of locations around the world.

GRAVES: But I want to be the brand known for, not as craveable chicken finger meals, great crew, cool culture, active community involvement, right? Guides everything I do, and it’s timeless. Those are the basics. If you want a great crew, you treat your crew right, and you do those things. And you want the culture, you empower the people that can simulate that culture, which is a culture of appreciation.

So for me, it’s look, I feel like God made me good at chicken fingers to help people. It’s my purpose. So I have purpose. That’s why I continue to grow this. And if you have that purpose, then you’re going to take care of your crew, you’re going to take care of your communities, you’re going to do that. And if you can’t execute on that, then you’re not executing on the vision, then the whole idea is over.

The reason why I tried to talk these business founders into not selling the private equity is… And look, they’re not all bad. And so, I’m not talking about all of them, but a lot of them are. And look, if you have investors, if you have shareholders that their concern is, “What financial return I’m going to get,” then things go bad because people are not… They’re caught in that deal.

If you’re private equity and you need to be out of this deal in three to five years, that’s your goal, when you’ve out and sold made your money, there’s still people that are running these restaurants whose lives are just as important as yours. Their families are just as important. And now, you’re gone and the next people come in. Might come down and hack it down again and you just see when it happens. And so, there’s a few out there that I’ve seen in our space, restaurant space that do a good job and they take care of the people. Most of the time these other ones don’t because it’s not what they’re talking about in the boardroom.

So let me give you one example. So different CFO types and different people and different advice. So something as simple as this. If you’re sitting in a boardroom and you’re talking about CFOs and they’re like, “Here’s these 15 things I can cut to make it cheaper, to make us more profitable. The music system we have. It’s number one, top music system, has all these choices. This one we can say we can do half that amount for the music system and it has the basics, da, da, da.”

Well, then they implement that, and they implement from a boardroom not being in the kitchens. And the reason why the crew members love it is they have the newest music and they can jam where they go and they’re happier and they’re doing the deal. Now they don’t have that music. They’re listening to old music they don’t like. Their attitude goes down. They’re not quite as happy. Customer service is not as good. Speed goes down. All those little cuts, those 15 things go, right? “We can get our sauce made at a commissary. Commissary keeps [inaudible 00:17:35] da, da, da, we can save 50%.” Another slash. It’s death by a thousand cuts in that deal. It happens over and over again. Most of the time that’s what happens.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Todd Graves on whether he’s ever tempted to expand his menu, why he brought in a co-CEO and much more.

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Copy LinkHow Raising Cane’s approaches marketing

You all are known for your marketing. It’s exceptional. The product is phenomenal. My youngest and I, especially are massive fans of the product. In this world of, we are deluged with marketing messages nonstop. How are you generating the ideas and having the courage of conviction to go after non-obvious plays that actually break through?

GRAVES: So starting off, being an entrepreneur, another great thing is you learn marketing and you learn it, how you get great impressions, cost per impression, because you don’t have the money to do it. So around LSU, I started doing the LSU radio, and getting them to do that. But I’d meet the DJs and bring them food and they’d talk about it and got it good in with them. And then when I was able to afford billboards, TV, things like that, add it. So in my business, quick service restaurants, you have to be top of mind. You need to see the billboard on the way to lunch because at lunch everybody says, “Hey, what do we want today? Oh, Cane’s.”

It’s that speaking it. I’m speaking it. Hear on the radio, see the television the night before. So that’s a really important part of the deal, but there’s so many of those messages of that. So for me, it’s being literally in the moment when something is going to happen, when want to be a part of it. So Cynthia Erivo, she at the Oscars is going for the triple. She goes to Cane’s afterwards. She wins, she goes there, she gets this amazing shot, and she’s a Caniac and she’s a friend. She gets that shot.

It’s like after the Super Bowl, it’s going to be having the quarterback from either team with the winning team, but do it immediately after. Doing Saquon two days after the Super Bowl last year, going and doing it, it’s timely. I like tapping into celebrities’ fan bases. And so that’s an obvious thing. And then customers becomes loyal because, “Hey, Saquon loves it. And he’s friends with Todd.”

But having that in real time is to me so important when it’s the top of people’s minds, and it’s in the press and it’s going and doing it. So just anything, you can be creative. So fashion week. Wasn’t my idea. The team’s like, “Hey, let’s do a Cane’s fashion show. We’re not taking ourselves seriously, but we like this designer. We can do Cane Sauce dress and da, da, da, da, da.”

