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

**David Senra** (0:00)
Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business. He says the most successful people he knows stay in the details of their business. In fact, he mentioned learning from his friend who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company, and how his friend would even pay attention to how much his business was spending on bottled water. And when I read that section, I thought it would be a lot easier to do this if that shipping company was running on ramp. Something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common is that the fact that they know their business from A to Z, and their costs down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact, like the shipping company with the ramp of spending on water. With ramp, you can stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson, who is the founder of MarketBeat, recently switched to ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money that you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says, cost control became nearly an obsession. All of history's greatest founders were the exact same way. Ramp helps you make it an obsession. If Carnegie was alive today, I believe he'd be running his business on ramp. Take the time and set up a demo of the product, and you will see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more tool that I need to tell you about is the AI assistant that I built for Founders Notes. So Founders Notes has this giant database that has all of the notes for every book that I read for the podcast, all the highlights for every book that I read for the podcast, and all the transcripts for every episode that I make for the podcast. I built an AI assistant on top of it called Sage. So what Sage does is it reads all of my notes and highlights for every book that I read for the podcast, and it reads all the transcripts for every episode. So when I ask Sage a question, it's able to pull up the collective knowledge of History's Greatest Founders immediately. It's like having access to the super brain that has read all of these books on History's Greatest Founders, and you can ask that super brain for advice on how to solve problems in your business. If you are running a successful business, I highly recommend going to foundersnotes.com and getting access today. I highly recommend using Sage to supplement the decisions that you're making in your work, and you can do that by going to foundersnotes.com. The link will also be down below. Since I study dead entrepreneurs for a living, I get the question, out of the living entrepreneurs, who do you most admire? And a lot of the people on the list would be familiar to you. But I found when I mentioned that one of the living entrepreneurs that I most admire is this guy named Todd Graves. People, first of all, haven't heard of him, and they're even more surprised when I said, well, Todd Graves founded this quick service restaurant that serves only chicken fingers over 30 years ago. He owns over 90% of it. And the business, his business is worth at least $10 billion. And I think Todd is a great example of one of my favorite ideas I heard from Charlie Munger of find a simple idea and take it seriously. And so, I didn't know who Todd Graves was because there's no books written about him. So I saw a clip a few years ago, and I watched every interview I could find with him. And so for this episode, what I did is there's two main interviews that he gave, I transcribed them, and then I went through the transcripts just like I do for the books. But there is, my fascination with this person is sometimes you can find, you hear somebody say, express an idea or perspective or philosophy, and it could be like in a sentence or two. And you're immediately like, yes, I feel that way too. This happened with Pat Riley, the legendary coach and NBA executive. And I was listening to an interview with him many years ago, and he was asked, why is winning insatiable? Pat is in his 70s, and he's still pushing it every day, he's still working very hard, he's still determined to win. And he said, I hated to lose. I always thought that there would be severe consequences if I lost. It was personal to me, I'm going to pause there, remember that line, it was personal to me. Todd's going to repeat that over and over and over again. I like how serious he takes his business, I feel the same way, just like I feel exactly, identify exactly with the way Todd is building, raising canes with the way that Pat Riley's still approaching his career, five decades into it. And then the follow up question in this interview with Pat Riley was, but how could you feel that way? And as soon as I heard this, this is how I know I'm eventually going to do an episode on Pat, too, because it's like, I felt I feel this way, too. He goes, I just did. I felt that way since the day I came out of my mother's womb. I felt that I wasn't going to let anybody take anything from me that I worked hard to get. You are going to see a lot of similarities between that short excerpt from an interview with Pat Riley for the what we're going to go through with Todd Graves. I'm going to start. I'm going to go kind of in order Todd's career. But I do want to start with the one clip that I saw that made that piqued my interest. As soon as I heard that, I sat up. I was like, wait, wait, wait. I've seen this before. Once Todd has a lot in common, as we'll see, with a lot of history's greatest founders. But also, you see this idea over and over again, where you can have a lot of success. Charlie Munger has this great line, something to the effect of oftentimes in the winning, we find the winning system in business goes ridiculously far minimizing and or maximizing one or a few variables. And he used Costco as an example. And so the clip that I saw was Todd saying, you know, he has this very simple menu, the same menu that he's had since day one. He had all these people tell him before he started the business and the earliest of the business to this day, what you're doing is not going to work. Your menu is too simple. You need to follow the trend. You need to do what your competitors are doing. And he's just so stubbornly believes in doing one thing and doing it the best you can. So he says, I've always believed in doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else. If you do what you do well and consistently do it great, your customers will come back. And so if I added different things, meaning to the menu, if I over complicated things, if I made things, he believes in this beautiful simplicity that I identify with. So if I add different things, I wouldn't be as quick in the drive-thru. If I added all these things, my quality would go down, my speed would go down, and it wouldn't be our concept. Adding different things and losing focus would lose while we're special. And so it's not just, hey, if I narrow the focus, if I limit the amount of details that my business has and then perfect every single detail, I will create the greatest product in my category, which he has obviously done.