INTERVIEWER: How did you come into this line of business?
JOHN MAUTNER: When I graduated from college, I got a degree in accounting and finance; and frankly, I don’t know why because I don’t even like accounting.
INTERVIEWER: I don’t like accounting either.
JOHN MAUTNER: So, it was just kind of dull and boring but at the time, I guess it sounded cool. When I was in my mid-twenties, I quit my job with a Fortune 500 company. I was an accountant, a financial analyst person, and I saw that corporate America just wasn’t for me. I think spending my life working for the man, for a lack of a better term, just didn’t do anything for me. So, I had my midlife crisis at twenty-five, and I decided to start my own company and I quit my job, a good paying job. Everybody, my friends, my parents thought I was crazy. I bought a copper kettle with a flame underneath it, and it was a candy making kind of thing. It had a mixing arm and it spun around, if you can imagine. I created my own recipe for making cinnamon roasted almonds. I put the almonds and the cinnamon sugar in the copper flame and I had a flame underneath it, and the smell of cinnamon started filling the air and within about ten minutes, we had a batch of these almonds. They were crunchy, coated in cinnamon sugar, and I sold them—I had a really small little roasted nut cart that I had on the street corners in Orlando, Florida. It’s downtown Orlando—
INTERVIEWER: As a good twenty-five-year-old should!
JOHN MAUTNER: Exactly, exactly. Of course, everybody thought I was nuts, no pun intended, but they did. After about six months of being in business, I was pretty much out of business. And now my parents and everybody is saying, “Maybe you could call and get your real job back. You could go back there.” I’m like, “No, no, no. I have a dream, I have a vision. My vision is that someday, there will be roasted nut carts all over the world.” Of course, I had one cart and it was failing. But my vision was so strong that I was totally convinced it was going to happen. About after six months, I thought to myself, Was is it me? Is it the product? Is it the service? Was my hair parted on the wrong side of my head? There’s something wrong here. And I realized it wasn’t me, it wasn’t the product, it was the location I was in. At the time, the Orlando Arena had just opened. And there was the Orlando Magic, it just got the new basketball team and Shaquille O’Neal was their big star at the time.
So, I approached the Orlando Arena about selling the roasted nuts inside the stadium. I met with the food service director, and there’s a funny story about it. Basically, I convinced them to give me a test to see if it would work. I opened up the roasted nut cart at the Orlando Arena, and I was completely slammed. I was sold out. I couldn’t make them fast enough. It was like a revolutionary thing. It was crazy. And I saved up enough money to buy another cart, and I put it on the other end of the arena and then I had people selling them in the stands, and I sort of took that money and I built another cart. Then I approached Universal Studios, because this was the time in Orlando; they just spent a billion dollars building the Universal Studios theme park. I called the food service director up there, I said, “Hey, I sell them at the Orlando Arena and maybe they’d sell well in the theme park.” He goes, “I don’t know. Let’s give it a thirty-day test.” I said, “Great, let’s try it.” And in the first month, I did $100,000 in sales in my first theme park ever.
INTERVIEWER: How about that? Awesome!
JOHN MAUTNER: Yeah . . . So, I was able to save enough money to buy another cart and hire some people, and make sure the quality of the product was there and the inventory and deliveries. And the next thing you know, wow, I have this company, I have locations going. And then I approached Disney and Six Flags, and other stadiums and arenas. Then I got a chance to go to the White House a couple of times to meet the president. I started winning all these awards, and they’re printing out magazines and newspapers about this crazy entrepreneur or this concept. So, within five years, it became one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the country. We tripled in size every year for six or seven consecutive years, and I went from one location to over 200 locations with roasted nut carts all around the world.
INTERVIEWER: Excellent!
JOHN MAUTNER: So, I took what I learned about building a very profitable, high-growth company that could expand and grow, and I realized, selling roasted nuts was fun, but it’s not like it’s going to change anybody’s life in any real way. So, I decided to do something more meaningful with my life and take what I’ve learned, and teach it to other people. Then they could build other profitable, high-growth companies and get things jumpstarted and turned around, and so on and so forth. About fifteen years ago, I started teaching a unique real world four-step system that I had developed. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve had 4,000 people I’ve worked with all over the country, and all kinds of businesses who’ve been able to make millions of dollars as a result of these four steps that I teach to really grow their companies and become more successful. The program is called the Cycle of Success Institute or COSi.
