ENTREPRENEUR VOICES SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH TODD GRAVES
Founder, CEO, Fry Cook & Cashier of Raising Cane’s®
Scale Your Culture Without Losing Your Soul
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there are a few cultural institutions that are so ingrained that they become a part of everyday life and the identity of the city. LSU football. Community Coffee. The legacy of Huey P. Long. Perhaps the most recent addition is Raising Cane’s.
What, you might ask, is a quick-service chicken finger restaurant doing in a book on company culture for entrepreneurs? The first part of the answer is that “founder, CEO, fry cook, and cashier” Todd Graves is the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. He never took a business class in college, yet he had a dream about opening a chicken finger restaurant. He and his original partner wrote a business plan as a college assignment. The professor gave it the worst grade in the class and told them it would never work. He took his business plan to the banks, and was told it would never work. He decided to bootstrap his dream by working in refineries and then literally risking his life as a commercial fisherman in Alaska à la Deadliest Catch. He came home, opened up Raising Cane’s (after his dog, whose name is a sweet, sugarcane twist on the phrase “raising Cain”), and is now a multimillionaire.
But the second and more important answer to the question of what do chicken fingers have to do with company culture is actually another question: despite its phenomenal growth, despite having hundreds of locations across dozens of states and a number overseas, despite having thousands of employees, despite having major operations centers in both Baton Rouge and Dallas, despite being the first employer most of its millennial workforce has ever had . . . how has Raising Cane’s been able to keep its unique, upbeat culture consistent throughout the world and still be independently ranked in 2017:
• in the top 50 places to work in the U.S. (Glassdoor), appearing on the same list as Facebook, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Apple, and SpaceX—an amazing accolade for any company and that much more for a drive-through restaurant staffed
• as number one in “drive thru speed of service and accuracy” (QSR magazine)—a much-appreciated near miracle if you’ve ever gone through a drive-through with a picky child
• as number one in “customer intent to return” (Techonomoic)—the holy grail of quick-service restaurants
• as number one in “supports the local community” (Techonomic)—something nearly every company pays lip service to but rarely makes a true priority
• having the highest average gross revenues per restaurant in the industry, second only to Chik-fil-A (Restaurant News)
• . . . and the fastest growing chain in the U.S. (Restaurant News)?
What is this magic formula of Raising Cane’s that creates a scalable culture where people love to work, where customers love to return, and that competitors love to hate?
Entrepreneur: Well, Todd, what’s the secret?
Graves: Look, it’s not rocket science. I fry chicken for a living. That’s probably the easiest part of our business.
The hardest part is just staying focused. Everything we do, every decision we make, and everybody’s job ties back to the restaurants. Last week we made a three-million-dollar decision to purchase better headsets. Our crews told us they had trouble hearing with the old ones; we listened.
We don’t have corporate offices—we have “restaurant support offices.” Throughout the company, everybody wears the same Raising Cane’s uniforms. Everyone’s title is their position plus “fry cook and cashier.” No matter who you are, every new hire goes through the same restaurant training. Our restaurants and the people in them are at the center of everything we do.
Entrepreneur: Wait. Everyone goes through restaurant training? As in, everyone everyone?
Graves: Every person who works for Raising Cane’s has been a fry cook and a cashier, from our vice president of real estate to my co-CEO. And once a year, we do a total cultural immersion where we take the newly hired leaders of the company and all work a late night together at the original Cane’s, and then do another two to three days working in locations around Baton Rouge and revisiting Raising Cane’s roots.
When we interview people and tell them that, some of them say, “Great!” Some people say, “Really?”
If you don’t like the idea of being hired for marketing and then starting out frying chicken, we understand, but that probably means you won’t like it here. And if you don’t like it here, that probably means you won’t be successful here. That probably means Raising Cane’s isn’t the best place for you.
We’ve even had to let people go when we saw that they weren’t a good cultural fit. If you have a transactional, short-term perspective, that’s fine. The corporate recruiter we work with told me that that’s what many of her clients are looking for: someone for a three- to five-year position. But that’s not what we’re looking for here.
Entrepreneur: So keeping the focus on the restaurants is one piece of the puzzle. Hiring the right corporate employees is another.
Graves: Not just at our restaurant support offices: we want to hire the right people at every level. Each restaurant manager is like the CEO of their restaurant. When we don’t have the right leader in place, we can see a drop in revenue as large as 30 percent. The restaurant manager is the most critical hire we make.
But we also want to hire the right crew members at each location. We have an enormous pool of potential hires. As part of the application process, we have people take a personality assessment, which we compare to the tests from some of our best crew members. It helps us immediately spot some of the obvious stuff that wouldn’t make for the right fit in the applicant pool.
