Advice Line with Todd Graves of Raising Cane's

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And you basically saved enough money to open the first restaurant. And then it took a while. But of course, today, it's just an unbelievable story. I think I read that This past summer of 2025, Cane's surpassed Kentucky Fried Chicken as the third largest chicken quick service restaurant in the U.S., Yeah. You know, I grew up with KFC. Right. Chicken. Buckets of chicken.

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And the Colonel and the red and white striped buckets. And you're just all of a sudden, you're like, wow. You know, it just blows you away. You're bigger than the Colonel. It's also really interesting, too, our unit count. You know, we only have 1,000 restaurants. And looking at the average unit volumes, it's kind of a different way to grow, right?

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We're just not having mass volumes, but having the highest of the highest average unit volumes per restaurant, that really adds up. So, yeah. Anyway, sometimes that stuff hits you, and I told the team, let's enjoy it. Let's enjoy it for a minute. I bet. I mean, one of the things I think that you guys have done well and smartly is you've got kind of a hybrid model.

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You're not a – I think mainly corporate-owned locations, but you do have some franchises, and I think overseas – they're mainly franchises. That's harder because you've got this quality standard, right? It's easier in a corporate owned store, but when you've got a franchisee, it's a different ball game.

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So what are the ways you're able to, or you guys focus on maintaining those standards when it's not you guys who are directly controlling it? Yeah. Number one is picking a good partner, obviously, right? If you're going to have a You're going to have a franchisee.

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And another kid said he knew how to get ahold of coffee beans. And we just started aging it in our apartments and roasting it out in the parking lot. So how did a guy like you who grew up on Folgers Crystals or whatever in kind of small town Texas, did you get into, were you into coffee? Oh, no. We didn't know nothing about it. We drank it every day. That's for sure. Yeah.

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But yeah, we'd made our first coffee roasters, got some barbecue pits from tractor supplies and welded up a drum and definitely just learned by, by failure. That's for sure. How did you know that whiskey barrels was going to make coffee taste delicious? We didn't. Um, we heard from a guy that if they keep the coffee in the bar lap too long, it'll start to taste like bar lap.

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So that was the only research we had really done. And, uh, Yeah, we had $320 as a group from the class, and we bought green beans off of Amazon and aged it. And luckily, people around school bought it. How long ago was that? That would have been 2018. Senior year. Wow. Okay. So tell me where the business is now. Do you guys have a store? Do you guys have a shop?

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Are you in Toler, Texas, you said? Yes, sir. So really right now we're mostly online e-commerce, direct-to-consumer. We do a lot of events and trade shows as well as roast for other coffee companies or coffee shops now. Last year, it's still me and three buddies. So there's four of us on the team full time. Last year, we did about 924,000, which is crazy. Wow, that's amazing.

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So what percentage of your business is roasting and what percentage of your business is selling beans? So we're about 60% direct to consumer from the website, whether it be subscription or just one-time purchases. The remaining 40%, that's either what they consider total roasting for other people or coffee shops or events. That's a great business. You've got a nice diversified business.

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more favorable that's why i call them angels right and so i got angel investors uh to help me as i grew the business because i did not want to give up equity i didn't want to give up control i didn't even want having other equity shareholders just to have that in my head am i doing a good job for them because it took me off my focus of what i knew was the right thing to do for our business and so generally these higher interest rate things so what i had was angel investors that i would do a 15 interest rate subordinated debt

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OK, it was a one pager and I personally endorsed these. I mean, if I personally signed on to it, they knew anything I had in the world, which is all just tied up the business anyway, back then that I was going to be 100 percent into this. And but there was no equity being done, but it was a 15 percent interest rate. But my cash flow could pay for that.

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So that's why I was asking you about if you run your numbers in that million four and you feel real solid for that. I was able to do a higher interest rate, but they were a part of it. I made them feel a part of the business. They got Cane's gear all the time. They came to restaurant openings and, you know, their family was thrilled.

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And we went and we put together photo albums of look, look, look how great this Homa, Louisiana, new restaurant is and how much the community loves it. And then they made a 15 percent return, which actually was really good. But as soon as I could pay that thing off, I did. And that wasn't convertible debt. It was just a straight up loan. Straight up loan.

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And look, banking back then was a lot more lenient. I could actually take that subordinated debt and actually use that as equity to get loans, traditional loans. But, you know, for a million four, if you had five to ten angel investors, you know, that really want to be a part of this and everybody could break off, you put in one hundred thousand dollars.