A career in business wasn't even in his radar -- until one day, under pressure to choose a major, he wandered into the campus placement office and had a life-changing conversation with a counselor there, a woman whose name he can't even remember.
"What about business?" she asked him.
"Not creative enough," said Mansueto." (He imagined a shopkeeper, he says now, haggling with suppliers. "I guess I had what I thought were higher aspirations than that.")
But she came up with lots of examples of companies that were doing creative things, and that started him thinking -- not so much about business in general as about entrepreneurship. About creating a company of his own; finding something that challenged him and captured his interest; pursuing it with like-minded companions; building an ideal community. Life as one big ham fest was the basic idea.
Mansueto enrolled in the Professional Option Program at Chicago. That meant he could start business school as a senior and finish early with two degrees, a B.A. and an M.B.A. It was a shock, he recalls, "to go from college, where you're in these literature courses and there are no answers, to all of a sudden the next day being in business classes, where you're talking about the market share of Crest in Ohio. I was kind of taken aback."
Mansueto's B-school roommate was Kurt Hanson. He was more outgoing than Mansueto, perhaps, but was otherwise a like-minded spirit. Hanson brought Mansueto in on a venture he'd begun earlier, a soda-and-snack service. They did business out of their dormitory suite, in the former Shoreland Hotel. Room 607 Soda Service, they called it. Twenty flavors of soft drinks, 15 brands of snacks, open 24 hours a day.
The University of Chicago School of Business, circa 1979, was graduating two kinds of people: free-market ideologues committed to exporting capitalism around the world, and techno-wiz consultants schooled in the latest econometric theories. Hanson and Mansueto were on a different wavelength. "We'd get together on weekends and brainstorm," says Hanson. "We thought about restaurants. We thought about starting a chain of stores that would sell movies on videotape, but then we thought, 'Naaah, that would never work." Finally, they settled on a business Hanson already knew something about: market research for radio stations. Strategic Radio Research (SRR) was the name they chose. Degrees in hand, they rented an office in the suburbs and went to work.
As it turned out, tabulating the responses of listeners in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to "Peaceful Easy Feeling" was more Hanson's thing than Mansueto's. Business was good, but Mansueto was beginning to have second thoughts. He was afraid that SRR's success relied too heavily on the two partners. He couldn't imagine how they'd ever be able to sell their products in more than one market at a time. And he was beginning to clash with Hanson, as partners will. Hanson was a more willing spender, for one; it was his idea to rent an office and fill it with furniture right away. Mansueto, by temperament, was more of a pay-as-you-grow company builder. His values were Thoreau's: simplicity, independence, thrift -- "great things for somebody who's 17 years old, but also for somebody who's going into business," Mansueto says.
But the biggest influence on Mansueto at this stage in his life was not Thoreau or Rousseau ("He said to take the course opposite the custom and you'll do well") or Einstein ("He said the things that he pursued in his life were goodness, beauty, and truth, and not comfort and happiness") or any of the other great thinkers he casually refers to in the course of ordinary conversation. Rather, it was Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor from Omaha. Mansueto had first heard about Buffett in college, and went on to read everything he could find by him and about him. Buffett's rational approach to investing ("If you can't understand it, don't do it"), his systematic, dispassionate approach to evaluating companies and their prospects, made sense to Mansueto. "I began to see a vision of how business worked, in a way I really didn't get from business school," Mansueto says. "Why certain businesses were succeeding and others weren't. I think I spent a good deal of my time in my twenties just thinking about that very question: What are good businesses and what are bad businesses?"
Mansueto's growing interest in investing led him to investigate other stock-pickers and to study their methods. He sent away for mutual-fund shareholder reports and scrutinized lists of holdings. "This is really fascinating material," he recalls thinking. "Too bad somebody doesn't compile it and make it available." A vision was slowly coming into focus, of a life's work that would combine Mansueto's passion for investing with a moral component -- tools for the little guy -- and be a good business to boot.
In 1982 Mansueto left SRR (he sold his half stake to Hanson for $138,000 in 1985) and went in search of some "real company" experience. First stop: Golder Thoma, a Chicago venture-capital firm, where he worked on a team that was filing applications for cellular licenses around the country for Pagenet, a $257-million communications company then in its start-up phase. He worked 60-hour weeks and thrived -- for four months. Then he quit. "He had a future with us," says Carl Thoma, who was sorry to see him go. Next stop: Harris Associates, a Chicago money-management firm, where he was a securities analyst covering media and food stocks. Harris managed to keep him a little longer, but not much: 14 months.
