The Making of an Inc. 500 CEO: My Favorite Job

Mansueto looks like one happy entrepreneur. (He'll tell you as much, but you may have to ask him more than once. "It feels a little awkward for me to talk about myself," he says. "I feel more comfortable talking about the company.") He has no plans to sell, no ambition to go public. He lives off his salary, takes nothing out of the company. He has fun doing.

"It's very creative," he says of running Morningstar. "As we get bigger, it gets even more fun because we have more resources in our control and can take on bigger projects. The incremental changes, they're very satisfying -- adding another floor, adding another product, adding more people, watching them grow and develop. I enjoy tremendously what I do."

"Joe," said his little brother on the day the shipment arrived from the supplier, "what are you going to do with all those crickets?"

"John, there's a big demand," Joe insisted. He was 9 years old, just starting out. The idea was to sell the crickets to the neighbors as garden accessories. He had ordered 1,000 of them. "He was going to make a lot of money," his father recalls. "But they all died." So much for an early entrepreneurial success story.

Joe Mansueto's father, Mario, was born in Italy in a poor hill town east of Naples. He is the son of a laborer who came to America, found work on railroads and in factories near Chicago, and saved for the day, 10 years later, in 1928, when his wife and children would join him. Mario was a bright student, strong in math. He won a scholarship to Purdue and became the first in his family to go to college. The navy put him through medical school. After his service was up, he settled in Calumet City, Ill., not far from his parents' house, and opened his own practice as an ear, nose, and throat specialist. He married Sara Smart, a nurse.

There were four children. Joe was the second, the oldest of three sons. If you go looking for signs of a budding entrepreneurial spirit in Joe's childhood, they're not hard to find. After the cricket debacle, there were successes. Once -- was it in sixth grade? -- he bought a vintage Drake 2-B shortwave receiver for $100 at a gathering of ham-radio enthusiasts, and turned around and sold it two weeks later for $300. That was neat -- "the first time I ever made any real money," he says -- but you shouldn't read too much into that statement. The pleasure Joe got from ham radio had little to do with discovering bargains at ham fests. It was the community that mattered, the tight camaraderie, the shared sense of mission.

"If you had a problem, other people would join in and help you solve it," Mansueto says. "If you were building a transmitter and it didn't work, we'd kind of tinker with it, and it would be like an intellectual exercise. It was never 'What's in it for me?' It was 'How do you solve this problem?'" Mansueto hasn't fooled with ham radio for more than 20 years, but he hasn't forgotten Morse code and can still recite his catchy call letters: WB9DGY.

The end of his ham-radio phase coincided roughly with the family's move -- two towns south, one rung up the social ladder -- to Munster, Ind. The Mansuetos settled into a modern ranch house on a large lot in an oak-filled subdivision a short walk from the park, the public library, and the high school. At Munster High, Mansueto was a standout student, active (but not necessarily a leader) in peripheral groups. His picture never made it into the yearbook senior year, but his list of club memberships did: Drama (he was on the stage crew); Musical; Thespians; Science Club; Chess Club; Speech. (Was he a geek? Mansueto says no, not him, but his friends were. "I hung around with a lot of geeks, people who were very good in math and science. I kind of like those people.")

When the time came, Mansueto applied to Purdue (a state university), Northwestern, and the University of Chicago, and was accepted at all three. He chose the University of Chicago because he could choose -- his parents were paying -- and because "it seemed to tolerate eccentrics a little more than Northwestern. It had a little more focus on pure learning, less on all the rigmarole. I just felt more at home there."

Joe Mansueto might have been a doctor. He had the academic skills, and his father encouraged him. But while he took the same physics and chemistry courses in college that the premed students did, he had no interest in practicing medicine. His indifference was partly a contrarian's natural reaction to the times. In the mid-1970s, at elite schools like Chicago, it seemed as if almost everybody was premed. Mansueto was turned off by all that: by the pack mentality and the fierce competition to get into medical school that started when you were a freshman, and by the plain fact that so many were choosing the profession for all the wrong reasons. "People were doing it just to make money," Mansueto says, "not because they wanted to be doctors."

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