As an entrepreneur, Todd Graves has the secret sauce. It’s his Cane’s sauce: the orange, peppery concoction that millions of customers dip their chicken tenders, crinkle-cut french fries, and Texas Toast into each day.
The founder of chicken tender chain Raising Cane’s has become akin to fast food royalty. This year, his restaurant empire, which has nearly 1,000 locations in 43 states, surpassed KFC in annual U.S. sales to become the third-largest fast-food chicken eatery in the country, behind just Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. Annual revenue from all of those chicken tender plates—the only item on the menu—is expected to surpass $5.1 billion by the end of 2025.
That entrepreneurial feat landed Graves on Inc.’s annual Best in Business list this year, and the 53-year-old got there with a decidedly hands-on approach. Raising Cane’s, which started in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1996 and is now based in Plano, Texas, has eschewed the franchise model.
Nearly 30 years later, Graves still maintains a 92 percent stake—an ownership slice large enough for Forbes to crown him the country’s richest entrepreneur, with a net worth of $22 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires List calculation puts his net worth at $10.6 billion. Not too shabby, since that still makes Graves the 305th richest person in the world, right below Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank and right above Vista Equity Partners founder Robert Smith.
Maintaining that level of involvement and attention to detail as a founder is a lesson that Graves learned from his most important mentor: Panda Express co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Cherng. That advice actually contradicted what a lot of other people told Graves when he launched Raising Cane’s.
“I had so many people, when I was kind of going through everything, tell me you can’t be in all the details,” recalls Graves, who met Cherng over 20 years ago when he was in his late 20s. Instead, Cherng preached “being in the details of the business.”
In practice, that means being an engaged leader, valuing your employees, and even knowing the details of every piece of real estate before opening a new restaurant location, says Graves.
“His story inspired me so much,” Graves says of Cherng, who was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. in 1966 at the age of 18 to study mathematics as a college student. “He’s talking to every crew member and talking about how you can make your crew members’ lives better and how you can support the community better. Man, I’m inspired to that today.”
Ali Donaldson
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