And we did it the day before, like Wednesday and Thursday cranked up. And we had all the press came because it was something different. And so we were also part of that and hit a different group, hit the fashion world group and got that different deal. So for me, if I think if I’m doing my job for my crew, how do I get them more sales and we stay relevant and do things, because it means there are bonuses and what people can make and all that good stuff that goes with that. So I just push myself constantly to do that.

So I run our marketing. Marketing for a founder obviously is a very personal thing. Also, it’s a slippery slope being top of mind all the time and doing so much because you can slip and not be cool. You could pick the wrong person. It’s somebody that might not be a genuine Caniac. It might be somebody that later gets in trouble for things. So it’s that deal. It just takes quite a bit to do it, but the activations are great.

BERMAN: Well, and celebrity is so often misused. And it does strike me that the celebrities you work with truly are Caniacs. They love the… You can feel that from them. It’s fun. It’s not so serious. It’s a good time. Snoop working at a drive-through, who doesn’t want to hang out with that? That’s a good time.

GRAVES: It is. And people want to see their heroes doing something like that, work a drive-through. It’s just the humanization of it. And then someone like Snoop is so funny with doing it, and he’s just so clever, and the crew loves it. The customers love it. It’s a really fun way. So actually Snoop’s the one that I broke into doing the celebrity drive-through with. And we help each other in business. We’ve been friends for a long time. And he literally called, “Hey, man, what can we do? What do you want to do? What’s going on?”

I said, “Where are you?”

He said, “I’m about to be in Little Rock to do a show.”

I was like, “Man, you know what? I’ve been wanting to do someone in the drive-through. If you do it, I know I can get everybody after it.”

And he’s like, “What are you talking about?”

I was like, “Just go in and work at Cane’s, man, and put secret cameras out.”

He had a blast doing it. And then after he did it, I was able to say, “Hey…” With different people I’m like, “Hey, Snoop did it. You got to do it now.”

But you hit on a really good point is just the whole being a brand ambassador, they have to be Caniacs. And so it starts with that. And I think a lot of brands do it really, really well. Some don’t though. They end up getting somebody then you can see through… People have so much messages now, marketing messages, they can see through things that aren’t genuine in two seconds. It’s like, then it hurts the brand, right?

Copy LinkWhy Raising Cane’s sticks to a limited menu

BERMAN: I want to go back to the professor who gave the business plan at B-, because the other element here beyond customers seeking a range of options and what have you is supply chain risk. God forbid, knock wood, we one bad bird flew away from a really bad quarter or year for you and for your customers. How do you think about managing for that kind of risk when you’ve got such a limited menu?

GRAVES: Yeah. So for me, well, one’s just redundancy within the products you have. Let’s take out bird flu, anything like that. Just look at it, so it’s use most of the poultry providers. Everybody can do it. Like fries. We get fries made to our specs by several different fry companies. In the beginning, when I couldn’t get that redundancy, look, if they had a fire at the plant and couldn’t give me potatoes, I’d have to change the product that I was doing. I could still get fries and then do that. So it was redundancy in all our suppliers. Plus it keeps everybody honest. We have really good vendor partners. So it’s not they don’t, but it’s good competition, healthy competition is always a good thing.

So as far as protein, let’s take a bird flu and that sort of thing. Chicken is an extraordinarily resilient protein. The poultry houses are on and stay up to date and do it. I just don’t see that there’d be something that would go in. When the first bird flu happened in China, I think KFC sales went down maybe 20% for a period of time, and then bounced right back and was studying those different things. So for me is, we do fresh chicken, but we have frozen supply to get us through any kind of outbreak. So we still have that going. So long lead times on the frozen supply on that deal is… But ultimately, if people just stop eating chicken, then I’d be extinct. I would absolutely be extinct. I wouldn’t start serving steak fingers or something like that. I’d go, “Look, it’s time for me to hang this up.”

BERMAN: Yeah, I think we’re at low risk there. I love the simplicity of your menu. I have to imagine that certainly outsiders have advised to diversify the menu. Has there ever been a point where you’ve really questioned this and thought about adding a new item that goes beyond your core?

