#383 Todd Graves and his $10 Billion Chicken Finger Dream

Founders

David Senra

History, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Todd Graves is one of my favorite living entrepreneurs. He's a great example of Charlie Munger's maxim: Find a simple idea and take it seriously. Todd wanted to create a quick service restaurant that only focused on quality chicken finger meals and nothing else. Everyone told him that couldn't possibly work. The college paper that described the idea that would turn into Raising Canes got the lowest grade in the class. Banks wouldn't loan him any money —but nothing could stop Todd from living out his "chicken finger dream." He worked 95 hour weeks as a boilermaker, risked his life on a commercial fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, and scrounged up startup money from his bookie and a guy named Wild Bill. Todd made every mistake in the book, over leveraged himself, almost lost everything and yet he refused to give up or sell out. Today he has over 800 locations, 50,000 employees, and owns 90% of a business that's worth at least $10 billion. Todd's maxim is "Do one thing and do it better than anyone else." Sources: Trading Secrets: Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves reveals his path to building the wildly popular restaurant Theo Von: Raising Cane’s Founder Todd Graves ---- Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business.
0:04.2	He says the most successful people he knows stay in the details of their business.
0:08.6	In fact, he mentioned learning from his friend who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping
0:12.3	company and how his friend would even pay attention to how much his business was spending
0:16.9	on bottled water.
0:18.3	And when I read that section, I thought it would be a lot easier to do
0:21.6	this if that shipping company was running on ramp. Something a lot of history's greatest founders
0:27.1	have in common is that the fact that they know their business from A to Z and their costs down to
0:31.8	the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your
0:37.3	entire team, automated expense reporting and you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team,
0:38.3	automated expense reporting, and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable.
0:43.7	You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find
0:48.9	out about excessive spending after the fact, like the shipping company with the rampant spending
0:52.9	on water. With Ramp,
0:54.7	you can stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson, who is the founder of MarketBeat, recently
0:59.3	switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best, the amount of money that
1:04.3	you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever
1:09.5	you want will far exceed the best credit card
1:12.8	rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There's a line in Andrew
1:18.6	Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession. All of history's greatest founders
1:24.5	were the exact same way. Ramp helps you make it an obsession.
1:28.2	If Carnegie was alive today, I believe he'd be running his business on Ramp.
	...

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