Todd Graves

Everybody told Todd Graves his idea was stupid. A restaurant that only sells chicken fingers? His own college professor gave him the lowest grade in the class for the business plan. But Todd didn’t care, and now Raising Cane’s has over 800 locations and is one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the country.

To fund the first restaurant he worked as a boilermaker in an oil refinery and as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. Just brutal, backbreaking work to save up enough money to open a single location near the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. That was 1996. The menu was simple on purpose: chicken fingers, crinkle cut fries, coleslaw, Texas toast, and that Cane’s sauce. That’s it. The whole bet was that if you do one thing and you do it really well, people will keep coming back.

They did. Raising Cane’s built a cult following. Todd has never franchised the business either, which is unusual for a chain that size. Every location is company owned. He stays involved in the details in a way that most CEOs of 800-plus location chains just don’t.

On Shark Tank, Todd brings a food industry perspective that’s hard to find on the panel. He knows what it takes to scale a restaurant concept without losing what makes it special. And his whole origin story is basically a Shark Tank pitch that got rejected, except he went and did it anyway.

He’s also big on giving back, running community programs through Raising Cane’s around education, animal welfare, and disaster relief in Louisiana.