Artist-Branded Profit-Share (Post Malone Model)

A franchise alternative that keeps control

Todd Graves has described a partnership structure he used at Raising Cane's to satisfy celebrity fans who wanted to own a restaurant without the company franchising. The artist designs and decorates an existing location so it visibly reads as theirs, the two sides split the profits, and there is no legal franchise paperwork. In this account the brand captures the celebrity's pull while the company keeps full operational control. Rich Kleiman, interviewing Graves, framed it as "a different franchising model, you don't lose control, but you allow an artist to have a canvas."¹

The structure is Graves's answer to a specific tension. He has said he refuses to franchise in the United States because franchisees, in his view, run the operation at a lower intensity and lose enthusiasm over time, a position developed in Don't Sell Your Baby (Founder Control). At the same time, popular fans genuinely wanted a stake. Franchising would surrender the operating control he prizes, and a passive endorsement deal would, in his telling, leave value unused. The profit-share arrangement is how he says yes to a partner without either.

How Graves describes the mechanics

By his account the arrangement separates two things cleanly. The artist receives unconstrained creative control over the look and feel of the location. Graves describes Post Malone's Salt Lake City store as having a pink interior, pneumatic ping-pong balls, and bespoke merchandise, and recounts telling the artist there was effectively no budget cap. The company retains everything operational: crew treatment, service standards, food quality, and supply chain.

Graves is explicit that the structure is deliberately informal on the legal side. "We'll just split the profits on it, that's just like owning anyway, there's no legal stuff behind it." In his framing it behaves like ownership for the partner without a franchise contract, a royalty, or any loss of standards control.

He also cites a measurable result. Because the partner reskins an existing restaurant rather than opening a new one, he treats the effect as clean to isolate, and states that both Post Malone locations, in Salt Lake City and Dallas, run roughly 30 percent higher in sales than before the partnership.

Why Graves says it works

Graves ties the model's success to genuine fandom. In his telling it converts only because the celebrity was a real customer first, so the affiliation reads as credible to that celebrity's audience: "people are loyal to the people they love." This connects to Authentic Affiliation Marketing, which he treats as the precondition rather than a separate tactic. He also frames the arrangement as repeatable, saying that after the first case "some of the biggest artists in the business were calling," and that he intends to place further artist restaurants in different markets.

Attribution and open questions

This account comes from Graves in a single interview and reflects his own framing of a partnership he considers successful. He does not disclose the profit-split terms, so whether the arrangement is more lucrative for the company than operating a given location on its own is left unstated. He also notes a tension he has not resolved: he wants to keep the model "pure," yet a program actively courted by artist managers strains the genuine-fan filter he credits for making it work in the first place. A location tied to one artist also inherits that artist's trajectory, leaving open whether the sales lift persists if the celebrity's cultural relevance fades.