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Baton Rouge tends to fret over its perceived inability to attract and retain young professionals, which might help explain the outcry when Raising Cane’s decided to move its operations to Dallas. But the chain’s young CEO and founder says he still believes the city is a “fantastic place to do business.”

“We have the young, cool, hip people here,” says Todd Graves, 36.

What Louisiana’s capital city didn’t have until recently, he says, are executives with a proven track record for taking a $125 million restaurant operation like Cane’s and turning it into the $500 million chain it would like to become. People who fit that description don’t live here; they live in Dallas.

After spending two years trying to find a vice president of marketing who was willing to move here, Graves realized it was time to go.

“This is not a restaurant hub,” he says. “If we were growing slowly, we could all be self-taught like we have been.”

Jamie Griffin, 27, Cane’s senior manager of business development, says only 40% of jobseekers are willing to consider relocating. Graves says the company’s new president, chief financial officer and vice president of purchasing all live in Dallas, and would not have considered leaving a city where 28 of the 400 largest restaurant chains are headquartered to take their chances in Baton Rouge.

A mid-size city like Baton Rouge has certain built-in disadvantages for any business that has, or aspires to have, a national or global reach. As Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret explains, those disadvantages can be categorized into generic drawbacks that everyone faces and more specific hurdles that will vary based on the industry.

Moret says the most common complaint about smaller cities is the lack of flight options as compared to transportation hubs like Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, although Moret says a large corporation like Dow or Lamar can address that issue with its own shuttle flights on corporate jets.

“We’re still kind of paying for a lack of economic development decades ago,” Moret says, trotting out the familiar example of Austin, Texas’ capital city that was about the same size as Baton Rouge in 1970 but now sports a metro area with nearly double the local population. Fewer people mean fewer potential recruits, especially in sectors that don’t have a big presence here.

Business retention and expansion is LED’s top priority, and as soon as Moret heard Cane’s was considering a move, he reached out to Graves. If there was anything his department could have done to keep those jobs here, they would have done it, Moret says. But throwing incentives at the problem wouldn’t have solved anything.

“It was a talent issue that could not be solved with money. They had already tried that,” Moret says. Top-tier hires don’t just ask about the job they’re being offered, they want to know what will happen when they’re ready to move on to the next company. Moret says technology companies face the same issue.

“It’s a lot easier to feel good about switching from one company to another in the same city than having to move your whole family again,” Moret says.

Graves says he didn’t want the state’s money, anyway. And Griffin says Dallas didn’t attract thousands of high-end restaurant executives overnight; it happened over 40 years. There’s not much Louisiana, or Baton Rouge, can do to replicate that success.

The state has had success this year in putting together multimillion-dollar incentive packages to attract the headquarters of Albemarle, a specialty chemicals company, and retain the headquarters of The Shaw Group, two corporations that are natural fits with the region’s economic strengths in the chemical and industrial sectors.

Going forward, the state wants to make its mark in new high-growth sectors where other regions aren’t already decades ahead. Hence the hype over landing the EA Sports testing center, which will only provide 20 full-time jobs but gives Baton Rouge a beachhead in the burgeoning digital media business.

EA Sports is now part of the pitch Antares Technology Solutions co-owner Michael Moles gives to prospects. Potential project managers in particular want to know that there are other companies to work for in the area in case a given job doesn’t work out, he says.

“Competition is actually good for us,” Moles says while on a recruiting trip in Texas. His 20-year-old company has offices in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and he says they’re committed to staying local, although they might establish a presence in another state at some point. A branch office in Portland, Ore., didn’t work out, possibly because the tech bubble burst shortly after the office was set up.

Moles says the local tech sector is growing, but not as quickly as he’d like. He says companies like Exxon and Blue Cross create more of a demand than people realize.

“There are a lot of companies that have technology needs. That’s one of the things you have to educate people about,” he says. “It’s just not as sexy as an Austin or Silicon Valley, but the jobs are actually there.”

Dariel LeBoeuf is senior vice president of communication and educational services for TraceSecurity, a Baton Rouge-based security compliance firm with an office in Dallas. The company does most of its sales work over the phone, and the engineers have to travel regardless of where they’re based, so he says being in Baton Rouge isn’t a big problem beyond the inconvenience of the smaller airport.

LeBoeuf and Graves agree it wouldn’t hurt recruiting if the state had a better image nationwide, although Graves says bad statistics on crime or education are rarely deal-breakers for a prospect. But both say it’s not impossible to sell south Louisiana to out-of-staters.

“People that haven’t experienced it, I don’t think it’s on their radar,”

Le-Boeuf says. “But when they experience it, it is an attractive culture and lifestyle.”

LONE STARS

Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers will still be officially based in Baton Rouge, but the day-to-day corporate operations are moving to Dallas. Counting part-timers, 94 people work in its current downtown headquarters. About 25 people will remain in Baton Rouge, including founder and CEO Todd Graves. He says the move allows Cane’s to attract top-tier talent, including these three recent Dallas-based hires:

Clay Dover

Position: President and chief marketing officer

Education: Brigham Young University

Experience: 17 years, most recently as president and CEO of Metromedia Restaurant Group, which had more than 700 locations under various brands, including Bennigan’s. Was Chain Leader magazine’s 2007 “Protégé of the Year.”

Carey Carrington Jr.

Position: Chief financial officer

Education: Indiana University and University of Chicago.

Experience: More than 15 years in C-level restaurant positions with companies like Spaghetti Warehouse, California Pizza Kitchen and Fired Up Inc. Also 14 years in investment banking.

Shawn Jenkins

Position: Vice president of purchasing

Education: Texas A&M University

Experience: More than 15 years with Metromedia Restaurant Group, Brinker International and 7-Eleven.