GRAVES: Well, thank God that I’m just hardheaded, you know what I mean, and not listen. And so from the get go, I just do this product, serving that one thing. If you try to be all things to all people, you’re not serving any of them well, right? So doing one thing. And so, if you break down our concept, it’s craveable food served with fast food speed and convenience. So if you have to do a fast food speed and convenience, then you’ve got to be fast. And if you want to serve craveable food, you have to do it homemade style and do that. So it comes down to the simplest procedure to get that food through. And so I can do it all basically scratch cooking, because I have just that menu.

Outside of that, it’s the customers coming in and the customers come to the order window. I mean, look, they don’t look at the menu board. They pull up to the speaker, “I’ll take a box combo, no slaw, extra toast, da, da, da.”

Everybody’s got their order. It doesn’t take extra time to do it. So people are like, “Man, Texas, you got to add barbecue sauce, cream gravy.”

And I’m like, “I hear you.”

But it would come up to the window and they go, “Ah, you know what? I don’t know if I want that cream gravy or I want that.”

“Look, you’re getting Cane sauce and you’re going to like it and you’re going to do that.”
And you train people to go not on those extra choices. If you had spicy, people are like, “You should do hot chicken and that deal is…”

Once again, it would be slower from the cooking procedure because we don’t hold food. So how much are you going to estimate for each one of those types of orders? Then they’re going to come up and go, “Ah, you know what? I’m going to change that to spicy.” Even at the window, come up and do that stuff. All those seconds matter.

So I knew the concept. But yeah, I’ve had quite a few suggestions, not as many now, not as many now, but even when we went to the Middle East, we kept the product exactly the same. We kept the same thing. And there was a lot of talk there about there’s another sauce they had there. It’s like a mayo base and garlic and all this stuff. It’s the most popular sauce. I’m like, they will come to love Cane sauce and we got to stick to our guns. And sure enough, they love Cane sauce as much as that other sauce they got.

BERMAN: Because it’s awesome.

GRAVES: Because it’s good.

Copy LinkHow founder visibility can strengthen scale

BERMAN: Yeah. You are now Shark Tank famous, not have pitched your business there, but having the role of a shark. How do you think for you as a CEO about your personal brand and how that helps build the business globally?

GRAVES: So I grew up seeing Dave Thomas on the commercials for Wendy’s. And for me, it was like, “Wow, there’s really a person. It’s not a corporation. And that guy cares about the quality of the food, and that guy’s making those decisions.” So from a young kid seeing that…

So right now it’s even more important because there’s a lack of founders in the restaurant space and that’s because they sell to private equity. And so, it is something different. So I believe that when people see, “Hey, this guy and his family cares about quality, they care about food safety, they care about those things,” it just gives me another advantage over other competitors that just don’t have that.

BERMAN: Yeah. It strikes me you seem to really enjoy doing it also.

GRAVES: I do. I do. It’s just something when you’re happy about it and do it, and I can actually do it okay, a little bit of acting, but I get to have fun with people like Peter Billingsley, Ralphie. And to get to actually do a commercial with him, and he wrote them and all that stuff, but I could actually be a little bit of that part of that deal was really fun. I’m acting with Peter Billingsley, one of my heroes.

And same with everybody else and that. Doing stuff with Snoop Dogg and actually having him do that. It’s like fun. It’s like when I did Arch Manning and Nussmeier, but like Cooper Manning wrote the scripts and he’s like, “Todd, you’re going to do this.”

And Archie’s one of my heroes. It’s a blast. And for me is, I do take off time. So it’s not like I don’t have fun and do things like that. But for me it’s like work productivity. So I can actually goof off doing that and have fun. And I know it’s productive. So I can spend half the day with Kirk Herbstreit shooting commercials with our dogs. Because I’m like, I don’t feel guilty about like, I should be answering those questions, I should be in a meeting right now.

Copy LinkBringing in a co-CEO

BERMAN: So your original co-founder left, but eventually brought in a co-CEO to the business. Can you share what happened there?

GRAVES: When I was thinking about my skillsets and good operator, good marketer, okay IT, okay finance, I say okay, just barely okay. A lot of the components, supply chain that you hit on that’s so important, just okay at those things. And so, I’m talking to the business people and I’m like, “I want to bring in a co-CEO.”

And they’re like, “Don’t do it. Co-CEOs, who do they answer to, who’s in charge?” And then that sort of thing is… And they’re like, “Why do you want to do that?”

And I’m like, “I want somebody that has like the title of co-CEO that they know that I trust them to handle all these things and to supplement the things that I’m not good at, but to work together as a team.”

