Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers founder Todd Graves couldn’t get a bank loan to open his first restaurant, and in college, his business plan got the lowest grade in the class.

The bank loan officers and the business professor both had the same thing to say: A restaurant that sells nothing but chicken fingers just won’t work.

Graves and his 9-year-old yellow lab, Cane II, made an appearance at a Rotary Club meeting at Northwood Country Club Wednesday, where Graves told the story of Raising Cane’s. Raising Cane’s opened a free standing location on North Hills Street in Meridian late last year, and held its ribbon cutting Wednesday.

As a college student in Louisiana, Graves told the club members, he decided he wanted to open a chicken finger restaurant on campus, where he would serve his peer group and have a better idea of what they wanted from a restaurant.

After his business plan was rejected by his professor, Graves and his friend and business partner Craig Silvey, decided they would show the professor how wrong he was by getting a bank loan. After getting cheap suits and picking up some briefcases at Office Depot, they were rejected by every loan officer they petitioned.

So Graves decided to raise the money himself. In 1995, he went to California and worked in an oil refinery, where he made good money plus lots of overtime. After working there for a while, a guy named “Wild Bill” told him he could make better money working in the fishing industry in Alaska.

So Graves and Silvey headed to Alaska, where they hitchhiked from Anchorage to a tiny fishing town called Naknek. They stayed at a campground there until they got work netting Sockeye Salmon.

Salmon fishing, he found out, was a dangerous job — boat captains would often play “chicken” and sometimes ram each other in battles for fishing territory. Even more dangerous were the hours. During peak season, Graves said, fishermen worked 20 hours a day, making them extremely tired.

“It was a crazy experience,” he said. “I actually was delirious. But I was out there to start my chicken finger business.”

Eventually, Graves saved enough money, with the help of a small SBA loan, to open his first restaurant. He went back to Louisiana and found a cheap location on campus, where he saved money by renovating the old building himself, buying used equipment, and using the original decor.

The current Raising Cane’s logo, Graves said, was inspired by an old mural for a bakery that was uncovered on one of the walls of the original restaurant. The booth seating in the original Raising Cane’s looked liked it belonged in a really old Mexican restaurant.

“People said, what is your style, what is your look. I said cheap,” he said to the crowd at Northwood.

In its first month, the restaurant made 30 bucks. “It was a big deal to me,” he said, “because I could make all my payables and still come out positive.”

18 months later, Cane’s opened its second location. Today, the chain has 80 locations in 13 states, about one third of which are franchises.

Graves attributes his success to his motives. “We are involved in the business for the right reasons,” he said, adding that 27 percent of all of the money ever made by Raising Cane’s has been given out to the community.