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

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Mansueto was interested in "a gazillion things": architecture, the guitar, literature. His best subjects in high school had been math and science; reading had always been a chore. Animal Farm, Wuthering Heights, Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- those are the titles he remembers from then. Even today they elicit groans. Until he got to college, he didn't know reading could be thrilling. But then it clicked, and he began to read voraciously.

Among the first books Mansueto read at Chicago was Thoreau's Walden, the last line of which is, "The sun is but a morning star." "I remember very vividly," he says. "It was the 10th week of the fall quarter, right before finals. I was sitting up in the library, looking out over the quads, finishing Walden. The name Morningstar comes from that book. To me it's a very optimistic statement, that the sun is just the beginning, that there's a rebirth, something beyond, and that there's more to life than what exists today." (Fine. But Nancy Morningstar, if you're reading this, Mansueto hasn't forgotten you, either. "Oh, yes!" he says, blushing. You were one year ahead of him at Munster High, you had blond hair, you were "kind of this beautiful girl," he says dreamily. Let's just say the word resonates in a pleasant way for Mansueto, and leave it at that.)

Mansueto still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Why should he have to apologize for that? He was not his grandfather, after all, who'd had to take a job, any job, and be glad to have it. And he was not his father, who had come to medicine "just on a whim," because his roommate at the boarding house in West Lafayette where he'd lived while attending Purdue had been premed, and because being a doctor was plainly better than working in a factory. Joe Mansueto was another animal altogether, an upper-middle-class kid from the suburbs -- smart, idealistic, naïve. "I was not that interested in making money," he says. "I kind of looked down on that. I was focused more on learning."

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.

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