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

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.

Mansueto admits to no inner wavering during that period in his life, no sense of drift. Others, observing him, were less sure. He was 27 years old, four years out of business school, and already he had turned his back on at least three viable, lucrative careers (four if you count the private-investment partnership he managed for family and friends, the Mansueto Value Fund; five if you don't dismiss the two-month stint as a night manager at Arby's learning about the fast-food business). His doubts about SRR, it turns out, were unfounded. Two years after Mansueto cashed out, Hanson put the company on the Inc. 500 (#176 in 1987, #217 in 1988); revenues reached $5 million in 1993. And how could he have left Golder Thoma? "My father had a hard time understanding that," says Mansueto.

Then again, Mario Mansueto had never understood the concept of choice the way his son Joe did. For Joe (thanks to Mario and Sara), opportunities were just that, opportunities. Some were better than others, but none had to be taken. What Joe really wanted now, more than anything else, was to start his own business. "Deep down, I missed that entrepreneurial environment," he says. "I wasn't controlling my own time."

Enough said. Time to move on. "For a man is rich," Thoreau wrote, "in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

Once, late on a summer night in 1988, Mansueto felt a sharp pain in his chest and thought he was having a heart attack. Later it was diagnosed as pericarditis -- an inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the heart. It was a onetime occurrence and, in Mansueto's case, not serious. He doesn't run marathons anymore, but he still works out daily. The only reason the episode bears mentioning is that it occurred on the day Mansueto asked a woman to marry him. Of course, as Mansueto is quick to point out, "correlation is not necessarily causation. We make that point in our fund analyses all the time." And probably he deserves the benefit of the doubt -- doctors know of no connection between pericarditis and stress. But the illness did help him change his mind. Mansueto continues to see the woman, but six years later he's still single.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT