Latest / From Chad / Trusting #1168

Transcript

Trusting #1168 · From Chad

• 0:00
  He had 28 stores and 21 closed in one week.
• 0:05
  There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
• 0:08
  Chad. More 1168 to upgrade your mental
• 0:11
  game today by telling yourself a better story.
• 0:14
  Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
• 0:16
  yourself. This message is dedicated to
• 0:18
  Noah Harris. Here's the upgrade.
• 0:21
  You think the truth will scare your team away, but upgraded
• 0:24
  thinking knows the truth is what makes them stay.
• 0:27
  Here's the story. Todd Graves, founder of Raising
• 0:31
  Cane's, built the whole company on four items.
• 0:34
  Chicken fingers, fries, coleslaw and Texas toast.
• 0:37
  That's still the menu today. Bankers told him he was crazy
• 0:40
  for it. He didn't have the money to
• 0:42
  prove them wrong the easy way. So he financed growth the hard
• 0:45
  way and Angel investor put in $250,000.
• 0:49
  He personally signed A1 page contract promising a 15% return.
• 0:53
  And then he took that note to a community bank, which counted it
• 0:56
  as equity and let him borrow a million more against it.
• 0:59
  He did that deal 28 times. He was floating payroll every
• 1:03
  two weeks, food every 30 days, rent every 30 days, living on
• 1:07
  the gap between what came in and what he owed.
• 1:10
  Then Hurricane Katrina hit. 21 of his 28 restaurants went dark.
• 1:15
  Revenue stopped the bills. Didn't most leaders in that spot
• 1:20
  manage the story? They say something confident,
• 1:23
  keep the crew calm, keep the panic contained.
• 1:27
  Todd did the opposite. He called his crew together and
• 1:30
  told them the whole thing. No filter, no spin.
• 1:33
  He said. Our community needs food and you
• 1:35
  need to come back to work. That part first, then the part
• 1:39
  that costs a leader something to say out loud.
• 1:42
  If we don't reopen, we're done. The business is gone.
• 1:46
  He didn't pick one reason and hide the other.
• 1:48
  He handed them the mission and the math and the same breath and
• 1:51
  trusted them with both. They reopened before anyone
• 1:55
  else. For 90 days, Raising Canes was
• 1:57
  the only restaurant open in some of those neighborhoods.
• 2:00
  He says it now. We crushed it.
• 2:03
  But he doesn't recommend stretching things so thin.
• 2:06
  Graves sharing the reality of the struggle has become a big
• 2:10
  part of the Raising Canes corporate story.
• 2:13
  And that's exactly why his crew came back in the 1st place.
• 2:16
  Not because he sold them a story, because he never had to.
• 2:20
  The better story to tell yourself is those around me can
• 2:24
  handle the weight of reality better than I assume.
• 2:27
  Raising Cane's, by the way, opened their one thousandth
• 2:30
  store this year. Tell me a story of a team that
• 2:33
  rose to reality instead of the spend from chadsmith@gmail.com.
• 2:37
  Send someone a text and ask them what's a time someone handled
• 2:41
  the hard truth better than you expected?
• 2:44
  You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
• 2:46
  the World, by going to from chad.gumroad.com.
• 2:49
  The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
• 2:52
  always available at www.fromchad.com.