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

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Today Mansueto lives the kind of life that other people his age -- who may have families with small children, and lives that pull them in several directions at once -- cannot fathom. Home is a rented one-bedroom apartment in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, four blocks from the one-bedroom apartment where, working alone during the summer of 1984, he researched and wrote the first issue of his first publication, Mutual Fund Sourcebook. He sleeps on a futon. In the center of the living room is a large Japanese table, maybe a foot off the ground. On another, smaller table -- also knee height -- is a computer. There are no chairs, only black pillows scattered on the floor. There are books, of course, and a stereo; the television is in the bedroom. Otherwise, there's not much. "It's amazing," says Joe Sutton, Morningstar's chief financial officer, about Mansueto's apartment. "There are very few things on top of other things."

"I think that may be in response to the chaos he grew up in," says his mother, Sara, unapologetically. Sara was pregnant so often in the early years of her marriage that she had to give up her nursing career. But, she says, "I wouldn't want to give the impression that I didn't pursue my own development." She set up soup kitchens in Gary, Ind., and Calumet City, worked with alcoholics, and earned two more undergraduate degrees, in history and business. She didn't always have a whole lot of time left over to clean house. "He always tried to find order on his own," she recalls. "He was very particular about his room. He kept everything straight, whereas I'm pretty sloppy. I think that kind of bothered him. In fact, he used to take me to task about my housekeeping."

Mansueto gets up every morning at 5:30 and goes for a run. On the days he doesn't play tennis at Chicago's East Bank Club ("He's a keep-the-ball-in-play, patient guy," says MMF editor John Rekenthaler. "Doesn't go for the kill at all"), he arrives at the office, by taxi, at around 7:30, and devotes an hour to reading the newspapers. Every night, after a 12-hour day, he walks home, a straight shot three miles up La Salle Street or, when he's in the mood, a longer, prettier stroll up Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive, past the high-rise luxury apartments, and through the park. His normal bedtime is 9:30 p.m.

His social life is . . . predictable. Lunch with his father in town most Wednesdays, Sunday dinner in Munster with his parents, regular (though not as frequent as they used to be) dinners with Hanson and two other college friends (the Bainbridge Club, they call themselves). His former fiancée lives in North Carolina now, but the two still see each other; recently they went to France with Mansueto's parents. "I think Joe's happy," says his mom, "but I think he'd be happier if he got married, I really do. It's good to be close to your family, but we're not always going to be here. I'd like Joe to get married and have children and live a normal life."

Foreign travel aside (scheduled, usually, around business trips to the Morningstar office in London), it's not clear how he spends his money. Not on cars; he drives a 1988 Montero and parks it on the street. Or clothes; his favorite haberdasher is the Gap. "I feel rich when I walk into the Gap and I can buy anything I want," he says without irony. "Like, I bought six colors of this polo shirt. I don't really worry about the price. I'll spend 400 bucks at the Gap like that." He has a weakness for a concoction he calls "tea misto" (tea with steamed milk) that he special-orders at Starbucks every day, but it doesn't cost any more than what's on the menu.

"Here's another extravagance," he says finally. "I have a woman who cooks for me, cleans for me, grocery shops, does my laundry, pays my bills. She's wonderful. As soon as I come home, she has dinner mostly prepared. Then she'll start the wok or whatever, cook it up. Then, when I'm done eating, she washes the dishes and goes home. It lets me work longer. It lets me focus more on what I need to do."

In the beginning, his focus was on the product -- "like a laser beam," Mansueto says. The earliest hires worked side by side with Mansueto in his apartment. Even after the first move, things changed very little. Phillips remembers long, quiet days at the Monadnock building, all 10 of them together in a tiny room, listening to classical music on WFMT while they worked. (Until the opera music came on, the same time every afternoon. Mansueto would grow agitated and eventually would stand, stretch, and walk across the room and change the station. "Opera really grates on Joe's nerves," Phillips says.)

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