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

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David Senra

Steve Jobs, Founders, James Dyson, Company Builders, Technology, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Business Professional Biography, How I Built This, The History Of Entrepreneurship, Jim Clark, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs, History, Founder, Business Autobiography, Jeff Bezos, Entrepreneur, Biography, Biographies Of Entrepreneurs, Biographies, Business, Business Biography

4.8 • 1.5K 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."

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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