This article ends right before the actual interesting part begins.<p>Janitor takes some food his company produces, adds spices, makes a shitty pitch deck and profit? Cool, but... this could have easily happened in a dozen different configurations and gone nowhere. This is more luck than anything else.<p>The interesting story begins <i>after</i> that. This guy didn't end his career there - so, presumably, he was't a one-hit wonder. We have an illiterate janitor who suddenly got swept into the orbit of the CEO, without any business or operational acumen. He somehow -how??- managed to learn the ways of the new tribe, learn business, learn to read and write, learn how to lead a business unit, and do it well. This guy came out of nowhere, and had to zero-to-sixty from manual laborer to - what? executive? What position did they put him in? How did he ramp up? What kind of support did he get, if any? What kind of education did they provide him with, if any?<p>There's a long, interesting story between "janitor" and "successful VP", and they neglected to tell almost any of it!
My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me. The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes, which I had in LA) and adapting them in this way. The fact that everyone I interact with forms an upper class monoculture (white/asian, college educated, 20s-40s, mostly US-born) means that I have huge blindspots. I wonder what huge businesses could be created catering toward senior citizens, for middle aged people working retail, recent Asian immigrants, working single fathers, and so on.
Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a plant boxing chips.
This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed limits and accomplished something phenomenal.<p>One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses to see the good idea at the core.<p>Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.
Very impressed with the janitor's vision and the CEOs good leadership. A poor leader would have quashed the process when the janitor could not justify his idea. Being a good leader, the CEO came up with a solution to determine the viability of the janitor's idea.<p>The difference between seniors and juniors is experience, and that experience can partially be defined by your "moveset". A janitor would not know it is possible to run a limited trial, but the CEO would. I have found that managers are often amenable to ideas from their workers. But, if a worker does not have a full moveset, it will be difficult for the worker to pitch an idea in a way that is actionable, and he will be turned down.
> “It hit me that I had no idea what he was talking about, or what I was doing,” Montañez recalled. “I was shaking, and I damn near wanted to pass out…[but] I opened my arms and I said, ‘This much market share!’ I didn’t even know how ridiculous that looked.”<p>>The room went silent as the CEO stood up and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen, do you realize we have an opportunity to go after this much market share?” he said, stretching out his arms.<p>Huge smiles from me here.<p>This really amplifies the willingness of this CEO to listen and promote good ideas. I don't have a ton more context but I can relate to this janitor in many ways and this reaction from the CEO would be incredible.<p>I'm so glad it happened this way and that it came from the janitor's perspective.
I love this story. It's not about how Montañez "got lucky" - it's about how he, in several key spots, set himself up so luck would find him.<p>It's a great American success story.
The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to the top is done.<p>Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole.<p>Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing as emailrooms, unless you count exchange admins). All those things that allowed somebody to start at the bottom rung in a company and climb up have been systematically destroyed and/or removed.
Great story. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of D'Angelo Barksdale's cynical speculation about the inventor of Chicken McNuggets being a "just some sad ass down in the basement of McDonalds, thinking up some shit to make some money for the real players": <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A</a>
This is one of the best business stories I've ever read. It embodies the core principle of the American dream: that you can really make it if you are dedicated, work hard, and strike out on the right idea. It also highlights the importance of good leadership, to recognize good ideas no matter where they come from, and bottom-up management techniques that emphasize collective ownership of a company's products and success.
The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors.<p>I wonder how likely this scenario would be in today's world. I have found personally that many companies are unwilling to take risks on employees who aren't formally qualified, even if they demonstrate the skills to operate at far beyond their current pay grade.<p>Second real hero of the story is his wife. How important is it to have people around you who will enable you do things you aren't qualified to do because they believe in you unconditionally? All of the importants.
This is a great story. I'm surprised to not see Ketchup Cheetos[1] mentioned in the linked timeline[2], those are by far my favourites so I wonder what the story behind them is.<p>1 - <a href="https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european-products/cheetos/cheetos-ketchup-85g-800x800.png" rel="nofollow">https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european-prod...</a><p>2 - <a href="https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured-timeline/history-of-cheetos-timeline/" rel="nofollow">https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured-timeline/history...</a>
> “How much market share do you think you can get?”
"I opened my arms and I said, ‘This much market share!’"<p>Brilliant answer for a stupid question that was probably meant to put him down.<p>> Frito-Lay began testing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in small Latino markets in East Los Angeles. If it performed well, the company would move forward with the product; if it didn’t, they’d scratch it<p>So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.<p>Also brilliant, as such a "test" would certainly fail due to no marketing, likely intentional by the exec's and politics.
That's an incredible story and props to the guy, but let's not tapdance around the fact that this is incredible specifically because social mobility on this scale is extremely rare. It took both exceptional determination and unbelievable luck to make this happen. How many others have the doggedness and skill, but not the luck? How many of them are still mopping today?
I loved this article but I loved their Newsletter conversion page the most! I never thought I would feel warm and fuzzy after giving away my email address to subscribe to a newsletter of all things! Live to learn something new everyday!
What a great and inspiring story.<p>> “Nobody had given any thought to the Latino market,” recalls Montañez. “But everywhere I looked, I saw it ready to explode.”<p>It's incredible what a new set of eyes with different perspectives can bring to the table.
What about those 300k employees in the 80s? That just sounds way off-scale and hints to sloppy editing elsewhere. The only number close to this is what they call their direct distibution system customers.<p>This article NYT from 1986 mentions 26.500 employees: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-go-it-alone-ploicy.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-go-i...</a>
What a nice feel-good story which is totally not a marketing/PR concoction, albeit a brilliant one. The story is literally the Cheeto version of Good Will Hunting.<p>Do you all honestly believe none of the hundreds of food scientists working at Frito-Lay thought of making a spicy version their snacks?
This is my favorite part of this story: <i>“It seemed there was a group of [executives] who wanted it to fail,” he later told the podcast, The Passionate Few. “They thought I got lucky. They were paid big bucks to come up with these ideas… they didn’t want some janitor to do it.”</i>
When he broke the news to his family, his grandfather imparted a piece of advice that would always stick with him: “Make sure that floor shines,” the man told his grandson. “And let them know that a Montañez mopped it.”<p>As a Latino with humble beginnings, this brought tears to my eyes.
Here's an insightful interview with the man himself - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0</a>
man I love this story. And I wonder how many huge multinationals are smart enough to let something like this happen?<p>And this is why VCs often say they prefer teams with just domain expertise to teams with just the technical expertise, if the team doesn't already have both.
Wonderful story. Both the janitor and the CEO epitomize Ayn Rand's "ideal man":<p>> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e., to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you, and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?<p>> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a company president."<p>(HT: <a href="http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-billion-dollar-idea.html" rel="nofollow">http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-bill...</a>)