And so my co-CEO, AJ, has been with me for 10 years, he is better at me than all those components that went, including operations. But I know the fundamentals that I had to build all those things up where I can add value. Operations, I can still add good value. I don’t have to worry about finance and banking and supply chain. I get the right… When I test products and make sure we’re staying up there, but I can spend very little time on that, where I can spend it on operations, crew resources, right. Culture, that’s going well, and the marketing end of it.

And AJ has the private. I’m co-CEO with Todd, right? I’m not, some people call it president, other people, EVPs and all these different things. It’s like when it comes down to it, Todd and I, we have to be able to make the decisions for the company, and he’s intrinsically motivated because he’s there. So the model for me works, because we’re symbiotic. It’s the respect out of it.

My goal is to eventually, when AJ is at the right time to become CEO, full CEO, to where when I’m chairman… And I’m chairman now, but I’m so much in the weeds, sometimes I won’t look at globally what the business is doing to add value everywhere. Sometimes it gets whack-a-mole for me, and I think I’ll be even better at chairman, not in the details less, but be more global on what’s constantly going on, bringing that to the team, looking at it. I’ll have more time to get some other advice from other people more than I do now and things like that. But the co-CEO, it’s been a great model for me.

Copy LinkUsing AI carefully at Raising Cane’s

BERMAN: As we sit here in the first quarter of 2026, there is not a company in the world that isn’t thinking about artificial intelligence. How are you approaching the integration of new technologies into the business?

GRAVES: Yeah. So for us, one is just starting on how do we get information quicker and get it compiled quicker and doing it and also keeping the people thinking and saying, “Hey, look, I could have ChatGPTed that myself.” You know what I mean?

Let’s use that stuff and let’s use it to make our decisions, but we’re doing that to get better decisions and done. We use it right now too as it’s prediction for the future. So right now we use all the technology you can in the drive-through, handhelds, great systems. If all that stuff to go faster is what’s coming up with robotics? How quickly is it going to come up? And so I want to keep the human touch as we go, but I do believe someday you will have all robot restaurants serving food, doing it. And I’m going to use that as a competitive advantage.

So one, a lot of my competitors, and I would never mention any, but not have the friendliest crew, not the best experience when you go there, because they’re not being treated right, by the way. It’s really not their fault. They’re not being treated right. But in the future, when you have robots doing that, robots can be friendly every time. So you could look at this from Cane’s going, “Oh man, we’re going to lose that friendliness component with our crew, that competitive advantage.”
But no, I think people are going to go, “Hey, look, there’s a real person back in that kitchen cooking. There’s a real person at the counter doing it.” So I’m not planning to replace crew members with robots.

BERMAN: It’ll be a while, if ever.

GRAVES: Exactly.

Copy LinkTodd Grave’s advice to young people

BERMAN: We’re in a moment that is incredibly exciting and also daunting for young people as they are coming out of college or otherwise entering the workforce. If there’s a 21-year-old, soon-to-be Georgia graduate who bumps into you and says, “What’s one piece of advice? What should I be thinking about? What should I take away from a conversation with you?” What are you telling them?

GRAVES: You have to be good at what you’re doing. I was good at the restaurant business. I couldn’t have been professional quarterback and things like that. So that was not my dream to do that, but I knew I was good at the restaurant. But whatever you want to go into, be good at it and make sure you’re passionate about it. Then it’s going to be so hard you can’t even believe it’s going to go. So be committed to do it. Then go in, and when you start business or whatever, your field you go into, treat people well. If you treat people well, then things will always do well.

And I think this generation has even more opportunity than we’ve had in recent years because if you’re a go-getter… I think some points, I love the younger generation, but sometimes in some areas people are getting more soft and think of different things. The old work ethic, we had to work. You do these things is… For people that want to go out there and get after it, I think they’re going to just smoke it. And people will follow good leaders. Being aggressive for what you want to do, working hard, doing those great values while you’re taking care of people and doing those things, I think that’s a great opportunity for young ones out there right now.

I tell my kids right now too, my kids, one’s my daughter, graduated two years ago from LSU. She works in the business. My son’s graduating from SMU this year. He did business to understand… They’re coming to the business. I’m like, “You can come in immediately and start adding value and come in and go for it.”

BERMAN: Perfect place to wrap. Thanks for being with us.

GRAVES: I appreciate it. Enjoyed the conversation.

BERMAN: Thank you.