We want to work hard and have fun. We want our crew members to enjoy serving people. You know those people at a party who are always making sure everyone has something to drink and that everyone’s having a good time? Those are the kind of people we want working with us.
We’ve even had to let some of our franchise partners go. They were great people, but they weren’t able to have the crew members in their restaurants emulate their behavior.
Entrepreneur: Hold on: you fired a franchisee? Someone who paid to franchise a Raising Cane’s?
Graves: Yeah. I hated to do it. That’s why we’re more careful now. It’s hard to find franchise partners who completely buy in to the “fry cook and cashier” mentality. That’s why about 75 percent of our restaurants are company-owned and only 25 percent are franchised, whereas, in our industry it’s usually the other way around.
Take our franchise partner in Kuwait, Mohammed Alshaya. He genuinely cares about his people. When I went to talk to him about his interest in franchising Cane’s, I flew into Kuwait City a few days early to visit some of the other franchises in the Alshaya group. The people were friendly and outgoing, the stores were nice and clean, and the food and service were excellent. That’s what we’re looking for in a franchise partner.
Entrepreneur: So, your focus on culture goes beyond just the people who work for you. You want the people who work with you to be a culture fit as well.
Graves: You know, they don’t necessarily have to have the same culture we do, but they do need to be value-aligned. We want to work with people who want to deliver great products and services and focus on customer service.
On the East Coast, we buy our chicken from Purdue Farms. On the West Coast, it’s Ron Foster. I know our vendors and their companies. I know the way our cup manufacturer and our box supplier do business. When you’re manufacturing at scale, something’s going to get screwed up, no matter how great your processes are. When it does happen, how do they respond? Do they take care of us and hotshot the corrected cups or relabeled boxes or extra chicken?
We have an operators’ meeting in February where I give a state of the company address and we generally have a great time together. We’ll even invite our top suppliers. Over those two or three days, I’ll take 500 people on tours of Cane’s 1—”the mothership,” we call it—and let them get a taste of how we do business. We want to be more than just a customer to them, and we want them to be more than just a supplier to us. We are true partners.
Entrepreneur: Todd, what fascinates me about Raising Cane’s is that you kept this great vibe and workplace culture and somehow scaled to a national and now international scale. When and where did you make the leap from a local fast-food restaurant with locations in Baton Rouge to a national company?
Graves: We had grown to eight restaurants in Baton Rouge. I just ran around training everybody and working in all the locations. For a hands-on entrepreneur, it’s a really hard leap to go to a professionally-managed company and keep that entrepreneurial spirit.
We opened our ninth restaurant in Lafayette. It was just 45 minutes down the road, so it was close enough that I could jump in the car and be there, but far enough way that I couldn’t be there constantly. It forced us to create a Raising Cane’s prototype—not just on interior design but for all our systems, like human resources and operations. We had some really great vendor partners who showed us how to create a corporate setup. One of the things they asked me was, “What’s your culture?”
Well, I’d never taken a business class in college. I had no idea what they meant.
They said, “How do you treat each other? What does it feel like to work at Raising Cane’s?”
I knew how I wanted it to feel, but we decided to ask our crew members: What’s it like to work here?
Many of them described it as “cool.” Okay, but cool how?
“We treat each other right.” “You’re positive—you find the good things.” “We have a good time.” “We get to listen to music in the kitchen.”
That’s what made Raising Cane’s what it really is: that cool vibe. When we scaled, we didn’t want to lose that. We wanted our crew members—and these were all Millennial college students at the time—to keep that feeling.
We’ve never had a script. We want our crew members to welcome the customer, deliver the perfect box, and thank them for their business, but however they want to do that is up to them.
If we told our cashiers, “Here’s what you’re going to say when someone walks in the door,” we’d lose our coolness in two seconds. We let our crew members own their job and have as much autonomy as they can. As long as it aligns with our values and doesn’t violate any of our non-negotiables, we’re cool with it.
We want to be authentic. When we advertise on a billboard, we feature a local manager on it. When we film a commercial, we use actual crew members. When we record a radio commercial, that’s my dog barking.
Entrepreneur: It sounds like there’s not any one magic bullet. It’s all these things working together that lets you scale your culture—quite profitably, I might add.
Graves: Like I said, this isn’t rocket science. Our culture evolved from a deep appreciation for our crew members, our customers, and our communities. We love our people, and we love our chicken.
Entrepreneur: Any chance I can get the recipe for Cane’s secret sauce from you?
Graves: Sure! First, you . . .
*end recording*