Successful Businessmen
This article describes alumni James Maynard and Samuel Wornom III. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: "Successful Businessmen," ECU Report , January 1981.
East Carolina University has long enjoyed a reputation for graduating fine teachers, but many of the other schools and departments have graduates who are making their mark in various fields around the country. Two of these men, one from the business school and another from the psychology department, have become very successful by building businesses from the ground up.
Both have their offices in the Piedmont section of North Carolina. Samuel Wornom III, headquartered in Sanford, NC owns the Pantry Store chain and recently sold his large interest in Mack Stores.James H. Maynard has a suite of offices in the Beta Building located just west of the Crabtree Valley Shopping Center in Raleigh down the road from one of his chain in the Golden Corral Restaurants.
Wornom and Maynard are very active in Alumni Affairs. Both belong to the ECU Alumni Association and are members of its Board of Directors. They support the ECU Educational Foundation- Pirates Club and are members of the Chancellor's Society. Maynard is a member of the ECU Board of Trustees.
Samuel Wornom was born in Hampton, Virginia in 1942.In 1960, he decided to come to East Carolina for "no apparent reason."He came to Greenville to take the entrance exams with a group of students from Hampton and ended up going to East Carolina with a friend who dropped out after the first year. Wornom has a BA in business but that was just as unmotivated as his choice of East Carolina. He explained that back in 1960 the college herded all incoming freshmen into Wright Auditorium and instructed to choose a major.Wornom says, "I was 17 so I picked business for no real reason other than I felt like it would be interesting. "Wornom says in retrospect, "It seemed to be a good choice."
He began working for Garner-Wynne-Manning, a Greenville based firm wholesaling notions, over-the-counter drugs and sundry other items as a part of an advertising class project. The firm opened up a Big Value Discount Store in downtown Greenville and Wornom started working there and went with the firm full-time managing a store after his graduation.
Wornom knew he wanted to go into business for himself and he approached the Big Value people about buying out one of their stores. The deal did not work out. He opened up his first Pantry Store in 1967.
Up until that time, the convenience store business had been concentrated in the larger cities and Wornom started putting them in smaller towns and says that the growth of his company has been a fascinating business.
He credits the education he received at East Carolina with helping him reach his goals of company ownership. "It used to be that somebody could go into business just knowing one basic area about that business. I found real quick that it is important to know all areas. You know that you can make money, but if you do not understand the numbers or know how to make them work for you, then it is useless. So accounting has been very helping in reading a balance sheet and knowing what the numbers mean. The education that I got has been invaluable to me."
He puts the stores in a location on a main thoroughfare so they will bring in the transient trade and scouts for locations that have about 750 homes within a 2 or 2 1/2 mile radius of the store.He hires all his managers and employees outright and says there is a "tremendous personnel turnover in this business because of the rotating shifts, the weekend work and the hours that the employees must work because the stores stay open 24 hours a day."
Wornom believes that the danger associated in the minds of the public with this type of job is greatly over-emphasized and most of the danger is brought about by careless employees breaking company rules about the handling of money and the careless flashing of money around the customers.
Wornom bought into the Mack Stores when the management of hte stores got to retirement age and wanted to sell part of the stock in the company. Mack headquarters are in Sanford so Wornom managed the Mack stores and turned over the management of the Pantry Stores to Gene Horn. Last summer, Wornom was approached by a Dutch firm about acquiring the Mack Stores adn after some negotiations a deal was struck.Wornom says, "It was the first time I have ever sold anything. "The deal was for several million dollars and he says he will "probably look around for something else to invest in."
People Make it Go
He believes his success has been a combination of several things; being in the right place at the right time, taking some chances that have worked out and most of all being able to have people as associates who could help out with running the businesses.Wornom believes that the people are what makes the companies go. "I always tell them that I have the easy job.I only have to negotiate the deal, then they have to make it work. We have been on a big acquisition schedule.We have doubled in size two times in the last four years. I have been fortunate with the guys that I have had helping me." "If it were not for them, I wouldn't be here and I am sincere about that." The company is only thirteen years old, but the key men have been with the company for seven or eight years, and one for eleven years.
Wornom says he thinks the key to keeping people is treating them right and giving them a good fringe benefit plan.He is most proud of the company ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) which will give the employees thirty percent of the company by 1982.
Maynard
James Maynard has a psychology degree from East Carolina which he says, ". . . has been very helpful in my contacts with people while this business has been developing." Maynard and William Carl decided to start a big business together while they were working for a large multinational corporation.After examining other options, including used cars, doughnuts and pizza, they settled on an American staple, steak and potatoes. They named it The Golden Corral after a false start with the Golden Steer which had already been taken by someone else as they found out when they tried to register the name.
After raising investment money from former classmates in Jacksonville and East Caroliina, they had about $50,000 in seed money to acquire controlling interest in a publicly owned florist wholesaler in Sanford.They used this company with a ready made credit recore to give them access to new money.
Maynard believes they keep their edge over the competition by giving better service and by using fresh, unfrozen beef. They use these two qualities to generate word-of-mouth advertising and eliminate the need for an expensive ad campaign.
Six-Year Growth Plan
Maynard and Carl set out rather deliberately to earn money by going into some type of business together.They chose the food business because it was still one of the things left that could be entered with very little capital and made successful with long hours of hard work.They put together a six-year plan.They have been forced to cut their plans for expansion temporarily in half for this past year due to the tight money market. "It is nearly impossible to always show a day-to-day profit," according to Maynard, "in a business where the cost fo the raw material fluctuates so much. So we work on a six months profit basis. The cost of beef, potatoes, gas and the overall economy determines our profit margin."
They have been very successful with their six months profits projections and Maynard attributes much of their success to the type of people they employ and the management plan under which all of the Golden Corrals are operated.
The restaurants are not franchised, but are run by an owner-manager who must put $20,000 o fhis money into the company. He then gets a salary of $12,000 per year plus 20 percent of the monthly profits from the restaurant. Some managers earn as much as $75,000 or $80,000 per year. Maynard tells of one young man who started with the Golden Corral as a dishwasher and utility man while he was still in high school.After he finished his education, he became a manager and now earns around $100,000 per year.
Maynard stresses that this type of business is not for everyone. It requires a person who does not cherish the forty hour work week, who can put work before family in many cases, and who does not mind giving up his or her weekends and nights.
From the company headquarters, which are very cheerfully and tastefully decorated, Maynard and Carl direct the growth of the chain which now has stores in nineteen states including California and plan to operate in most states by the end of five years.They started with a store on Bragg Boulevard in Fayettevill and have searched steadily for smaller towns with 5,000 to 50,000 populations since.
Maynard, who entered East Carolina through the "convenience" route (his father was a subcontractor on the first men's dorm at the time) has become a staunch supporter of East Carolina in later years through the efforts of other alumni in the Raliegh area who saw he would be an asset on the ECU supporters team. Maynard says it is so easy to get away frm being involved in the work of the alumni when you are concerned with a business and a young family.
Maynard believes that East Carolina must have involvement from its alumni if it is to continue to grow and develop. "I am looking forward to greater involvement with Alumni. I certainly think that it is a challenge for the graduates from the late fifties and the early sixties just to see what changes have taken place at East Carolina since their graduation. The changes are significant enough that they are a challenge to get involved with the University and see what kind of University that you hold a degree from. Telling people about what is going on today is the key to getting alumni interested in the University again."
